Last week, I talked about how church felt irrelevant to me as a High Schooler.
I mentioned in passing that as a young person I started to think that if “God existed, then he was of the transcendant sort–one that didn’t really interact with this world.”
Let me explain:
You might think that this is a hair’s breadth from atheism… but it really wasn’t. Instead, I just believed that God didn’t intervene in the world at all. I didn’t have a well developed theology–of course–but while I wan’t ready to abandon faith in God entirely, I began to believe that God must be the distant sort. I was a functional Deist.
Prayer was the biggest reason for this perception in my life: I didn’t see any answers to prayer that couldn’t be explained away by reason. It seemed to me that unless we had to attribute something to God, because it was obvious He intervened, then we should assume that God wasn’t involved. Churches don’t do this, I observed. Instead, they always assume that God is involved in everything, something I would later learn is a theological viewpoint called “providence,” but at the time I thought this was ridiculous.
I didn’t make a big stink about this. I just continued to God to church and think that it wasn’t really about the real world much. I respected people–didn’t argue. But I was a silent conscientious objector in an evangelical world. By the time I went to college I didn’t really have a vibrant personal faith that made much of a difference in my life. I was a nice guy and didn’t rebel against anything. My parents weren’t the “rules based” types, so I just went along with the flow.
The irony about all this was that I had been planning to go to college to study for the ministry. I would be a “Christian Ministries” major–but I wasn’t sure I was entirely a Christian. Nobody ever asked me if I was a Christian. Everyone just assumed.
I can relate. Growing up, I’m sitting around confused,
really believing in God, but not all the way sure He is really involved while
everyone at church is saying, “God did this or that…” I came to
believe that church people were so bored and had nothing going on in their
lives that it really made them feel important to report that God had done
something so they could get some recognition and approval from their church
friends. So while I believed in God, I thought everyone liked to make a big
deal out of nothing. It seemed pretty
stupid so I carried on about my business trying to find something to make me
feel important so I could gain some recognition and approval from my
friends. I thought that I could really
prove that God was involved in my life if I could just elevate myself in the
world.
I was only able to prove to myself how much I needed God
to be involved in my life. Then God
began to show me that He wants to be active in our hearts. And the physical evidence of that can be as
simple as one sharing their heart with another.
It’s very hard to see with a natural set of eyes. God wants to be active in the world but He
chooses to work through those who know Him to be active. Now I can’t blame God so much…we must be the
distant sort…not really much about the real world…
Hey Wil.
Thanks for this great echo of what I was saying… and then drawing into your own experience and then the turn-around which I didn’t get to yet. Amen!”we must be the distant sort… not really much about the world.”
Aha! Eureka!