This
post was written for #killingmonsters, a Freedom phenomenon where brothers and
sisters in Christ share their monster-killing stories. For more information
about #killingmonsters, please check out the end of this post.
This is a picture of me and my cat Choochie. She and I enjoyed a
spontaneous photo shoot at my bathroom mirror on a day when I didn't have to be
at my 8-to-5 cubicle. Reader, perhaps you're thinking that there are a lot of
things wrong with this picture. Perhaps Choochie broke a lot of rules. But
Choochie doesn't know that cats shouldn't be awake during the day and snuggle
with their owners. Choochie doesn't know that cats shouldn't recline on their
owners' shoulders. But Choochie does it anyway, because she knows that she's
mine, and she knows that she belongs in my arms.
Choochie doesn't really care about cat stereotypes at all, and why should
she? She really isn't your typical cat. She loves water, she's extroverted and
friendly, and she rarely meows. She even lets me get close enough to her to
trim her claws and clean her ears once a month. Maybe it's because I'm bigger
than her, and she's scared to death of me. Or maybe it's because I own her. Or
maybe it's because she trusts me. (Or maybe it's a combination of all that. Sometimes,
I still have to outwit her, wrestle her, and/or speak calmly to her while she's
growling at me. She's a cat.)
I'm not a cat, but my situation is somewhat similar to Choochie's. My Owner
is a Person named Jesus. He made a way for me to be reconciled to my Father. He
sent me my Helper, the Holy Spirit. Three in One, They are my God. He is my
God. I belong in His arms. But getting there hasn't been easy. To get there, I
had to kill a gigantic monster named religion.
For the purposes of this post, I need to clarify my understanding and
definition of "religion." When I talk about religion, I'm NOT talking
about man's search for God. I'm NOT talking about helping orphans and widows in
their distress (James 1:26-27). I'm NOT talking about laws, rules, or
commandments that God Himself put in place. I'm talking about an extra set of
rules that mankind put in place. I'm talking about lip service to God (i.e.,
telling Him you love Him but not really meaning it). I'm talking about making
yourself as shiny as possible so that you look good enough to make it into
heaven on your own. I'm talking about shrinking God to the degree that anything
in His Kingdom becomes a convenient little compartment to set aside and display
whenever you want to look better than everybody else. I'm talking about a huge
monster that bred smaller monsters, latched onto and empowered already existing
monsters, and took me decades to hack away at and finally kill. And I couldn't
have done it without God's help.
Perhaps I'm confusing and/or mixing religion with "legalism"
or "Phariseeism" or whatever kind of "ism" that makes a
person think something like "I should do this so that God can be happy
with me" or "I shouldn't do this, or God will be ashamed of me."
But whatever that thing was -- which I'll call religion -- it nearly killed me,
and it kept me from getting saved in the first place.
I've been in church pretty much all my life, so I heard the gospel lots
of times before I finally responded to it. I was 8 years old when I marched up
to the front of a church sanctuary during an altar call. I knew I needed Jesus,
but I lacked the proper guidance, and I knew all the right words to say. While
I closed my eyes and knelt on the altar steps, a man came beside me and asked,
"Where is Jesus now?" I pointed at my chest and replied, "In my
heart," even though Jesus WASN'T in my heart yet.
Then when I was 10 years old, I had been pressured to get baptized,
even though I knew that I technically wasn't saved yet. (I was embarrassed. I
was tormented. I was deceived.) So, on a Thursday evening while I was waiting
for a children's church counselor to visit my house before my baptism, I got
saved while I was alone watching TV. (Perhaps you're thinking I was watching a
religious program. Nope, sorry. It was a rerun of One Day at a Time. It was the 80s. And I guess God has always known
that I process life in the weirdest ways, in the weirdest places.)
So, I was saved, and I had Somebody to pray to when I had an emergency,
but that was the extent of my relationship with God. I wasn't head-over-heels
in love with the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. I would have rather
stayed at home on a Sunday and rented a movie instead of going to church. When
I was in high school, I even became the Sunday School secretary, the youth
president, and the church pianist. I was very religious, I was quite the little
gossip, and I was blindingly shiny, but I barely cared about God at all.
All that began to change as soon as I arrived at college. I went to a Christian
school, and the people around me had something that I lacked. One evening while
many of us freshmen were sitting on the grass in the cool of the evening, I
heard people talk about surrendering their problems to God, and I heard people
singing to Him. I realized that they loved Him. The first church I visited away
from home, I criticized the bulletin. I finally visited a church where people
were raising their hands to God, and they didn't seem to be singing songs with
lip service. They loved Him.
