Conflicted with our identity?
My good friends Travis, Dave, and I were hanging out a few nights ago over bad cigars in Camarillo, CA when Travis mentioned that he felt incredibly conflicted these days. Travis and his wife Jyll are a month away from having their first child and three months away from moving across the country to begin a new community of faith in Jyll's hometown of Providence, RI. There's enough to be conflicted in those realities alone! But that's not really why he felt conflicted.
His "inner conflict" was coming from stepping away from an identity he has known for so many years. With his upcoming move, he is leaving an existing church to initiate one from scratch. He is leaving the known for the unknown. He is leaving a church that operates (like many American churches these days) with an assumption that if they just do things well (worship service, spiritual services to offer members, etc.), the people of their surrounding city will be interested and "come and see" what this Jesus is all about. He is moving to cultivate a new community of faith in a part of the nation that for the most part isn't in any way interested in this brand of Christianity. He can no longer assume that people "will come and see". His paradigm of the church must change - and it is. These are all tied to his identity. Over the past 5 years or so, he has found fit and favor within groups of people who see faith playing out through a similar lens. He finds himself feeling as though he is on the edge of a cliff ready to jump. I give him some major credit putting his feet to the edge.
I think most of us have felt as though my friend Travis does. Our identity is tied up in what others think about us. I know this from experience. For the past year, I have wrestled with the expectations of others. As our family walked away from missions organizations and denominations, I often felt (and still at times do) that we were walking out on our ecclesiastical families. I felt as though were were being viewed as liberal crazies who where abandoning all common sense. As we asked theological questions that we felt comfortable asking, we felt as though in the eyes of others we were "flipping the bird" to our conservative evangelical roots. Maybe we were. We felt really alone at times - stuck between being the people we felt was calling us to be and the people everyone expected us to be.
But why are we so afraid of this "inner conflict"? Why do we feel as though it is always better to fit within some existing groups of thought or faith. Don't we each have an obligation to wrestle with God (and life) as individuals and to come to our own conclusions? And if we are truly honest and always on journey (growing, evolving, changing) aren't we always going to discover conflict within ourselves? For me that fact is reflected in my choice of blog title, "Confused Clarity". Just as we grasp the idea of Jesus, we have to reframe our understanding with the perspective of his relation to the trinity. Just as we clean up one area of the messiness of our lives, we discover four more. Just as we come to terms with our imperfection, we run across Jesus' charge to be perfect (Matt 5:48). In conservative theological circles (and I suspect most other theological circles as well) there is pressure make our complete understanding of God all be able to be wrapped up in a nice package that can easily be labeled.
Maybe our inability to flee from conflict speaks of our relationship to God as humanity. God obviously has a handle on the things of the world - he created them. But we are so far from having a handle on most things. We are most definitely not God! So maybe we should take more comfort in this "inner conflict" and in fact expect it. Maybe we should become worried when we have periods where we don't feel this sense of conflict instead of when we do feel it. Maybe we should learn to expect it and even pray for it. Maybe it is a gauge of the journey we are on.
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Here is to being confused, struggling to clear confusion and finding peace in the struggle it causes.
Thanks for pointing out the dependence on God that we must have when in midst of confusion. “Finding peace in the struggle it causes” is difficult and probably is only a reality is when we remember that God doesn’t struggle with the same confusion we do and that his way is one of this kind of peace.
I miss Ventura!!!!!!!!1
me too buddy - it was fun. Thanks for taking the trip with me. I twas good to get to know you that much better.
The most conflicted and confused feeling I’ve had and have been having is the feeling that we may have been understanding all of our faith through a wrong or tainted lense. It gets heard in your circle with this prefix, “Oh well, Jesus didnt really mean….”. When we say what Jesus really meant or didnt mean, we have to be very careful because we could be watering him down. And he’s not too into that.
Agreed Trav. No question that we could be treading on thin ice. But, nevertheless, the questions need to be asked. Rather than see it as, “Jesus didn’t really mean….”, we need to look at Jesus with as fresh eyes as possible. That way we are deconstructing anything (at least not intentionally), we are simply trying to understand as much as possible him who we follow. If we don’t do this, then we are taking others word for who Jesus is, what he was about, and what his mission was/is for humanity.
In John 4, after the Samaritan woman interfaces with Jesus at the well and she goes back to her people and tells them about Jesus, they get to spend some time with him themselves. John says that, “A lot more people entrusted their lives to him when they heard what he had to say. They said to the woman, “We’re no longer taking this on your say-so. We’ve heard it for ourselves and know it for sure. He’s the Savior of the world!â€
I think we have an obligation as people who claim to be kingdom citizens and followers of Jesus to be able to claim the same thing. That we indeed know the true Biblical Jesus because we’ve “heard it for ourselves and know it for sure”.
In short, the desire is to truly be people who’s postures resemble the posture of Jesus. If what we’ve always known holds up as reflecting the true Jesus, then we can be that much more sure of it. If it doesn’t let’s toss it as far as possible from our understanding of Jesus.