Ten Things I Hate About You: #7 - Happy Happy Joy Joy

Let's face it: Christianity isn't exactly a cakewalk. Especially in our day and age, Christians of all ages and walks of life face plenty of challenges both from within and outside the church. From my own experience and the shared experiences of people I've met, I've come to think very strongly that we all experience, at least at one point in our lives, a prolonged period where have our own journey out into the desert, with no food or water to sustain us. Sometimes we're tossed in kicking and screaming, cast out of the palaces of comfort that we've built for ourselves. Other times, we wander into it, lost, our heads stuck in a mist.

Still other times, it is an exile of our own choosing.

Regardless of the how or the why, it is a trying time, and those 40 days can seem very long indeed.

Hand in hand with the Prosperity Gospel encountered so often in its myriad permutations is the notion that Christianity is all quite pleasant, lovely and rosy. "Don't Worry, Be Happy" seems to be the general theme in some services I've been to. All you have to do is, as Willie Nelson once sang, "Ac-cent-uaaate the positive".

Frankly, I think it's plain unhealthy. I don't think anyone would argue with me when I say that if there is one thing life is not, it is an endless succession of ever higher and ever steeper peaks - there are plateaus of dullness and mundaneness. There are lows. And there are crashes. Sometimes, deep crashes from which a recovery to even just the baseline can take a lifetime to accomplish. I say "unhealthy" because when theology is presented with the broad brushstrokes of rosy living, it provides the perfect set up for all kinds of deep crashes:

First, it provides an over-inflated view of what Christianity is, what Christianity offers, and where the Christian believer fits within that greater context. Like so much stock of Nortel and JDS Uniphase (anyone remember them!?) it can lead people's expectations about the Christian life soaring through the stratosphere, but when the bubble bursts and the plane runs out of fuel, there is a very heavy price to be paid. Which leads to the second point: what happens when the crash comes. Is it my fault? Am I not being a good enough Christian, or am I not trying hard enough to be what the people around me see to be a Good Christian? There's a great post about the idea of lament in Christianity at InternetMonk, but really latched on to me was a comment to that post written by J. Michael Jones:

...We were missionaries in the Middle East at the time. We had just gone through two hellish years alone (with some very sick children). I had just sent out a newsletter asking for our donor/prayer team to pray that we “could cope with the situation.” It was the first time I had ever shown any chink in my armor. A few weeks later I had a letter of rebuke from one of our “prayer warriors.” I will never forget his words, “Christians don’t just ‘cope’ . . . they are always victorious! You apparently don’t have your eyes on Jesus.”

At that moment, my entire Christian world (built over 15 years) collapsed, like bringing down a skyscraper with a feather from a hummingbird.

We need to face up to the fact that yes, life is really bloody hard. We can react to this by pretending that it isn't, or we can make some effort to admit it, move on, and learn from the experience. Isn't that how faith grows and matures? We can also learn to accept this as a healthy component of our spiritual lives, and perhaps, even a vital component. I wonder sometimes from my own experience if our prayers are at their most truly heartfelt and honest when we're in our darkest hour and everything is collapsing all around us. I've often seen people in immense emotional or psychological pain, and yet are avoided or even shunned by the communities who in theory would be the ones most capable and able to help them, all because they seem to be object reminders of difficult and saddening life as a whole can be, let alone life as a Christian. What we really need is a realization that yes, there's nothing wrong at all with wanting to, along with "I'll Fly Away", sing the blues.