I am honestly not sure why I don't go to church anymore. Why I am not searching for a church home. It's probably one of the most complicated parts of my life, to tell you the truth. A question I often labor over.
For one, I am not sure what I believe, so I don't know where I would look. I agree with Donald Miller about the dangers of religion, and how religion could never give me what a relationship with God and Christ gives me.
It's just that... I read Tozer. I read Augustine. I read Donald Miller. I read Anne Lamott. I've read some Max Lucado. Some C.S. Lewis. Mark Galli, Mark Batterson, Rick Warren. I read the Bible (sometimes)...and I am constantly learning what I believe. There is always more to learn.
I guess it's kinda like relationships. There are people who want to find someone to join their complete life, and there are those who want someone to complete their life. Well, first of all, my life isn't complete, I don't know what exactly I believe, and I think I want a church to join a complete me, not complete me.
I don't think there is a church in the world that could complete me. I believe that only Christ and God have that power. And I am still getting to know them, still learning about them through all these authors. Through the Bible. Through talking with God and Christ. Through this website and the writing that I do. I am discovering them through me, and I am discovering me through them.
I suppose though, and am starting more and more to believe this is true, that these authors, I believe that they have become my church.--
And we aren't even touching my health and how I don't have anything in me to leave the house.
I suppose I created my own church. I mean, I take Don with me practically everywhere. His books bring me so close to God, so close to Christ. Reading Donald Miller and all these other wise Christians is an act of worship.
So many people rely on church so much, and for a lot of them I know it can be so good to have that community, but I worry, I worry that people aren't seeking, ON THEIR OWN, God enough, Christ enough. They rely on a pastor or a group leader to do all the work for them, and you forget, or never even learned how to seek God on your own. And I feel sorry for those of you who do that. For those of you who don't know how to just pick up one of the greats on your own, from a passionate interest in your God, and read Confesssions by Augustine. Jesus, Mean and Wild by Galli.
Sometimes it isn't so much what you are doing, but WHY you are doing it. Why are you spending time with God, only when it is scheduled at a specific time? Why isn't it spontaneously fervent, ardent, blazing, burning, charged, emotional and intimate?
Which would you rather have in a relationship, someone having to pencil you into their planner sometime next week, or someone who drops everything spontaneously because they are madly in love with you and want to spend all the time they can with you, because they want to get to know you, not just know some stuff about you? I know which I would rather have...and I believe I speak truth when I say that is what God wants.
And that is what my church is like. It is quiet. It is intimate. It is me, usually in the dark of the night letting one of these authors talk about God or Christ, to light the room with. It is letting the Holy Spirit guide my hand when it is reaching toward the bookshelf, to guide me to pickup what I need to read, when I need to read it. So I can learn what God wants me to know now, not next Sunday, not next Wednesday for Bible study, but now, in this moment with Him.
And my community, the way I embrace the community of Christ, is through some key relationships, and then the other relationships, which I honestly am not good at but try at them nonetheless...slowly but surely, hopefully.
And there is this website and the other websites....now if only more people would read them, then I would be active in the Christian community. But it will come when God says it is time. I trust that. I wait patiently, content with whatever He has planned whenever He has it planned for (Philippians 4:11).
And like Anne Lamott says, I put on the pants and they fit..."because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I [read the words] of the people at my church and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home" (Traveling Mercies, page 55).
