When God Ruins Your #Safespace

Last updated on: May 1, 2016 at 6:47 am by Anne Kennedy

When God Ruins Your #Safespace 2016-05-01T06:47:41-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I didn’t say, because I’m a tiny bit paranoid, that we were away for a couple of days at our church’s synod. But now we are safely home and everyone has shouted and yelled and reported which other child did what wrong, and we have subsided already into our ordinary cluttery and jumbled manner of life, especially with its being Sunday.

Going away, even for a very short time, is so very disruptive. I didn’t head into the meetings in a reasonable or settled frame of mind. The morning of the meetings, instead of getting in the car to go to them, we buried a friend, and there was the usual running back and forth to make the service go. All that running is a good way to tether grief to some distant outpost so that you don’t have to pay attention to it right away. You tie it up and make sure it doesn’t follow you as go from one end of the church to the other, finding small jobs to do and people to talk to.

Anyway, if you’ve wanted to know why blogging has been so bad, or even well nigh non existent over the last three days, that’s why. I’ve been busy, and unsettled, and traveling, and needing more sleep and more caffeine.

There is something about the way our culture is headed–I enumerated this observation to myself as I watched the orange cones of so many work zones along the high way narrowing down the road, forcing the traffic into sharper turns and tighter patterns–that imbues the irrational atheist mind that sits at the center of every human person, sometimes even me, with one particular wrong idea about God. And that wrong idea is that personal comfort is a human right. Life, Liberty, and, not so much the pursuit of happiness, which would mean getting up and going somewhere to find something, but rather the right not to be unsettled.

And this right, though we may feel like it should be given to us by the government, we really feel most deeply should come from God himself. Don’t trouble me, I might say. Let me do what I want. It’s not just the modern college student who doesn’t want to encounter scary different ideas and thoughts, and who tries to cocoon into a hashtag of safety. It is most of us who are able to organize our lives so that alarming and troubling news and experiences are held appropriately at bay, confined to a Facebook feed.

My favorite prayer, in the whole prayer book, is the one asking God to let us live without degradation and without reproach. I always like to add in my own mind, ‘and without any trouble at all ever’.

This, I think, is another mark against the Christian God in this modern world. Intuitively we know that God himself can be blamed when things go badly, when there is a natural disaster or tragedy of magnificent proportions. But when you decide to cry out to Jesus to save you forever, because you understand, troublingly, that you are perishing and need help, it’s very easy to think that part of the contract should involve no more trouble any more. Indeed there are a lot of preachers trying to make that case. When, in reality, the Christian who trusts God is signing up for God’s personal afflicting trouble to follow after him wherever he might go.

Moses is the person who leaps to mind. There he is, living his quiet and basically untroubled life in the desert. He had endured the suffering of alienation from his family and people, but he buried all that grief in the sand of Egypt and left to cope as best he could elsewhere. Marriage, children, sheep. What more could you ask for? Certainly not to be hassled by a dangerous God whose mode of communication involves fire, blood, and a stick. ‘I don’t want to sign up for this,’ reposts Moses, not beating around the bush (…sorry, that was terrible, I couldn’t resist). And he is right to be so cautious.

Safety and settledness are not in his, nor Israel’s, immediate future. They go from one alarming trouble to the next. From persecution to plague to running for their lives. And all at the hand of God. Is it any wonder they moan their way across the wilderness, upset and micro-aggressed.

It’s not a fun gospel to have to preach. Come, put yourself into the hands of Jesus and watch your life go downhill fast. Of course we’re flailing in our articulation of this troublesome good news, and of course no one wants to hear it. Thank heaven that God doesn’t wait around for us to catch the mood. ‘Stop fussing,’ says God to Moses, ‘will you please stop fussing. Just go, go and say the words I give you.’ And so Moses goes, because you can argue with God for a while, but eventually the fire and the blood will get the better of you.

It’s not Safety First for the Christian. It’s everlasting safety first followed by lots of bricks without straw and a hot desert wind. The comfort, ordered life is for later, after you’ve died in your body and the sand has blown up over your perishable complaining. Safety forever is actually a pretty dangerous endeavor.

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