Reflections of a Variant

“Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. ¹⁵ Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. ¹⁶ From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” – Ephesians 4:14-16

Pendulums are a funny thing. I am fascinated by human’s tendencies to always swing so far one way or another in major cultural trends. Boomer parents, for example, parented with heavy hands; authoritarian spankers who were emotionally unavailable and expected perfect compliance and worship-like respect. Their children, the millennials, recognized the toxicity of this parenting style and decided to become the generation who would do it different, better, healthier. We went to therapy, we did the self-work, we read all the parenting books. We really did it right.

At least, that’s what every generation thinks about themselves. Is it possible that all we really did was swing the pendulum so far in the opposite direction that we’re bringing up the next generation of anxiety-ridden chair-throwers, who aren’t aquatinted with “no” and have few coping skills? The best intentions of those who want to be agents of change, even good, necessary change, often run too far in the other direction only to find a different manifestation of the same results they were trying to avoid.

I am really enjoying podcasts lately like The Russel Moore Show, and The Holy Post, that discuss the issues facing American evangelicalism and call out Christian nationalism and hypocrisy. I find myself agreeing with nearly every word, cheering and right on-ing in my head. I caught myself, though (or rather, the Holy Spirit smacked me upside the head), feeling superior to those who are usually the subject of the show doing faith “the wrong way”. It’s so easy to get into that mindset, especially when a group of like-minded thinkers form and you begin to feed off one another. “Isn’t it so great that we’ve all got it right on this?” “That is the wrong way, this is the right way.”

Even when we’re right on an issue, once we’ve taken on that mindset, we’ve lost sight of the purpose: Love others, show people who Jesus is.

We’re at risk of our Christian walk becoming more about how we’re doing it better than the other guy, or more about how wrong the other way is, than what we should be doing as Christians. I’ll never stop calling out injustice and abuse in the “church”, but when I take inventory of all my efforts, both mentally and in action, I hope it can be said that I am more about what I am for than what I am against.

If we find ourselves with a sense of pride over how far we’ve come or how much we’ve changed our perspective/thinking, we should stop to examine whether or not we are simply pendulumming.

“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.” – Ephesians 4:2