Twenty years ago today, I was baptised. All these years on, what do I believe now?

 
Twenty years ago today, I was baptised. I was 18 years old and about to go off to study Medicine at university. I had always believed in God, due to growing up in a Christian household, but I didn’t properly think about it, question it and take it more seriously until I was 9 or 10 years old. It was then that my faith took on a central, vital part in my life. When I was 18, I realised that I had never been baptised and decided to do so. It was a public declaration of what had been happening in my heart for a long time.

Obviously my faith and relationship with God have changed a lot over the years. My faith certainly has been through the wringer. I cringe at some of the things that I believed to be true when I was 18; I hope that I wasn’t too insufferable! On this twentieth anniversary of my baptism though, I’ve been reflecting on my faith journey and wondering what I would say is key to my beliefs now.

‘God is love. Those who live in love, live in God and God lives in them.’
~ 1 John 4:16

This verse above succinctly sums up my view. Love is the basis of my faith. The love is God and comes from him. Through communing/praying/merging/becoming one (whatever word you want to call it) with God, that sort of love seeps into the very substance of my being and (hopefully) spills out to others as a result. His presence is at the core of me — Godself overlapping and interweaving with my self — so that you get moments of sensing who he is, his heart, how he feels about you, the world, and others. You get occasional moments of feeling or thinking things alongside him, one with him. This can include his pain too.

Hopefully I have gradually come to know a small part of who God is and I love everything about him that I have found. There is so much more to know than I could comprehend and much that I don’t understand but I’m intrigued to carry on along this journey of discovery, of questioning, of peeling away the nonsense and the facile. I seek truth, even if the answers that I find are different than I expected or more difficult than I ever imagined. I always want to know the truth of things. I suspect much will remain a mystery this side of eternity.

I’ve found that a sign of God’s presence in someone, even if one is unaware of it at the time, is a tenderness as God nudges one towards kindness, empathy, fairness and compassion. When hatred, anger or selfishness rear their heads, the tug on one’s heart towards love, understanding and empathy for the recipient of one’s anger or hatred, pulling your heart to soften; I suspect that is God at work. You have to want it and let it happen though. You can choose to ignore the tugs and nudges, you can harden your heart. That’s the choice that everyone has to make: whether to follow God and his ways in this manner or not. Choosing to follow those tugs and nudges from God is what being a Christian is, I think.

My attitude towards the Bible has definitely changed a lot since I was 18. I remember someone telling me when I was young that I would find the answers to all life’s questions in the Bible. I read the Bible a lot in my teens, both as a whole and in bits, many times. It definitely does NOT hold the answers to all life’s questions.

Many people seem to regard the Bible as the fourth member of the Trinity. In doing so, they make an idol out of the Bible. They worship it instead of God. The Bible is not God. It can point people towards finding God for themselves but it is not God himself. The Bible has to be taken in context of the times and cultures in which it was written. My current view is that the Bible is the story of how human beings’ idea of God gradually and slowly changed as God tried to reveal himself to humans in a way that we could understand. An unravelling revelation of God. There were many misunderstandings along the way though and we got a lot of things about God wrong, misunderstood him so fundamentally, as can be seen by what is written in the Old Testament, that God finally sent Jesus to show us who he really is. ‘This, this is who I am’ is what God shows us in Jesus.

Jesus shows us that everything boils down to how, as we learn to live loved by God, that love transforms our hearts towards naturally wanting to treat everyone how Jesus said:

‘In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the essence of all that is taught in the Law and the Prophets.’ ~ Matthew 7:12

I have a complicated relationship with the Bible and still struggle with it. I often actually find it more unhelpful and a hindrance towards knowing God, if not viewed through the lens of Jesus and what he brought to our understanding.

I still struggle with many things about God but I stand by what I wrote back in 2018:

‘I’ve been living with the realities of the non-intervening side of God for over fourteen years. It doesn’t get easier but I’ve also realised that my expectations were skewed by so much Christian teaching – that God always saves or rescues you and intervenes when you need it most and when you pray hard and passionately. None of this is actually promised in the Bible but, before becoming ill, I heard this preached so often.

People seem to need to believe that God will intervene in desperate situations for them, even though when looking at the world, you can see that’s not the case in most instances. It’s very rare that miracles happen.

