relationality

If there's one thing that thinking hard over the past week has brought me, it's a desire to learn more. Sitting in Sunday sermon today, as opposed to dozing off as I like to do sometimes (when you sit near the walls, the hot air blows in your face and.... Zzzzz...), I was mostly wide-awake as I heard about how humans are obsessed with beauty.

The one thing that stood out to me most was the interpretation of Genesis 1:26-28, when Pastor Andrew said that "Man was created in the image of God," and consequently, that we are relational beings.

It's exactly what I've been thinking about the entire time I questioned my faith. I am relational. But where is that relationship directed? Toward God, or toward myself? An excerpt from the book "Searching for God Knows What" by Donald Miller is something that really just causes a burning desire in my heart to get to know Him, and get His love to be the only thing I need to feel right, to feel valued.

"I figure I was attaching myself to a certain identity because it made me feel smart or, more honestly, it made other people tell me I was smart. This was how I earned my since of importance. Now, as I was saying earlier, by doing things to get other people to value me, a couple of ideas became obvious, the first being that I was a human wired so other people told me who I was. This was very different from anything I had previously believed, including that you had to believe in yourself and all, and I still believe that is true, but I realized there was this other part of me, and it was a big part of me, that needed something outside of myself to tell me who I was. And the thing that had been designed to tell me who I was, was gone. And so the second idea became obvious: I was very concerned with getting other people to say I was good or valuable or important because the thing that was supposed to make me feel this way was gone.
And it wasn't just me. I could see it in the people on television, I could see it in the people in the movies, I could see it in my friends and family, too. It seemed that every human being had this need for something outside himself to tell him who he was, and that whatever it was that did this was gone, and this, to me, served as a kind of personality theory. It explained why I wanted to be seen as smart, why religious people wanted so desperately to be right, why Shirley MacLaine wanted to be God, and just about everything else a human did.
Later, when I set this truth about myself, and for that matter about the human race, next to what the Bible was saying about who God is, what happened at the Fall, and the sort of message Jesus communicated to humanity, I realized Christian spirituality fit my soul like a key. It was quite beautiful, to be honest with you.
This God, and this spirituality, was very different from the self-help version of Christianity. The God of the Bible seemed to be brokenhearted over the separation in our relationship and downright obsessed with mending the tear.
I began to wonder if the actual language of life was not the charts and formulas and stuff we map out on a graph to feel smart or right, but rather the hidden language explaining why every person does everything they do, the hidden language we are speaking that is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us."

Even reading this, I realize I'm relational, but it depends on where I find my significance... I heard sometime this week, probably during the All-Nighter, but I don't exactly recall... that it must have been immensely painful for Adam and Eve to lose the significance they found in God - so much so that they had to dress themselves because of their shame of being naked. That's really analogous to what I am - I find significance in myself, my deeds, my successes, and my words and thoughts (and more particularly, how other people view me through those things), and that's what I'm clothing my nakedness and shame with, that's where I find the value in myself.

Recurring themes and questions in my life nowadays:

• Finding a relationship with God.
• Knowing grace.
• Returning to my first love, Christ (Revelation 2:4-5).
• Dedicating myself to Him.
• Breaking down my self-sufficiency. (Ezekiel 34:16)
• Leading a God-centered, grace-centered life.
• Gazing upon Jesus' beauty rather than my own.
• Knowing I can't make it back to Him unless He brings it about in my heart.
• Faith comes from God (Jeremiah 24:7).
• Receiving and sharing Christ's love.
• Being a sacrifice by willing myself to go outside of my own comfort zone.
• Caring about things other than myself.
• Feeling Christ's pain (Isaiah 53).
• Perseverence, and being helpless. (Psalm 44)
• Stop trying to break down "coming back to God" into steps, into a formula, so that I can fulfill it and become a "good" Christian again. (This is tough because of the engineer in me...)

And in case you were wondering, no. I did not fulfill all of those, probably not even any of them. Sometimes that makes me feel worse, and sometimes, it just makes me feel... human.

Sorry for the long post :)

P.S. Wondering about what it means to really have faith, I thought about how ironic and paradoxical it is that in order to have a full relationship with Christ you need to be both completely unaware of yourself in the sense that you don't matter anymore, and also completely aware of yourself in the sense that you know your place as a helpless sinner that has been redeemed at a high cost to Christ, at no cost to yourself.
And to me, a good test to see when I'm truly dead to myself and alive in Christ seems to be when I'm willing to say what Paul said in Romans 9:3-4:
"For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises."
I think this is exactly the heart of Christ that Paul is expressing. Jesus Christ was willing to have the Father turn His back on Him (sorry for the ambiguous pronouns there) in order to save us. He was willing to be cursed and cut off from the Father for our sake... to shout "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46b)
Paul was willing to have himself cut off from Christ for his brothers' sake. When I come to be willing to give up all my eternal life and glory in exchange for eternal damnation for someone else, I will know that I have truly been loved by Christ and that I am willing to love others in the same way. Until then, I know it's all about me... I receive this relationship because of MY desire to go to heaven.