Bright eyed little ones ages 4-13 flood the small school house. They carry in their plastic chairs from the back room and tuck in behind their little plastic desks. They greet me in their own precious way and then collectively, “Good afternoon teacher! How are you?” The tile floor and the three concrete walls echo as their little voices fill the room. This is how English class begins.
Friday 6th January 2017
A, B, C, D…
I write the date on the board followed by the alphabet. The kids are eagerly shouting out each letter. When I’ve finished, we review.
A: APPLE
B: BOAT
C: CAT
D: DOOR
E: EAR
And so on…
These kids are smart and they are so hungry to learn, leaping at every opportunity to practice English. It didn’t take me too long to realize though, most of the words they know are memorized. They know few A words other than apple. They can spell key and hand without batting an eye, but ask them to read kite or hat and they stare blankly. They only know what they’ve been told over and over again, what’s been drilled into their brains, and memorized to spit out at any given moment. These memorized words don’t help them read a book or carry on a conversation in English. They need more than dry memorization, but how to even begin to bring new meaning to letters that have been locked away in the chains of memorization for so long?
This is religion.
We shout out God is love in the same way these kids shout A is for apple. How much we are missing when we lock God in the small box of what we know? Sure God is love, but he’s also laughter, and light. He’s lasting and bold as a lion. He is lemonade when it’s hot, leaves changing color in autumn, lowly in a manger, lilies in the valley, the last slice of pie on Thanksgiving, and he’s loathing of injustice.
Oh how much we have to learn about the nature of God. Our minds can’t comprehend but that doesn’t mean we accept our current memorized definitions of him. John Eldredge said, “Two dimensional Jesus equals two dimensional Christians.” I don’t know about you, but I want more than two dimensions of a God who is infinitely dimensional.
These little children will find little satisfaction holding a conversation using only 26 words that they have memorized. If they even have the courage to try to speak to begin with, they will quit soon after, bored with what little they can accomplish. Likewise, when we only use our two dimensional memorized versions of God to describe him to the world, PEOPLE GET BORED, and they should. There is so much more to offer, so much more than our eyes can see, or our minds can comprehend.
“You cannot live life on one quality anymore than you can speak intelligently using one word. Meanwhile, we continue to sound on about the love and compassion of Jesus, like the village idiot banging one note on a piano. After a while the world turns away. Can you blame them? Alas – if only Jesus followers shared his personality. That one shift alone would correct so many of the ridiculous and horrifying things that pass for popular Christianity.”- Beautiful Outlaw
I’m gonna say this one more time, if we only began sharing Jesus’s personality, if only we started using more than the Christian alphabet to describe God, that would change everything.
Let’s talk about God’s personality
His relentlessness is in the flowers that spring up between sidewalk cracks. His joy is in your best friend’s laughter. His radiance is in every sunrise. His wrath in every bolt of lightning, his playfulness in puppies. His abundance is the ever-expanding galaxies. His wit is in every response to the Pharisees and to us when we live in the chains of law and religion. His power is in earthquakes and hurricanes, his close attention to detail in ever snowflake and seashell. His comfort is hidden deep in your mom’s arms as she hugs you. His personality colors our world and breaths life into you and me.
Church, everything we do, everything we say, portrays who we believe God to be, to the whole world. Can we all lay down our Christian ABC’s and start telling the world about the personality of Jesus?
