The three legged race you didn’t know you’re in
You’ve heard it said that what you bring to the table of a relationship is what you get. I think that’s a half truth but also a half lie.
Something I do believe is true is this idea of “you go as far as your person does”.
Be it in a friendship or a marriage. Isn’t that why when one seems to outgrow the other in really major life defining ways that one moves on and it no longer “works”.
It’s like we’re in a three legged race and you can take a few steps forward only to feel the tension on the rope that’s attached to the person who’s behind. I think behind this is the idea that we both get free together.
Be it free in our mental health, our baggage, our failed hopes and dreams, our pain or trauma, our damaging behavioural patterns and coping mechanisms, our physical sickness , or other obstacles. Whatever it is, I believe we only move as fast as we do together, and I see this when I look at Jesus. When I look at the Jesus that poured out His Spirit to be Immanuel, to be God with us.
I don’t see a God who conquered in the way we expected him too. I don’t think Jesus needed to die for the Father to forgive us. The entire premise of forgiveness is that there can be NO PAYMENT, nothing that could ever pay back or make it so that it basically never happened. If someone needs to be punished It’s not forgiveness. Forgiveness is the choice not to punish. And that’s maybe why forgiveness is so hard for us. Because there’s nothing f**kn token about it. IT’S COSTLY.
I don’t see a Jesus who needed to hang on the cross make forgiveness happen. I see a Jesus who in the greatest moment of evil that humanity could ever enact (to murder the only perfect human who ever lived, who also is God), chooses to display non-violence, to display love, to say “Father they don’t know what they do.” And then to pour out His Spirit so that we’d never have to go another day, thinking he was far away.
Jesus on the cross is not so much changing the father SO THAT, he can now love us. He’s revealing that the father HAS ALWAYS loved us. The horrific nature of the cross is not the father getting out his anger onto Jesus so that he doesn’t need to take it out on us. It’s HUMANITY taking out our anger on God, so that he can say…
“Even in this evil moment, even as you kill me. I am declaring my love for you. THIS is how much I love the world.”
I think this matters when we look at suffering, and the suffering of those around us. Because when we misunderstand the cross as God’s violence being something that’s “good for us”, that “saves us”. We fire out things like “God’s allowing it” or “the blessing you’ll receive for this trial will be even bigger”. Thinking that Jesus suffered his Angry dads wrath and then got a crown and to rule forever is kinda the shaky ground this thinking can often be based in. Thus, maybe if I suffer the punishments >insert your hardship here< that God needs me to go through I’ll get some mad reward on the other side too. Or at least God will have tested my holiness which I can then prove I have.
Hello humanity. I’d just like to say, there are things like friendship fall outs, job losses and such that are super difficult and still aren’t easy to walk through. But if you look a little down the line in horrific events, there are things that getting a blessing for later still don’t make okay or completely even out the score board. Sometimes nothing can make up for what’s happened. NO MATTER how much healing or good God brings to it. To a mother who’s lost a child, there’s no 5 more children that will somehow make up for it. For a victim of abuse, who has suffered more than just a day’s worth of pain but suffers for years with traumatic flashbacks that debilitate their entire days….. nothing. I tell you nothing, makes up for that lost time. No blessing will make up for having to endure that.
The God that often gets preached is the God that “conquered”, went to heaven and who now reigns, seemingly less-worried about your suffering, your disappointments, about your pain, about what you’ve lost. But more concerned with the “godliness” in other words your “conquer ability” to overcome them. “Yeah, yeah suffering, pain etc.. but this is your chance to be tested and be found Holy and faithful.” Surely we aren’t more compassionate than the God who invented compassion right?
Let me tell you something, when we see a God who needed his own Son to die, to satisfy his wrath, to satisfy the balance of good and evil in the world, so that we could see grace? We miss the God he actually is. We miss the God who in all AUTHORITY has the POWER to simply forgive. Yes forgive. Not even to need a perfect lamb to take your place. Grace is literally “to spare” not “to spare in place of something else”. It actually just means to spare.
Here’s a wild thought. What if God is actually more beautiful and good than we dare to think. What if God is actually not that different from Jesus. What if God sent Jesus to reveal how good he really is because even the Israelites seemed slightly inept to see all of it? Maybe today we’re still a bit inept at capturing it all, because we possibly wouldn’t know how to deal with a God that truely enacts the most wild, unimaginable love there is.
Dear hurting friend, I don’t believe in a God who’s up there like “dude I paid for it, and I know you’re being crushed, but have faith, you just need to get how great my grace is and when you get how much you really deserved, you’d be content with the fact that what’s happening right now…. Is not as bad as it could be”.
I want to vomit writing this.
I don’t need to remember much of my counselling degree, to see this as apathy, minimisation and denial. No matter how you spin it, no matter what theology you have, if you’re struggling to see a God that’s WEEPING FOR YOU, that’s VALIDATING every tear, every bit of anger, frustration and disappointment, you may not be staring at his eyes.
Sweet friend, He’s not waiting for you to catch up, to know more. Not waiting for you to have more faith, to have more positivity, to be content, to conquer those obstacles, that joy you don’t have, your inability to see how good he is. His ego isn’t that big, I promise.
I see a God who hung there, who still hangs there, in the way that he’s presently in our body. Experiencing the suffering, experiencing the ways we still exploit our brothers and sisters and the agony of it, experiencing the blindness, experiencing the lack of freedom we feel because of what’s happened to and around us make us struggle to understand if You’re even there God. Or more important, if you’re even good enough to trust.
Here’s what’s true. He can and WILL heal what the locust has stolen. However, He’s neither actively causing your suffering nor passively allowing it. He also didn’t need or want you to go through it to learn a lesson, to be prepared to receive your “blessing” or “calling”.
If I could do one thing for the person who’s walked through the most difficult season they could encounter, I would want to rip this image of the Father out from underneath the foundations of your mind. Then I’d want to wrap your heart up until it can no longer remember the searing pain of these words.
He’s not sitting up on high always singing “it is well with my soul” and waiting for you to catch up and sing it over yourself until you believe it. We don’t worship a God of wishful thinking.
No I believe it is not well with him WAY more than it is not well with us.
His tears flow for you, his tears flow with yours A God who’s heel is literally tied to yours, tied to mine. Who in all his power could choose be totally unaffected right now. But chooses to live in our bodies by his Spirit, who says “I don’t want to be free without you”. I’m not moving on without you. Your joy is my joy, your freedom is my freedom, your suffering is my suffering, your sorrow is my sorrow.
And I believe that’s actually true of all relationships. Life isn’t about charging ahead just so we can be further along. I believe there’s a speed to God, and it’s walking pace. I believe the deepest beauty in life is about looking at our sister and our brother and saying “I’m not free without you”.
