Adding Our Rules to God Decreases Our Need for God

I’m noticing a disturbing trend as I allow God to dismantle and rearrange the Christianity I grew up with.

I was talking with friends last night- the cumulative venting of parenting, faith and our current versions of isolation. My friend and I lamented that as we seek to find a Christian devotion or learning source for our kids, we tend to mistrust the direction most Christian authors want to take our kids.

I said I’d found a book I like, but still grate when I read phrases like, “People think this…but Christians know the real reason…” (Which to me is basically a way of indoctrinating our kids to believe that the world is US versus THEM and Christians are supposed to have all the answers.)

My friend expressed disappointment in how frequently Bible verses were taken out of context for children’s devotions in order to make a “positive point” with an easy Spiritual lesson.

She shared a story of her child feeling that something was wrong with her because her “prayer” didn’t work. I remember having a similar feeling of frustration with God when I prayed with my son for his itching mosquito bites, and I couldn’t even pray those away. My son questions whether prayer works.

I already know it doesn’t work. Because “working” implies that there’s a system and if we put in the right amount of change, the vending machine will spit out a Holy gumball everytime. (Hallelujah!)

Oh I believe in prayer- I pray every day. Not because I have to, and not because I love Holy gumballs, but because I find it to be an anchor and shelter of sorts. But my prayers are not cute or tidy- and they don’t often end with the exact thing I’m requesting. It is very much to me like processing my life with Someone who knows a lot more than I do, who listens well, and gives me hope and wisdom and peace in the wrestling (or a long time after the wrestling). I write God thoughts down like a conversation through letters. And yes, God answers prayers too- outside of my formula. It’s alternately beautiful and infuriating, hopeful and tearful, soul-baring and soul-filling. But never-NEVER- do I pray without mystery.

But this is what disturbs me- as Christians we seem to want God with no mystery. Because mystery implies we can’t have all the answers, that there is no system in which we do X so God responds with Y. Mystery means our faith isn’t a math equation and our walk with God can’t be measured by a checklist or posttest.

Yet everywhere I look I feel the suffocation of man-made “Christian” answers to erase the mystery.

• Our need to overlabel people as “good” or “bad”- villains or heroes. This habit exists outside of Christian culture, but it seems we’ve perfected it. Its difficult to teach our kids to learn from someone whose character is nuanced, so we extract only the good qualities or only the bad to make our spiritual points. But this leaves us with two-dimensional views of everyone, including ourselves. It’s why we constantly feel guilty about ourselves for living in apparent hypocrisy that is often just humanity. We’re disgusted that we can’t be perfect because we’re told that’s the goal and our inflated, airbrushed role-models confirm that we’re just not trying hard enough.
  
  Or maybe…there’s a little mystery and God uses regular people with mixed-motives, partially wrong ideas, and a raging knack for imperfection.
  
• We can’t stand the dilemma that all political parties have inherent flaws, so we remove the mystery by baptising one party as Holier and assume God agrees with us. (We can be guilty of this on EITHER political side, by the way.) And then we feel we can’t question the “Holier” party because that would cause a crack begin enough for mystery to seep in and sink us all. (When maybe all along the mystery is the only thing able to give us buoyancy.)
  
• Some Christians feel that women should be able to teach male children, but not male adults, so we arbitrarily draw a line around the age at which a boy can’t be led by a woman anymore. And when we can’t figure out for certain what roles God “allows” for men or for women, we fix it ourselves by chiseling the roles a little tighter, adding our bias to the few verses we allow into the debate. We remove the wiggle room for anyone who is made outside our lines. There’s not much room to breathe in there, but at least no one has to deal with doctrinal mystery. Whew.
  
• We also want to know the exact age at which a person is responsible to “know or reject God” so people make up an arbitrary “age of accountability” as though people are void of variations and God must be bound by some rule to “be fair”. I refuse to believe God runs salvation through any human checklist or fairness chart.
  
• We can’t quite reconcile God’s love for everyone with our understanding of His morality, so we draw weird boundary lines around the Kingdom of God so everything (and everyone) makes sense inside our box. No more mystery to see here. We’ve rebranded and patented Grace so it’s small and manageable and makes sense to us. Thank God we avoided the catastrophe of actual Grace.
  
• We sometimes limit our prayers to bless the “Christian” things of the world (businesses, camps, churches, schools), because we believe those things most deserve our prayer. We believe those things most deserve God’s favor. Let’s not be too quick to remove the mystery by separating the “sacred” from the “secular”. Let’s not be too hasty to bless the church and not the city.
  
• Even our church services often become a routine version of spiritual digestion where we input a consistent algorithm to get a consistent result. How often do we leave room for the mystery in church? (If God is in the mystery, this should scare us a little.)
  
• There’s many more examples- perhaps you have one of your own?

Any time we need an EXTRA manmade rule to support our belief, we can assume we’re trying to erase the hope and grandness of mystery. Anytime we default to oversimplification, we’re in danger of white washing the mystery. If we think we’ve figured out the steps to following God without error and without wrestling, we’re reducing the mystery of who God is.

IF we are relying on our extra rules to make sense of God, we are really avoiding our desperate dependance on God. Adding our rules to Him doesn’t increase our faith- it decreases it. It’s the belief that maybe we can figure enough of this Christian thing out that God doesn’t have to do much- that maybe we need Him a little less. And I don’t think that’s our real goal.

I’m letting go…slowly…there’s so much more for God to free me from. But the only way I can go forward is through the ocean of mystery.