The members
of the Sunday School class I teach and other friends that know me, know that
when it comes to my faith, I do not accept easy answers for tough
questions. I am a skeptic by nature and
faith does not come easy to me. I have
lived enough life to have suffered a little and struggled a lot. The seemingly trite explanations of suffering
or the traditional answers to biblical questions are not always easy for me to
accept. When I sit down with my Sunday
School Class on Sunday mornings, I want us to wrestle with meaning of difficult
passages. I don’t want to skip over the
unpleasant or difficult passages of the Bible.
When it comes to the familiar passages, I want us to slow down and not
just accept traditional understandings.
In short, I take the bible and faith seriously, but it is not “easy”.
On a recent
Sunday Morning, one of my longtime class members asked, “Just out of curiosity,
is there any “easy answer” that you
accept? The class laughed and I blushed
a bit. I did not think of an answer
right off, but the question stayed with me all week. I reflected on the basic tenants of our
faith. I thought about various “truths”
I have been taught through the years. Ultimately,
I came to the answer that I usually come to when thinking such thoughts – God is
Love (I John 4:8).
I was eating
lunch with a new friend this week and we were sharing the respective stories of
our lives and how we came to be the people we are and do the work that we
do. I was struck, as I often am in
hearing other’s stories, that though my friend’s story was nothing like mine on
the surface, what we shared was an overwhelming experience of God’s love. In my own story, I talk about a time in my
life when I felt unloved and unloveable and a friend reached out to me and
offered me love. This act was followed
by other friends demonstrating love to me – not wholesale approval of where my
life was, but love and acceptance in the place that I was. I have also experienced incredible love from
my wife, Lynda. This love demonstrated
to me by friends has become an internalized experience of what I had previously
professed as God’s love, but did not truly understand. This love has become a living reality for me
and the experience has been so profound, I want only to help others have such
an experience.
In a
training I recently attended, I heard Richard Rohr say, “I am better at talking
about love than doing it.” That sentiment immediately resonated with me. Having had an experience of transforming love
and having done study on the power of love, I am woefully aware of the times
that I fail to provide it to others. At
times when I am tired, insecure, frustrated, hurt, anxious, fearful, among
other feelings, I can let those other emotions cover and smother the desire to
be loving. Each day I pray that God
would make me more loving; that I would live out in my life the love that I
have experienced from God through others.
All of that
to say, while I may have questions about some of the fundamentals of my own
faith tradition, I cannot just walk away from my faith because there is an
experience of love that I have had that literally changed my life. When I read the bible now, I see that love in the pages. I desire to love others because I have
experienced the love of God. I desire to
be an embodiment of that love for others.
There may be one or two others, but I know that the one “easy answer”
that I accept is that God is love and God loves me (and you). The journey to understanding that and
learning to live that out in every circumstance of life is not all that easy,
but I can imagine no other truth that is greater for me.
