I have a friend who was raised in an atheist home surrounded by her atheist family, friends, and community. When she was in high school, she did a semester abroad and ended up on the other side of the Atlantic – in a CHRISTIAN home!
My friend recalls how as time went on and the host family shared the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ, her whole atheistic worldview came crashing down. But as much as Christianity was making sense, and as much as she wanted to accept it as truth, she had one major obstacle: accepting Christianity as ultimate truth would mean that everything she had been told, everything she had read (and she was a voracious reader and owned MANY heady books proving the validity of atheism), and every person she had always trusted, were actually wrong.
To fully accept Christianity, my friend had to first acknowledge she had been misled and the very people she desperately wanted to believe (including loving parents!), she really couldn’t anymore. It was a big leap for a teenager, but she did it and was then able to accept Jesus as her Lord and Savior.
On the flip side, one of the most heralded evangelical Christian authors of our day, Philip Yancey, recently gifted the world with his memoir, Where the Light Fell, where he portrays life growing up in a fundamentalist southern Baptist church in the 60’s. Even though his parents were missionaries and raised Philip in the church, he now describes his upbringing as “toxic.” Yancey says it wasn’t until he became a young adult that he came to understand just how racist, hypocritical, verbally abusive, and unloving his upbringing had been. Yancey describes needing to completely dismantle the Christianity of his childhood in order to truly fall in love with Jesus and accept him as his loving, forgiving, and inclusive Savior.
What he always thought was right was actually wrong.
Both conversion accounts – my friend’s and Philip Yancey’s – are SO compelling and pertinent for our day and age. It seems that today, more than ever, deception is rampant and the great deceiver has figured out how to lead us into destruction by confusing the heck out of us when it comes to which figures in authority we should be listening to.
And one thing we ALL KNOW is true: God is never the author of confusion.
In our very divided nation, some of us who believe we are trusting the right voices and are absorbing truth are most certainly listening to deception (which has to be true because we can’t ALL be right). Somehow, some of us have chosen to trust people and voices that we shouldn’t and have shut out the voices we need.
But here’s the thing – that word TRUST is what’s biting us in the butt.
Whether we’ll admit it or not, we are all trusting someone or something. And it’s so important that we step back and analyze the voices we’ve put our trust in. If we say we don’t trust the CDC, NIH, or the AMA, we’re then saying we DO trust the online doctors and social media stories that contradict those medical entities. Whether the recipient of our trust is our school boards, my friend on Facebook, black/white people, immigrants, police officers, evangelicals, Muslims, atheists, Democrats, Republicans, Tucker Carlson, Don Lemmon, my grandmother, your neighbor, ZDogg or Zindaya – if we are listening to ONE person/group and saying, “Yes, I trust you and what you are saying,” we are inevitably choosing to NOT believe in the counter-narrative.
Are the voices we’re listening to SO trustworthy that we’re willing to risk our well-being, our character, our health (or our kids’), relationships, our children’s futures, our nation or our democracy on what they’re telling us?
Let’s be extremely careful before we answer that question with an emphatic “yes.”
Yet many of us will insist this conversation is unnecessary because God alone is to be trusted. And, as is often posited subconsciously by well-meaning Christians, by trusting God alone we’re exempt from deception (we trust God will lead us to the TRUE news sources, the TRUE medical experts, the TRUTH about history, the morality of and intentions of leaders, the values of a political party, etc., etc.). Oh man, what a dangerous, deadly belief!!! Of course, God alone can be fully trusted, but as fallen humans living in this sinful place, we cannot escape deception! It’s Satan’s favorite (and really, his ONLY tool) and he can, and does, target Christians (maybe, even more so). Because we live and breathe and walk on this planet and must interact with other humans every single day, we have no choice but to choose who we will trust and who we will not. There’s no way around it.
As evidenced by several of his previous book titles, Where is God When It Hurts?,or What’s So Amazing About Grace? or Church, Why Bother? or The Question That Never Goes Away: WHY? Philip Yancey reveals something Christians are afraid to admit: it’s NOT a sin to ask questions! We owe it to ourselves and the world to research the sources of our information and ask a LOT of questions. We owe it to ourselves and the world to check references and credentials. We owe it to ourselves and the world to ask if we’ve been stuck in an echo chamber or if we’re really listening to all points of a debate before deciding our position.
