I’ve been thinking lately about how I see my faith.
I’ve written in the past about how the essence of my faith is surrender to a higher power. But how, exactly, do I see that higher power?
God is both infinite and mysterious, which means that a lot of us who call ourselves Christians see (or, perhaps, merely focus on) different aspects of Him. I know Christians who focus on God’s glory, or on God’s justice.
I suppose for me, there are two aspects of God’s character that strike the deepest chord with me. I wouldn’t presume to say that these are the most important parts of God; that would be hubristic in the extreme. But they are the aspects that are most likely to bring me to tears of gratitude, or to (what I hope is righteous) anger when they’re violated. That suggests that perhaps these are the aspects that I ought to lead with, when I’m describing my faith to other people.
1) No-One Is Beyond Redemption
The deepest Christian I know is currently serving a life sentence for murder.
I don’t know if this man was raised a Christian or not. I do know that, in prison, something happened to him. When he’s not working, he mostly just sits in his room praying for people or reading the Bible. He’s on a prison salary, which means he makes about $15 per month (inmates don’t get paid minimum wage), and he’s still excited to pay back the $300,000 restitution his case imposed on him.
When a new guy came into the prison and quickly racked up a bunch of debt to some pretty dangerous people, my friend asked the new guy to let him help. My friend’s plan was simple: he was going to visit each of the guy’s debtors and pay them off out of his own (very meager) savings.
I work with a lot of inmates who might still deserve to be in prison. In my opinion, this man emphatically does not. God has transformed him from the inside out.
Nor is this man’s story unique. I’ve known more than a few men in prison who have deeply changed, and are now being punished for a crime they would never commit today.
Which hasn’t made me soft on crime. I’m a fan of cops, prosecutors, and (sometimes) long prison sentences. I have plenty of stories from prison of men who desperately need to be locked up.
But at the same time, my friend’s story drives home a reality to me: none of us are beyond God’s redemption. None of us have done anything so heinous that God cannot transform us into someone new.
This is the story of Moses, a murderer turned leader. It’s the story of Paul, the most notorious killer of Christians in the New Testament, who went on to become the most successful missionary of all time.
It’s the story of John Newton, a slaver turned abolitionist. It’s the story of Chuck Colson, hatchet man for Richard Nixon turned founder of Prison Fellowship. It’s the story of every Christian, if we’re being honest; I sin a thousand times per day, but each time, God is there to welcome me back and to encourage me to become better.
2) God Loves Us All Equally
I love how Father Gregory Boyle, who runs Homeboy Industries (the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world) puts it in Tattoos on the Heart: “The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives.”
In his early days, Boyle used to ride his bicycle between different gang neighborhoods, trying to orchestrate treaties and ceasefires. I imagine that the work was extremely dangerous. As Boyle puts it, everyone spoke highly of the peace process when it was just their gang talking to him, but the minute that members of the other gang entered the scene, “they couldn’t resist posturing in high gear in front of one another.” I think it’s a minor miracle, given how many of these situations that Boyle attended, that he was never hit with a stray bullet.
And yet, this is as good a picture of the Christian life as I can come up with: a (then-)unknown priest, riding his bicycle every night between gangs, desperately encouraging peace even at the risk of his own life because he knows in his bones that there’s no such thing as a less-valuable life.
Love and redemption. Those are the most moving aspects of the God I want to spend my life growing closer to.
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