Losing Your Place
I grew up in a tiny mountain town in Southern Oregon, barely forty miles from where I sit now.
Yet, it might as well be light-years away.
The landscape of my youth has buckled under the weight of poverty and vice, transforming into a “forest ghetto” I no longer recognize. I avoid going there. I even avoid the memory of it.
I have no place there.
I feel the same estrangement from the faith that reared me. That brand of evangelicalism tried to twist me, then tried to break me. I am broken, it’s true—but not by their hands.
In truth, they simply bore me. I grew weary of the formulas and the rigid dogmas; the elaborate structures they built around a God who had no place to lay His head. I watched their frantic lust for certainty—their desperate need to categorize a God cloaked in mystery upon mystery. They were always hunting for enemies, never realizing the greatest rot was within.
I have no place there.
At this point, my only place is at the feet of Jesus. The “communion” I belong to now is a wreck itself, so I hold fast to a few kindred souls who truly love Him. I find rest in the early creeds; I prefer them because they don’t try to do too much. They simply point.
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father!”
— John 14:9
This is my faith: I have seen Jesus. I see Him in the Scriptures and in the radical dust of the Sermon on the Mount. I listen for His voice, and that is where the gentle breaking happens. In that brokenness, I find an invitation to ask, to imagine, and to explore—acts that are rarely considered virtues among the “holy.”
Writing is a labor these days. I spent over half my life trying to work within the system, saying everything I felt the Lord gave me to say. For my efforts I have been labeled an enemy.
I find that oddly comforting.
I used to view this as a fight where I had to dig in and defend a position. Now, I realize the only way to “win” is to hope that people see Jesus as He truly is.
Some will find Him irresistible.
Others will join the spirit of those who crucified Him.
As for me, I will keep trying to see and hear—looking forward to a home that finally feels like one.
Michael W. Smith wrote a song I used to listen to back in the 90’s. The song was “Place in This World”. Michael, these words you wrote in this post reminded me of that song. For the past three years, I have been searching to find “My place” in the world of evangelicalism. At times, I feel lost, searching for a resemblance to the church I once knew. The church where I spent 22 years serving as a pastor.
You might remember 4 years ago, when I thought I had found such a church where I could once again serve as pastor. I had the chance to return to Oregon! It seemed like a perfect answer to prayer! The church asked me to come, but a health scare with my wife put a halt to that dream. Needless to say, disappointment would flood every bone in my body. That disappointment was soon replaced with the realization that it was God’s protection. He was protecting me from returning to a situation where I would no longer fit. The evangelicalism that I left years ago had been replaced with dogma that I could no longer teach.
Bob,
I’m fortunate in that I was never comfortable in those spaces.
Even as a kid, I had seen too much.
Still, it leaves a hole…an empty space I try to fill with people who feel the same way…
When I read this line, “I watched their frantic lust for certainty”, I had the following words pop into my head
An Apologetics of Insecurity
Because where I came from, that’s what it felt like.
Terry,
There is little taste for mystery among many…which leads to creative ways to feel secure…
My parents were both born in Oregon, but they came down to California looking for better job prospects. We would visit my aunt in eastern Oregon in a very small town every summer. It seemed like paradise to me when I was kid (urban child seeing all that open space and nature), but by the time I was in my teens, I knew it wasn’t the place I thought it was. The teens had no job prospects, the schools were terrible (three of my cousins were home-schooled before it was fashionable because my aunt and uncle wanted them to be employable), and the only thing they could find to do on the weekends was to drink beer and fool around (at that time they had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the state). Everyone went to church, and I was considered the heathen from California. All of my cousins left the town as soon as they were old enough.
I have found my tribe inside my church-those of who are neither red nor blue, but probably pink. We didn’t vote for Trump, but are conservative on some things and very “liberal” on others. We talk to each other, but don’t talk with those who we know are ardent Trupeteers (although that number is shrinking pretty quickly). It doesn’t seem worth blowing up the church over the differences, and I am thankful for that. Politics is no longer being ardently preached from the pulpit like it was during COVID times, and we have actually been cautioned to be loving and kind despite what differences may exist. I am thankful as I know it could change in a heartbeat. I do feel a bit sorry for the Trumpeteers as they seem lost without Tucker Carlson, MTG, and Kirk. No one is showing them “the way” anymore, and I pray they will find out it is only found in Jesus and applying His principles to our lives.
Michael
This is a deeply Christian instinct, though many religious systems fear it. The Gospels are filled with people asking questions, misunderstanding, wrestling, and still being drawn toward Christ. The Sermon on the Mount does not create certainty so much as it creates hunger—for mercy, justice, truth, and transformation. Perhaps holiness begins not in pretending certainty, but in allowing oneself to be broken open enough to hear His voice.
