I got a text this morning from someone who knew me as a devout evangelical Christian. Our relationship isn’t as close now, mainly because of my faith questions. The text read,
“Praying for you this morning and God asked me to share this with you. ''I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness'' Jer 31:3”
I stared at the text for about 15 minutes before responding. “Thanks, have a great day!” I’m sure this person meant for the text to be uplifting and encouraging. But all it did was bring me down. The verse itself is nice; I like the idea of unshakable, unconditional love. What irked me was the reference to this person’s morning prayers. Apparently, she got a message directly from God in which He guided her to a verse and asked her nicely to share it with me.
Really? Did the invisible, silent, and intangible god of the universe ASK YOU to share a verse with me? Not just a nudge, or a well planted idea, not even a chance breeze that turned the pages of your bible, but GOD himself physically ASKED YOU to share this verse with me?
This is how I know I will never be a good enough Christian. I was a biblical literalist, fundamentalist, God-fearing evangelical Christian for the first 18 years of my life, and never ONCE in all that time did God physically speak to me. I used to plead with my invisible, silent God for some kind of personal guidance. Everyone around me was claiming miracles and clear callings, and I just stayed home, begging “here I am Lord, send me.” And nothing.
My husband says that God doesn’t talk to him either. He gets his comfort and strength from God, he gets his moral compass from God, and then he goes about his business just like everybody else. No supernatural intervention needed. The less time I spend around evangelicals, the better I feel. I start to think that maybe God really is just an enormous force of unexplainable love that cares about people and inspires them to greater joy. I start to think that maybe I don’t need to compete with the God-whisperers. Maybe I can carry on in my quiet hopeful faith, and live side by side with other Christians, no questions asked…
And then I get texts like this one. They remind me of the Christian rat race I used to know. Everyone wants to know about your “walk” with God. Haven’t heard God’s voice lately? You’re doing something wrong. Haven’t seen any miracles lately? You must be letting sin blind you. Pray harder. Live better. YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
You and me both, sista! I have to tell you something.. I have been reading up on the trauma that religion does to people. And they are finding that there is a PTSD connected to children who have been raised in religion. I have written a couple posts on my Amy the Free blog about it and some of what I have found. Sarah you are not alone in walking this out. So many people are unraveling and shedding their religious upbringing, and being around old verbage, and people pushes and triggers fear, shame and terror.
ReplyDeleteBecause in all honesty, none of us will EVER be good enough for the God of religion. Not one. But that God is man made. He isn't real.
I have been walking through some of the same shit. I tried going back to church with my hubby and it slams me into this ugly and dark space. If you are interested my blog is Amy the Free. The last 3 or 4 blog posts have been EXACTLY what you are talking about here. The comments are amazing too. I have gained so much encouragement from people who have walked this out and share the resources.
BIG hug. Thankyou for sharing your heart. You ARE enough just the way you are.
xo Amy http://amyforreals.blogspot.com/
THanks so much Amy! I've been reading your blog for a while. (not recently, must be why i missed those posts!) You rock! :)
DeleteSARAH! Yay... grateful to meet another friend on this journey!
Deletexo
Amy
Here is the first PTSD and religion post I did...
ReplyDeletehttp://amyforreals.blogspot.com/2012/05/ptsd-and-religion.html
And here is Part 2
http://amyforreals.blogspot.com/2012/05/ptsd-and-religion-part-2.html
And here is my most recent on a decision I made to move forward.
http://amyforreals.blogspot.com/2012/06/place-to-start.html
Am I the only one who sees things like that text as a profound failure of faith?
ReplyDeleteI mean, these are people who (ostensibly) believe that God is not only active in the world, but is also all-knowing and all-powerful. And yet, apparently, God requires their help to communicate? Or maybe He just thinks it would sound better coming from them?
I feel like this mindset gives people the opportunity to say whatever they want and claim that "god told them to." I dont understand how people dont notice that it take power AWAY from god and puts it in the hands of a very "spriritual" few. Which in my experience just means the best actors.
DeleteMaybe she thought i would listen better if i thought the message was coming from God?
That's... well, not to be offensive to any Christians reading this, but that's my impression of it. I'm not even sure it's a deliberate dishonesty; in fact, I think it's a lot more complicated than that.
DeleteI've said before that if God wants me to believe in Him, all He has to do is say so. What I get, instead, is people telling me what He has to say.
