I sat in a near empty classroom in our church basement with a handful of friends over a decade ago. Most people were elsewhere, still getting their Sunday morning coffee. I don’t recall the topic of conversation, but I vividly remember my friend Justin nonchalantly gesturing to a toddler’s scribbling at the bottom of the whiteboard. “Yea, well, that’s a graph of my spiritual life,” he joked. Per usual, he was humorously poking fun at tidy depictions of the Christian life. I may have laughed a little too loudly. It can happen when you’re called out.

In my experience, spirituality and faith are rather messy projects. My own thoughts, feelings, and actions are often jumbled and sometimes contradictory. When I sin, it’s not usually new material. I’m traveling down a path to regret that I’ve been down before.

Then there’s the church. Sometimes it seems like a support to my faith. At other times I wonder if my faith can sustain the strain from any more abuse done in Jesus’ name. How can people know Jesus and do some of the things that people do? And how are people so often convinced of their rightness while doing it? So yea, sometimes that childish scribble feels pretty descriptive of my spiritual journey as well.

It can be distressing to honestly reckon with the way things are.

One of the ancient spiritual teachers, Ezekiel, spoke to this distress. God’s people were pretty overwhelmed by how messed up everything was, themselves included. And this is what Ezekiel told them: “The righteousness of the righteous man will not save him when he disobeys, and the wickedness of the wicked man will not cause him to fall when he turns from it…. If I tell the righteous man that he will surely live, but then he trusts in his righteousness and does evil, none of the righteous things he has done will be remembered…. And if I say to the wicked man, ‘You will surely die,’ but he then turns away from his sin and does what is just and right… he will surely live; he will not die.”

In other words: each new moment offers us a fresh chance to respond to God. Our security is not in how well we did yesterday, or any number of yesterdays. Righteousness cannot be refrigerated. It’s like the mana God sent to the Israelites. It enabled them to survive the desert, appearing fresh every morning, but would rot if they tried to save it up and store it. When emotionally stock piled to preserve our sense of security and OK-ness, our righteousness too “breeds worms and stinks.” And from my vantage point, there are piles of it littering my current spiritual landscape. 

Rightness (as important as it is) can’t be stored, it has to be daily received and picked up by faith. And it’s there every day for the taking, whether our last moment was in the right or in the wrong. So if you’re right, there’s no place for overconfidence, and if you’re wrong there’s hope. The yesterdays are not some guarantee of God’s favor. But neither are they some insurmountable obstacle forever trapping us in our past choices. We can pivot. God is waiting for us to, and eager to give us life instead of the death and stink we build for ourselves.

It was sort of a relief to me to realize that either way (whether I was right or wrong) my fundamental action point was the same. If you’re getting it wrong, turn to Christ. If you’re getting it right, turn to Christ. It relieved me of the burden of accurately diagnosing my own soul. Which was good, because I didn’t really trust myself to do that anyway.

I’ve discovered that faith is a little like riding a bike. If you forever glance down to analyze your pedaling, you lose your balance. Now I am not against the hard work of self-reflection. Some of my posts are invitations to do just that. “Turning,” as Ezekiel calls it, assumes self-reflection. We take action to course correct as God reveals where we are off base. But Ezekiel’s words served as an off ramp for me from obsessively checking my own spiritual pulse. It helped calm my nervous soul, as I’ve watched people past and present do horrible things out of religious zeal. 

God, make our souls soft toward You. May we ever retain the willingness to turn, and thank You for Your open invitation to do so.

♰♰♰

For Ezekiel’s full statement, see Ezekiel 33.

For the story about the manna, see Exodus 16.