Saturday afternoon, I sat on a blanket beneath the warmest sun that Estonia has to offer. I shared chips and grapes and cold Coca Cola with my teammates and a handful of Estonian Youth. We’d just wrapped up a scavenger hunt around the town of Viljandi and were celebrating with a picnic in the park. As we prayed for our meal, two young men came to sit on the blanket near Derek and I. Their pants sagged and their baseball caps were worn crookedly and they sat down quickly, before they lost the courage.
“Are you religious?” the boy nearest me asked, staring intently at Derek. Derek responded by saying that yes, we believed in Jesus and asked the boy if he was religious. The boy chuckled a bit and said “I don’t know. I am searching.” Derek urged him to explain more and the boy said something that I don’t think I will ever forget. “Most people make God out to be kind of a…. a douchebag. And…. I don’t know. I just don’t think that’s how God is.”
As our conversation continued, he shared his desire to visit America and the struggle of having a 2 year old daughter to provide for as an 18 year old boy. He asked good questions and listened intently to the answers. He’d get deep for a moment and then retreat with a more superficial question. He was pulled away by his companions sooner than I would have liked.
The whole thing has really forced me to think, though. Why DO we make God out to be such a douchebag sometimes? We focus so much on changed behavior and forget to tell the stories of transformation. We join churches and participate in bible studies and do our daily devotionals and we utterly miss the point. We gloss over the depth of our sin and mangle truth to fit into Christian lingo and make the whole thing about us.
What would it look like if we truly attempted to understand the heart of sin as separation from God and that we haven’t just been saved from hell but saved to an intimate relationship with the creator of the universe? How would the world be transformed if our stories were shared with God as the focus and heart change as the result? Perhaps we could benefit from focusing on what’s often referred to as the greatest commandment. In Matthew chapter 22, Jesus says that the most important commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind and to love your neighbor as yourself. We do a great job of signing up for the right things and saying no to the wrong things as far as appearances go and it is far to easy to be a really good Christian who never falls in love with God.
He didn’t pray to receive Christ in the park that day. Nothing about our conversation indicated that he would leave with his life transformed. To be honest with you, I’m not even sure of his name. But, I hope that he left that conversation feeling like maybe there were some people in the world that he would consider “religious” who didn’t make God seem so much like a douchebag. I hope that our short time together was a small part of something beautiful that God is doing in his life. I know that it’s part of something beautiful that God has been doing in me. He continues to remind me that grace is freely given because it’s needed often and the point of things is not as much to live a life free from blemish but to live a life that continuously seeks the heart of God.
As followers of Christ, let’s all make an agreement to try to stop making God out to be such a douchebag. It will make everything better.