Maybe we need to be asking more questions.
If you haven’t seen the film The Social Dilemma yet, I highly recommend it. This poignant film describes how we (internet users) are all recipients of a very carefully curated feed finely tuned to our specific interests, fears, and beliefs. In other words, “they” know what we want to hear and “they” pummel us with it. “They” know exactly what it takes to lead us down the proverbial bunny trail and are experts as doing it. If you’ve ever wondered why THE WHOLE WORLD isn’t up in arms about XYZ because it seems it’s everywhere and evil and going to destroy us, there’s a good chance that you are being fed a whole lot more of XYZ than everyone else. You may have clicked a time or two too many that initiated the bunny trail, but soon, “they” had you pegged for the exact kind of person who will get all fired up about XYZ so “they” pummeled you with it. Your sources are amplifying the thing and making it appear so much bigger, so much worse, so much more dire. It’s no wonder many Americans feel the sky is falling. “They” told us it was.
Who will we trust?
Maybe the voices we’ve been listening to that we’ve been SO VERY SURE we could trust (as with the case of my friend’s family and with Yancey’s parents) are not trusted voices.
Maybe we’ve been so caught up in a political quagmire that we’re not even able to see up from down. Right from wrong. Good from bad.
Maybe we need a healthy purging of our internet feed and instead drive to the border ourselves and ask a bunch of questions. Maybe we need to invite a local epidemiologist, or a school board member, or a law school professor, or a homeless person over for dinner and be the LISTENER, not the speaker. If we’re white, maybe we need to attend a black church for a while and make some new friends. And vice-versa. Maybe we need to ask our long-time family pediatrician what we should do in this current public health crisis. Maybe we need to really concentrate on the reputation of our news sources by asking all kinds of questions about where they get funding, who’s their target audience and why, and what political motivation they might have to bend the news. Maybe we need to study media bias charts (here) and ask ourselves if we’re getting skewed or biased news reporting.
Maybe – MAYBE MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE – we need to step back and say, “How important is it that I have a STRONG opinion on XYZ and then try to convince others my viewpoint is correct? What if I refocused that energy and instead just try to love others as I would want to be loved?”
What kind of a world would that be?
I don’t know. It’s been too long for me to remember.
Thank you, Cindy. Watching the situation in the States, and, especially in the American church, from a distance we are moved almost to despair. Lord, who will heal us of this poison? Maybe the syncretism in the American church – with materialism, with politics – will eventually diminish it to an irrelevant entity. Of course, the Church will go on, but it will be the church in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, that is carrying the torch.
You make a good point about asking questions. Here are some that I propose:
P.S. Typo above: “voracious” reader
HELLO KATHY!!! Well, first of all, I RACED to my computer this morning and corrected that typo!!! UGH!! Here’s a confession: I take such pride in my spelling and grammar ability, that I almost never use spellcheck. Isn’t that awful??? How freaking arrogant! I sure learned my lesson with this post, though! So THANK YOU!!!
Secondly, another huge thank you for these additional thought provoking questions! I love them SO much more than the ones I came up with. That first one – WOW – Amen. Amen. Amen. I’m not sure how to do it, but if I can figure out a way to make like an “addendum” to my post and add these questions for further reflection (giving you the credit), would you be okay with that? I think these questions you propose are exactly what the believer needs to ask themselves in these days of division and confusion. So, so, good. Love you, my friend!
You are very sweet, but you don’t need to give me any credit. Anything I said was only inspired by what you said. I really appreciate the things I’ve read by Philip Yancey, too, though I haven’t read all the books you mentioned. Thank you for having the courage to be a prophetic voice in these difficult times.
Love to you and your family,
Kathy
Because of your blog and your questions you bring up, I am reminded of Mark 12:31, “Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these”. Yes, wouldn’t it be a better world if we would love our neighbors, friends and strangers as we would want to be loved? Thanks for the reminder of what we were created for.
Oh sweet Marcia! Yes!!! Thanks for sharing Mark 12:31! EXACTLY!!! I know I fall short of this commandment every day, but we must never stop striving to get it right, eh??? And oh, how the greater American Christian community is largely missing the mark!!! And it’s not okay. We must do better. Let’s promise to keep reminding each other of that very thing, okay Marcia? I appreciate you SO MUCH!!!
