Perfect and beautiful foolishness

I opened up my journal to do some chewing on the Bible, and when I opened it up, I saw that I had never actually chewed on the verse that I had written down from yesterday. I had an hour to kill before my lesson, so I said to myself, "Well, shucks, let's turn this one over a few times in my mind before I hit up what resonated with me from today." I started writing... I looked up forty-five minutes later... and then I looked down and saw that I had written six pages worth of thoughts. I usually write about one. I whistled (or tried to), put it away, and got ready for my lesson. But throughout the day, it's just kept bugging the back of my mind. To continue the use of the verb "chew" that I used earlier - you know those times when you are chewing on an exceptionally tough piece of meat, and after a good minute of chewing, you get fed up with it and try to swallow it, but something in your reflexes just won't let you? And so you are basically forced to keep chewing... and chewing... yeah. That what today was. And I think it's about ready to be swallowed. We'll see if organizing it and writing it down helps with that.

"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God." 1 Corinthians 1:18

 Really, the whole story of God and Jesus and salvation actually makes no logical sense. I've battled my fair share of doubts before (and it never fails that when one doubt creeps in, Satan multiplies that by twenty until you yell at him to stop - he sucks). I had a conversation with one of my friends last year around this time who was baffled by the idea of Easter. He said something to the extent of, "So... Christianity is the belief that some sort of cosmic Jewish zombie who was, in fact, his own father can make me live forever if I become a cannibal and eat him? And if I somehow telepathically tell him that he's my master, he'll remove some sort of dark force from my soul that's there because a woman made from a rib was tricked by a talking snake into eating an apple? Really?" Seriously. I got that in a Facebook message and was like, oh gosh. Here we go. And people found it ridiculous even in the Bible. There's some place in the later part of Acts when Paul was going from one judge character to another in an effort to not be killed, and the judges were basically saying to eachother, "Yeah, Paul really hasn't done anything wrong. It's some sort of religious dispute about a dead man named Jesus. Paul says He's alive."

So, yes, on all accounts, "the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing."

But on the other side of the coin, to those of us who have been saved by the power and grace of God, there is nothing more beautiful and pure and obvious, there is nothing more real and true, there is nothing that resonates more deeply within a soul. Everything within me has faith that God is real and that He loved me with a love so intense and powerful and selfless that He Himself, as Jesus, died so that I would know that love, so that I could love Him back, so that we could be together forever, so that no mistake I ever made would matter anymore, so that I could have a life more full that I could have ever imagined, so that the life after that life would blow my mind. Absolutely everything within me has faith in that.

And the truth is, I wouldn't even have been able to say that if it wasn't for God. I have only come to know Jesus and know salvation and know grace because God gave me that sudden "aha!" moment. Jesus says time and time again that you can look but not actually see, that you can hear but not listen or understand. In our own abilities, we can't even believe in God. He takes Him opening up our eyes and our ears and our minds to the truth that is Him, and then, what was once completely foolishness suddenly glistens with truth. All that God needs is an open heart, and it is even through His work that a heart can soften. We really and truly can't take credit for any part of believing and having faith in God.

That same chapter in 1 Corinthians goes on to say that...

"Human wisdom is so tiny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can't begin to compete with God's "weakness." vs.24

 God is that big. God is beyond our ability to comprehend. Just trying to makes my head hurt and my heart swell! He wanted it that way, and it is good that it is! And that brings up a question - what do we, as humans, do when we come up against things that we can't understand? The way that I see it, one of three things usually happen (after the initial curiosity, of course) - 1) We decide that it really doesn't matter and refuse to give it much thought, 2) We denounce the whole thing as impossible and nonsense, or 3) We appreciate and even marvel the intricacies that are so far beyond us. Those are basically the three general reactions towards something we don't understand, be it calculus (I totally went with the first route on that one), Santa Claus, or God. When it comes to God, I live in the third option. I know that I don't understand everything about Him, and that I will never understand everything about Him, and that's okay. That's more than okay. I can do nothing but stand in awe and completely praise Him.