Michael! I KNOW right? It's such a back ass-ed mentality that is taught. Sorry for the verbage..but couldn't think of another word to describe just how messed up and confusing it is to people.
DeleteAnd honestly I think it makes people sick.. mentally sick. They are finding connections to mental illness and religion, and it's no wonder why they are finding this connection. It's plants seeds of sick and unhealthy into people's psyches.
" an enormous force of unexplainable love that cares about people and inspires them to greater joy" That is a beautiful sentence! I love this so much.
DeleteMM, if this is too much information, disregard. But the idea Jesus was promoting was that God lived in us and thus loved others through and along with our loving others. I could be wrong, but I think that the person with the message might have been trying to communicate that massage of the duality of human/divine love (I'm thinking of you with affection, thinking that God loves you: here a Bible verse that says so!) but her intentions are clouded by the Christian jargon and derailed by Sarah's unhappy experience with that jargon-producing religion.
The jargon and the lingo mean different things to each person who hears it, and so when someone does use the Christianese, it's impossible to know what they really mean.
When you are in it, attending services, listening to Christian radio, etc. you do not realize how it has co-opted even your ability to put thoughts into words. It's very insidious.
I'm not sure from the original post whether or not the person who sent the text is aware of Sarah's doubts and difficulties. If she isn't aware, then it's a perfectly understandable mistake - a well-intentioned word of support that happened to be phrased in a way that had the opposite effect from what the sender intended. If she is aware, then at best it's well-intentioned but kind of tone-deaf, at worst passive-aggressive.
DeleteI'd agree with you that when Jesus was preaching about the Kingdom of God, He was talking about something that people were supposed to be doing for each other here on Earth. And while I don't see anything supernatural involved, I'm all in favor of that.
MM, The texter knows all about my doubts and difficulties. I dont know if she was being nice or passive agressive (she's been known to do both!)I just know that even if it was an accident, it still shows the mindset that says "God speaks through me, someday you too can be as good a christian as me"
DeleteMaybe that's just my take on it? Idk. It seems like the competative language is always present.
The lingo sort of takes over your brain and destroys your ability to convey thoughts and feelings honestly. I hate that I was immersed in it so many years. I wonder how many people I hurt during my thirty years stuck in evangelical culture? It makes me very sad to consider even.
DeleteIsn't it called "loading the language"?
Anyway, I'm sorry she hurt your heart by not listening to what you were saying, Sarah, and loving and accepting you as you are, who you are.
MM, totally agree about not needing supernatural involvement to love one another or aspire to follow Christ (or Buddha, for that matter). =)
Okay, this is going to be a bit of a derailing, I'm afraid, but here goes...
DeleteFirst off, Sarah, you know your friend better than any of us, so you're the best judge of this particular situation. But, whatever the case here, I do think that at least some of the time, when this sort of thing happens, it's simply because people have learned (or been trained) to phrase and present things in particular ways. It may not necessarily mean that they really believe that God is speaking through them, let alone they're speaking for God; it's just that in their particular tribe, when it occurs to you that it would be nice to send someone a word of support, you automatically pull that support from scripture; and since that line of scripture occurred to you, you present it as something that God wanted you to say. (I think that's very much how shadowspring sees it, too.)
Now, a reflective, empathic person might wonder how their words would come across (but some of that is tribal training, too). They might consider that it could be taken as religious one-upsmanship, and either find a better way to express their support, or keep their mouth shut. But then again, if they essentially never communicate with anyone outside the tribe, they may never have met someone who would find that phrasing problematic, and it might never occur to them that it could be problematic.
I tend to think of it as being similar to urban legends. You know how they go, right? Someone tells a scary story about something that happened to a friend of theirs. Someone else hears it; when this person tells it again, they adjust the story so that it happened to a friend of theirs; and so on, and so forth. The stylistic adjustment is so automatic that it's not immediately clear that it isn't actually true; in fact, the people passing the stories along don't even think of themselves as fabricating those details. That's just how you tell the story.
@ shadowspring - well, and if there is some sort of divinity out there, I love the idea that one of its primary concerns is encouraging people to help each other out. We've talked about this before, but I still want to clarify: when I say, "I don't see it," that's really all I mean. I don't feel qualified to add, "so obviously nobody else does/should either," let alone, "so obviously it isn't there."
