Church signs often irritate me.
I’m sure you’ve seen them—signs offering some pithy statement about God or church or living a good life, with the church’s name and often the pastor’s name in smaller print nearby. My Favourite Person claims he doesn’t notice them. Somehow I can’t not notice them.
It probably goes back to my childhood, where I experienced several different flavours of Christianity, all of which claimed to have the only truth. By the time I reached adulthood, I’d heard multiple different versions of “we’re the only church that gets it right”. I have a deep appreciation for the many different flavours of faith expression that exist, and an equally deep resistance to dogmatic pronouncements.
Thus, my beef with church signs.
The one that caught my attention a few days ago announced, “Nothing takes God by surprise.”
Oh yes. I’m quite familiar with that proclamation, as well as its close relative, “God is in control of everything.”
Either or both of these tend to make an appearance when someone is struggling to come to terms with something truly difficult, even heartbreaking. They are usually meant to be reassuring, although in my experience, both shoot well wide of the mark. They feel dismissive of our human emotions.
The soul-work I’ve been engaged with for the past decade always invites me to pay attention to my inner being when I’m feeling reactive to something … like a church sign. Rather than getting caught up in everything that is wrong with the pronouncement, I noticed my discomfort with the words and just let myself be uncomfortable for a bit.
Slowly, I became aware of the part of me that longs to believe that there really is a force out there somewhere that is in control of all in the world that seems random and chaotic and painful. The truly awful things in life feel less awful if I can tell myself they are all part of a plan too big for me to comprehend.
In other words, when I’m facing difficulty and heartache, I instinctively reach for some kind of certainty. I want control. Since life reminds me regularly that my control is at best an illusion, I am prone to looking outside myself for “Who is in charge here?” I want to know that there is a force bigger than the humans making overwhelmingly horrible choices.
The Gospels teach that God came to earth in the human form of Jesus of Nazareth. What I see in the life and message of Jesus has very little to do with control. Instead, when Jesus interacted with other humans, what he offered was presence and compassion. His final words to his disciples were, “I will be with you … day after day, right up to the end of the age.”
With a deep relieving sigh, I realized that’s actually what I want when I’m experiencing or witnessing the hard things. I just want to know I’m not facing it alone. A Divine Presence that accompanies me in my darkest moments is more meaningful than the depiction of a being who has the power to prevent the many atrocities of our world but doesn’t because of a “greater plan”. When I experience that inner companionship, I can’t help but want to extend it to others. When that Presence is real to me, I want to be that presence in human form to the humans around me, and I realize it can begin in the smallest of caring gestures.
It also felt healing to connect with the part of me that wants to believe control is what will make life feel easier, and my heart hurt less, and to realize that companionship is what I really want. When I’m looking for control, I get brittle, and opinionated and cranky. When I feel companioned, I soften, and quiet and reconnect with my own care.
And now that I’ve connected with what brings comfort to my heart, I discover it doesn’t matter so much if someone wants to make a sign about God being the boss of everything. They get to choose what has meaning for them.
For me, remembering the Presence that hovers even closer when life is hard helps me attend to what is mine to do today.
Leave a Reply