Absolute? God only knows, I'm tired of thinking about it.

Rob Bell got to me again. In this random moment of complete boredom and self-loathing, I picked up "Velvet Elvis" again last night and read this:

Once again, the springs [doctrines] aren't God. They have emerged over time as
people have discussed and studied and experieinced and reflected on their
growing understanding of who God is. Our words aren't
absolutes. Only God is absolute, and God has no intention of sharing
this absoluteness with anything, especially words people have come up with to
talk about him. This is something people have struggled with since the
beginning: how to talk about God when God is bigger than our words, our brains, our worldviews, and our imaginations.

I've mentioned before that I'm in capstone seminar--this class set up for seniors to process their Huntington experience and the faith-based learning they've paid nearly $100,000 for. Well right now we are reading this book called "The Myth of Certainty" and it is all about what it looks like to be a reflective Christian, or at least, the dilemma one runs into when trying to be reflective. This has occupied a lot of my free thought time, especially one sentence the author wrote. He said, in effect, that there is no absolute truth, no certainty, that we can attain about anything.

This statement made me want to throw the book against a wall, then I realized that it is just a book and that this is only one man's idea. No absolute truth? That flies in the face of most of what I've learned as I've come into my faith. Most of what I've been taught in HU ministry classes, for sure. If certainty is really a myth, how can I be certain I'm right? And to echo that statement--although I would never say it out loud, but I caught myself thinking it--how can I know that everyone else is wrong?

Then I realized what my issue was. Me. I want to be right. Self-assurance is my goal in becoming a "reflective" Christian. Why is it so important to keep convincing myself when I've already bought into it all? "Bought in" might be a harsh phrase to describe what I mean, which is that I've surrendured my life to Christ because I believe he's more than just a moral man that belongs in the history books. He is my Savior, my King who has a better way for me.

And then I got it. In a way that made me want to lock myself away for fear of all the other hidden agendas I probably have under my belt, hidden so well I'm not even aware of them. I want to be right. I want to win. Not only do I want to be right about God, but I want my opponents--anyone who DARES feel a different kind of certainty about God, anyone with another point of view--to be WRONG. When its time for this world to go by the wayside, I want God to split everyone up into three categories. A wrong group, a right group, and an "I was too busy to care" group. And I want to be in that right group. Right, right, right... I want to be the one who has it all figured out.

I'm sorry for being that girl.

Now I know that I've got it all wrong. My words, my politics, my worldviews, my feeble knowledge, my bloated ego could never wrap my mind around the nature of God. That doesn't mean that He isn't worth pursuing, because, what an amazing life that would be... But I am not right about him. I'm just as wrong as the self-proclaimed atheist who whole-heartedly believes that we're on our own in this vast place in the universe. Because if I can't be right about it all, I'm wrong. And I believe that God has revealed fragmented, molecule-sized parts of his absoluteness with me, but it's broken knowledge without the whole picture.

There is a myth out there called certainty. God is bigger than my words and ideas about him. I'm not right and you're not wrong... but we get to pursue the truth together at least. That's a little comforting. Ben Lee says it in his own amazingly corny way in the song that I love right now:

Woke up this morning
i suddenly realized
we're all in this together
i started smiling
cause you were smiling
and we're all in this together
I'm made of atoms
you're made of atoms
and we're all in this together
and long division
just doesnt matter
cause we're all in this together