I didn't assume you meant anything more. You are one of my favorite internet peeps because you do communicate clearly, thoughtfully AND the heart and mind you communicate is wholly humane. :)
Deleteps I love alliteration <3
Sarah, I think pulling the whole "God" card is a low blow... Maybe she did it out of genuine concern, and plain ignorance of how it would make you feel...as well as what it would press on inside you. I do think people mean well, but they really don't know what they are doing or saying when they pull that card out of the deck.
ReplyDeleteI used to be so scared of stuff like this... like it would rage that fear and terror I was talking about up above...like maybe I have it all wrong? Maybe I have totally lost my "first love"? Maybe I am deceived? Ugh such doubt in the journey I was on...but one days I realized that if there was something God wanted to get through to me, that HE was perfectly BIG enough and LOUD enough to do so. I mean, who doesn't want to hear what God has to say anyways? Hope that makes sense...but I don't listen to that stuff anymore. If God is leading me, He will speak to me about my life and anything I need to know. It's pure manipulation on people's part, whether they realize it or not, to use that on anybody.
"who doesn't want to hear what God has to say anyways?" That's such a good point! People always assume im angry with god, or that im rejecting him. But im not. I'd be more than happy to talk to god.. It's not my fault that he's always been silent!
DeleteOh, and i'm not really sure if she did it on purpose or not... She knows very well what my faith struggles have been... but i'm sure she didnt purposly try to hurt me. She just legitimately thinks she's god's mouthpiece.
DeleteSarah, I love your post. It resonated with my own experience. These days I find myself keeping an arms length relationship with those who claim or imply the are God's mouth pieces. They may have the best intentions in the world, but I too would prefer it if God spoke to me directly, after all, it's not as if I told God to stay out of my life, because the opposite is true; I would welcome His intrusion. Having said that, I have had what I can only describe as God-inspired thoughts which have provided insight, as well as comfort when I have been on my metaphorical knees in prayer. When my heart is crying out for an answer to why this or why that, a simple, yet unexpected thought has entered my mind... one so different from the mental conversation leading up to it that I can only conclude the Holy Spirit breathed it into the conversation. For example, after finally being able to reconcile my faith to being diagnosed as transsexual, a process of reconciliation that took almost a decade, I wondered why God had not allowed me to understand the certain scriptures in a new light, the very ones I had used all my life in my attempt to retrain my mind (as a good child of God). Then one day I asked Him the question, "Lord, why didn't you allow me to see this sooner, it would have made the last few years more bearable and I could have transitioned that much sooner?" The thought that came to me was the equivalent of Him saying, "Because I was also listening to your wife's prayers — to let her have her husband for as long as possible." You know what? That thought was just a quiet, simple answer that not only satisfied my need to understand, it bought praise and thanksgiving to my lips and the tears of joy flowed like a river. I knew God had spoken.
ReplyDeleteLisa that's awesome!! It's so great that you feel that connection with God despite everything. :) And yes!! "God's mouthpiece" is exactly what people try to be to me. Its so frusterating...
DeleteSeriously. Thank you. When telling friends we quit seminary because of all the pressure, we were asked honestly, "What pressure?" WHAT PRESSURE? WHAT PRESSURE? The words "the Christian rat race" totally say it all for me.
ReplyDeleteI honestly dont know how its possible to be in a community like that and NOT feel the pressure. It's impossible to keep up. I cant even imagine living though it as a pastor's family.
DeleteDH's mom does that to him all the time. Pisses me off to no end. Because of that I almost never mention anything I read or recall from the Bible to him. I can't stand evangelicals any more.
ReplyDeleteUgh. Yeah it feel so manipulative!! I always try to assume the best of people, but it's hard. :P
DeleteI just think that people experience God in different ways in their lives at various times. It's not so much that one way is better than another, just different. I've been a committed Christian for many, many years, and I can only recall a very few times when I felt God spoke to me in a more direct and personal way, and I'm not talking about an audible voice here either.
ReplyDeleteTo me, it's not about being good enough, or feeling that we have to compete with anyone. We're already unconditionally accepted by God in Christ, doubts, warts, and all. :)
In the past, when people have spoken into my life, and have shared that God has spoken to them in someway, I just smile, consider what they have to share, and trust that if they are indeed hearing from God, He will show this to me in some way as well.
Rebecca.
I remember a tagline that says "O Lord, protect me from those to whom you speak directly"
ReplyDeleteI have never had that level of contact with God. it doesnt bother me. I used to be fundamentalist. There are still many things about it that I value. When i find things like a Bible verse that might help a friend, I simply say "i found this Bible verse (or passage from some other book or other) and thought it might be helpful for you.