Sad Writing
I’m writing a book. I don’t want to say too much about it at this point, but I need to tell you a bit about it for the sake of clarity.
It’s a book about finding that Jesus is already in our suffering. A mix between dealing with theodicy and a theology of the cross. Here’s the problem: So far, it’s angry and sad.
I’m writing chapter one, and I’m establishing the situation: we are suffering, and God is — or at very least seems to be — absent. It’s real depressing. I mean, you can’t exactly be happy when you’re accusing God of being a cosmic asshole. Here’s an excerpt:
And this is where I stumble; this is where I fall. If you had all the answers, why didn’t you give them to us? If you knew the secrets that we struggle with, that we get hung up on, why didn’t you leave the answers with us? Why did you set us up to fail? By leaving us with nothing more than a had full of parables and some sermons to dissect, we are left wrestling and wondering, trying to “work out our salvation,” but with fear and trembling, we stumble, stutter, and fall short, far short of your glory.
Life hurts. Do you know this? Do you remember this? Has the bliss of heaven eradicated the memory of the pain of earth? Do you remember why your scars are there, where they came from? Is your sacrifice for the sins of the world just a distant memory? If not, why do you let us hurt the ways we do? If you know what pain is, what suffering is, what it is to bleed, to be crushed to the bone, they why would you leave us not only to experience these things but to have no answers to the “why?”
It’s real uplifting.
Honestly, I don’t want to write like this. I want to exhort people to live in love and walk in grace. But the truth is I have a lot of unresolved anger and sadness surrounding suffering and pain, death and grief. There is so much that is simply wrong in — in, not with — the world. I’m angry and confused and sad and only and all these “negative” emotions Christians aren’t supposed to have.
And That’s the only place I can start my book from.
It’s a horrible marketing move. People aren’t going to get past the first chapter. After that, they’ll be too depressed, too down to want to continue. And what publisher is going to want to try and sell a sad book?
But we can’t hope unless we are honest about our sadness, our fear, our anger. So this is going to be a gloriously hopeful book, but first, we have to reveal the reality of the situation.
Are you secretly angry at God?
Are you fearful of pain?
Are you, in the depths of your inner child, hurting because of and at God?
I am too.
But we’re never honest about this in church. Put on a happy face of nihilism because we refuse to imbue meaning into our churches by refusing to be honest with our community. Even when we are honest, we are met with quick-fix medicinal statements to gloss over things and get us back to a feel-good place.
But what if the church wasn’t about feeling good? What if it was about becoming fully alive, and that means being honest about anger, pain, fear, and hurt without trying to fix what we can’t.
I don’t know if we’re ever going to get there, but one can hope,