a tainted imitation

my adopted children in heart (or any excuse to throw in a favorite Africa pic)

Because you aren’t fully aware of what you are thinking until you write it down….perhaps it is time for another blog post. From time to time, I feel this need to ask God for forgiveness for the thick cultural lens in which I view my faith.

As I look over some of my old blog posts and journal entries from the last few years, I have noticed an overarching theme of frustration –frustration over trying to effectively express and articulate myself in my writing, frustration over spiritual longings, frustration in deciphering God’s will, frustration over discerning my spiritual gifts, frustration over feeling like I am not serving God to the best of ability with what He has given me, frustration over feeling weighty amounts of frustration, and so on and so on as the cycle of frustration further perpetuates itself.

Last winter I found some solace in putting my frustration into words, I wrote:  Perhaps a major part of the frustration we experience as a result of failing to adequately or sufficiently express ourselves is because we may not be able to more loudly express ourselves than the thing that serves as the impetus for the expression. Frustration is a part of our nature.

I have never really asked God to forgive the culture that surrounds me because that is basically almost equivalent to complaining or expressing dissatisfaction for being born a twenty-first century American which I am thankful to be. I also realize the word I am looking for isn’t “culture” –I intend that word to encompass other things such as personality, social economic status, education, etc. (and ultimately I mean to say “sin” or rather “tainted by sin” not “culture” per se because every discontentment or frustration roots back to our sin nature but go with it for now). 

Admittedly, I sometimes wish I lived during the early church era.

Today's church looks radically different from the early church. We certainly don’t live in the age of reformation, revival, or progress anymore; we live more in the age of ideologies, orders, and denominations. Councils, creeds, and controversies will always be with us.

At times, convents have been appealing to me; living in Africa as a missionary seemed like a pretty noble calling; and practicing extreme asceticism while living with and working alongside the poorest of poor in the inner-city seemed almost too saintly but incredibly attractive at the same time. Throughout my life, I have always struggled with this idea that I was made for more….that I wasn’t doing enough to further God’s kingdom….that I can never fully serve the ones Jesus came to serve until I lived among them. I didn’t just want to share a birthday with Mother Theresa, I wanted to become her.

I desire simple Christianity but our culture or “we” rather have somehow made it complex.    

Sometimes I like transposing my own words over other words in quotes. Thomas a Kempis wrote “Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be” (Imitation of Christ). Instead of “others,” I think practically any word or idea or anything human that provokes frustration can be substituted here.

Special thanks to my beloved Mumford and Sons who are playing these resonating words right now as I type: “Cause I need freedom now, And I need to know how, To live my life as it’s meant to be.” 


And thank you, Tozer, for your simple view of Christianity: 

The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we Christians are in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word. We have almost forgotten that God is a person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can. It is inherent in personality to be able to know other personalities, but full knowledge of one personality by another cannot be achieved in one encounter. It is only after long and loving mental intercourse that the full possibilities of both can be explored.

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too easily satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.


Now to use the same sentence structure (but not the same structural meaning) in the words of Bethany: to have found frustration and to still pursue it is quite the paradox of the soul, scorned indeed by the too easily satisfied culture, but justified in the pursuit of knowing Christ.