Then I got baptized in the Holy Spirit. The first thing He convicted me
of was living to glorify myself. Now I wanted to live to glorify Him. I wanted
to love Him. I started to hear God's voice. I started seeing visions. Everything
was wonderful and meaningful and seemed brand-new. But an old monster still
latched on. Religion didn't go away. I think perhaps with each new thing I was
learning about God, religion latched onto it and perverted it.
My junior year in college, I heard a preacher basically say at a
missions conference, "If you're a Christian, you should want to become a missionary
unless God tells you to do something different." So, I wanted to become a
missionary. And I thought God wanted me to become a missionary. I also thought
He pretty much wanted me to evangelize anything that moved instead of doing mundane,
everyday things. (I think religion made everything that was supposed to be
healthy, like washing dishes and having an 8-to-5 job, look unholy.) Pardon my
French, but it's as if I had suddenly become God's ho, and He had become my
pimp. Missions and evangelism were my new gods.
Long story short, I graduated from college, but I eventually became
extremely depressed. I didn't seek professional help because I was concerned
about what other people would think and because I had been told by shiny
religious people that modern psychology was humanistic. Then 12 1/2 years ago, while
I was in missionary school, I attempted suicide. Then for a few months, I saw a
psychotherapist who specialized in counseling burned-out ministers. He helped
me to begin to see how unreligious Jesus really is. He said, "What was
Jesus' first miracle? He saved a party."
Getting professional help was awesome, but my deepest, most meaningful
healing came by having encounters alone with God. (And most of my healing still
happens that way.) While I was still recovering from depression about 12 years
ago, something finally clicked in my heart one evening. I had driven some
friends to the airport so that they could begin their missionary lives overseas.
While I was driving home alone and wrestling internally very intensely, I
screamed at God, "WHO ARE YOU?? And who am I??" He replied quietly
and firmly, "I am yours, and you are Mine." In the midst of all the
therapy, all the medication, and all the accountability, all I needed was
relationship with Him. I cried the rest of the way home, in a good way. And all
I did was meet with Him while I was driving on the highway. I tried to explain
my experience to other people, but they didn't quite understand how significant
my bonding time with my God had been. And that was OK, because nobody could
steal the memory that I made with Him. I still tear up just typing about it.
Through the years, religion proved to be a very tough monster to kill,
but I kept hacking away at it a little bit at a time. I would do things like
feel guilty for actually trying to enjoy my Sunday afternoon in my living room
instead of hitting the streets to evangelize. (Is evangelism one of the Ten
Commandments? No, but taking a Sabbath is. Hmm. Imagine that. "I wonder Who
thought that up?" she pondered sarcastically as she blogged.)
So, religion -- the slimy octopus of a beast that squeezed the life out
of me, alienated me from my family, and sank its venomous fangs into my skull
-- finally, officially died for me sometime last summer or fall. Something clicked
in my heart again when very unreligious people treated me kindly. Can you guess
what they valued more than following a set of rules? They valued having a
relationship with me.
So, this is what I've been taught, and this is what I've learned
firsthand: Relationship kills religion. If God hadn't unclogged the religion
out of my spiritual ears, perhaps I wouldn't have heard Him say unreligious
things like, "I want you to fast from fasting." (While people at my
church were shouting for joy at a worship service during a 21-day fast, I was ordering
a milkshake and bawling my eyes out while Father God was comforting me and
bonding with His little girl again.) If God hadn't helped me suffocate religion
from my daily routine, perhaps I wouldn't have heard Him tell me something as
unreligious as Him wanting to dance the tango with me in my living room. (I
didn't realize that listening to Julio Iglesias would help me bond with God in
a very unreligious way, but maybe God remembers my weird tendency to process.
Or maybe I'm not really that weird after all.)
I'm a worship leader. One of the biggest wrenches I could throw into
God's design for me would be to embrace religion and all its death. God is
life, and He longs to connect with people in a passionate, life-giving way. He
doesn't want people to choke to death on "I should" or "I
shouldn't." He wants every person to understand that he or she is uniquely
His. He wants every person to understand that he or she has a very unique spot
in His arms.
So, reader, if you ever see me leading worship, and you hear me make a
mistake, that's actually healing for me. I'm not saying that I don't want to be
an excellent musician. I'm saying that I'm not a slave to musical rules. I'm
saying that my religion is dead and doesn't come between me and my God anymore.
God isn't an abusive perfectionist who glares at me from across the sanctuary
because I'm not keeping the right tempo. He's a good Father -- the BEST Father
-- who simply enjoys my company and doesn't mind the weirdness. And He loves
me. And I love Him, too. Rules or no rules, there's nothing wrong with that
picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment