I was trying to get to sleep the other night when a
frightening possibility occurred to me: I realised that I spend an unusually
large percentage of my time (by the standards of most people) thinking about
church, God, His plans for us and what He wants me to do. All that stuff. This
wasn’t the frightening part, the frightening part was that maybe the only
reason I love God and try to live my life how He wants, is because I think so
much about this stuff. In a nutshell: what if I’ve been brainwashed to believe
what I believe?
You can believe anything is a great cause if you think about
it enough. You can come to the conclusion that genocide is the answer, that
Middle Earth is more real that the UK, that meeting your own needs is the only
way to be happy.
But then again, if I compare God to the other things that
have taken up my thoughts over the years, God seems to have had a noticeably
different effect on me.
I’ll give you some examples. In my teenage years, like most
other teenagers, I thought mainly about boys and romance and sex. I became
obsessed with the desire to be in a romantic relationship, and I felt sure that
this would make me happy and complete, but the real results were disappointment
and low self-esteem.
Then I retreated from the world and into my own head. I
barely connected with other humans beyond shallow, daily interactions. My
daydreams became stories and I wrote them down, every spare moment of thought
was spent in them and they became as real as reality. This preoccupation with
myself and my writing lead to self-absorption, loneliness and an inability to connect with others,
until eventually even my creativity dried up.
Now, however, I think about God (although I still think
about relationships and myself and my writing, cos I ain’t perfect). In stark
contrast He has changed my life in better, subtle and more beautiful ways.
I no longer search for romantic love, or need male attention
to boost my self-esteem; more often it comes from the person who created me and
the friends He has placed around me. I am not as introverted and afraid; I can
make friends and keep them and accept love from them. I don’t write so much but
what I do write is more meaningful, and I’ve been given an incredible
opportunity to illustrate a book.
I’m not saying everything is 100% wonderful because it’s
sure as hell not. What I am saying is that God has grown me and healed me, and
continues to grow and heal me the more time I spend with Him.
I have not been brainwashed: I am a different human being than I was seven years ago. And it is not a change that could ever have happened by accident or by my own doing (I promise you, aside from the fact that it was happening to me, I had no hand in the good stuff God has done in my life).
The thing about God is that He loves each of us, and it’s
not a sort of pity-love or begrudging-love, but He truly likes us and wants to
spend time with us. The only thing standing in the way is our own desire to do
exactly what we want, when we want (this is what sin is)
because we are arrogant enough to think we know what is best for us. We forget
that God is fairly competent at His job (running the universe and all) and that
He loves us more than we love ourselves.
All this sin pushes God away from us until He’s so far away
that we may never even glimpse Him. A big ole wall is built up so high that we
don’t even realise that there’s someone calling our name on the other side. But
when Jesus died, rejected by his friends, humiliated, arms outstretched, He
took our selfishness, fear and sin with Him. He made a direct connection
between us and the Almighty so powerful that you only have to whisper a thought
and He hears you, and if we decide that we don’t wanna do our own thing
anymore, because it doesn’t work very well, that we wanna do God’s thing, He’s
right there, waiting with His arms outstretched.
***
Hello little friends! I didn’t want to write
this post very much but I felt like God thought it was a good idea, so you can
blame Him. If you have any thoughts or questions about this stuff please feel free to share them, either publicly
on this post or privately by text or fb message.