The thing is, I can't go up to an atheist and gush about how true God is and how life-changing what Jesus did for me was because, to them, it's nonsense. Their minds and eyes and ears haven't been opened. God's still working on softening their hearts, in readying them for that "aha!" moment. It will do no good to try to reason with them and then get frustrated and open the door for Satan to fester those doubts. No, instead, as Christians who have come to a life by faith, we need to live out that love and truth that we know. They may not understand it, but if they see the reality of it in us and not a hypocrite, if they see us actually doing what Jesus told us to do and not corrupting it all with power motives, then they will at least come to respect it. You can't reason with an atheist - you love them. You love them, you respect them, you build relationships with them.

And you don't view them as a potential convert. I mean, we should absolutely want to see them come to know Jesus! But if that is the sole way that we view them and the motive behind our interactions with them... how condescending is that, really? Couldn't they see right through that? I read a book once called Jim & Casper Go To Church which was, by the way, an amazing read about a pastor who took an atheist with him to a wide variety of churches and got his opinion on them and how they are showing the image of Jesus. Anyways, there was a paragraph in it that kept getting stuck in my head sometime after lunch today.

"Christians don't like being in a "one-down" position to an atheist, or even thinking an atheist has anything important to say to us. Let me ask you, how would it feel to you if atheists were in charge, and rather than being called Christians, we were called christians? (I have to force my spell-checker to allow me to use the lowercase to spell christian, but not to spell atheist.) Or worse yet, what if we were widely referred to as "non-Athiests"? That's how we think of them, and believe me, they know it."

We should view atheists, and anyone who doesn't follow Jesus, as a human being, as a child of God! I mean, aren't they? Regardless of whether they claim that title for themselves, are they not still a child of God? Didn't He still make them, still love them? We should love them as we would a brother or sister in Christ! Whether a person follows Jesus or not should really have no bearing on how we treat them or talk to them or act around them. Jesus was constantly relating to people who did not hold His beliefs or practice the Jewish religion. And one of the things that is amazing about Him is His knack for keeping a conversation on spiritual realities without playing the religion/beliefs card. He talked about God and salvation without shoving a sermon down their throats. And I think that a good part of that was because He has relationships with people. People will listen to you if you have earned their respect.

And perhaps God will use that to soften hearts, and show them how beautiful and real the foolishness of the cross is.

____I just took a break, had a really good phone call with someone, and I think I know why I have been chewing on this so long... if you care to know, keep reading.____

I think the thing is... I have some friends whom I love so much, and they are either atheist or agnostic or really aren't sure what they are but they know that Jesus is ridiculous. And my heart, I swear, literally breaks for them. Every now and then, they ask me one of those things about Christianity that isn't logical, and it turns into a frustrating conversation.

A friend from MSA just called not that long ago, and of course, Jesus and the Church and Christianity in general came up when she asked what I've been up to lately. One of those tough, illogical questions got asked, and she ended the question with, "I mean, really, do either of us really know anything until we die and see?" And I thought about it... and I decided to be straight with her. And I answered, "You know, in the sense of knowing and proving gravity, I can't say that I know or can prove Jesus is God. My soul knows it without a doubt, but if you want logic, I won't be able to give anything to you that you haven't already heard.  It's called faith. I have my faith, my hope, and my confidence squarely in the fact that Jesus is God, and it has shown to be something completely real." She was really quiet... and then said, "You don't know how much that means. Because truthfully, ask any atheist, and they'll say that it's not the belief or faith or confidence in God that puts them off. Really, Jesus seems like an amazing dude. It's the fact that you guys keep asserting that you know it for a solid fact, like it can be backed up with proofs or experiments or what not. What you have is a strong, beautiful faith in something that has a huge amount of truth in it. And it may, in fact, be true. Thanks for being real."

Huh.

To those who haven't been shown the truth about it by God, the message of the cross is foolishness. But to those of us who have been saved by it, it is the power of God.

It's real to us. But others can't understand it. And it's not up to us to make them understand it. That's in God's hands. We're supposed to love them, to be real with them, to not hide behind cliches, to build relationships, to have conversations, to earn respect. That's our job. With God working through us and in them, the rest will happen in time. The foolishness will become perfect.

Oh Jesus... I'm in love with You.