Uncomfortable Christianity

     If you spend any amount of time with me at all, you will quickly realize that I am deeply obsessed with quotes and have been since I was in elementary school. The fact that Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States never sufficed for me. I wanted to read his words and understand who he was as a man, as a human being. One of the most brilliant human beings that I have stumbled across in my short lifetime is C.S. Lewis. He once said: "I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity."

     Christianity has been making me uncomfortable recently, and so it should. How can one be faced with the Creator and Author of the universe in all of His glory and wisdom and NOT feel the least bit intimidated? Are you afraid of what God is calling you to do? I am. I am afraid that he will ask me to leave my comfortable home, my safe neighborhood, my sterilized water and three meals a day, my family, my social standing and my comfortable ideas about what I am here for, for a straw mat on the ground, a daily fear that my life might be snatched away and some frighteningly uncomfortable ideas about what it truly means to love like Jesus loved. "Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken,"as Rich Mullins so eloquently stated it, and even more importantly than that, Jesus lived a perfect life and died so that I have the right to choose to either accept or not accept the uncomfortable concept of true Christianity. Brennan Manning once wrote something that I think about daily: "For me the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the present risenness of Jesus Christ." We, as Christians, are the only people in the world, as far as I'm aware, that claim to serve a God who is living within us and cares for our trivial day to day lives. Our God is not a statue made of precious metals. He does not sit in a shrine or a temple or a cemetary. He rose from the dead and is currently taking up His inhabitance in YOUR heart, and if that doesn't make you uncomfortable, I think that it probably should. It should make you so uncomfortable that you have to "summon the courage to say YES" to what God is calling you to do, however frightening or dangerous that might be.