I remember his small beady eyes listening intently to my frustrated declaration of confusion over why truth is so damn obscure in a world where supposedly God wants us to find it. After a few seconds of quiet he said something I've had a hard time forgetting since then. From the mouth of an academic--a rationalist, he said, "have a little faith, Leah." In the short pause I was given a view of myself from the outside. Profound mistrust masked in academic piety of my quest to get concrete answers. The power in his accusation was in its succinct expression. I realized that I virtually had checked faith at the door.
A lot has transpired in short six months between that conversation and where I stand now. Essentially what I've come to realize is that God would not have left truth as hieroglyphics to be deciphered by a handful of academic elites who would eventually make claims to, in fact, have come to terms with understanding the nature of everything.
Last year I lived solely for one desire: to find truth. It being my first year at a prestigious, rigorously academic college, my genuine belief was that the means to discovering truth was through logical analysis of both religious texts and philosophical treatises, and the faculty of my mind to somehow synthesize it all. The process was really daunting. To be honest, that approach only led to a deeper, more complex confusion. I started to wonder how people were to find truth and whether it was even possible.
Believing in God was easy. Mere logic and inquiry will prove that. But which God? Is he knowable? How? After a long, hard year of questioning I came to the defeatist conclusion that truth had to exist in order for the world to operate, but while we are capable of hypothesizing about it, we are not capable of knowing it with certainty.
Simplicity of wisdom later made it clear that if God existed, His divinity meant sovereignty; sovereignty meant power--power I couldn't conceive. Thus, He has ways of reaching everyone: The intellectuals. The feelers. The impoverished. The consumers. Those who've heard, those who haven't heard. Because at the end of the day it really does come down to trust, and the openness of the human heart.
Now I've found God. Now I know who I love, yet He is no different than the God I've always loved. It's just that all of those dark splotches I could not reconcile in His character, the ugliness that made me scream and run have been wiped clean so I can see Him. And yes, He's beautiful. Yes, He is a Father. And yes, He commands obedience. Yes he sometimes calls us to suffer, but that does not negate his love for us. The most poignant thing is that this person is not a flowery vision brought into existence by my wishful thinking. That was always the problem before. I wanted safe, I wanted comfortable, I wanted lovely, I wanted utopia.
But he gave me something better.
He taught me how to love reality. And to be honest, if the truth that is unchangeable turned out to, in fact, mirror the truth I was fabricating, it would be a sorry day for all of us. Because life is not utopia, and God knows that. I would have been seasonally happy, but ill-equipped to live a life of freedom. Down the road it would have gotten really difficult to reconcile real life stuff with the expectancy of static transcendent, permanent peace. My current joy is not rooted in the fiction I wanted so badly to call a reality. But all of me rejoices with all of Him--the good and the bad--bad in the sense that we, as people, are forever vexed by our fixed notions of good and evil, that are most likely, but sadly, inaccurate. We're so reluctant to let those opinions be re-informed. Or better, redefined.
If we would only trust enough to let go of our illusive stability and see our individual worldiews for what they are--completely dichotomous. We claim belief in something, yet we functionally live differently. Why accede to the dishonesty?
The admittance that perhaps I didn't really believe in Christianity because I lived like a functional existentialist (or agnostic) was uncomfortable. And by functional I'm talking in the realm of hopes, thoughts, desires, decisions, life planning, and daily activity. Whatever Christian was, mine weren't Christian. So maybe Jesus wasn't real, and praying people were just so far convinced of something that the experience of everyone believing it together gave them that rush and that glow. There was the possibility that I was completely alone, and that everything I had given my life to was a lie.
After honest recognition follows honest search. I started looking for somewhere legitimate to anchor my belief. Then, I knew that once I had found it, I had to surrender my ideas.
I know, surrender has scary implications. Especially to a religion. because most of them are a) fatalistic b) a product of human construction flaunting the facade of divine instruction. And this leaves a bad taste in everyones mouth. Hope in science is worse--it makes US the saviors. Clearly we're not.
No wonder the contemporary American spirit is to make it up yourself. My gosh, that's better than submitting blindly to something that will control or screw up your life. But what about option c? Submission to a way that is actually better than yours. I'm pretty sure that if those of us who have testified to have found this way were truly convinced, we would be happily surrendering our consistently failing, disappointing methods.
The Bible says that those who are pure in heart are blessed because they will see God. When you picture purity, you get this picture of something really simple and liquid, almost clear--like water. It has no added elements. The pure in heart are those who recognized a long time ago that their water was contaminated and filthy. But they saw what pure water looked like and wanted it. Then they gave God room to purge out the muck, until the water glistened true in itself. Holistic. Beautiful. Pure.
I think purity starts with a recognition that sometimes we don't know what we're looking for. We don't know what is best. In some deep corner of every heart we know what goodness is and want it, but our understanding of it might be a little off. And so the particular way of life we are clinging to really is, to quote C.S. Lewis, "a mud pie when God wants to give us a holiday at the sea". This is your life. You have one. Don't let someone screw with it. Don't let lies mess with it. Don't you desire freedom?
Truth?
In the post-modern age, tolerance has painted it as too narrow. Relativism has made it inconceivable. The religious have made excuses for it, and in these waves of thought that compete with the longing of our hearts we have written off the legitimacy of a search for it.
So I would say the "good news" is that it not only exists, but it's available. Now.
Let go and let God. He'll surprise you. Trust. He'll awaken you. If you're looking, He will find you.
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