It was raining out so I took my outreach efforts into my
grocery store, and after finishing my shopping I found Luke, a fellow teacher,
in the snacks and chips aisle. He kindly
allowed me to record a conversation about what happens after we die, and told
me about his Catholic upbringing and present self-description as a “transcendental
agnostic.” He believes there is another,
spiritual plane of existence after we leave our physical bodies, but has no idea
what that might be. Yet he says he is
comfortable not knowing for now.
Luke isn’t alone. I’m
meeting many adults like him who grew up with some sort of Christian education,
enough to trust that God is loving and merciful, so it didn’t seem like a big
deal to drift away from his spiritual roots and leave memories of Bible lessons
in the distant past. He really hasn’t
read the Bible for over 20 years, so it becomes easy to believe any sort of
nice, comfortable belief system.
But the Bible is anything but comfortable. I recently read a book called “The Coddling
of the American Mind”, about the dangers faced when a society and individuals
get too comfortable. We develop an
entitlement mindset, we get lazy, we expect to be catered to and feel like
victims when we aren’t. The same happens
with religion and our relationship with God.
We start to form our own ideas about God and eternity, feeling entitled
to do so and offended when told we can’t.
But the Bible challenges us to receive God as He reveals
Himself, not as we imagine Him to be. We
must often struggle to accept what we don’t yet understand like Abraham did, to
wrestle with God as did Jacob, to step out in faith like Peter walking on the
water, to change our whole way of thinking when God reveals Himself, like Paul
on the road to Damascus.
Luke told me about a devout Christian roommate he once had
who told him how he felt “moved” at a deep level when he recognized the truths
of the Bible, and I told him of the same experience, what I call an “inner
confirmation”. Luke explained he never
felt that connection, but then again he really hasn’t been exposed to the
truths of the Bible for years. For Luke
and others like him, my challenge then is to revisit the Bible, especially the
New Testament which most directly tells us about Jesus and His message. Paul understood the importance of this when
he wrote in Romans 10:17 “Consequently,
faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word
about Christ.”
What he finds in Christ’s message might not be comfortable. In fact it can and should rock our world and pull
us out of our comfort zones into truth about who God is, who we are, and how we
can relate to Him and one another. It
pulled me out of my comfort zone to reach out to a stranger there in the snack
aisle of a grocery store, and, like Luke, it can pull any of us out of our
comfortable but false ideas about who we want God to be and into the challenge
and adventure of who He really is.
Thanks, Luke, for allowing me to record our
conversation! It can be seen HERE at https://youtu.be/V5qCeqYxTz4
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