I never trust a smile. Smiles are adept liars, communicating happiness, peace, and contentment whether or not those emotions actually exist. Smiles will tell you that everything is ok despite the world being shattered. Smiles will tell you that everything is under control despite the despair that is spreading like a cancer. No, you can never tell with a smile. The eyes, however…well, that’s another story.
If you glance up that couple of inches from the lips to the eyes, you will discover some truth. Can’t disguise the emptiness that hides behind the eyes with some nice words and a quick smile. The eyes always give it away. You can see the pain and the heartache, the confusion and fear. The eyes practically scream the truth of disillusionment, of deferred dreams, of crushing disappointments. You can discover some real truth in the eyes.
Where did I learn this nifty bit of observation, you may ask? Why, from church of course! In my thirty seven years as a believer, I have seen more lying smiles and dead eyes then I can count. A common Sunday morning presents the opportunity to gaze into eyes desperate to share the difficulties and pain of life that are silenced by a smile that says, “I’m a-ok, in Jesus name!” For an organism that is rightly focused on the truth, we have become quite practiced at deceiving when it comes to our lives. We pretend to be overcomers when we are being overcome. We claim victory while suffering defeat. We are destroyed by sin and sing of being set free. This should not be! How can we ever hope to grow if we cannot be honest with one another! I’ve seen it for too many years and, frankly, I hate it!
It’s easy to see why we would hide our lives from the church. We thoroughly explored the idea of judgment yesterday. Desperate people want help, not criticism. They want to share their lives and not be emotionally slaughtered in the process. And, if we are being honest, they are more likely to believe that they can find that in a bar after a few drinks than in any church. This has got to change. We have got to create an environment where people can feel free to be who they are, so they can become who God imagined they could be. This is not easy. Life is messy and people more so. If they feel free to be open and honest, some crap is gonna come out. We don’t like that at church. We want everything nice and clean. But that’s not life. Real life is a broken, filthy, experience that we so need Jesus to rescue us from. That’s not going to happen if we keep pretending, if we keep forcing people to assume a veneer of holiness simply to conform to the image of what we want church to look like.
So here is the challenge, people of God. Stop attempting to sanitize the church. When we do, we drive out the very people that our Father so desperately wants there. I am not suggesting we give license to sin. I am suggesting we give grace to sinners. Remember, you are one too. No matter how long we have known God, there are days when we need to be able to be honest as well. We need to allow the church to be the place where that can happen. It’s messy, silly, sometimes ugly, but always good. And that certainly doesn’t suck.
Good stuff
Posted by: Heath Goodson | August 12, 2010 at 02:11 PM