I will be good and I will be happy

Hooray! Internet! I can write things and then they will be there so that the people can read them!
Yes, I did just get back from a (wonderful) two-week holiday, bursting with things to blog, to find that my internet's down and I don't know why. There's no point ringing the company - I tried that once before and it made Centrelink look gloriously efficient and accomodating. But I'm in a library with free WiFi and I've got a bit of time! 

Ahem. Late last night I got to wondering why all those years ago when I gave up on Christianity it was because I found it disappointing, almost heart-breakingly so. Why not that frustrating or plain wrong?

I think what happened for me is that Christianity seemed to be making me promises. "Be a Christian and you will experience the joy of knowing God, and singing praises to him will be your heart's desire. Hold to these beliefs, live this way and you will experience the assurance of knowing you are a good person, you will live with your head held high." The whole thing was clearly important and obviously Right and Good, so I think I guessed it might also be good.

But that was not my reality. I had a go at holding to my beliefs and moral views and living uprightly and all I felt was mortification. I saw zero examples I wished to emulate and zero acceptance of the Christian way. There was no place for abstaining from sex (the key issue for me). In my world this simply did not occur. So all I felt was that living was being denied me, my options and opportunity to enjoy life shut out. My faith's demands relentlessly severe in their near-impossibility. I was being asked to follow a path when I could hardly see how and to be mocked as I did it.

And the consolations I was implicitly promised brought me no actual comfort. So with heavy spirit I began to walk another path, bearing the guilt of knowing I was doing wrong but anticipating the solace of living alive, free, grasping the opportunities offered me.

My original disappointment came because I thought in being moral you would gain dignity and joy. I didn't see that not having sex and being opposed to homosexuality and abortion were hardly enough to make me moral. I didn't notice the myriad ways in which I lived my days cloaked in sin. I thought it a simple thing to be rid of. There is certainly dignity and joy to be found in purity, but that purity is only found in Jesus' death where I should die, in his twin-gift of forgiveness and righteousness.

It came because I thought that in knowing you were right you would gain peace and satisfaction. But I hardly knew the right and what I did know I did not love. I failed to grasp the beauty of things being as they should be; I did not see the goodness there is in truth, in reality, in living well. I had not learned to love the things of God. I had not learned to love him.

Whereas now I see that first to come to him with messed-up thinking and actions no better, and are forgiven. Only then do you begin to follow him and learn his ways, his truth. And in that ordering of things, you know from the very beginning the awfulness and ugliness of the wrong that sent your Saviour to the cross, and the beauty and blessing of right he has given you, and you learn to hate the one and love the other. That's the way of it. You can't force yourself to love what is right and so feel the dignity and joy of it while you are still scrabbling about in your sin. I had to learn that, and thank God I did.