All the Small Things

 

Nope. This isn't a Blink 182 song. It's my attempt to keep a promise to myself to blog at least once a month in 2023. And I'm having trouble really finding my theme because there's about a million things to have gone on in January, but it's just all the small things.

I took the time while I wasn't as busy these past few months to make some long over-due specialist appointments for me and the boys. Now I AM busy and somehow those kinds of appointments all sprouted other appointments. Like how they say when you pop a pimple more just grow in its place. Funny how that works. There's been the hilarious amount of additional hoops to jump through AFTER getting my substitute teacher's certificate but BEFORE I can actually take jobs. Then there's homework (me and the boys'), drama practice, band concerts, youth group, maintaining healthy relationships, church. Oh, and our car's tires were demanding this month.

We're feeling a little bit like that scene in Indian Jones some days, where he's chased by the enormous boulder (great now I want to go to Disneyland). There's this tendency when it's all the small things keeping us constantly moving forward to forget to reflect, or to fail to think about why we do what we do, or what kind of person we're becoming while doing it. 

The class I'm currently taking has to do with theology. Don't stop reading just because I used the word theology. I'm learning that we are all theologists to some extent. Theology has to do with our thoughts about God-who he is, what is role is in the world and our lives. So, in a sense an atheist is even a theologian as they have formed some sort of beliefs about God. Of course there's different levels of theology, all the way from folk theology to academic theology with quite a bit in between. We don't get off the hook by saying "I'm just a Jesus follower...I'm not into all that theology stuff." Because you are. You maybe haven't stopped to put it into concrete words or don't know the same terms used by academics. But you, my friend, are a theologian.

The problem with not recognizing our own theology is that there are many things we believe to be just straight-up fact due to our embedded theology or first-order theology. Our embedded theology includes the things we almost learn without trying. As a child watching my parents, I learned that reading our Bible is important. Singing songs from the Christian radio station I learned that God loves me and that Jesus died for me. We don't have to spend a lot of time reflecting in order to figure out certain things about the faith we participate in. If you are a Catholic Christian your embedded theology may be slightly different than the embedded theology of someone who is protestant. And among us protestants, we may not even be aware that our embedded theology is different than another protestant who's sign on the door says they are a "community church", or Nazarene or Southern Baptist. Some of our embedded theology truly is founded on universally orthodox Biblical teachings. And some of it comes from bumper stickers and Facebook memes. Have we stopped to analyze the differences?

Often we do not stop to construct a deliberate theology until we rub up against something that exposes a hairline crack, or maybe even a full-on Faultline, in the embedded theology we'd always just taken for granted. These usually come in the form of unexplainable tragedies. For some this level of soul searching happened during the COVID shut-down, after the loss of a job, or the death of a loved one.  What do we do when our embedded theology had us thinking that we just had to have faith and everything will work out fine...and it has worked out so very not fine? Do we throw out our faith? Or do we pull up our sleeves, and build a more robust and intentional faith out of the rubble? Do we give up? Or do we get knee deep in the writings of the early church fathers, and of Luther and Wesley, Mother Teresa and C.S. Lewis? Do we pull out a great annotated Bible and begin reading all around those verses that had become the cliché's of our faith. Ask ourselves what they were REALLY trying to say, that wouldn't fit on a pretty book mark. 

Knowing our own beliefs thoroughly matters because our theology drives (or is meant to drive) our actions. This is theological integrity. If I truly believe God's gift of salvation is offered to ALL people and not just a select few, that should absolutely change the way I see and treat ALL people. If I believe in the restoration of creation, how might that inform my attitudes towards conservation efforts? Am I showing integrity by living what I say I believe to be true of God?

There's a lot of goals I set in January that I have failed at following through on. I have ignored the healthy meal plan one too many times and missed the gym to get the tires fixed or finish homework. But, I needed to be reminded  of why I can't skip out on times of reflection. We can't just live like we're being chased by a boulder. I always need to ask myself what the beliefs are that's triggering my actions, and fix some things when I start to see inconsistencies.