A Different Kind of God
Plastic gods are safe. Plastic gods don’t mess with you. Plastic gods don’t matter much; they fit in a small crevice of the life you want, the life you were planning to have. And when everything in life is working… plastic gods feel like enough.
JENNIE ALLEN
Somehow I had gotten comfortable with a life that was typical, ordinary, average. I was content in the simple and familiar. Without realizing it, my dreams and goals only went far enough to ensure my little boat wasn’t rocked.
I was graduating from high school and felt the surge we all feel during that exciting season—that the world was my oyster. I was ready for a summer of fun before heading to college and was perfectly happy in the little bubble I lived in. My planned major made sense to me, as did the sunshiny life I was designing, the kind devoid of challenge and discomfort. The one where I married my high school boyfriend and we rode off into the sunset.
In this idealized vision, I had no desire for adventure and whispered to myself that it was not the kind of life I wanted, even though my parents always used the word adventure as I grew up. To me, adventure required stretching and being out of my comfort zone, like when we lived in Guatemala during my junior high years. I’d had plenty of that and I was done, thankyouverymuch.
What I didn’t realize as I turned my back on adventure was that I had unwittingly turned my face toward safety and ordinary—and I was just fine living that way. So, when my parents wanted to swoop up our family and fly off on a big family trip to Europe instead of letting me go on my idea of a senior trip to Hawaii, I begged and pleaded for them to reconsider. I wanted to spend a few weeks lying on the beach, leafing through magazines and devouring novels. Despite my protests, they chose Europe.
I was so disappointed. I know, what kind of person is disappointed in an all-expenses paid trip to Europe? Looking back, I could kick my teenage self.
My dad is an academic, and to him learning is fun, so Europe was ideal. Now I would agree, but back when I was eighteen I just couldn’t see learning as entertainment or enjoyment. School was hard for me, and my grades never reflected my desire to be a successful student. I envied my friends who would spend their senior trips in tropical places where the sun always shines and stress fades away with the tide. At least they were getting tan.
Instead, my family flew first into Frankfurt, Germany, where we rented the tiniest of tiny cars, and my brother, Erik, and I enjoyed days full of knees shoved up to our chins in the backseat. We drove through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France, and ultimately rode through the Chunnel and into England.
What happened on that trip, a trip I dug in my heels so deeply against, completely surprised me. Suddenly history came alive when we stayed in thousand-year-old castles-turned-hotels, walked over the same cobblestoned streets the Romans marched on, and searched ruins, museums, and the countryside.
I came alive.
Soaking up every morsel of history and culture I could while I munched on baguette and cheese in Italy, I walked through the narrow streets, passed over mossed canals in Venice, and fell in love. Not with a boy, but with learning and people and God. My heart awakened as it tuned in to the achingly beautiful violin music drifting through the cramped streets of this ancient, sinking land.
This dreamy città captivated me as deeply romantic-sounding songs drifted up to our room from the gentleman who delivered black olive scones and feta spinach tarts to our bed-and-breakfast every morning before light had peeked through our shutters. And afternoons—post-siesta, naturally—brought us the most melodious tenor from another man as he collected garbage from cans resting beneath a web of linens drying on the lines strung through the windows, high above.
I was utterly enchanted.
Love and Truth meet in the street, Right Living and Whole Living embrace and kiss! Truth sprouts green from the ground, Right Living pours down from the skies! Oh yes! GOD gives Goodness and Beauty; our land responds with Bounty and Blessing. Right Living strides out before him, and clears a path for his passage.
Psalm 85:10–13 MSG
Love and Truth meet in the street.
Christ certainly allowed these two to meet me right there in the ancient streets of Europe as He showed His goodness and beauty to me in a big way. Touring small villages fenced in by nothing but countryside, our car was repeatedly delayed, surrounded by goats and sheep herded by children who had been taught by their fathers and their fathers before them.
Those children made me realize how I wanted to be taught by my Father too. I wanted Him to show me how to live a life that would yield harvest, bounty, and blessing. Though that thought frightened me because it seemed to hold adventure, it somehow made me feel safe at the same time, because I knew God would travel beside me.
As the countryside whisked by, wedged in the backseat of that tiny car, my mind wandered and dreamed. I pondered and remembered His protection and guidance in my past. He taught me as I listened.
Somehow as He met me in ancient European streets, God no longer existed as someone I loved simply because my parents taught me to. I’ve loved Jesus for as long as I can remember, and even as a child, my faith felt real and not simply a fairy tale my parents told at bedtime. I continue to feel fortunate and blessed that in our family, faith and relationship with Christ were like breathing; they were just part of who we were and how we lived. At the same time, though, since God had always been part of my story, it took this trip abroad to remind me what living and breathing with God by my side really meant.
Perhaps my growth had become stunted because I was jaded by years of Sunday school and youth group and I forgot the magnitude of what relationship with Him looked like in my everyday life. I lived a life where Jesus simply was but forgot that He also is. It was during this trip that Jesus ceased being the fair-haired, light-skinned Man-God I learned about on flannelgraphs in Sunday school.
Instead, I finally viewed Him for who He really is: a Man with dark skin and hair and grime beneath His fingernails, calloused hands from His trade as a woodworker, and blistered and weary feet from miles of dusty travels with His disciples. A Man with grit and passion and struggle. A Man with a deep love I could only attempt to fathom.
I could trust a Man-God who looked like this. He seemed legitimate. He felt solid. This was someone whose deep love was a small fleck of light that began to shine through the sliver of my heart recently pierced by His grit and passion and struggle. That tiny fracture continued breaking open as my will was tossed aside, and in its stead He began construction on a house He engineered.
My eyes poured over our dog-eared Baedeker travel guides, and I pleaded with my parents to pay the extra few dollars for a docent to take us through various museum tours, closed umbrella raised high above her head so we didn’t lose sight of her in the dense crowds. I was as hungry for knowledge as I was for Parisian chocolate croissants—I just never had realized it. I became so enthralled while people watching in Paris that when a waiter came by for the third time to take our order, I realized I still hadn’t looked at the menu. I was too absorbed in really seeing people for the first time … seeing their lives, their stories—both the individuals whose portraits lined the museum walls and those who occupied the café seats near our hotel.
I felt God whisper the words bigger and more into my heart, though I had no idea what they meant … other than the possibility that my safe little bubble might lose a bit of air.
I realized why my parents wanted to bring my brother and me here, on likely our last big family vacation before they became empty nesters. They wanted to open our eyes and hearts and minds to how vast the world is. They wanted to remind us how many exciting things there are to be a part of so we wouldn’t get too comfortable, sequestering ourselves in the limited sphere of life that’s so easy to get caught up in.
I still don’t completely understand how my view of Christ changed so drastically on this weeks-long trip, but I think touring through new countries and cultures was the catalyst God used to get me out of my comfort zone and allow my eyes to open to His bigness—and the bigness of life itself.
My heart soared with life’s possibilities and the future.
Because without realizing it, this journey across the globe opened in me something new. I saw life in a new way and viewed Christ as less of someThing and more of someOne. I hadn’t read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity yet, but if I had, I know I would have highlighted this section in deep pink with arrows and exclamation points all over the margins:
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense.
What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.1
Fall quickly approached, as did the time to pack up all my belongings and move from life as a child to life as an adult. My heart pounded wildly as I remembered the past summer’s travels. I never wanted it to end. I wanted to travel the world and see everything, examine every culture, and learn all I could from our world and the people in it.
The problem was, in every dream and plan, the main focus was I and me.