I was a different person back then. At least I’d like to think so.
Dogmatic. Self assured. Self righteous.
It’s hard to know for sure. What part is personality, what part is learned behaviour, what part is a combination of both?
I was apparently “dogmatic” before I even knew the meaning of the word. Imprinted in ink on a Year 4 report card, the implication still echoes down the years. Even back then I knew it wasn’t exactly a compliment.
I think that part is personality. It’s part of my DNA, a trait I know I share with others in my family. Probably on both sides, a double portion if you will. On a good day, we call it tenacity and applaud. On a bad day, it makes the person on the other side of a conversation want to scream.
And sure, one can learn to moderate it. But I’m like a dog with a bone at times, and sometimes like a dog without one. Argumentative. Unwilling to set the thing down. Driven by an inability to concede. Certain I am right.
Or at least I used to be certain about my certainty.
Now, I’m not certain about a lot of things. The older I get, the less wise I find myself to be, the more finite, the more fallible. I mean, it starts to become obvious – I can’t possibly know all there is to know, or understand all there is to understand. And I’m running out of time. At best I might nudge a good old century. At worst, well, how does the saying go… “in the midst of life, we are in death.”
Any day could be the day AND THERE IS STILL SO MUCH MORE TO KNOW. I confess, it’s a constant fear I’ll go before reaching the end of the book I might be currently reading. Luckily, a lot of the time they’re re-reads.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that conviction may be only one step away from arrogant certainty. Wisdom is mostly a growing awareness of how little you really know. And I’m no longer certain that ‘being right’ is the point of the exercise anyway.
Stretching The Edges Of The Map
I’d like to think I’ve changed, that I’ve learned to temper some aspects of character and grown in others. But one thing is for sure: I don’t see the world in quite the same way anymore.
The thing is, people are generally a lot more nuanced and complicated than I ever gave them credit for. Back then, I saw things in monochrome and definites, no shades of grey, no mitigating factors, no flex.
Where once I would have decided upon a person’s character in a moment and, then, having lost my good opinion, it would be lost forever, I now (try to) see past an action or conversation or opinion and understand the view from the other side. I want to see things from their perspective, to understand how they arrived where they did, and in that understanding really see them as a fellow human. I might not agree or be persuaded that it makes any kind of sense but I’m no longer arriving through the lens of my own perspective and thinking that’s the only way to see things.
A Kingdom Of One
I didn’t always have that posture.
Embarrassingly, I once dismissed a guy in my youth group as unspiritual because he wore pink shorts to a youth group activity. Short shorts too, which made the whole situation so much worse. I thought a girl at a youth camp with a smoking habit was undisciplined and not taking her faith seriously enough.
I once attended a Christian youth event in the city, hosted by one of those other misguided groups. Our group attended ostensibly because we were “interested in the topic”, but really it was a pretext for blatant proselytising. We were intent on straightening out the group’s misguided theology and maybe winning a few souls to our side of the fence. Although we didn’t really use the word “souls”, as that was somewhat fraught, doctrinally complicated by all the suspiciously pagan-Christian immortality overtones.
I remember refusing to stand for the singing at this event. I wouldn’t participate in their apostate worship. It was too modern, not reverential enough, and who knows what those lyrics were getting at. I remember being proud that I was taking a stand for Christ. I was probably 17 years old, and today, when I think about that moment, I want to give that girl a hug and simultaneously box her ears. My ears are pink thinking about it.
I was obsessed with end-times and prophecy because I had been taught to be. Always watching the news for Middle East updates, always predicting what Russia would be up to next, certain that at any moment we could be raptured away. As a teenager, I deliberated for weeks over whether to update my bedroom furniture to matching sideboard and drawers. It was clearly a waste of money as I wouldn’t be around to enjoy it for long, one of the many certainties I was certain of. That was over 30 years ago.
Anything terrifying in the international news was, paradoxically, also cause for celebration. I lived in a state of constant expectation, wearing a hair tie around my wrist at all times because, you know, any day now and who knows where we were going and what we’d be doing but I’d hate to not be able to tie my hair back. Jesus was on the move, these were surely the last days. (I hated the thought I’d probably have to do without my toothbrush, but carrying that around at all times seemed a little excessive, even to me.)
Except people had been saying that for years and living off the hype of end-times adrenaline and, in the meantime, perhaps living in much the same way I was. Judgy, insulated, self-absorbed, self-righteous, narrow-minded. I speak only for myself, but maybe you recognise something of your own Christianity in my description.
We Shall Not Cease From Exploration
Humans are a lot more complicated than I realised back then. Life is a lot trickier. Things look vastly different from the vantage point of time. We may be sincere. We may want to honour Christ. But we are also spectacularly capable of confusing our own certainty with faithfulness to Christ. We have faith in our version of faith and in the way we express it, rather than in the One who is the object of our faith, Jesus himself.
