Just be Real

It happened again. I shared a part of my personal experience as it relates to Christianity, and felt rejected for doing so.

The fact is, repeatedly I’ve been made to feel, both in my former unhealthy church and in Christian circles since, that I’m not Christian enough. Not in all, but in too many. I’ve been told by pastors that I’d take too much work. Members have questioned and seemingly quarantined me. I asked a question in a Sunday School class that brought abrupt silence. The next Sunday only the teacher and I showed up. I’ve found myself unfriended on Facebook. And again, this is not by members of unhealthy church groups. This is by people who I’ve met since. This is not because I’m “confessing my faults” or participating in some accountability group, either. It’s because someone hurts and I have the audacity to say, “me too.” For me that’s a way of respecting others’ vulnerabilities as they share as well as growing, myself.

So am I not Christian enough? I really don’t care at this point. Judge me for that. I’m sick to death of Christians who believe we should not lie expecting me to live a lie, to hide behind platitudes and facades, pretending to believe just like they say they do, acting like everything is perfect in a fallen world, denying my own sorrow and grief and doubts and failures. So if being a Christian means living a lie, I hope I’m never THAT “Christian”.

I don’t think that’s what real Christianity is. I think that the whole idea that we have to “fake it til we make it” is an insidious lie and one of the most commonly accepted hypocrisies of American churchianity. The fact is we’re human. We live in a world filled with other humans. Sometimes life stinks. Sometimes things go wrong. And when that happens we hurt, we cry, we question. Sometimes we doubt God and sometimes we doubt ourselves. And pretending we don’t doesn’t fix one blessed thing.

God calls us to honesty. Honesty with ourselves and with Him. We don’t do that with fake smiles and hurried “amens” said while brushing all of our questions, fears, and doubts under the nearest rug. My life isn’t a Facebook wall. There are studies that use of Facebook actually has a correlation with increased depression and loneliness, and one of the reasons most cited is that on social media people tend to put only their best face forward. Most people don’t post on social media that they spilled soup down their blouse right before their presentation, that they have had a week of bad hair days, or that their child smeared poop on the wall for the third time that day. They post about the successes and share the cute baby and toddler pictures. The rest they leave off Facebook. Doing this leaves everyone reading their posts with a false impression that their friends’ lives are near perfect while their own are… a mess.

Think of what this might implicate within Christianity. If we only hear about the great services and prayer meetings that everyone else has been in and we privately realize we almost fell asleep in church for the third Sunday in a row, or our Christian friends talk about faith, faith, faith and how sure they are that everything will work out and itemize ALL the times God’s answered their prayers and never admit to the other times… or perhaps worse, if we get strange looks and sense mild shudders if we acknowledge we don’t understand something about God… what does that do? What image does that portray to those who are honest enough to have admitted to themselves that some things just don’t make sense? What does that teach those who aren’t quite ready to be honest, even with themselves?

To me, there are a lot of similarities. So I choose to be honest. And if that makes me not Christian enough, so be it. If people judge me, I’d rather them judge me for my honesty and not the design of my facade, but hopefully more will stop to see the beauty of the nuances that make me who I am and will relate and reflect themselves in their own honesty. Hopefully more will hear my respect of and empathy for their vulnerabilities. Hopefully more will take off their masks, strip away their facades, and enjoy the reality of each imperfect and incomprehensible but still very real moment with me.