With God there is a what-ness and a who-ness to the question.
What is God?
Who is God?
Are those the same question or not?
There’s a God of the Bible who lives in deep darkness, and suffers, and burns but is not consumed; and another god who is squeaky clean and holds lambs and lives in a gated bubble rather than the darkness. I met that god once in the clappiest church in Houston and didn’t want to stick around for his small talk and weak church lobby coffee.
Supposedly leprosy can lie dormant in your system for up to 50 years. I saw God on the tip of a leper’s nub and I shook it. There wasn’t much to grab onto, but the mustachioed leper smiled and I gave him a hug. So I have 34 years left to find out if I contracted anything from him.
But God was there in that Indian leper colony. He was probably more attentive to the nasty lepers there than the comfy churches blasting Brandon Lake’s latest moneymaker. I believe God is in most music except for those, the one-hit worship wonders that bring in the cash and take the imperfections out.
The airline stewardess poured me a FULL paper cup of red wine and now the sky has descended into a dark blue with the fainted red line fighting it off at the horizon.
I’m thinking about someone I’ve known since birth, a Bible and theology teacher, father of four, now withering away beneath cancer at the age of 56. The What of God isn’t saving him yet, just like it didn’t save my cousin from himself four years ago.
But I think the Who of God is suffering with him.
Right now I’m flying with the window shade open at 589 miles per hour, watching the sun set over a cloudy pacific. We’ve been chasing her slow descent west for hours. The primary colors are agonizingly beautiful as they show off above the white, lumpy horizon.
In this life I see beauty so acute I can’t blink, married to pain so deep I can’t breathe, and they share the same bed. They aren’t yet at the point where they sleep in separate rooms, the beauty and the pain.
I suppose we speak similarly of the gospel: that in the cross, beauty meets pain and we’ve spent two millennia wrapping our minds around that.
This free plane wine is loosening up my fingertips. I just ingested three films on the flight to Asia and realized, every story that interests us is either about creating life or ending it. If it doesn’t include at least one of those, we are bored.
Sex.
Violence.
Grace.
Sin.
Beauty.
Pain.
Life.
Death.
^ Married couples who are still in a honeymoon phase.
I want my church to have 1-star Yelp reviews.
I want it to be where the coffee is cold and
the ushers take a smoke break and
the congregants swear and
the worship team messes up.
I want it to not have its own wifi because
we can’t afford it because
the widows are paying their two cents and
that’s enough.
I want to know the names of everyone who comes
and all their crap because
they know mine too.
Some night someone is going to come and expose what you’ve been doing in the darkness. There’s a sunrise coming for all of our sins and it’s gonna shine on the righteous and the wicked alike. It’s gonna show you all my crap but then I’ll find that you have your crap too.
I used to be terrified that God was going to drag all my darkness out into the light, but then I realized that even if it doesn’t happen, the idea is the same: I need to live as if it’s going to happen either way, because that’s the healthy way to do it. A life of integrity is the best way to go; being whole in private and whole in public is not just ethical, but healthy for us too.
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