Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Yes I am picking up on the ‘thankful’ theme but I am not doing it to be mean. This truly is something I’m thankful for and I’d like to explain why as best I can.
I used to hate evangelizing. For me it was the absolute worst part of being a Christian. It was so hard to do; I felt so awkward and uncomfortable. I second-guessed that the other person wouldn’t be interested, even though I was sharing about something extremely important, valuable and life-changing for me. I was generally right about their reaction. I can only think of one time when I shared what I believed with someone and they said “Well, I didn’t expect to believe you but I do!” It felt like God was truly at work that night and I was in awe.
Maybe I would have seen more of that type of response, had evangelism not felt so hard to me that I was rarely brave enough to do it. That was the reality though – I was not brave enough, most of the time. So, on top of everything else I felt guilty for letting God down. For possibly letting people I loved go to hell, because I was not trying hard enough to stop that happening.
For what it’s worth, I have lately realized I struggle a lot with feeling overresponsible. If someone has a problem I feel a sort of compulsive need to try to fix it, like that’s my job. I’ve realized recently that if it’s not my problem it’s not actually my job to help! I can offer to help and I want to offer if I believe I have something helpful to contribute. This of course is the motive behind evangelism – we have good news that helped us; of course we want to help other people benefit from it too! However, “I want to” and “It’s my job to” (aka “I need to” or “I should”) are two very different things which I believe i mistakenly equated for years. I suspect life conspired against me starting at quite a young age and equated them for me.
I do remember getting the response when I was 12 years old of, in effect, “Don’t be selfish, Helen!” to “I want”, expressed innocently by me, in a group conversation in which I’d thought everyone was allowed to express what they wanted. It took me by surprise and hurt my feelings and led me to conclude (or, more likely reinforced my suspicion, already formed) that it was not ok to say what I want. Which messed me up for years. Literally. I only just realized two months ago that I have trouble saying clearly what I want, because of this wrong messaging early on. I believe that in a similar way, I got the wrong message about “I want to” and “I need to” or “I should” or “It’s my job”, not actually being one and the same thing. Which led to me feeling overresponsible and having a compulsive need to try to fix problems that aren’t my responsibility to fix.
In any case, when thinking about overresponsibility the blasphemous thought occurred to me: “Hey wait a minute! God set this whole scenario up in which most people (so I have been told) are going to be eternally tortured. Doesn’t that make hell his problem to solve, not mine? In any other scenario in life I would be being unhealthily overresponsible and have my boundary lines in the wrong places if I thought it was my job to fix someone else’s problem! And even if there is shared responsibility between God and me, let’s face it, which of us has all the power and privilege here? Is it me or is it the one of us who is omnipotent, omniscient etc etc? Realistically isn’t that person likely to have a lot more success righting any wrong in the universe than me? It can’t be possible that God is more powerless than me in stopping people going to hell!”
Anyway it was a huge relief to me when I accidentally got permission to stop doing Christian stuff in general as a consequence of acute mental illness (I wrote about that recently, here and here), It was a huge relief partly because it meant I could stop evangelizing. Wow, what a weight off my chest! I hadn’t thought of the overresponsibility aspect of evangelism yet. That meant that I did have a slight background worry about, what ifneglecting my evangelism duty might be sending someone to hell? Fortunately, due to my selfish (?) desire to look after no 1 and save my sanity, I didn’t let that get fear in my way. I set it aside and got on with the business of doing everything I could that might protect my sanity in future.
So, evangelism. Why is it so hard? I think it’s because on the whole, when I have tried to share with people the amazing good news that the God-shaped void in my life, has been filled, they respond with “But I don’t have a God-shaped void!”. Why don’t they? Is it because double-predestination Calvinists are correct, ie:
- Hell is fair because it’s what everyone deserves since everyone sins
- God in his kindness chooses a few people not to go to hell
- People have no ability to make that choice for themselves but that’s ok because God will enable the ones he chooses to choose him, as it were
- As Christians our role is to try to save everyone, I guess, because we are part of God’s method to connect with the few he has chosen?
Ok I don’t know about you but to me that does imply God is very evil, having created the majority of humans to go to hell. It absolutely does not make it ok for me that ‘hell is fair’. I don’t even agree with that. Seriously, eternal torture is a fair consequence for a limited time lifespan which was not entirely unremittingly evil? How can that be fair?
I am saying that even when I was a Christian I could not be a double-predestination Calvinist. To be honest I was unaware any Christians believed that and was rather heartbroken to discover my own pastor was at least a single-predestination Christian. That discovery led me to do some research and I reassuringly discovered that this was not a thing all Christians believed that I just hadn’t come across yet. In reality it is rejected by many Christians.
So, back to the question: why don’t people who aren’t Christians feel that void? I have been told it’s because they want to keep sinning so they pretend not to have one. In other words they do, they are lying about it. Or – more nuanced – they are in denial ie they haven’t realized they have one, so they claim they don’t and believe what they are saying, but, really, they do have one. Well, that seems very judgmental and disrespectful to me. I don’t appreciate it when I say something that I truly believe is true about me and I get the response “Incorrect” or “you’re lying” or “you’re in denial” (the last one is the only one that might possibly be true but, it’s still disrespectful because you are not inside my head. Only God could truly know whether I’m in denial or lying or simply telling the truth about what is true. You are not God.
Seriously though, I have good news and they are not accepting it. What’s wrong with them that they cannot see that?
Here I find myself back where I was yesterday, feeling this all ties together, because: what if the reason they aren’t seeing my good news as good news, is because I am inadvertently mixing Dress Code in with it? What if I am saying “Hey try these shoes, they are amazingly comfortable!” and they are saying “Yes but my feet are a different shape from yours. (I can see that with my own eyes!) If I put your shoes on I would be in physical pain. I would rather walk barefoot and deal with the challenges of that – I know some paths are stony and will hurt a bit, than put on your shoes and be in pain all the time I am wearing them.”
By the way, it seems to be a reality that in spite of (so I am told), ‘once saved, always saved’ aka God will never take his Holy Spirit back once given to a person, which is what happens when someone becomes a Christian (so I am told) – in spite of that, there are quite a few ‘ex-Christians’ out there in the world.
It seems to me that if there are ex-Christians ie people who truly believed and lived the Christian life, who truly had the same relationship with Jesus as those people who are Christians to this day – who later decided, “hmmmm, maybe I didn’t have a God-shaped void after all. Maybe I have been wearing shoes that hurt for the last several years! I’m going to take them off and see what happens! Wow, this is actually better!” – if such people truly exist and can’t be ‘brought back to the faith’, then………
I literally don’t know how to end that sentence. But I think I’m done for today.
So, as I said, Happy Thanksgiving! I hope it’s a wonderful day for you or if not, that you were able to successfully manage your expectations ahead of time?