The Long Ride Home

Three years ago if you had asked me what my dream was I would have said it was to some day have my own parish and serve as lead pastor. 

Today I realize exactly why it is so vital to trust God's plans over ours. 

Surrender has always been difficult for me. Although I believe in a God that moves mountains the size of continents just cause He can, I find it challenging to let go of my need for control. Yes, I am a self-diagnosed control freak. I am also an obsessive planner. I had my whole life planned at fifteen. (That was not a joke or an over exaggeration.) 

So when God says, "Lay your cares on me" I have learned to listen. 

Today I realize that God knew, better than I, that to be an indentured servant of a dysfunctional system would break my spirit and leave me emptied and bitter. 

I pondered all of this on my drive home from work today. 

I thought of how my radical Jesus came to a time where oppression was the norm and legalism had reached new heights. He came to a time where holiness was reached by being perfect on the outside and performing all the right deeds precisely as directed. 

My crazy, beautiful Jesus came to a cookie cutter religion and blew it out of the water. 

I could count on one hand the number of times its recording in the New Testament that Jesus taught within the synagogue walls. 

He showed that relationship with God very rarely happens within the walls of a designated place. More often we encounter God at the dinner table, the graveyard, the hillside or while we walk down the road. 

Not only this, but He looked at Peter (a fisherman with a tendency to put his foot in his mouth when he spoke turned disciple who still had a slight tendency to not be so tactful) and said to him "On this rock, I will build my church." (Matthew 16:18) 

He looked at a synagogue (the church of that day) and prophesied that it would be destroyed. (Which it was.)

Fast forward approximately 2,000 years. 

Now we have tried to shove Him back in a building. We've declared church is not church unless it takes place in the walls. 

And worse: We've declared that Christian is not Christian unless within the walls each Sunday morning and Wednesday evening. 

We've lost sight of the crazy, beautiful heart of Jesus. That wild One who was wholly God and wholly man who ate with thieves, made disciples out of fisherman and tax collectors and showed that God loves prostitutes where others would judge them. 

This is not me attacking the Church. 

This is me attacking the lie that the Church has bought into.

The lie that everything has to be done exactly as we say or it's wrong and ungodly. Sound familiar? We've made ourselves beautiful Pharisees and given up our true beauty as the reflection of a loving, powerful, redeeming God. 

The hardest true is this: before we can lift up the true image we're meant to bear, we first must break down the lies that have corrupted it. 

How?

I haven't the slightest. But I know it starts with surrendering our need for perfection and control so that we can be remade into the the true Ekklesia.