Rugged Belief...

Your heart's on the loose
You rolled them seven's with nothing to lose
And this aint no place for the weary kind
-- Ryan Bingham's The Weary Kind (From the Movie Crazy Heart.)

As children they taught us to pray, "God is great,God is good, let us thank him for our food, Amen." This worked its way deep down in us and taught us an important lesson: God is, in fact, good. And it was easy to believe, especially where I grew up. The pine trees reached the sky and the sky seemed to go on forever. Crime was low, friendships plentiful, and the preacher always had a half-stick of gum ready for the children at the end of the church service. How could God not be good?

And then it all got complicated. Acne and weird body hair, girls that wouldn't pay attention and guys who wanted to fight you. Car payments and collection agencies. And eventually, words like Cancer, AIDS, and death got attached to the names of people we knew. We still kept saying "God is good," but slowly the question began to work its way out of us, "Really? Is God good?" The puzzle pieces just didn't seem to fit.

A few of us rejected the God piece altogether. The realities on the ground seemed to be proof that either God was a fairy tale or that Bette Midler was right, God really was just watching us from a distance.

Some of us tried to force the pieces together. We developed a language that polished off the harsh realities of life. We smiled our best Joel Osteen smile and said everything was ok. Difficult times were just illusions. Devastating life circumstances were no longer cause for lament, but "opportunities to rejoice." Funerals became "celebrations of life," and the answer to "How are you doing" was always "blessed," no matter how much shit we were covered in. (It's a wonder we marveled when others accused people of faith as having their heads in the sand.)

Others of us turned God into a puppet master, calling the shots and micromanaging the universe. The universe was created in six days, God has one perfect plan for your life, and don't whine because "He is in control." This was perhaps the easiest to embrace because it took all responsibility for our lives away from us and allowed us to dictate the people God looked down upon.

Through it all, the two-pronged mystery of a good God coupled with a harsh world got lost in the garage sale. But some of us are looking for it again.

Recently I was a participant in a time of prayer. We made a few confessions of faith, each repeated by verbalizing the words "God, you are good." We were then encouraged to say prayers for our selves, our community, and our world. Each prayer was followed by a collective "God, you are good." The Haitian earthquake... God, you are good. Death of a loved one... God, you are good. Estrangement and disownment... God, you are good.

It was painful.

How can we be honest about all that we see in the world and still believe in a good God? I don' know, but we do. I suppose it may be because one does not negate the other. King David knew this, and gave us the Psalms as a guidebook for embracing tragedy and God at the same time. The pain and the hope mixed together. Both were acknowledged, neither ignored.

Today after church there were quite a number of us at Mi Tequila, one of my favorite places in Waco. A few of us have become regulars, and many more joined us today. I looked around and thought about how much I loved all these people, the ones who have shared life with me, the ones who are relatively new, and the ones I have just met. We were all there, together. There was something normal, boring, and extremely holy about those moments. But then a tinge of sadness overtook me as I recalled what a good friend of mine said to me shortly after the death of my friend Kyle... What is so horrible about this is that it is just going to keep on happening. We are all just going to keep on dying. All of us are going to have to keep burying each other until there is no one left to bury.

None of this negates hope. We still embrace the ultimate reality that everything will be made right at an appropriate time. But we shouldn't allow that fact to sweep us away too soon. The gospel is bad news before it is good news.

This is hard and requires rugged belief. Annie Dillard said that if we really believed the words we said in our worship, instead of coming to church in our Sunday best, we would put on pads and crash helmets. Life is hard, God is good, takes what some would call guts, others would call something else.

This ain't no place for the weary kind.