The uselessness of doctrine

Perhaps I’m just a rebellious jerk, but I don’t like being told what to do, what to think, or what to believe. Details of denominational distinction disgust me. My gut tells me a simple truth, and I find the heaping upon of doctrine irrelevant to my relationship with God.

I seem to have three types of days.

Type one: I wake up well-rested, find the sun shining on my bed, enjoy my breakfast, and feel the calm presence of God as I get ready for my day.

Type two: I wake up tired but ready to sacrifice, largely open to an unknown future.

Type three: I wake up and feel like I got run over by a truck. You know the rest.

It doesn’t matter in any of these situations whether I was baptized as a baby, as a kid, or as an adult. It doesn’t matter if I was baptized at all. It doesn’t matter if I’ve taken communion recently. It doesn’t matter if I’ve been a good boy and gone to Sunday school. It doesn’t matter if I think we’ll have free will in heaven.

All that matters is that I drag my spirit with all its baggage into the presence of God and lay it before him without holding back. This means I bring my nastiness along with my goodness. This means I bring the grudge I’m holding and the fears I have about the future. It means I bring my endless worrying about my car’s front suspension and my rage at getting a parking ticket.

Laying these before God without holding back means that I release them to him. I no longer cling to the grudge and my self-righteousness; I no longer cling to the belief that I can control my future if I am smart enough and responsible enough; I no longer cling to the belief that my careful driving habits can make my car last for ten years.

Also, it means I have to stop fantasizing about ramming that damn parking services truck.

Did you really think Obama was the answer?


Barack Obama is a human being just like you and me.

Hope and change, abstractions, look so good on campaign buttons. Abstractions have a way of staying abstract.

Did you fall for it?

You’ll be wiser next time. You’ll see the promises for what they are. You’ll laugh and shake your head as you punch a hole beside a name, knowing, as you must, that it’s all the same in red and blue, black and white,

Barack and Bush–

neither is this one the new Christ.

FEAR

Fear is not real; it’s a lens through which you can come to see the world. Events are real, but not when they are imagined. Most imagined events never come to be; many real events were never imagined.

Fear is nothing more than a mental projection of the future that sees the glass as half-empty. Often it appears to be the result of rational analysis, but it is in fact entirely emotional.

Sudden reactions of fear are easily managed, but a pervasive life-attitude of fear is insidious. Waking up morning after morning with the nagging thought I might not make ends meet today will lead you to a dreadful degeneration of soul; likewise the thoughts I might not be pretty enough today; I might not work hard enough today; I might not be good enough today.


For those of us who claim to be Christians, this twists our noble minds into tired machines with only one output: fear. Hello, we were made for something better: joy.

I never understood the word faith until I had learned the meaning of fear. Faith is not a declaration of willful placement of trust, but an admittance of a lack of will in the matter. Do you get it? A willful placement of trust is actually an act of fear, an attempt to control your world and get things in order. True faith says nothing to God but I present myself.

God, I do not even choose to trust you. When I do this, I do it under my own power, believing in my own will, trying to get my ducks in a row by bringing you back into my life. All I do now is turn around, find you there just like before, and acknowledge that you are.