More to Learn
I keep feeling the need to open this blog post with something about how it’s 2020! How it’s still a new year! And we’ve got a whole 11 months ahead of us!
But that feels a little disingenuous. Perhaps it’s because this year, more than any other year, feels like a continuation of the last — a building, a learning, a seamless transition, a turning of the corner to find that largely, I’m still pretty much in the same place as I was last year.
I don’t have a ton of plans for this year. I don’t have any big hopes or big dreams… at least not anymore. I’ve let those fall by the wayside for reasons I’m sure I will tell you about shortly (and if you’re like my friend Daltyn who’s been worried by all my melodramatic New Years posts, don’t be. I’m fine. Dan is fine. We just had a little shake up on January 8th that’s given me reason to pause and consider what it means to have dreams and make plans). While I don’t have any resolutions set for this year, I do have a lot of questions and I’m ready to learn.
Back in the fall, I updated the front page of my website with a quote that says: “Learning to love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength and encouraging others to do the same.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about what that means. The phrasing is found in one form or another four different times in the Bible: in the books of Deuteronomy, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The last three were Jesus’ response to the question “what is the greatest commandment?”
“And you shall love the Lord your God,” he said, “with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31 NKJV).
The part of the passage that is sticking out to me most right now is the loving God with my mind part. Have you ever thought about that? What does it mean to love God with your mind?
When I was a senior in high school, my Bible teacher took our class through a series of lessons on developing our Biblical worldview. We discussed big words like sanctification. We talked about death and resurrection. We defined the role of the Holy Spirit and a plethora of other things I can’t remember all these 15 years later.
At the end of the series, we took a test where we had to write out what we believed about each of the topics, state what each word meant, and back it up with a passage of scripture. There were right and wrong answers. Everyone ought to have written some version of the same thing and used one of the five scriptures in the teacher-given list to back up their belief. There was no room for question. There was no room for doubt. There was no room for challenge.
This is the exact opposite of loving God with your mind.
I have thought about that class so many times over the last several years. I have wondered how different it would have been, how much more prepared for college and beyond I would have been if I had been taught how to think and ponder and consider, rather than just how to give a blanket response — if I had been trained and equipped to love God with my heart, soul and mind.
What if I had been asked to consider what my personal values were and write about how Christianity aligned with them? What if I had been taught the tenets of several different religions and then had been asked to compare and contrast each of them in light of Christianity and my personal values? What if I had been taught that faith and science actually work together, not against one another? What if I had been shown that some passages of scripture can be interpreted multiple different ways and that oftentimes, context changes everything?
I know that there is only so much you can teach a group of moody teenagers and that life experience is truly the thing that best shapes our faith, but I also think it’s worth considering how we can do more and how we can do better. While giving kids a solid biblical foundation is important, when our sole purpose is to teach someone the “right” answers, we completely miss out on teaching them how to actually experience God because to experience God means to get comfortable in experiencing mystery.
The mystery of God might just be one of the most beautiful things about him (or her, depending on how you see it), but it’s also the part we seem most afraid to fall into.
I am grateful for the foundation my Christian schooling laid, but loving God with my mind and experiencing him in mystery is something I’ve had to learn to do on my own.
I tend to think this focus on absolute certainty and getting everything right is one reason so many young people abandon their faith — because they’ve never been taught how to hold faith in light of their questions. But faith implies a bit of uncertainty.
When we say yes to Jesus, we’re saying yes to mystery because we’re choosing to accept a love that surpasses all knowledge— a love that challenges every single status quo you currently hold, a love says you’re good even when you think you’re bad simply because you are mine.
I have to wonder if this insistence that there are always a right and wrong answer for everything is affecting more than just our faith. I wonder if it’s leaving us, as Christians, incapable of holding the complexities of human suffering and affectively living and loving in the midst of a messy, broken world? Sometimes our desire for straightforward answers and the need to be right returns us right back to the religiosity that Jesus came to fight against.
Remember the greatest commandment? love the Lord your God,” he said, “with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
That command casts a pretty wide net, but man it sure is hard to swim inside of it.
I’m holding this call to love God with my mind seriously in 2020, and I hope you will too. I’m doing so in a number of ways and the first is to embrace the idea that God himself is couched in mystery. That loving him with my mind means getting curious and asking questions across all avenues of my life.
Leaning into this mystery might be the best way to heal the divide we see happening in and around us. It might be the key to leaning in and listening, to surrendering to a different opinion, to reading a news article or listening to a podcast we might normally ignore. It might be the key to growth — a surrendering of this highschool-induced belief that there is always a right answer and we are in possession of it, and an embracing of the truth that there is always more to learn.
How do I get comfortable with mystery?
I’ve created a two-day devotional designed to help you get quiet with God and begin your journey to getting comfortable with mystery. Sign-up for my monthly email and I’ll send it over to you!
My hope is that it draws you closer to the God who loves you and that you become more aware of that love as you experience the fullness of him.