I know you don’t remember Aug. 2, 1990 – but I do. Sitting alone on my living room floor, I stared at the TV in total shock at the news that Tom Brokaw had just delivered. Unless I’d misheard his heavy South Dakotan drawl, I had just beheld the most spectacular of announcements. I leaped to my feet and ran outside to find my father who was mowing the front lawn. He smiled at me and cut off the motor, bringing the sound of his yard work to an abrupt halt. I staggered up and relayed my message, completely out of breath from a sprint that had lasted all of eight seconds.
“Jesus is back,” I said, panting, hands on my knees and straining my eyes upward to gauge his reaction. My father gave me a slow, deadpan nod, acknowledging nothing except that he had heard me. “Isn’t that great?” I asked, gasping to catch my breath. He told me that I was mistaken and asked where I had gotten an idea like that. I told him it was all over the news, that Jesus had returned somewhere in the Middle East. “I mean, it makes sense,” I said. “He left from the Middle East.” But my father insisted that I didn’t need to worry about whatever the television said.
I was perplexed. Had I been unwittingly brainwashed by the evening news? Mr. Brokaw repeated the phrase multiple times – Christ is in the Middle East, Christ is in the Middle East. The earnest and somber tone with which he relayed the story was a confirmation in itself. My preoccupation with the entire incident lasted for two days, and ran so deeply that I firmly believed it all without actually having seen Christ – until the graphic over Mr. Brokaw’s shoulder alerted me to my error: “Crisis in the Middle East!”
Though I’d never heard it before, the word “crisis” was apparently common enough in the English vernacular that people worldwide had managed not to mistake the headline as a sign of the apocalypse. I wasn’t so lucky. As I tried desperately to figure out what on earth that word meant, where on earth Iraq was, and why on earth the tanks no longer had anything to do with Jesus, only one thing was clear: NBC’s senior anchorman boasted a vocabulary that far surpassed my own. I felt instant shame for having mistaken a military incursion in Kuwait for the Second Coming, and was determined never to make the same mistake again. Sadly, I’ve only bolstered my resolve ever since. Why is it that at seven years old, when my sense of God’s hand moving in my life is so grossly underdeveloped, I can somehow believe wholeheartedly that my Savior is on the move? Why now, when I’ve seen His hand at work for so many years, is my formerly childlike faith marred by incredulity? Lately, I’ve begun to see the potential cost of my ignorance.
Were I granted an opportunity to view through the proper scope and with adequate perspective, my efforts to supplant the Almighty, my pitiful coup on the throne of grace, my ill-gotten claims to His sovereignty and the woeful state of the arsenal with which I waged my assault, I would in all likelihood die of laughter. That I am afforded no such opportunity is among the simplest of His daily mercies.
To hear Him and not obey is the true crisis. To love him and not thirst, to worship Him and not fear, to know Him and not bear fruit – these are crises. Too many of us only believe on paper. We select Christianity on a pop down menu or check if off in a box. After a while, we become reprogrammed (“upgraded,” we tell ourselves) to a new level of compatibility with the world around us, our fondness for the order of modernity and the convenience of relativism yields a god that doesn’t even fill up the box we put him in. But the ‘god’ in our box is nothing of the sort – it’s simply an idol no different from the other worthless things that we cling to everyday. We presume to outgrow our duality and reduce it to a passing phase, treating the spiritual realm like a fairy tale that our newfound adulthood demands we ignore. Then I hear students speak with such disdain of ‘the bubble’ that envelops their campus while turning it into an incubator for complacency. Eventually our attendance at a Christian college or even a church becomes the extent of the “fruit” we bear until one day we awaken as mere loiterers in the Kingdom.
Thankfully, someone got to me, and several concerned citizens – not of America or humanity, but citizens of heaven – have encouraged me to go back to the seven year old me. They’ve admonished me to stop perusing the Word and to be devoured by it. They’ve convinced me to broadcast my faith instead of burying it, and to suffer for goodness of the gospel when necessary. So, suffer I will and the next time someone calls our faith “childish,” I’ll thank them. When they reduce our dependence on Christ to a mere crutch, I’ll tell them that it’s really more like a stretcher. When people tell me that we’re brainwashed, I’ll simply smile and let them know, ever so gently, that it’s pronounced ‘heartwashed’.
Sincerely,
A fellow citizen
