Faith.In.Life

#Deconstruction

Crisis Point

In 2018 CBS came out with a show called “God Friended Me.”  In the show you are introduced to the main character Miles Finer who hosts a podcast essentially about that God doesn’t exist.  In the very first episode you learn that Miles grew up in the church with even his father as a pastor.  The viewer quickly learns about the crucial moment that he stopped believing in God at the age of only 8.  His mother is diagnosed with breast cancer and receives the very difficult chemotherapy treatments.  The eight year old Miles prays for his mother to be healed.  His mother finally comes to the appointment where she finds out she is cancer free, but  her way home from the appointment she is involved in a car accident and dies.  The viewer hears Miles’ frustration with God ever contemplating why would God somehow lead her on this journey, give her this amazing relief, only to allow her to be involved in a car accident that very same day?  This crisis is the catalyst for Myles to stop believing in God and becomes the driving factor for his journey to disprove God’s existence.  

While this is a fictional story, it is not any different than what those who will #Deconstruct experience on a regular basis.   In Alicia Childers’ book “The Deconstruction of Christianity” she points out that:

Virtually every deconstruction story speaks of a trigger event (or several) that sets the whole thing off, leading to disillusionment with Christianity or the church.

Now, some might point out that many Christians have had difficult crisis and equally have not deconstructed or deconverted from their faith.  I am reminded of a sermon given by Timothy Waggoner who was the pastor I served under at my first call in Overland Park, KS at Knox Presbyterian Church.  In one sermon he gave on grief he said that when difficult things happen humanity has two options:  We can either lean into the Father’s loving embrace, or we can lean away and even reject his loving arms.  

To which we might talk about two examples of such a concept.  My wife’s father passed away suddenly due to a heart attack in 2010.  We were caught off guard by the event, and it truly challenged our faith.  Yet, while this story was formational for my wife and I, when we started looking for an explanation for my in-law’s sudden death we knew that he had a bad heart and should have been getting help long before the actual heart attack happened.  From a purely worldly point of view, we might suggest that his death could have been avoided.  However, as we looked to counsel for our devastation we confided in the pastor I was doing my Student Pastorate with at the time.  In our meeting with both this pastor and his wife, she shared  about her own father’s death.  Her father was working underneath a car and the jack failed and the car fell on him.  Her father was perfectly healthy, and without any warning he was taken from their family.  As they sought God out in their grief they were the ones that told us that asking the why question was not very productive, but rather that in the onset of our grief we would do well to simply look for the Lord’s comfort.  They proceeded to share as even still they didn’t necessarily have an answer to the why, but they did find the Lord’s caring heart as the loving Father and comfort in His warm embrace.  

In contrast, if we return to Derek Webb’s story that I introduced in the second chapter of this blog, “Defining the Battle Lines,” we find a different story entirely.  Initially,  I had heard that Derek had gone through what he called two divorces, first the divorce with his wife and then with God.  In the initial podcast I heard about how Webb was thinking through his deconstruction where he blamed God for what happened.  In doing so he referred to God as either not existing or if he did, he was sometime of vindictive a*hole.  This made it sound like Webb somehow was the recipient of what he saw to be God’s vindictive nature.  To an extent this makes some sense because Cadman’s Call was known for the Reformed lyrics emphasizing the sovereignty of God.  In some Calvinistic circles they will say that God even causes bad things to happen so it is not all that creative to suggest that God either allowed or even caused Webb’s divorce.  But, at the time, I did not know that Webb was the one who had been involved in an affair that basically set the divorce into motion.  It is one thing to blame God for something like cancer or even a car wreck, but it is a whole other thing entirely to blame God for one’s own sin.  In many ways this is akin to the children that are arguing where sometimes my second daughter will literally say “my sister made me do it” and fails to take responsibility for her actions.  The odd notion about when one of my daughters does this: they almost always know that what they did was unacceptable, but they don’t want to be held responsible for it.  Once I found out about Webb’s divorce, my thought process was did anyone call Derek out on his own mistakes?  Or, like I have actually seen in some circles, did the people simply applaud him and tell him to live his truth?  There is no question that facing something like a divorce is life changing and even a crisis event, but to what extent do we need to take responsibility for our own actions verses blaming God for that which we cannot control?

