Next to Rob Bell’s Love Wins, William Paul Young’s The Shack pushed me down the rabbit hole of deconstruction.
Religious deconstruction always starts somewhere, right? Everyone’s entry point is different, but typically it starts when a “question” is introduced in regards to some piece of theology that we always assumed could be understood in only one way.
Homosexuality.
Salvation.
The Cross.
The Atonement.
Hell.
Whatever.
… Hell was it for me. It never really sat right with me in my spirit. I always felt like something was off with the whole idea of there being a place of eternal torture where people who believed the wrong things about Jesus would be tossed for all of eternity.
“Really?”, I thought. “God asks me to love and forgive my enemies, but he's not willing or able to do the same? That sounds super weird.”
I was give all the typical answers as a kid …
“God is sovereign!”
“God’s ways are not our ways!”
“You just gotta believe.”
Blah.
Blah.
… All the things that well meaning (most of them are, anyways) Christians say when someone asks a question that might make them think too hard about what they believe and why they believe it.
I was told that “God is sovereign, he is good, he is all-knowing and all-powerful.” I was told that he didn’t want me to spend eternity in hell and that if I did it was only because I chose it, I chose not to believe in Jesus.
It was all my fault.
My doing.
My stubborn lack of faith.
“God doesn’t send people to hell,” they said, “we send ourselves there.”
Somehow that was supposed to lighten the load or take away the sting, but I still didn’t understand.
I mean …
Why would God allow such a place to exist?
Why would God allow someone to be punished for all of eternity for 70, 80, 90, whatever years of “not believing in Jesus”?
Is that really justice?
Millions of years of torture for 70 years of a “crime"?
And is not believing in Jesus really a crime? Like, if an atheist volunteers at the homeless shelter every weekend while the church going believer stands on the street corner telling him he’s going to hell … is the atheist really at fault? The screaming guy gets to heaven, but the homeless shelter volunteer gets hell?
What kind of crazy universe do we live in?!
I don’t know. There were just so many questions for me and when I came across Love Wins and The Shack … I felt like I was finally understood. More than any other books, these books showed me that God really is love and that even in our deepest and most terrible pains, we are never alone.
Sure, bad stuff happens. All the time. We live in a world of humans and humans sometimes do terrible things. And sometimes terrible things happen just because … they do. Not because the world is “fallen” or “sinful” or whatever, but because the world is the world and life is hard and difficult and exhausting.
HOWEVER.
Even when those bad things happen, we are met with a God, with a Spirit, with a Surge of Energy that will walk with us, sit with us, cry with us, mourn with us, rage with us … through our pain.
I believe …
That God will meet us in the bottle of alcohol.
She will meet us at the bottom of the pill bottle.
They will meet us under our covers.
Spirit will meet us at the therapist.
God will meet us and be with us, never abandon us. We might not sense the Presence at first. Heck, we may never sense the Presence at all. We might forever feel alone until we close our eyes on this life for the last time.
But we’re not.
Some of us recognize the Presence sooner than others. Some of us never recognize it at all. But, for those of us who have - we can be the Presence for someone else.
Right?
That’s the key.
Your friend or neighbor or family member may be walking through hell right now and may not even believe in God because the pain has become too much, too heavy to bear.
The last thing we should do is tell them about God.
The worst thing we could do is try to convince them that God is near.
That God is real.
The best thing, though - the BEST thing we can do is just be the Presence of Christ to the people in our lives without ever mentioning the name of Christ to them.
Love them.
Show up for them.
Sit with them.
Cry with them.
Grieve with them.
Refuse to judge them.
… All of these things, that’s what The Shack taught me.
✌️
- Glenn || PATREON / BUY ME A COFFEE
Will You Spread the Word?
I quit my job at Apple. And then I quit my new job at Starbucks. What’s next? For now I’m working on the podcast and am looking to put myself out there as a Social Media Manager.
Will I get you a million followers? No. If you look at my social media accounts I don’t have many followers because I’m super picky with who I put on my “friends list”. I also recently deleted 2,000 people from my Facebook friends list.
Followers aren’t my thing, I really don’t care.
That’s because my doctoral dissertation wasn’t about how to build a following with social media, but how to connect with the people already following you and help them connect with one another and with God.
If you need that help OR know someone who does …
An author?
A pastor?
A church?
A business?
… PLEASE pass my name along.
I’m currently the “Social Media Wizard” for Alexander John Shaia at Quadratos, LLC and will soon announce a job I picked up with someone else. My goal is to add another one by the end of the year and then a few more in 2022 so that I can generate some income in addition to the podcast and keep doing the things I love and am on this earth to do.
I want to make content creation my full-time gig. I love it. Plus I have a book that’s been halfway written for almost a year and it’s screaming for me to come back.
Help me spread the word, please; and feel free to pass along my email address at whatifproject.net@gmail.com.
Thanks!