I think it’s also true that while we inevitably become who we are because, in part, of what we’ve journeyed through, sometimes we mistake stagnation for stability, change for compromise, and remain locked in one perspective, and one (right) reality (ours). Sadly, the world never opens up before us but remains small and insular, a kingdom of one.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” | T. S. Eliot
The Other Side Of Then
I guess I’m not quite sure where I’m going with all this but this much seems clear to me now: We only see some things on the other side. And only if we want to.
While I can admire some aspects of the me back then – I was serious and sincere, even if somewhat misguided and ill-informed – and despise other parts – the way I treated people or judged them privately, the arrogant certainty I mistook for faith – I forgive my younger self, and offer grace to my future self. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I know that in another 20, or 10, or even five years, the landscape will have changed again, time will have once again worked its magic and shown me things I can’t yet see.
So what are some things that look different now…?
- I’m no longer beleaguered by the need to be right or crippled by a narrative that says “If you don’t know the answer, you’ve failed.” Again, don’t misunderstand me. I like to be right. I like knowing the truth of something. Accuracy matters to me. The biggest fights with my significant other are over words and the exact meaning of the (wrong) word he used. But this is also the part I am learning to temper. Accuracy matters, but being right doesn’t make me superior just as being wrong doesn’t make me useless. It just makes me human.
- I’m more comfortable with not having all the answers (although, notice I said “more”. I think I’ll be searching out the “hows” and “whys” of stuff until my last breath…). I’m also learning to see a situation as an opportunity to be taught something new. To be a life-long learner is to remain curious, teachable, and open to the possibility that there is still more to see.
- My definition of what makes “a Christian” a Christian is much simplified and, I hope, infinitely more Christ-centred. Back then, it was about all the stuff I knew and could explain. Many, many second- and third-tier doctrinal positions that, while making for interesting conversations, have no relevance whatsoever to the good news that God is setting the world right through His Son.
Now, it’s about faith in Jesus and following him. It sounds simple, embarrassingly so, but, in some ways, it’s actually the hardest thing in the world. It asks me to consciously lay down my crowns, set aside my self-assurance, retire my doctrinal dissertations that I clutch like pearls, and put my trust, wholly and solely, in him. He is the only way, and it’s about belonging to him and nothing else.
That, of course, opens up a whole kitten ball of conversations about belonging, identity, purpose, sanctification, ecclesiology, and new creation…. I’m not embarrassed to say I rabbit on about these quite a lot on here and offer my (fallible and finite) thoughts and convictions on these topics and many others.
But the long and short of it all is: Is he mine and I am his? Everything else is just noise.
- You might be sceptical that “just having faith” is sufficient. And am I suggesting we don’t bother with trying to understand the Bible or that arriving at convictions is bad?
Respectfully, have you been living under a rock? I talk about that stuff All. The. Time. Those are the kind of conversations that are important, and life-changing and super fun to get neck-deep into. But in the end those conversations only make us better people if they make us more like Jesus. Holding convictions isn’t bad. But how we hold them, ah, that’s where I’ve come to learn the difference lies.
And that’s another significant change. This stuff is supposed to change me. Am I changing? In all the rabbit holes I head down and fascinating side-trails I venture into, am I simply accumulating knowledge or am I becoming more like Christ? I hope so.
- That shift is a rather remarkable springboard into the somewhat earth-shattering realisation that, often, my interpretation isn’t the only one, or even the best one (or that when I think I’m forging new territory, it turns out I’m just late to a party that’s already started).
It was a shocker for someone like me who was certainly certain about my certainty. As it turns out, seriously sincere Christians who hold the Bible as both inspired and authoritative can arrive at different and valid interpretations on a subject.
And you know what all this forces you to become? Humble.
We are not the sole inhabitant in a kingdom of one. We don’t encounter Christianity in a vacuum. Jesus didn’t finish his ministry Tuesday and we arrived on the scene Thursday afternoon. There’s 2000 YEARS of faithful Christian witness long before we arrived, with thousands of years of God already at work in human history before that. (And no, this is NOT A PRELUDE to a conversation about YE or OE creation…).
We are not original, we are not unique, we are not specially gifted; we’re simply grateful recipients of a faith that has traversed millennia, handed down by God-fearing and sincere men and women who have wrestled with the text, wrestled with how to live it out faithfully in their time and place, contended for truth, made mistakes, adjusted course, and persevered in the faith once entrusted to the saints.
I think that’s still our job. I want conviction. I want truth. I still want to spend the rest of my life chasing down the hows and whys and getting hopelessly lost in theological rabbit holes. But I hope the edges of the map keep stretching. I hope my world keeps getting bigger, my certainty more humble, and through it all, I become less occupied with defending my own little kingdom of one and more concerned with faithfully following the King.
