It’s so weird to live in this world. What a bizarre tension to care deeply about the refugee crisis in Syria and also about Gilmore Girls. It is so disorienting to fret over aged-out foster kids while saving money for a beach vacation. Is it even okay to have fun when there is so much suffering in our communities and churches and world? What does it say about us when we love things like sports, food, travel, and fashion in a world plagued with hunger and human trafficking?
Obviously, good reader, I understand the dilemma. In this very book you are holding, I seriously discuss trauma recovery and abusive churches as well as Netflix and junior football leagues. I love people. I love curry. I love God. I love coffee tables. I care about the church, and I also care about dinner. Justice and humor are equal heavy hitters for me. I live in several categories wholeheartedly, sometimes in the same hour.
In the complicated world of Christian subculture, there is an unspoken standard, a notorious goal to “win the contest.” It’s there, the contest. We don’t say it out loud, because it sounds ludicrous spoken into the open air, but we all know about it, we feel it. The contest is a race to see who is the better Christian, and beyond the basics of behaving, extra points are awarded to people who do the hardest work with the least amount of fluff.
Obviously, top billing goes to missionaries. This is a given, the brass ring. These are the ones who went all in, the clear winners. Doesn’t matter that they debunk our American notion of international work constantly, telling us they are still normal people with normal friends and sometimes they even have fun or sin. We don’t believe them. They pulled the total-obedience trigger, and now they live on Winner Island with all the other missionaries. (People who don’t own TVs live on the island too.)
The rest of us still living in the land of plenty are left to battle it out for the remaining prizes. We keep a close eye on each other, paying attention to who is volunteering more, sacrificing more, spending less, misbehaving less. You know we do this. Right this second, you can envision that one person nailing the standard, the one winning the contest in your estimation, the one of which you ask: “What would _______ do?” (Or more likely: “_______ would never _______ .”) This is the person you remember when you need to feel bad about your Christian performance.
Laughably, hysterically, people sometimes put my name in that blank. Sisters, please. Listen, if you think for a millisecond that career ministry qualifies anyone for the prize, you are mistaken. What is “career ministry” anyway? How is my “ministry” any more “ministry” than anyone else’s? Regardless, the contest hits a whole ’nother level up here among us full-timers, those of us who stand on stages and do Jesus-y things for a living. Who is the most Christian? Who complains the least? Who posts the most Scripture references on Instagram? Who requires less downtime? Who works harder? Who does the most good? Who is always happy to be alive and shows the least humanity?
Oh, trust me: the struggle is so real.
Or maybe you favor the individual events in the contest and your toughest competitor is yourself. Am I wasting my life on things that don’t matter? Is God proud of me? Should I be more devout, serious, dedicated? Am I radical enough? Do I “lay down my life for others,” and are all my “treasures in heaven”? Perhaps you don’t look sideways for these criteria but wage a constant, discouraging war against yourself. I cannot think of a greater burden than imagining God’s perpetual disappointment.
The contest is exhausting and demoralizing. And then I remember something else: it isn’t even biblical. It’s not how the family works. Forget for a moment the whole notion of comparing Christian obedience, which is clearly insane, a man-made competition that pits apples against oranges, kale against cheeseburgers. It’s so silly and unregulated and impossible. Total nonsense, a full miscalculation of Jesus’s new way of living, a game with no winners that centers on human performance over freedom in Christ. In a race to be faithful, we succumb to pride, rigging and ruining the whole thing.
But that aside, the idea that winning Christians enjoy the least number of good-and-fun things (all branded as selfish and frivolous) is a mess. These good-and-fun things run the gamut from basic merriment to time off to pretty things to outside interests not found in the New Testament. The Christian guilt that often accompanies these pursuits can be daunting, tempting us to downplay them in certain company.
The thing is, God absolutely created us and His world with tastes and sights and sounds and connections designed to thrill. He thought up humor and laughter and delicious flavors coaxed from the earth. He gave us beautiful colors and dance and music and the gift of language. He invented apples and beaches and sex and baby lambs.
In addition to an overabundance of raw materials, God designed community to connect with Him and each other through feasts and parties and wide tables set with bread and honey and wine. He fundamentally, theologically established the Sabbath, every seventh day for people and every seventh year for the land, declaring rest not just helpful but holy. God proclaimed Jubilee once every fifty years, a year of debt cancellation and universal pardon, a time for reconciliation between adversaries and a radical display of God’s mercies.
In other words, God is into beauty, food, fun, and naps.
It often feels unchristian to enjoy life, especially knowing what we know and seeing what we see. Appropriately, we are deeply connected to human suffering and setting wrongs right; we care about sharing and generosity and making sure our grossest, basest selves don’t overtake our character. A life spent entirely on pleasure is the emptiest of containers. We know this in our souls, in our Scriptures. God positively told us to stay close to the brokenhearted, the hungry, the hurting; that is where He is and where some of His best work is going down.
But wisdom also embraces the rest of the plan, which includes a beautiful world and beautiful people and beautiful delights meant to be enjoyed. When the story we tell ourselves is that God is a bit punitive and stern and we are only here to serve His bottom line and basically just suffer until we die and finally get to heaven, then it makes sense that embracing pleasure is out of bounds and only lesser Christians succumb, those disqualified for the contest.