Tip-Toeing through Relativity - The Struggle to Be All In

I. The Importance of My Faith

If you know me, you know that I love Jesus. But because of the nature of this segment into my thoughts, it will be helpful to give a little context. My life has always been centered around church. There was a direct line from the hospital to the sanctuary. However, the real journey, the personal decision to follow Jesus Christ, did not happen until much later in my life, middle school to be exact.

My Christian journey has always been, let’s just say a world-wind of sorts. As a twelve year old, I began to feel and understand what true unconditional love was through the Holy Spirit. But I still lived in the real world with real struggles and with people who did not share my worldview and outlook. As a learner, I started to dig deep into what it meant to be a Christian. The biggest question on my mind, even at twelve, was how do I live my life in a way that would bring God the most glory and show people the love and hope of Jesus Christ? This led me to a church, where on the one hand I learned a lot of doctrinal foundation but on the other hand I also developed a hostility to legalism which would affect me for the rest of my journey.

II. Scars of Legalism

For those of you who have no idea what legalism is, let me give you a quick definition. Legalism is when you formulate an understanding of the church, God, or the Bible that has been cultured through tradition and personal experiences and hold that your understanding is the ONLY understanding of what it means to be a follower of Christ. Early on in my faith, I felt a strong resistance to this type of belief system.

You see, as much as I hate it, God has created me with an undeniable ability to completely and unapologetically love those who are not like me. When I meet someone, I often try to see where they are coming from even if their point of view is not what I believe to be true. Because of this characteristic, it often feels as if those who clung to a more legalistic approach lacked compassion for those who identified differently than they did. And that was just a Kool-Aid that I could not drink.

As I got older and started to study theology, my perspective on who God was also began to change. There were so many books about theories and commentary on scripture. The most compelling were the writings of the early church fathers who dared to think outside the box in such a way that has influenced most of modern scriptural understanding. At the same time, philosophy became a pleasant past time for me. More than just in the writings of Irenaeus and Augustine, the beauty and magnitude of God was becoming clearer through thinkers like Plato and Pascal. My intellectual thirst was being overfilled, while at the same time my distaste for a Christianity that was one-sided grew stronger.

III. Fighting to be Relevant

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the Christians that I knew subscribed to the ideas and worldviews that I had such a strong distaste. With the advent of social media, however, I was able to find other Christians who had the same view as me. Christians who were fed up with American individualism seeping it’s way into protestant liturgy, who were fed up with being seen as a religion that hated those who disagreed with them, and who were fed up with always having to preference conversations with, “I am not one of those Christians.” For the first time, I was not fighting against the legalistic oppression alone, there were others! Whoo hoo, social media gave me validation that, although it had only begun in college, was not fully developed. I believed that finally, my struggle with how to be a “good” Christian was finally over.

But here is the problem, I became so obsessed with not being a certain type of way, that I missed the forest for the trees. The very thing that often left me distraught, had seeped into my way of thinking. Because of my foundation in a legalistic world, I began to live my private life in anguish. Always thinking that there were only two worlds. I could be all in for Jesus or I could live the way my unsaved friends lived.

The times when I chose to live the way my unsaved friends lived, I was filled with guilt and worry of not being a good enough example for them. But on the other hand, when I chose to be focused on Jesus, I never truly sold out completely, because of the fear that I would lose my ability to have compassion and love those who are not like me or that do not believe the same way that I do.

This split left me on the fence and if I am honest, at times it made me feel as if there was really no concrete truth in the world. Most of the time, my life was standing in the middle of the street sometimes leaning to one side and at sometimes leaning to the other. This warped view bled into my faith and hindered me from having a personal relationship with God because as much as I tried to fight the legalistic voices in my head, that is what I thought all-in Christianity looks like. I mean, all-in has to mean isolation right?

IV. Discovering anew, My First Love

But the great thing about Jesus is that he pursues me. Like really pursues me, even when I do not even want him too. Lately, this hesitation to be all in, has really been troubling me. There is such a gap between what I want with my mouth and what I am willing to actually do in my actions. But there is a light.

Recently, God revealed something to me that has been life-changing. In the last few weeks of my life, I have found myself increasingly more irritated with my brothers and sisters in Christ who are all about Jesus. That irritation was in all honesty just a reflection of the distraught inside of my own head about my dilemma.

Okay, but on to the life-changing solution: I do not have to straddle the fence and I do not have to choose which set of rules to follow, because that is just it - the Christian life is not about rules. It’s like God is hitting me upside the head saying, yes I have called you to be compassionate, Vania. He has shown me that my calling is not like everyone else’s calling and that is okay. My whole life, I have looked at my sensitivity to other people as a weakness that leads me into sin. But it does not have to be that way.

It is more like I am a tree planted in the middle of the road, but God has given me roots that flow on both sides. There are people that I may get to reach that my other Christian friends will never ever get to reach, because I listen to the other worldview and find common ground and that is okay. We are designed to be different but loved the same. The key to all of it is simply building a personal relationship with Jesus. That is all I have to do, I do not have to focus on reading my bible, I do not have to focus on how different my theology is to some of my friends, because it is the relationship with the godhead that I am called to, all of the other things just flow from that.

It’s like Jesus said, “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.” John 15:4. You see, the sun and rain are not focusing on producing fruit, but instead growing and sustaining the plant. In the same way, I must focus on Jesus, and let the fruit come in his timing. I am on the journey now of forgetting long held categories, such as dos and don’ts, and instead discovering my first love. I am all-in.