Which, when it comes to those events we cannot control, I can relate.  My aunt, Julie, dealt with breast cancer in two different forms and ultimately died from it in 2006.  While I was attending Bethel University finishing up my Undergrad Degree for a Bachelors in Bible and Theology, I was faced with this crisis.  Julie was one of the sweetest souls I have ever known and even did a lot of legitimate good working in social services.  She always wore her heart on her sleeve and whoever she was talking to was always the center of the conversation.  To say the least, she did not deserve the cancer that would steal her livelihood and ultimately take her life entirely.  There were many nights I stayed up asking God “Why?”  I even approached my theological professors looking for legitimate answers.   And maybe, to a certain extent, when we are walking through the shadow of the valley of literal death there are very few if no answers to be found.  There is something incredibly tangible about the Jewish notion of the wailing wall when we come to the wall left standing of the Temple and effectively throw a temper tantrum at God, because well, He is big enough to take it.  There is something about how children themselves will eventually tire out in their temper tantrum and in the same way, we might cry ourselves to sleep.  In our very exhaustion alone we are at least able to get some rest leading to some hoped for relief.  In looking back, these times were some of the most formational times of my entire spirituality and relationship with God because it taught me how to pray R rated prayers.  As I learned, God already knows what we are thinking, so why don’t we just say it aloud?  I wonder that for those who have faced such traumatic situations if they never felt like they could pray R rated prayers because they think God is so unapproachable.  Instead of trusting that the Spirit would pray on their behalf, I wonder if rather than praying at all, they simply walked away.

Yet, if we assume that there is a God who is there when we cry out in our distress, and if we look to Scripture we very quickly find two very real truths:  One, the cause of our inability to commune with God was our own transgression with a consequence we already knew - that we would surely die.  We turn around and blame God as if it was something He vindictively placed upon His creation.  And yet, we are the very child who is blaming the other for what is ultimately our own mistakes.  Where Adam and Eve had freedom to truly overcome the temptation, they failed to do so in eating of the forbidden fruit.  Our freedom and what we might designate as paradise is somehow lost.  Our very intuition knows that sickness and death is not how things are supposed to be, and we are not even wrong to question why these things happen.  We know this both from a small scale when we see a loved one get cancer and ultimately die from it, to a wide scale of earthquakes, tsunamis, or other natural disasters claiming a mass amount of lives all in one fell swoop.  The Bible teaches that through Jesus there is resurrection despite death and that ultimately there will be a new heaven and new earth offering us both a reality and a hope for what will come despite our current sufferings.  But, if we reject Christianity and we say that healing or a new life is not possible and truly today is all we have, well then to me it seems even more cruel.  In fact, there is legitimately no reason for sickness and suffering, simply a part of the human phenomenon to somehow endure and wait for death.  To me, this is truly hopeless and the worst crisis we could never conquer.  

Two, Scripture warned us that in this life there will be trouble.  Statistically speaking, its not just a matter of if someone in your life will face a crisis that even leads to sudden death or if you yourself will face such a catastrophe, its a matter of when.   My wife and I were unprepared for the phone call that told us the worst news we could imagine about her dad.  The call hit us in the gut and brought us to our knees.  And that is one of the key problems in our culture:  Many have accepted some version of Evangelicalism or Christianity based in the classic clause of Amazing Grace that says “I once was lost, but now I am found.”  That is, my life was so much worse before knowing Christ, but now, oh now life is so much better.  Where, in reality, when the Apostles were writing their reassuring letters to the early church they were all being persecuted even to the point of martyrdom.  And yet, the Apostles were convinced of the incredible promise and hope that we have in Christ Jesus.  Or, one might say that their hope was secured in the face of adversary or crisis.  In many ways, we are seeing a lack of in depth Christian teaching forming surface deep Christians who have no roots to rely on when crisis comes our way.  These houses that we thought were built on the rock were, in fact, shacks built on sinking sand.  The crisis hits and simply blows us away.