Wow Cindy— great post. Such. good. words. Thank you. May God help us—help us to love as we want to be loved.🙏❤️
Thanks, Patty! Man, I miss you!!! It was always such a joy to know I’d see you every Wednesday… And yes – may we all be used as Instruments in the hands of our Maker to love one another well. I know I could do better. And I also know the body of American believers could do better. So, one by one, we do our part!!! Love you and know that you are doing your part so well!!!
So true Cindy! We need to step back and put things in perspective (God’s perspective). Phillip Yancey’s “Grace Notes” devotional is a daily read for me. Praying that God will fill us with Grace and truth.
One of thee best blogs you have written! “Now we see in a mirror dimly, now we only know in part”. This one thing I know – Jesus loves the little children of the world, and I am one of them! And so are you!💕
Thank you, as always, for your continued encouragement in my writing journey, Betsy! I almost used that same Bible verse – 1 Corinthians 13:12 as the key verse in my blog! It’s SO comforting to know that we DON’T and CAN’T see everything clearly this side of heaven! We are only look through a glass dimly!!! And my favorite part of that verse: “but then, face to face.” I am getting more and more excited about that day, Betsy!!! My health isn’t declining THAT rapidly, but it is declining and I think about heaven a lot these days. I can’t wait for that face-to-face day!!!
Very good post and good advice.
Thank you Cindy for a great post! Thank God He knows the total truth and that will never change. What is going on in our country is total madness. I thank God everyday knowing He is in control, no matter what opinions people have,
Thanks, Karla! YES! So agree!!! I would have definitely sunk to levels of total despair these past few years had it not been for my faith in a God who doesn’t make mistakes and is always, forever and ever, sovereign. Praise Him!!!
So True Cindy! God Bless!
Thank you, Karla! I appreciate your feedback!!!
Thank you, Cindy! Your words flow along the same lines as one of my favorite books this year, “Think Again” by Adam Grant. In my mind, the main theme of the book is to have some intellectual humility and be willing to, well…, think again. Why on earth would any of us think we are absolutely right about a given topic. We are so small in the scope of things, we have so much to learn about any given topic. How is it that we love to say, “I’m right, you should think like me, you should change, you need to move toward me!” while holding to our stance like our feet are stuck in concrete?
I loved your emphasis on asking questions and listenings. I spend my days training people in those two skills AND I have so much growth needed in those same areas as well!
Hey Katie! Somehow I missed this response from you on my last post – sorry about that! I’ve only recently “discovered” Adam Grant and I’ve been fascinated by his wisdom! I’m definitely going to check out his book! Intellectual humility – a great two-word punch, eh? May God always grant us (you and me and all who are willing to ask for it) the humility to recognize we never “know it all.” I love it that your career path has taken you to a place of coaching and encouraging others this very thing! Yes, yes, yes to being lifelong learners!!!
Yes! More questions, more leaning into the heart of God. Thank you for your words!
spot on Cindy!
Thanks, Bill! I really think if we’re humble enough to admit we’re not always right, and we’re thus willing to listen to what others have to offer that we might disagree with – and even though we’ll STILL get things wrong sometimes – AT LEAST we’ve done due diligence toward growing, learning, and developing our psyche and that is really all we can ask from one another when the world feels so freakin divided!!! Miss you guys!!!
I am catching up on a few blogs that I missed so this comment is late.
As I was reading the very first part of this post I was thinking, “Wait what about all of those Christians who had a similar experience but with institutionalised “Christianity”. You did not disappoint by mentioning that exact point in the second part. Adrian Plass is my favourite writer on this topic. (He was a British radio speaker, is a conference speaker, comedian and writer.) I liked Adrian Plass so much that when I pastored a church in Cyprus I almost always used a quote from him. One person in the congregation complained (anonymously) so the next time I spoke I quotes from Adrian’s wife 😉
I am not involved in that cesspool called Facebook. However, we should not completely blame social media. It has just amplified what we have always been and have always done. We live in our segregated worlds (segregation not only by race) and listen to our comfortable feedback loops. You allude to this later in the blog post. Thanks.