Maybe the universal human dilemma can be summed up in the following question: how do I live between the two poles of, on the one hand, my own insignificance and the transitory nature of my finest achievements, and, on the other, my potential for greatness and capacity for eternity?<\/p>\n
If you’ve been able to answer this question for yourself, I’m all ears. Seriously<\/em>. Because being a Christian has only complicated this question for me to the degree that it seems to widen the distance between these two poles.<\/p>\n What do we do with stories like those of David and Goliath, for example? \u00a0A pimply, scrappy adolescent manages to take down an enemy that a whole army of testosterone-filled men could not. \u00a0And he does so all with a pebble and a sling and the faith that God is on his side.<\/p>\n Or, a carpenter and his twelve disciples overturn the world, leaving it never the same again. \u00a0Not by wielding force. \u00a0Not by introducing some new Utopian ideology and lobbying for adherents. \u00a0Not by developing a network on Facebook and going viral. \u00a0Just by believing in God’s power to make all things new and really living like it, to the point that they even give up their lives for it.<\/p>\n But if truth be told, some days I feel about as small as a cog in a great, big, unfriendly machine, with little power to help the world around me- not to mention just keep it together. \u00a0 Other days, I feel big enough to live as if the world really revolves around me and my self-perceived greatness. \u00a0On those days, I try to remind myself that I’m only a few short steps away from embracing a kind of triumphalist, self-aggrandizing “Manifest Destiny” that we Christians are often guilty of: thinking that we are so great and so special that we, the church, really will change the world in some grandiose way, with the implication that even God depends on us. \u00a0Just spend a little time at a Catalyst<\/em> conference and you’ll know what I’m talking about.<\/p>\n Here’s the thing that I’m trying to wrap my mind around: \u00a0when God enters the picture, we are, as my Quaker friend Lily likes to say, “challenged to believe in things that we thought would never be possible.” \u00a0Like true love and resurrection and forgiveness and community that lasts. \u00a0And, the paradox of the Gospel is that we are simultaneously utterly helpless to save ourselves from our condition of being turned in on ourselves and missing the mark, even as we are clothed with the splendor of God’s love and purpose and are in this sense “royalty” as “children of God.”<\/p>\n And while this can be, at times, a recipe for existential schizophrenia, I’ve not been able to find a better distillation of reality and the human condition anywhere else. \u00a0The question is, how then shall we live “in the middle”? \u00a0What does it look like to live between these two poles? \u00a0And is it possible to stay<\/em> there?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Maybe the universal human dilemma can be summed up in the following question: how do I live between the two poles of, on the one hand, my own insignificance and the transitory nature of my finest achievements, and, on the other, my potential for greatness and capacity for eternity? If you’ve been able to answer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":461,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,180,43,15,187,32,13,65,122],"tags":[532,150,533],"class_list":["post-1557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity-and-culture","category-christianity-in-politics","category-humor","category-mission","category-saints-and-sinners","category-sanctification","category-spirituality","category-the-bible","category-theology","tag-catalyst","tag-evangelical-2","tag-manifest-destiny"],"yoast_head":"\n