Linn,
I think you have the best possible world in terms of church at this point.
There is fellowship and support and you have a place.
I wish the same for all…
Duane,
It seems to me that the whole Christian tradition has been about wrestling with things while having Christ as the center.
As you know, I have little patience for those who refuse to engage …even though it means being continually broken…
Interesting thread.
“There is little taste for mystery among many”
I lost the “mystery” years ago. These days my security is living each day and doing my best to not worry about the next.
And to answer the “mystery” thing; what I found is most of the answers given about the “mystery” were just more made up things people said. They are all too often given/sed to control and dominate others than to provide real comfort for the issues of life.
“It seems to me that the whole Christian tradition has been about wrestling with things while having Christ as the center.”
This statement is the answer to worrying about the “mysteries” of it all. It’s the whole idea behind the name “Israel,” struggling with God and my existence.
“And to answer the “mystery” thing; what I found is most of the answers given about the “mystery” were just more made up things people said. They are all too often given/sed to control and dominate others than to provide real comfort for the issues of life.”
I suspect much of our theology is made up things…and much made up to provide comfort…
‘Where else can we go? Only you have the words of eternal life…’ Evangelicalism has exhausted itself and many of its converts/victims going all the ‘places’ seeking religious significance and meaning only to find themselves empty and tired. I appreciate this post and the passage you chose–those who have seen me have seen the Father. If we seek and find Him, we have all we need.
I know the place where you grew up. Stayed there in a cabin a few times going to and from Crater Lake. Sad to hear what it has become. Visited my hometown at Christmas a couple years ago. Definitely didn’t feel like home.
I’ve become more comfortable with uncertainty, tension and mystery the last few years.
Many good points in this thread. The Christian life is about the tension between walking in the Spirit and walking in the flesh, and most of us know much less about these things than we are willing to admit. Walking in the Spirit, I believe, is a desire to be attentive to His voice and wrestling through the uncertainties without requiring full understanding. We want to look at the externals, and the greater the manifestation, the greater the work of the Spirit. Maybe, but maybe not. I think God is more concerned with changing us on the inside, where we develop an ear to hear what the Spirit is saying to us and how He is calling us to walk with Him.
“I suspect much of our theology is made up things…and much made up to provide comfort…” Is that a good thing?
I’ve sat with more than one person who was dying, but the most vivid memory I have is when my father was in his last days.
Stricken with lung cancer and in hospice at home; during one of his lucid moments in the fog of his pain killers he looked at me and simply asked, “son is it over?”
I could only answer, “yes dad it is.” He got back in bed, laying his head against his pillow he returned to the fog.
And that is the last conversation I can remember I had with him.
Nothing made up.
One more thing caught my attention here;
“…I believe, is a desire to be attentive to His voice and wrestling through the uncertainties without requiring full understanding.”
How do you know it is His voice and not just your/my imaginations? What helps us to decide?
I personally think we humans are driven more by our own desires/voices than those of God.
We are far more like Jacob than we are Abraham.
“We are far more like Jacob than we are Abraham.” I agree with you on that observation. We flatter ourselves as more mature and holy than we are. If there is a weaker person in the narrative, it more likely represents us much more accurately than the protagonist.
Regarding your question/observation regarding the voice of God vs. imagination, I will only say this: The two times I am confident God spoke directly to me were clearly things I could not know on my own or from anyone else; both were highly personal instead of an application of a scriptural passage, and would not translate to the broader Church or fellow believers, and finally were impeccably accurate, beyond dispute.
Two times in the last fifteen years I knew God was communicating with me in specific contexts and situations because two people said things to me that I knew they wouldn’t have been prompted to say unless God was the origin of their prompting. One occasion involved my wife in the room with me when it happened; the other involved a person I regularly interacted with in a blog comment section who I never met in person, whose real name I never knew, and, in addition, who I had an antagonistic relationship to online, telling me online that in prayer he had gotten the impression that the name of a certain Saint might mean something to me. To say I was shocked by the name he gave, because it did mean something very specific to me, and something very current, is to woefully understate how gobsmacked I was; I I got the sense that he was also a little unsettled by having felt compelled in prayer to share what he had to say with me. Insofar as I can tell nothing was being asked of me or the other parties to these experiences, it was that God was signaling his presence to us because maybe that’s what we all needed at that moments, the grace of God showing himself clearly, as if to say — “I’m here, I’m here.”
I think we can become far more like Abraham and less like Jacob. Perhaps not enough of us allow the Spirit to take us in that direction and we resist His sanctifying work.
