Messy faith

I was sitting in my Early/Medieval Christian Thought class and, like so many before me, trying to figure out the trinity. Someone raised his hand and asked, "Wouldn't it have been easier if they had just explained the Son as the thoughts of the Father, instead of trying to hold that they were distinct persons but the same God?"

I was astounded. I imagined the early Christian thinkers gathered together discussing the topic. They weren't trying to invent a doctrine or come up with easy answers. They were faced with the much harder task of trying to explain a God that they could not fully know. They were on the search for truth.

Christianity is a messy business. Life is a messy business. I am a messy person. (Seriously, you should see my dorm room.) How do I reconcile my search for truth with the idea that God is so deep that I cannot find the bottom and so wide that I cannot see the other side? How do I understand God as judge and the friend to whom I tell my deepest secrets? How do I follow a God who told the rich young ruler to sell all of his possessions and follow, who asks me for my whole heart, soul, mind and strength, and who said, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:30)?

My freshman seminar is examining whether or not evolutionary theory can explain acts of human altruism. We talked about natural selection and the mechanisms that might lead to human behaviors that look like altruism but could in fact be selfishness in a biological sense. Something was tickling my brain, and I realized that I was walking around with my eyes squeezed shut (metaphorically, of course), very carefully not looking these ideas in the eye.

But I was on the search for truth, and it wouldn't say much for my faith if I refused to look too closely. So I opened my eyes and found that it made sense that I would have genes for things like love and trust and cooperation. I am, after all, made in the God's image. You know that part in Shrek when Shrek is trying to explain himself to Donkey and he says that ogres are like onions because they have layers? God is like onions, too . Sure, some of the layers might smell a little funny and make me cry, but if I never peel them back to see what's underneath, I might (or probably will) miss something important.

I spent a couple of days this week walking around feeling like I was personally disappointing the world. Really, the whole world. I sat down and tried to figure out what was going on. It seemed unlikely that my professors actually minded that I had only managed B plus work thus far, and I hadn't done anything my church could be disappointed about. It seemed that the only person that I was actually disappointing was myself.

Then I asked, "What does God expect from me?" If I expected near-perfection from myself, God must be expecting perfection itself, or at least perfect obedience to all his commands, right? Luckily, God is much smarter than I am and he has actually met me, so I am sure he recognizes the impossibility of this. The hard part was getting myself to recognize it.

If I believe that I can know what is right all the time and even manage to do it, I do not recognize the grace of God. If I believe that I have all of the answers, if I am afraid to ask the questions, I do not live by faith. If I do not recognize God as beyond my comprehension, I do not give him all the credit he deserves. It seems that God has not called me here to accomplish lots of great deeds perfectly or to find all of the answers. He has called me here to live out a faith that is messy, unpolished, and full of holes fully believing that he will make it beautiful.

Allie Lundblad is in her first year as a HELM Leadership Fellow and is a member of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Asheville, North Carolina.