I Know What I Do Believe; I Know What I Don't Believe; I'm Okay with "I Don't Know"

Break through:

When the dross being squeezed out is now a greater percentage than the dross still remaining;

The “I can see clearly now the rain is gone;”

The flying in dark overcast for hours only to suddenly jut through the final bank of clouds into pristine, sunny-blue brightness.

This dross I speak of is heavy—polluted with the impurities that moor us to legalisms, spiritual self-righteousness and religious idolatry.

And it is no surprise.

C..S Lewis expounds on this very thing in his book The Screwtape Letters. 

Submerged in it, we go from either no theology, self-theology or denominational theology to only become caught in a wider net of all-encompassing Catholicism, Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, Anglicanism, Agnosticism, Atheism, or Orthodoxy.

If we are fortunate, we find Jesus Christ in spite of all the contamination. 

Liberal, conservative, it doesn’t matter. They all contain it. They all promulgate it. 

The only constant is Christ: either the acceptance of Him in various human-theological constructs, or outright rejection of Him, or the re-configuring and co-opting of His person or historicity.

Where Christ began and took hold in me, was, I see now, the beginning—slowly and arduously—of the end of the busy charade that is doctrinal, hierarchal, corporate, “culturally relevant” and super spiritually competitive congregational “life.” 

That life, manufactured on a paradigm, program, or “mission,” and set up according to humanly pre-ordained ways of humanly interpreted and spoon-fed teachings of Jesus, is not life at all. 

It is a sinking craft of man’s faulty making: a cargo carrier from which I have, over the years and with God, jettisoned load after load and bundle after bundle of excess that anchored Jesus to someone’s ideology, cultural agenda, opinion, tradition, social justice, political party, and “holding accountable.”

Today, (extraordinarily, considering), the gangplank is lowered and I disembark, no longer having to toss even one more satchel over the bow.

I walk down the passageway to the shore and stop, one last time, to gaze at the listing vessel.

And then I turn away, and in overwhelming relief and virgin joy, I walk—nothing and no-one but my Savior with me.

Copyright Barb Harwood