Even Followers Get Lost

This morning I stumbled upon one of those social media posts. You know the ones where big named ministry guy (always a guy) from big-budget ministry group announces how we all should be be feeling right now if we are serious about our faith. In this particular case, he claimed that the truth of one’s faith is dependent on how good it makes you feel. Positive outlook was equated with having a mature faith.

As is often the case, this one got me spinning. I thought of all the people who are going through hell. Who are watching the bedside of a dying loved one through a Zoom call. Who are seeing their marriage unravel and are out of ideas. Who are trapped in their apartment with their abuser. In any of these cases—and thousands of others—feelings of despair, sadness, or anxiety are quite literally embedded in their situations and the chemical swirl that is triggering those emotions embodied in their very cells. The asinine idea that picking a different thought would somehow change the truth of these situations is beyond ridiculous, its harmful.

And, honestly, I thought of myself. I wanted to reply back to this stranger, “Most of my Jesus journey would be written out by your rules.” When I followed the despair, Jesus was there. When I followed the anxiety, Jesus was there. When I followed the doubt, Jesus was there. When I allowed myself to believe the impossible: that the echo of silence, the hollow of loneliness, the desertscape of the wilderness weren’t places to escape, but places to be found. A hope that requires no feelings of hope, a love that does not require us to feel lovable, a faith that holds in the deepest doubt have the been the only reliable platforms for my lifetime of faith. The mountaintops have been few and far between.

So if you are like me, more familiar with valleys, more comfortable in the shadows, let me offer you this permission: you are enough.

You don’t have to manufacture confidence.
You don’t have to prove your Christian card with positive feelings.

All the stories that got you here mattered.
The dark days and the light.
The confidence and the fear.
The comfort and the isolation.

To go the Jesus Way does not require that you found all the right things to believe at all the right times. In fact, your well-practiced thoughts matter very little at all. What matters is to be here, in the rest of Holy Saturday, held between all our losses and all our hopes.

Holy Week Ends on Saturday

“By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” - Genesis 2:2

“When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” - John 19:30

Jesus recreates the world in Holy Week. His march to the cross rewrites the six days of Genesis 1, culminating with the King taking His throne except His throne is a cross. The revolutionary theology of the gospels is in equating Jesus’ entry into suffering with His claim to Lordship, His walking into death equated with victory and rest. Easter Sunday reveals a victory embedded already in the New Creation of the cross.

This means something incredible. This in-between trapped between our grief and our healing, our losses and our recovery, our foolishness and our truth, our entrapment and our liberty, our injustice and our revolution, our Good Fridays and Easters is the place God’s rest can be found.

The party of Easter is great. By the time most of you are reading this, you are in the midst of it. But many of you won’t be feeling it. And that’s more than ok. Because God’s rest is in the in-between. It’s in the wilderness. It’s in the quiet silence. It’s in the places we’re trying to race out of with all of our self-help feelings. Jesus’ home on earth is homelessness. Which means He is oh-so-near to us now.

Holy Saturday is what Lent has been training us for. We haven’t been training all these days to find our hope in the hunger, only for Jesus’ presence to be fullest in the feast. We’ve been training to find him in our lostness. To see Him finding us all along.

Even Followers Get Lost

The only thing in my life that has carried me through is Jesus. Most of the time I couldn’t feel it. Much of the time I was passing between anxiety and despair. If I’m 100% honest with you, I’m somewhere between those two right now as I type these words. I feel the silence of God with such palpable frustration that it awakens me. I feel my hunger for Him growling within me, I hear its whispers in all my daily frustrations.

If my faith required good feelings I would have no faith to hold. If my following Jesus required me to always know where I am, then I would forever trapped in place. The religious happy-talkers will say anything about Jesus to manage their feelings. But you don’t have to. We can be here, in the endless Saturday between death and resurrection, and find the fullness of Him here.

I close with Andrew Peterson’s words from The Silence of God. They were a critical part of the Good Friday service we watched and I wept as I heard them for the first time:

And if a man has got to listen to the voices of the mob
Who are reeling in the throes of all the happiness they've got
When they tell you all their troubles have been nailed up to that cross
Then what about the times when even followers get lost?
'Cause we all get lost sometimes

We do. And some of us are in a perennial state of lostness. Unhooking from old religions that hold us fast and keep us spinning. Unwinding from obsessions with surety that have kept us from seeing the beauty in the wild. As for me, I’ll keep training here, keep my Lenten watch going into these post-Easter ordinary days, reawakening each moment to the ever-present, though often not felt, nature of His rest.

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