How do I know it’s not just my imagination? Many years of following Jesus and learning internally how to discern His voice from my own. I’ve done more study in Spiritual Formation than most whom I know. Among the many spiritual writers, I’ve studied Ignatian’s writings on discernment of spirit. Knowing His will is something I learn through prayer, trial and error, waiting, and developing an ear to hear what the Spirit is saying. There are also those times, as filbertz shared, that are unmistakably the leading of God through situations that I could not have arranged on my own. I would call that a supernatural work of God; miracles if you will.
God desires for His will to be known, and I trust in His faithfulness that goes way beyond my sense of confidence in hearing His voice. I’m not 100% in my discernment, but that is where faith comes in. He is faithful even when we are faithless, because He cannot deny Himself (2 Tim 2:13).
Not exactly my journey, but it still connects.
I started with a new counselor this week, which of course involves a lot of digging through the old nonsense that continues to shape you. Not a small portion of that involved recounting how it was that I ended up shaken out of the church. I have spent several years very intentionally not telling that story. It had become an outsized part of who I was and I wasn’t really comfortable with that anymore. That being said, recounting it beginning to present again, was kind of cathartic. It was a more concrete reminder of how and why I am where I am today, reaffirming that those reasons, as sad as they are, remain valid.
It doesn’t make me feel any less alone… or homeless, but I think I had lost touch a little bit with the why.
“I suspect much of our theology is made up things…and much made up to provide comfort…” Is that a good thing?
It’s unavoidable…we’re finite creatures trying to grasp an infinite God.
My cats and I communicate…but it is open for debate whether we have discerned those communications accurately…
“How do you know it is His voice and not just your/my imaginations? ”
It doesn’t matter much…God uses imagination and intuition quite frequently.
The Christian life is far closer to art than science…and above all else it’s relational.
How God chooses to communicate with his other kids is no concern of mine…
“God desires for His will to be known, and I trust in His faithfulness that goes way beyond my sense of confidence in hearing His voice.”
Amen and amen…
Dallas,
The “why” is where the rest of the road begins…I hope your counselor is helpful.
“How God chooses to communicate with his other kids is no concern of mine…”
Interesting comment, however you have built your website on a theme of pastoral abuse and now the political side of it.
This begs the question, how do you know God is not communicating with these men and women you have done your best to reveal as false prophets and abusers? They all say they heard from God in some sort of way.
Every cultist I know of and have met says God speaks to and through them.
One of my most favorite preacher comments I heard one day was from a ranting evangelical pastor.
He said this (or something close as I remember) about being directed by the spirit of god (yes I used lower case), “When I preach I listen to what the spirit tells me to say. If I don’t hear anything I just start talking and eventually the spirit begins to speak through me.”
In spite of your comment about “no concern of mine” it actually appears you have made it your concern (as we all do) and that brings up the question of how you discern what is from God or just rubbish?
And it does matter if we actually hear God’s voice or if it is just our imagination and personality speaking to us.
Now can and does God use these? Absolutely and it’s often not what we would expect.
And Yes God desires that His will be known, again how do we learn what that will is?
My answer is simple, but it is hard to swallow and live out. Learn from those who have gone before us, apply what we think we learned and then see what the real life results are.
All too often the results won’t live up to what we expected them to be and worse we may not actually like them.
Michael
The instruction is to “be renewed in the spirit of your mind,” and to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”
Both of these texts some give some additional clear instructions about how to do this mind renewing. And this is a hint about how I have come to separate my imaginations from the voice of God.
Blessings to you in this day.
“This begs the question, how do you know God is not communicating with these men and women you have done your best to reveal as false prophets and abusers? ”
Pretty simple.
I had proof that they were false prophets and abusive.
As I have stated many times, I hold to the foundation of the early creeds, scripture, and tradition.
All of which mitigate against false prophets and abusers.
Now, to be clear, this wasn’t what I was addressing…I was addressing how I help people pastorally navigate these waters.
One thing I didn’t mention is that we have a rather objective standard given to us through the Word of God. I say rather objective because it can be misinterpreted.
A man I know once told me the Spirit told Him that Jesus was not God. I think the Bible teaches the contrary of what he thought he heard. Based on what I believe the Bible teaches, I do not believe he heard from the Holy Spirit in that experience.
If what I am hearing is contrary to what the Scriptures teach, then I am not hearing from God.
So, learning from those who have gone before us is exactly what I am doing in my studies in Spiritual Theology. I apply it into my life, and see how it is lived out.
1 Thes 5:21 “Test all things, hold fast what is good.”