Confessions of a Troubled Christian Pilgrim

Shall We Begin?

Wherever you are on your journey, I want you to know that God is ready to meet you. How do I know this? I learned it the hard way. Jesus promised that “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30 ESV). God is not in the business of making it complicated to find him. He understands the complexity of our life and does everything conceivable to make access to him simple. In 1 John 4:8 (ESV), we read “God is love,” which means that God defines for us what love means and not the other way around.

God defines for us what love means, what it looks like, and how it behaves. Love looks like Jesus. It acts like Jesus. It is tender like Jesus. It sacrifices like Jesus. Sometimes, it is even stern like Jesus. On rare occasions, it speaks eloquently like Jesus. Such love encompasses emotions, but it is larger than that, and it is reflected more in action than it is in feeling.

Why start here? Because Paul taught that in our Christian journey, we don’t merely plod along but are in a kind of race. He used this metaphor in 1 Corinthians 9. Paul spoke of the Christian pilgrimage in terms of learning to rely on Christ more deeply, identifying with Christ more deeply, and finally becoming like Christ more deeply. These three goals constitute the main goal of the Christian pilgrimage.

Sounds simple, right? Beware. The simplicity of these goals belies the personal cost involved in reaching them.

Any goal that runs up against the grain of our selfishness, our thoughtlessness, our ego, and our hang-ups is going to require a lot of prayer and work. Like a great sculptor, God wants to take the raw piece of marble that is us and chip away at it until the masterpiece that he wants to create out of us emerges. Sculpting is a process of work and patience. One can only speculate about the time it took for the great Michelangelo to create his glorious statues out of carved marble and rock. What Christ makes of us will be his work in us.

Unlike the inanimate rock of a Michelangelo masterpiece, God requires our cooperation in allowing him to carve us into the image of Christ. He sometimes allows situations to happen in our lives to get us back to a place where he can continue to work on us. He provides us with comfort in the hard places, but his long-term goal is to develop our character into Christlikeness.

Some parts of our marble are more resistant and require hard, painful, and deep chiseling. At those moments, we might want to run from what God is doing in our lives. Experiences that lead to growth can be painful and even heartbreaking. We would not choose them. In fact, it is only in hindsight that I look back at events in my life with a sense of thankfulness. I certainly didn’t feel that way when they occurred. Admittedly, I felt more anger at God than thankfulness. Yet as a sign that hangs on my wall states, “Trouble is what God uses to mold us for better things.”

Upon later reflection, I realized a still more important truth. We often unfairly blame God for our decisions, even those we never consulted him on. After all, Galatians 6:7 (RSV) reads, “Whatsoever a man sows, that he will also reap.” Many people blame God for circumstances they engineered without any regard to what the Lord wanted for them. Hopefully, as we grow in our faith, we more often seek God’s guidance for difficult decisions. I hope my book offers some helpful perspective along those lines.

God bless you.