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A Response to “Stop Looking at People, Look to God”

Anonymous said:

i just want to say i think it’s ok to be skeptical and have questions and doubts but it’s bad when you start making the christian faith about people rather than Jesus. stop looking toward to people for faith and focus on Jesus and encourage that more as well

 

Hey there, thank you for your concern and for bringing this up. I hear what you are saying and I can agree, and I’m also not sure it’s the whole picture.

I heard those types of statements last year dozens of times: “Stop looking at people, look at God. Stop focusing on the church, focus on Jesus. Stop putting your hope in people” etc.

I understand this to be a meaningful truth. In fact, I can say this: People let me down so much last year that the only one I could really trust was God. It was only my tiny bit of faith that kept me alive, kept me from completely unraveling in my depression and anxiety. I doubted and questioned people. Did I doubt God? Sometimes. But absolutely not as much as I did the church. When nothing else was good, I trusted that God was the only one who is.

Most people of faith know that they ought to focus on the center of their faith rather than what people are doing. It is such a basic and obvious truth, that again, it was basically my only option.

Back to your statement. I want us to consider a few things.

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How Do I Talk About God with Someone Who Doesn’t Want to?

Anonymous asked a question:

What do you do if every time you bring up God in a conversation someone changes the subject?

Hey dear friend, I would say: Let them. Be kind and let them.

That doesn’t mean you never talk about your faith around that person. But my guess is that

1) the topic of God is painful for that person,

2) the topic of God is repulsive for that person,

3) it is not entirely relevant for that person, or

4) I say this with much love, but maybe the manner in which faith is brought up has not been gentle or understanding.

You cannot force someone to talk about something they don’t want to. I’m not saying you’re doing that. But if they’re changing the subject and your goal is to “bring them back to God” all the time, you’re coercing that person into a subject that they obviously don’t want to discuss.

A Christian’s goal is never to transmit information until another person is persuaded. That’s a very westernized way of evangelism. It assumes that a “threshold of theological knowledge” is what makes a Christian. Modern church evangelism is a memorized checklist of systematic facts, and it seems that once you can recite those facts, this must mean you’re close to God. This, of course, is not true.

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Does Social Media Really Help a Cry-for-Help?

shatterrealm asked a question:

When Internet strangers rally together to assure a suicidal person that they are loved and precious, are we really helping? Or are we making things worse by arguing with their depression? Should we simply be referring them to professionals?

Hey dear friend, this is an excellent question that I can’t possibly hope to adequately cover, but I’ll offer a few thoughts on this to consider.

– On one hand, if you can save a life with words, do it. I think it’s absolutely a good idea to press in when someone expresses depression, anywhere, every time, all the time. It might really pull back someone from the edge, even for one more day.

I can’t really stop to evaluate the whole thing on whether it’s real or not, or if it’s really helping. That’s not for me to decide right then. If someone is drowning in a river headed towards a waterfall, I don’t ever want to think, “Am I enabling this person to not learn to swim?” I can think about that later. At this very second, I have to throw a lifeline, or I’ll jump in there myself.

– On the other hand, I’m less sure about how this will work for the long-term. It’s the old dilemma: “Give a person a fish for a day or teach them how to fish for life.”

In the short-term, rallying together online can certainly be helpful for a person who cries-for-help. I’ll be the first one there. But at some point, the online world becomes very limited in truly helping a depressed person. It doesn’t go deep enough, and in some cases, can actually be more harmful.


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Really Saying

It’s romantic to believe that the guy who calls and texts first, saves ‘I love you’ for you, covers you with his coat, cooks your favorite meal even if he’s allergic to it, and a flurry of other Hollywood montage moments will really fulfill you. Before we die, we want to visit Paris at night during Christmas and parasail over the Atlantic and sip wine on a hot air balloon — but you don’t really mean that.

What are you really saying? You want these things if the dude isn’t creepy, if the poor beggars in Paris do not intrude on your comfort, and as long as you don’t have to prepare a thing. A cute guy who texts you first is cute, but you change your philosophy when the dude is too nice or too short or has no jawline. Children are cute until you have to raise one — and kids are screwed up because we push our distorted view of idealism on them in place of real gritty sacrifice.

What you’re really saying is you demand a photoshopped dream, like the impossible make-up model on the cover of Maxim, to attain the highest degree of complacency at the least amount of effort for the easiest life possible. Your blog proves it.

We reveal our selfish hearts with a conditional wishlist that reads more like a bad movie script. Can you step back for a moment and examine what you really mean? And why you have these idealistic fantasies? And what your motives are? We buy into bizarre paradigms of romance and leisure and life without thinking to the bottom of them. You’ll find quickly that self-serving is not even good enough to serve yourself.

The wasted life wastes no time wasting it. The destined life invests time and makes it. You can cheat yourself to death simply by choosing the current convenient option. A life of non-committed fantasy is just a walking grave.

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