I have a confession to make: I’ve built a jail cell for God.
It’s not one of those medieval jail cells with rats and skeletons where petty thieves live out the rest of their days. Neither is it a modern jail with bars, painful fluorescent lighting, and people in orange jump suits.
At least on the inside, this jail cell seems more like a daycare. It’s colorful and cozy with patterned carpet and flowers on the wall. It’s nice to visit when I feel like it. I sit down in my favorite comfy chair and open my edgy prayer book and underline the verses of the Bible I like the best. I talk to others in the daycare who think like me. I like God like this, and God stays where I like him—where I can understand him.
But on the outside of this daycare are the 10-foot thick cement walls, the barbed wire, the security cameras. The walls are my deepest biases, my experiences, my interpretation of scripture. The security cameras tell me when someone or something tries to take God out of his comfortable daycare space in my head. The alarms always go off.
For a long time, my daycare-jail center was great. God stayed where I liked him, and I visited happily.
But then God broke free.
It might’ve been a jailbreak like Shawshank Redemption, a slow and persistent gnawing at the foundations until a big storm came. Or maybe it was more like an overnight climb, run, swim break from Alcatraz. In any case, the cement walls are crushed, the barb-wire snapped, and the daycare empty.
God, now bigger than could ever be imagined, is now scarier than ever too. I’m afraid of this God, and sometimes I wish he wouldn’t exist so I didn’t have to deal with the consequences.
In the midst of this, there’s a big temptation to build a new daycare-jail center for God: one that makes sense in light of new experiences, one that makes me feel comfortable and at ease again.
And yet, as frightening as it is, God doesn’t belong in a place like that—just like how in the end, he could never be confined to the tabernacle or the temple.
WellsNotWalls is a journey in understanding God—not by simply deconstructing the thickest walls, but rather by building wells that deepen our experience of God as a community (1). I do my best to place a high value on scripture, tradition, and experience—all while realizing that even all of these things cannot fully explain the Creator.
I want to ask the questions: How can we deepen our understanding of God, while realizing we will never fully comprehend anything? What does it mean to be Christian-a “little Christ”-in this current world? And just as important—how to we react to the world in light of this understanding?
I am a young, biased, fallible Christian, trying to follow Jesus in an ever-confusing world. I don’t promise to be agreeable or uncontroversial, but only honest. I need wells to live. Will you help me build them?
1 Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch explain this more in The Shaping of Things to Come, pg. 47
WellsNotWalls 