..abandon

How much of my ideals of ministry keep me from authentic love? The idea itself of ministry is derogatory to the people that you are ‘trying to reach’. The soul on soul, heart on heart, and pain on pain are a stepped removed from authentic and buffered comfortably by a title of ministry. Out of my own fear of intimacy and pain I jump into ministry, using it as a shield so I don’t get bloody on the battle field. I am beginning to find so much distaste in Christian phrases and similes and metaphors that have tainted my view on love and people and the world for so long. The books that I read are strings and knots and braids of guarded ideals and fictional attempts at describing reality. I know with all of who I am that even if I was not raised in this culture that I would seek Jesus out in my own life. I know what Jesus has done for me but the rest of Christendom makes me wonder about the legitimacy of it all at times. I stand in fear of the moments when I hear Jesus’ raw and passionate heartbeats inside of who I am but pause and rethink them [I like to console myself and say that I am praying] through a filter of American Christianity. Will I be the one that sees Jesus on judgment day, greets him with a playful high five just to have him say, “Get away from me. I don’t know you.”? Will I look back on my life and think of all of the Christianity I proudly lived out but how much of Jesus I never experienced? I want to be free of Christian over-thinking and ministerial processing of every life decision and I want to be free of the institutions of structure that I rely on so much for my life with Jesus. I feel like I have quit or most likely just fallen asleep to it all and let the system do it for me and that I need to take a vacation from Christianity and escape from all of it and discover God in the dirt and the mold and the trashed carcasses of humanity, not the plastic realities of Christianity. Honesty is beautiful and divinely humbling and I feel like it is miles away from our tainted religion. Why does the word hypocrisy color so much of what we do in this world, and how is that possible if we are not lying? Its not that I hate it all and act like an anarchist towards the church or anything but I am just tired and want to find God without any layers separating us. I don’t think I really know what Jesus looks like without the filter of American Christianity softening his demanding blows of discipline and faithfulness and abundance in my life. I want a break from Christianity to meet Jesus for who he really is, not what Christian culture has defined him as. I think that the depths of that experience could either help me never live like this again or give me enough hope in the dirt of life to endure it until heaven. Jesus promised life and anything other than him is a reality of death. Am I living a life that I would be proud to give to someone else? Does the sheer intensity, abandon, and passion of my life scream Jesus? If you where to examine me without the church I attend, the small group I’m in, or ministry I do, would my being reflect Jesus enough for you to know that I follow him? The Jesus I read about in my Bible and the Jesus that I have experienced in my life are different than the Jesus of America. In the end I will stand alone, exposed to the ridicule and misunderstanding of the religious culture of my past, and weep humbly in the grace of a Savior that I killed. In the rawness of his bloody body he calls my heart to adventure with him and I have to be willing to have my body resemble his once my time is finished on this earth. Jesus save me from Christianity so that I can love you and save me from Christian ministry so that I can love people.