All God promises is to be with us always, even if we can’t sense it or experience it in a tangible way. Getting to know the God who does not save, who does not help in the way that I want, has been both excruciating and, on the rare occasion when I feel God so close, his hand on my shoulder, that I can feel what he’s feeling and pick up a small slice of what he’s thinking towards me, it’s breathtaking and melts you, resting in that communing moment together. It doesn’t change the desperate situation you’re in, it doesn’t help in any way that you’re needing or wanting but it’s what’s there.

What strikes me is how vulnerable God makes himself. He risks losing people he loves and risks us ending up hating him when we feel so hurt by him when he doesn’t intervene or protect us in the way even any earthly loving parent would.

I don’t think he’s testing us and he definitely doesn’t want us in pain or any cruel nonsense like that. Instead, there’s the intense vulnerability of whether we’ll still love him back for who he is, not for what he does and whether we’ll still see the good in him. It might take a long time to get there and a lot of anger, hurt and feeling betrayed, which must be painful for him, but he just absorbs it while we wrestle with it all.

There is something special though when we do see his goodness and still love him, despite our anguish and what we perceive as his lack of action, and I think that melts him. This has been my experience.’

It does sometimes feel that there’s also a gaping wound at the heart of me, in the midst of God’s presence. Even though I may intellectually know the theological reasons why God doesn’t intervene in the way that we want and the way that we feel we need, it still hurts so much.

This is a little story of what it feels like: a king in a faraway kingdom has a 6 year old daughter who gets kidnapped by an enemy kingdom. The enemy king tortures this 6 year old every day but the good king can’t come and rescue his daughter because he can’t justify the tens of thousands of lives of his knights who would die in a battle to get her back. First and foremost, he has to put his responsibility towards his people first, his duty as a king. It is agony for him as a father but he can’t let his people die just to save one life, no matter how much he longs to. Years later, long after the daughter has been safely returned to her home and her father, even though she understands why her father couldn’t have come to save her when she was little, and even though she wouldn’t have wanted him to sacrifice anybody else’s life to save her, there is this great painful rift of a wound between her and her father. Because however much she intellectually knows that he did the right thing, part of her is still 6 years old being tortured and just wants her Daddy to come and save her. It hurts too much and that wound doesn’t feel healable or understandable. 

It’s a silly story but it has repeatedly stuck in my head as chiming true to what it feels like. Apart from I’m the one still stuck in a dungeon being tortured, wanting God to come and save me.

So my faith journey definitely hasn’t been easy but I wrote here in May 2023 about suffering and God:

I love that God is the exact opposite of an abuser. God never forces, never controls or coerces, never compromises our autonomy, our freedom of will or mind or crosses the boundary even to influence us in any way, apart from to share his love.

My experiences of awful, powerful people in this world, are that they always seek to control, to manipulate, use their cunning to influence, to curate people’s perception of them. I love that God is the opposite of that. That he goes to such great lengths not to do that.
The restraint and pain it must take, when he has the power to do anything. I imagine that he wants to use his power to intervene even more than we want it (which is a LOT), to stop our suffering (whether individual suffering or the larger collective suffering of natural disasters and war), the suffering of the people he loves. The restraint it must take to still not rush in to save people when we question his love and care and goodness for not helping, for not intervening. Because to intervene would somewhere along the line take away someone else’s autonomy, choice, their complete freedom, even if it is a person doing an evil thing. Even though it means that he doesn’t intervene when he would want and when we would want/need. Everything is sacrificed to protect our free will.

I used to be furious at him. I used to tell him that we are his responsibility; he created us so he should take care of us. But somehow, in order to prevent us losing freedom, freedom of choice and of belief, this is what seems is necessary. And he makes himself vulnerable to being hated by those he loves when he doesn’t intervene. Just so that he will never mess with our autonomy or consent or choices or thoughts. He never crosses the boundary to influence us. I love this about him. Because it means we can trust him. If God has gone to this much trouble and pain to keep our autonomy, then he’s not going to just throw all that out when we die. It must be key to everything.

So it is not a lack of power that restrains him but it is love that restrains him. Even though it feels like the opposite.

There we come full circle back to love. God is love. That sums it up.