Living with a Stick Shift
Seeking to Live for God as a Human with "Issues"
In my driving career, I have owned two stick shifts. My first car was a Ford Ranger stick shift that I drove in my late teens/early 20s. I remember the travail of learning to drive the damn thing. But I figured it out! Then, three years ago, I bought my “I’m 50, and I deserve it!” vehicle, a soft-topped red Jeep Wrangler. The Wrangler was a stick shift, and relearning how to drive one was much easier than learning the first time. My career as a human feels like driving a stick shift. Sometimes, I’m in first gear and barely moving (whether physically, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, etc.), and sometimes, I’m in fifth gear and going “gangbusters” (as my momma liked to say).
Thinking about this image, a stick shift to frame my experience as a human person made in God’s image, occupying time and space, has been helpful. Sometimes, I operate in fifth gear, a thrilling experience of enjoyment and productivity. Sometimes, I operate in first gear, with little excitement or joy, whether from reasons outside or inside my choosing or causation. Sometimes, I also have found myself stuck in first or second gear and lapse into habitual despair or depression, stuck and struggling with how to find joy in life yet again.
Within a span of four years (2018ish to 2022ish), I varied much of the time between one and two and found myself stuck and despairing. Many of the reasons are explicated in my previous posts about my parents’ deaths. Alongside their deaths, however, were two other extenuating circumstances, first being led by God to leave a well-loved religious tradition and a comfortable (financial and otherwise) career in the United Methodist organization (due to its apostasy), and second by walking through a season of great darkness and dysfunction with one of our adult children.
My reality has coalesced in my mind and practice as a priest in God’s Church, with a clarion call to trust God and his will for my life. Historically, I struggled with my understanding of God’s will for me and others, mostly due to my disagreement with much of the “pop” theology flitting around about God’s will. I rejected then, and reject now, any semblance of theology that believes God causes bad things to happen or “allows” bad things to happen to teach lessons. I also rejected then, and reject now, the existence of a divinely pre-determined ideal whereby God has a “plan” that is detailed and specific for me, and if I only hold my "spiritual” nose in the right way, I’ll, in time, figure it out.
As I navigated my choppy waters and my personal growth-in-God issues, I’ve come to clarity that God's will for me isn’t based on a cosmic plan of future events but rather is based on a cosmic plan related to my origin story, my nature as a man created in the image of God. What does it mean to be me? What does it mean to be human? What is the purpose in life? Of my life? How am I, as a human in time and space, my particular time and space, meant to operate within it?
A way to discuss this is the idea that God’s overarching will is for my (and thus your) flourishing. A way I pepper this idea in my weekly sermons is that “God’s will is for us to learn day in and day out what it means to live in and enjoy living in the shoes that God gave us.”
God’s will is a given; it is revealed. Human flourishing and joy in the present are predicated on my coming to terms with these facts and submitting myself to them. God has a design for me and you, for what we do on the ground, with our minds, with our bodies, and among each other. Operating inside said design, revealed in Scripture and taught by Christ’s Church, is required for life as intended and the pleasures that accompany it, such as joy, peace, and love.
As I got stuck in a despairing first or second gear, I realized my ideas about what I should or should not do were irrelevant. As a Christian, I am rooted in facts. As a Christian, I practice or inhabit a revealed religion. God created. God created me. God designed life and what it means to live it well or constructively AND what it means to live life poorly or deconstructively. God has revealed in His living Word, Jesus Christ, and His Word as proclaimed within the teaching authority of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church what kind of life fosters flourishing and what does not.
Much of modern cultural angst coalesces around the human desire to be his or her own designer. A besetting sin I have rightfully hated and worked with God to remedy is that I often find myself seeking comfort by gorging on food or drink. My experience over time was consistent. This doesn’t work. You cannot shift from a stuck and despairing first and/or second gear by trying to heal your heart wounds with methods that contradict and work against God's design, that are contradictory to God’s revealed will or Word. My body does not work well by gorging on Doritos and downing 200 ounces of Diet Coke or a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Trying to live that way is akin to spastically shifting from one gear to another and hearing that blaring grinding sound between gears. (Side note - that is as far as I can go with a vehicular metaphor! My behavior with my mechanic evidences my limits as I simply mimic the sound my car is making and then trust the expert from there!)
God’s will for you and me is that we would flourish, function well, and operate as intended on the ground in the time and space God has entrusted to us. Such operating depends on my willingness to cooperate with God as God and my willingness to stubbornly refuse to seek to supplant God as God over my own life and my hair-brained ideas about what will make me happy.