Brokenness

Dunno why, but I've been feeling pretty numb lately, the past few days. I dunno. I laugh a lot when I'm outside, I feel a lot of pent-up anger when I get home, and in between I just seem to have this perpetual haze that doesn't seem to go away from my head. So little nowadays makes me genuinely excited.

Been reading "A Sacred Sorrow" by Michael Card, and I've stopped reading it in cafes, simply cos its a little embarrassing when the tears just start flowing. I can't explain why also. Mebbe its just how beautifully he writes. Or mebbe its just how much I appreciate its content, and what it says about sorrow and even plain dissent towards God being a a most legitimate path to God, and indeed, a path all should go through in the journey to God. I've spent a whole lifetime in church concealing my tears, my pain and my despair, being very careful to always be the one with the ready answers and a ready smile, feeling both hypocritical and very much a failure as a christian in the process. Reading what he had to say seems to have given me some form of vindication against what everyone knows is a wrong attitude to take - that of expecting victories in Christ in almost every encounter - but still end up expecting from everyone.

Its like how he pictured it - the Christian being someone in the boxing ring against an opponent who is bigger and better. But the objective isn't to defeat the opponent, but to remain steadfast and survive the prescribed number of rounds. And I think too many times, we're too quick to make it about the victories. The cancer we want to see cured. Natural diasasters that we want to see averted. Broken relationships that we want restored to us. Broken pieces of our lives we expect to have been pieced back together, within a period we estimate to be a reasonable length of time. So when we see diasasters around us, broken relationships, godly men & women dying of SARS, we all suffer from a crisis of faith. "Where is God?", we ask. When the pieces of our lives remain broken, we start thinking ourselves as being someone who needs greater faith in God, and more discipline - for the godly christian's life ought to reflect a victorious lifestyle, not the broken and downtrodden state we imagine ourselves to be stuck in. We ought to be more determined! Purposeful! Successful!

Yet if that's really the case, that we all ought to reflect victorious lives where even if we have cancer or AIDS and nothing in our life's worth living for, we need to maintain a facade of steadfast belief that God truly cares for us, and we should not ever have moments (if not an on-going process) where we question God, or even to cry out in desair or anger at Him, then I think we're all screwed. When we hear a person down on his life, lashing out at God, we often respond like Job's friends. One week of silence as we strive to seem understanding, or even to have actually really tried. After which, we all decide to switch sides and be God's advocates, ending up ironically as the devil's advocate in the process.

I think its about the process. I don't believe anyone exists, no matter how far ahead in their spiritual walk with God, who does not at times bear a doubt towards God's loving kindness, or a grudge against God's appointed lot for his life. Mebbe that's why some of my most favorite authors and speakers are those who've been broken in their lives, and who lived to tell their story - people like Gordon MacDonald and his adultery, like Dennis Jernigan and his homosexuality. People who suddenly seem a lot more real to me than those squeaky clean and unblemished speakers everyone seems so easily attracted to. People who have a genuine brokenness in their lives that they're willing to share, that they're not ever willing to let themselves or anyone else forget. And I believe that its in those exact failures that they find the greatest grace, where they find their deepest need for God. Too many leaders in church today seem to be so well-off in almost every aspect of their lives that its so easy for the cynical to brush off their professed dependance on God as nothing more than mere rhetoric, like how Satan accused Job.

After all, Paul had the thorn in his flesh God never removed, I'm sure Job still missed his children who perished, David went through adultery, diesease and coups - his Psalms all reflect a lifetime of struggles with God, Moses must have borne the regret for all 40 years that he'll never make it into the Promised Land... the list goes on.

Was reminded of this, rather stupidly actually, in the final episode of season 6 of The West Wing, when Matt Santos reminded the Democratic Convention with the idea that those who expect their leaders to live by a higher set of moral standards than themselves are only asking to be deceived. If I can't live by a set of standards, I have no business expecting my leaders to be able to do that. And I certainly have no business having these expectations that the spiritual giants I see in the churches today are any less broken than I am, when their masks are stripped away.

Of all the people out there with the greatest respect for the major power-brokers of the church today, people like Rick Warren, Eugene Peterson, or locally, pastor Prinze, Khong Hee or even Chris Chia - how many of them actually pause to think to themselves that they're actually really ordinary like you and me, and probably have the exact same struggles as we do? Instead, do not most people subconciously tag them with having achieved a higher moral platform than the rest of us? So that even though we will readily claim that we recognize their fallen humanity as much as anyone else, we give them a lot more grace and credit than we give anyone else, and put a lot more in store by what they say, than anyone else.

And that's why we see so many christians stumbled whenever a "christian hero" is exposed to be in some scandal. You'd have thought the lesson on David and Bathsheba by now would make it abundantly clear that we should not expect our leaders to be the perpetual success we always made him out to be, but to expect them to have their inevitable weaknesses just like you and me.

Not sure where I'm going with this myself, actually. Just that having gone two-thirds into the book, I find myself with a very deep sense of frustration that everyone in church is just so full of positive thinking. Mebbe cos the whole paradigm of positive thinking has a very strong tinge of belief that life on earth should be positive, and how we should therefore learn to embrace the positiveness, and reject the negativity. And if life really isn't about staying positive that we'll be able to win the boxing match, but just about the utter despair at how impossible a task we have on hand, then embracing the despair might prove a truer path to the recognition of how much we truly need God in our lives, and so prove a much truer way towards seeing God more clearly. Everytime something along the lines of "self-motivation" and "self-empowerment" shows up within church rhetoric, I get this very faint but distinct sense of discomfort that we are just moving towards, albeit very subtly, "self-sufficiency".

Thus a cell group or fellowship that doesn’t grow is labeled “cancerous”, and we are more concerned with frowning upon it rather than with how we should help it, or the story behind its apparent failure. A congregation that isn’t doing well becomes the subject of scrutiny on “what went wrong” rather than “how should we pray for it”.

And when life is about positiveness and victories, that's when we end up cutting off those who can't ever seem to shake off that vague sense of despair, and those who don't seem to be able to manage their lives as well as our own "church celebrities". They leave cos they clearly have the feeling that they don't fit in to the expectations of the church. Thus, we end up ironically turning away those who not only seem to need God more than we do, but might actually be on a straighter path towards finding God than we are.

So cell leaders whose cells aren’t growing end up feeling like they’re failures, and oft-times questioning their own spirituality. Ministry leaders who failed to reach their targets, or who don’t seem to show the same kind of commitment we give, find themselves subtly ostracized and criticized, as we let our own frustration and disappointments get the better of us. And the people in church who have the same struggles as from 10 years ago… we just give up on them, thinking that maturity in their Christian faith means they should have moved on by now, instead of still being bogged down by that same struggle of theirs.

I'd love to see a church that can truly be broken before God, 7 days a week, instead of only during altar calls and songs of repentance. I think a church that recognizes our own brokenness - each and everyone - is the only church that can love the most unconditionally, and in turn be the most beautiful church this world has ever seen.


(And yes, I realize just how much interest and attention my 5km run has generated. I feel the love from just about EVERY person now. Sigh. The things I need to do to be a celebrity...)