What encourages me.

It’s two things, really, both required: honesty and a desire for something better.

I dislike cheerleader Christianity. That’s the only way I can describe it. Just pretending that everything about Christianity is sunny, treating faith basically like a big cheer. A lot of CCM, and contemporary Christian culture in general, is like that. Like, I’ve been to some Christian conferences where one part of the crowd will yell, “I like Jesus, yes I do. I like Jesus, how ’bout you?” I mean, it’s fine as a crowd cheer. But I actually think some people approach their faith this way. And I hate that. Also, I don’t think it’s true to Scripture. I think C.S. Lewis wrote about this in his Reflections on the Psalms, but he says something like numerically, there are more Psalms that deal with complaining than than otherwise. There’s a reason for that, I think, and I think that acknowledging pain and problem is more true to the Christian experience than the mentality that denies struggles or faces it with glib, fortune-cookie type advice.

What I am encouraged by is true honesty. Someone talking about their struggles is more encouraging to me than what some people call “encouragement” when it’s honest and real. In fact, in general, hearing about struggles encourages me a lot. It makes me feel a kinship there, a brotherhood as we both wrestle with faith.

But that second step, the desire for something better, is critical for me. Without it, honesty is worse than not being honest at all. Reason being, people who are “honest” think they’re better than those that aren’t. Cynics (and a lot of modern philosophers) are like that, I think. They think they’re wiser or better than others because they’re honest about what’s wrong. But they don’t go anywhere with it. They either use it to look down on other, more “naive” people or just selfishly wallow in their own thinking.

And that drives me crazy, when people just drown in their own issues, focus on those issues in the name of being “honest” and “real” instead of making any real pursuit of something better, and look down on other people (frequently fellow Christians) for not being similarly cynical. Can’t stand it.

So yeah, that’s what encourages me. Honesty, and a desire for change, something better. Need both though. Wanting more without being honest doesn’t quite do it for me. Nor honesty without a real effort for something different.

A few years ago I started reading this blog that was totally encouraging to me for precisely this reason. It was deeply honest in dealing with the hard stuff of faith, not just cultural Christianity, but the real thing, with all of the associated questions and challenges many of us deal with but don’t frequently talk about. And it was expressed in language I could not hope to attain. Which to me is the best kind of writing, words that express how I feel or could feel in a way I cannot say myself.

Somewhere down the line it changed. It never ceased to be honest and raw, but that’s all it was. Honest, raw, bitter, and cynical. It’s completely random that I’m mentioning this unnamed page, and the point of the page is certainly not to encourage me. But yeah, inside I kind of hope that that old blog, that old page wins out over bitter blog. Random.