Battered worshiper syndrome

There's a lie they tell in some parts that if you are following God, you will never be hurt.

Like the best lies, it has a germ of truth at the heart of it, twisted just so, so that the meaning of that truth is lost with its context and people trusting in a promise that was never made, rush headlong into disaster. You're told that if you have faith, you can overcome any affliction; that if you are following God, he will protect you from the fowler's snare, and on and on.

It's a crock. Pain is inevitable. As a wise man once observed, "Life is pain. Anyone who says different is trying to sell you something."

The Church with a Trendy Name has a monthly tradition called Philosophy on Tap, where about twenty of us get together at one of the pubs in Nova Bastille and discuss weighty issues like the Problem of Evil over beer. Not everyone who goes, attends the church; and not everyone who attends is necessarily a Christian. It's about the marketplace of ideas.

This past Monday, the question was about the balancing act between faith and reason; viz., Does faith trump reason, does reason nullify faith, or (more likely) how do the two interact? We were about ninety minutes into the talk, and discussion had wandered slightly, as discussions do; and we were talking about how faith sometimes just doesn't know when to quit. These are the moments where you are wracked with pain so deep that your only prayer is a heart-wrenching sob, and reason knows there's been a bait-and-switch and the show playing is not what was on the schedule. Faith persists.

Sometimes these moments come unexpectedly, after periods of great joy and spiritual ecstasy, when God has led the believer to a fantastic height and is letting her drink in the glorious view. The believer is lost in the wonder of the moment, and she doesn't even realize that she's standing on a precipice, until after God has pushed her off.

Other times, you walk into these moments in a willful obedience marked by a growing unease as the lights along the path begin to flicker and fail one at a time. You walk on, trusting that the Shepherd will see you through, while the shadows deepen and eager whispers spring up all around the thin nimbus of light that rapidly is fading into black. And then the light fails, you discover that your guide has vanished, the only path visible is the part right under your feet, and you know that one wrong step means destruction.

"God seems to take some sort of delight in getting us to that point, doesn't he?" I said, with a nod to "The Screwtape Letters": "Our plight is never more in danger than when one of these Christians, willing, but no longer desiring to obey, looks at a creation from which all signs of God seem to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

"And yet," offered one of our resident doctors of philosophy, "we have to assume that God has a good purpose for this, because he loves us."

"I don't know," I said, mostly to be ornery. "If you went home and your wife beat you senseless; and yet you defended the bruises and broken bones and other injuries, on the grounds that she really loves you and had a good reason for what she had done, I think there'd be a problem in your relationship, don't you?"

The comment got a few laughs, as I knew it would, but during a brief break while everybody kept the bartender busy with more orders, I took a moment to talk to the good doctor a bit more seriously.

"So what purpose would it serve?" I asked, in complete honesty. I didn't go into the sordid details with my friend, but God's scalpel cuts deep. Whether God abandoned you in the dark or pushed you off a cliff, it's not an experience you forget easily. The "Why?" simmers on the backburner long after the main course has been finished. "I can accept on faith that there's a purpose, but it'd be nice sometimes to get a clue."

"It would have to be something good for us," my friend put forth. "Or God would be as monstrous as your example suggests, and that doesn't match up."

"But what?" I repeated, and my friend drew the example of courage. A hero may display courage easily when there is someone else to protect him and to make sure he gets home unharmed, but when the hero doesn't have that support and still acts heroically, his heroism is more heroic -- and, my friend pointed out, it allows the wounded hero to better gauge the cost of heroism, and decide if the virtue is worth the cost.

"Or," I said, feeling an old wound heal just a little more, "it allows someone to decide that love is worth the pain, for its own sake."

Some people will tell that if you follow Christ, you will never be hurt. You'll overcome hardship, you'll be victorious in the face of difficulty, and God will not allow your foot to be dashed against the rocks. It's a bald-faced lie. Christ himself promises poverty, hardship and even death to the people who follow him.

All I can say is that whether he pushes you off the cliff, or leaves you in the Valley of Shadow, it hurts like hell. But in the end, by faith, I have to agree: It's still worth it, because he is.


Copyright © 2010 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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