Running Away

My friend Dan posed an interesting question, and again I think it's one that deserves to be explored. He asked why I (or Gomer) would run away from the best thing that's ever happened to me. In some ways that's a question that's impossible to answer. It's going to be something different for every "Gomer." As far as the historical Gomer is concerned, there's no record to tell us what made her decide to leave, so any thoughts I have on the subject would be mere conjecture. However, I can tell you why I ran away, though the reasons are complex.

I guess I should start by saying that, for me, running away isn't about leaving forever. It's about trying to find home. It's about recognizing that this is supposed to be the best thing that's ever happened to me, but the reality has fallen far short. In one sense, Hosea (Jesus) is the best thing that's ever happened to me. The problem is that Jesus (and my relationship with Him) has become so deeply entangled with my Fundy background that I can't entirely separate Him from it to experience Him in a purely undiluted way. So much of my experience of Him and perception of Him is skewed by the areas of Fundy thinking that are funky that I have a really hard time reaching out and connecting with Him without bringing all that other crap with me. It's like someone has embedded a lens on my eyes that has twisted the truthful images I see until they are so distorted I can't see them truthfully. I'm trying to dig out that lens, because until I do I'm never going to be able to see clearly and experience truthfully. Let me try to give you a concrete example.

During most of my last ten or so years in the Fundy church, I had an extremely difficult time admitting that the thing that was supposed to satisfy my soul, the thing that everyone around me said had satisfied their souls, wasn't really cutting it. Most of the time, I viewed that unfulfilled place in my heart as a result of my failures: I didn't seek God in prayer, Bible reading and fasting enough; I didn't want to lay my all on the altar and be completely sold out; I wanted a husband to share my life and wasn't fulfilled in Christ alone (You wouldn't believe how many times I was made to feel guilty for my desire to be married. It was as though I was saying God wasn't enough. Hello, Fundies, there are some needs that God satisfies through others, or did you forget that Adam, while living in perfect relationship with the physically manifested presence of God, still found that he needed a wife?); I just wasn't hungry enough for God to convince Him to fill my life with His presence; I wasn't willing to pay the price; I was too sinful and unholy...

Were all these "I wasn't enough" convictions of mine true? I'm beginning to think they weren't. Fundies are notorious for turning spirituality and the experience of God into a spiritual exercise, and an exercise that's exhausting, at that. Though most of them would never admit it and say the illustration is unfair and wrong, their mentality of having to jump through spiritual hoops to please God is nearly identical to the self-flagellating practices in other religions that include such demands as crawling from one city to another on one's knees and performing all sorts of ritual punishments to deepen one's divorce from the physical world. Most Christians do the same kind of crap, but it takes a different form. (I'll explore these concepts more some other time.)

I was convinced that if I just sought God hard enough and lived holy enough and longed for Him and nothing else, He would fill my life and satisfy the deepest longings of my soul. So I tried and tried and tried for nearly fifteen years. I prayed and prayed and prayed. I devoted myself and fasted and went to church three times a week. I served in church ministries that made me miserable and cut myself off the from the corruption of the "real world" I now live in. And despite all my sincere efforts to be a woman who pleased God and knew Him and was loved and satisfied in Him, I was full of just as much longing as before. Really good person, really empty heart. That's not to say I didn't have my moments. I did. I can remember a number of instances where God really reached out to me and touched me in a profound way, and it's those encounters, in part, that convince me that being a Christ follower is really that path to find truth.

It was about two years ago that I began to admit to myself, every now and then, the realization that Jesus wasn't really doing for me what He'd said He would. I didn't blame Him for this. I still don't. I see it as my inability to receive Him because of my own warped thinking. I began to realize that He had said that those who drank of Him would never thirst again. Didn't work for me. He said that He was the bread of life and that in taking Him in I would never hunger again. Not my reality. I was hungry all the time. My worship of Him and relationship with Him were based almost entirely on longing, not the thanksgiving and joy that come from being fulfilled. It wasn't His promises that weren't true; it was my thinking that kept me from experiencing them the way I was meant to.

So now we're back to the whole "why would you run away" question. The truth is I'm not running away from the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm running away from the Fundy thinking that clouded my perception and hindered my ability to experience God. I'm running away from an extremist lifestyle that cuts me off from real people with real wounds who really need to experience a legitimate Savior and not another religious exercise. Unfortunately, Jesus got all entangled in that, so sometimes, in my effort to cut away the mess, I cut away a little too much truth. Sometimes in my efforts to be real, I cross the line and do things I don't think Jesus would approve of. I've said more than once that in order to fix this mess I'm throwing the baby away with the bathwater, but before it's all said and done I'm going to go out and get that baby. I know that I'm swinging from one extreme toward another at times, and this frightens me a lot. I intend and hope to swing back toward the center to a place of wholeness and balance, but sometimes I'm afraid that if I run away too far and too hard and He doesn't come after me, I won't ever find my way back.

I have a lot of issues with the truth. (I can just hear my old Fundy friends crying "Amen.") There are some things the Bible says that, at this point in my life, I don't like or agree with. I'm not saying they aren't truth; I'm saying I don't like them and therefore have a hard time accepting or swallowing them. I know that at times I'm holding Jesus at arm's length because there are some really tender places in me and I'm not ready to come face to face with truth just yet. All those "religious hoops" have left their mark, and I'm trying to sort the good from the bad, untangle the worthwhile from the worthless.

So I hope that helps to make a bit more sense out of all this. And, Dan, please feel free to ask away. Your questions are great, and they give me food for thought and material to explore. I appreciate them.