Discontent with the Disconnect

I’ve been following Jesus now for right around twenty years, and in that time my own faith and faithfulness has waxed and wained, adapted, changed, deepened, and grown. There have been probably just as many if not more valleys than mountaintops. I’ve experienced incredible periods of joy and episodes of soul crippling pain, and alongside me in all of that has been the presence of Jesus through His Spirit, in some amount, maybe more or less, but never completely vanishing to where I don’t know where or how to find Him. I liken it to driving through the mountains while listening to my favorite radio station. There are times when you’ll have a definite connection, but that connection comes in and out. At times you can hear the music as clear as day, other times it’s overcome or patched over with pockets of static. The worst is when it’s your favorite song or an important piece of news and all the sudden you’re inundated with white noise. We all know that longing to get back to a place to where we had the clearest reception — don’t we all know what it’s like to be back in the place where our lives were deepest connection the heart of Jesus, the love of the Father, and the power of the Spirit?

For me it was walking with Jesus through the end of my first marriage. His voice felt most enunciated and His fellowship most evident in the sharing of my life’s deepest wounds. All of my shame, from childhood to adulthood stood exposed at His feet, and for once I felt I could be completely naked and honest before the God who made me. More than that, I felt heard, known, and understood in a way I can hardly explain. There was a fondness I felt from the Lord, a love I hadn’t felt had been fully expressed to me until then that still drives me today. That walk and healing has made me much of who I am now and will inform my faith journey until it sees it’s completion in seeing Him face to face. But that is when my spiritual antenna picked up the signal of Heaven most clearly; I often find myself trying to remember the pain to find myself back in that moment again, kind of like listening to the last voicemail a loved one sent you before they passed.

I don’t mean to say that God is not alive in my life — He absolutely is, but in a new way. It’s me that’s changed. He’s still here with me, but rather than acting primarily as my Great Physician intent on healing the wounds of my heart, He is most prominently acting as my King and Counselor, and I’m gaining a better understanding of what it means to live in the power of the Spirit in the use of my gifts to help bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. That is to say, though we’re taught be culture to live our lives minute by minute and hour to hour, God moves in us and through us in seasons, and seasons of rest and healing are always providentially offered specifically to allow us to hear God’s voice personally, while seasons of action we see God working in power, or in seasons of waiting we may struggle to hear His voice at all.

Covid-19 provided the church largely with a season of waiting. Seasons of waiting offer the interesting effect of bringing all sorts of impurities to the surface of our hearts. One moment Sunday gatherings, worship services, and all their trappings are common place and taken for granted; the next, not only are exposed to what it’s like to have all of those things stripped away, but now you can couple that with all of the skeletons that were once hiding safely in our closet are now strewn out on our front lawn like a cheating husband’s wardrobe. Racism, sexism, all sorts of bigotry, Christian nationalism, the failure of pastoral heroes, the ineffectiveness of sermons to motivate change, the inability for pastors to maintain discipleship, the lack of love for neighbor, and shallowness of the modern evangelical movement lay open and exposed to broad daylight- and that’s not even mentioning our own personal struggles that seem so meaningless in the stark realities of a global pandemic. Suddenly we’re having to grapple existentially with our faith in a way we never have before, deconstructing long standing, long held beliefs, or walking away from the faith altogether.

I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m exhausted. I’m tired of this wrung out, dried up thing we keep calling faith but looks more like propositions we got form dusty old books we don’t really believe anymore. I’m sick of the feeling like we’re just going through the motions, chasing an echo of what we had before the waiting started, when the echo is just a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of what we thought church was supposed to look like some day at some random point in time centuries ago. Sing a worship song, hear a sermon preached, retain five minutes of it if we’re lucky, pray, sing three more songs, and break for lunch before the clock hits noon. Isn’t their more than that? Don’t you want more than that?

There’s a reason why there’s this itchy disconnect down in the pit of our souls. It’s because we’re trying to do what God’s asked us to do, but we haven’t bothered to ask God if He would empower us to do it, much less have we really invited Him in any real way into our space. We have a schedule. Church needs to get out on time. After all, football’s on, it’s lunch time, we’ve got to get the kids to bed, and our crippling anxiety needs us pinned to our cell phone to watch TikTok videos for the next six hours or we won’t get any sleep tonight. When have we given God the time and space to flesh out in us His desire for His Kingdom made real in us?

Sadly, we are so far from the church I read about in Acts. A church alive and filled with the Spirit, risking life and limb to get the good news out further, and further, until it reaches the whole known world. A church who’s prayers weren’t petty or self promoting, but rather effectual due to the ineffable trust they placed in Jesus.

That’s what I want. I don’t want church to be business as usual. I want depth; depth with God, depth with you, depth with my downstairs neighbors. I want real worship, justice, and mercy pouring out from every corner of this city. I want for us to be a people marked by radical repentance; a massive turning away from our idols and back towards the Lord. I want to see our church services exploding with the gifts of the Spirit and people empowered to take them deep into the unknown. I want to invite God back into His temple, us, in a mighty way.

If you struggle with making prayer a daily discipline like I do, you certainly aren’t alone. But whatever uncomfortability there is surrounding prayer, it’s one piece that is critical in “dialing in,” if you will, to get the sort of connection our early church siblings had. Forming our lives around the disciplines of prayer, scripture reading, silence, contemplation, and community are absolutely critical if we want to receive the Spirit in power, just like in any age before us. The internet doesn’t make us special. All we can do is be intentional about being conformed into the image of Christ and pouring our lives out for our friends and neighbors. Anything short of that is just an invitation back into broken cisterns that are sure to leave us thirsty.

Don’t you want more from this life? I know I do. What are we willing to change to get it?