Blue Like Jazz

I read so much in the months after Krista passed away and felt like I learned so much, and really examined my doubts and clarified some things as best I could.  I slowed down a bit the last couple of years and really tapered off the reading in the last 6 months (which I am not to proud of...) but have been doing more of it lately.  I love Donald Miller's writing.  Here is an excerpt from Chapter 11 of his book Blue Like Jazz which I am currently re-reading.  It's about Don sharing his faith in Jesus Christ with others:

     "When I was in Sunday School as a kid, my teacher put a big poster on the wall that was shaped in a circle like a target.  She had us write names of people we knew who weren't Christians on little pieces of paper, and she pinned the names to the outer circle of the target.  She said our goal, by the end of the year, was to move those names from the outer ring of the circle, which represented their distance from knowing Jesus, to the inner ring, which represented them having come into a relationship with Jesus.  I thought the strategy was beautiful because it gave us a goal, a visual.

     I didn't know any people who weren't Christians, but I was a child with a fertile imagination so I made up some names; Thad Thatcher was one and William Wonka was another.  My teacher didn't believe me which I took as an insult, but nonetheless, the class was excited the very next week when both Thad and William had become Christians in a dramatic conversion experience that included the dismantling of a large satanic cult and underground drug ring.  There was also levitation involved.

     Even though they didn't exist, Thad and William were the only people to become Christians all year.  Nobody else I knew became a Christian for a very long time, mostly because I didn't tell anybody about Jesus except when I was drunk at a party, and that was only because so many of my reservations were down, and even then nobody understood me because I was either crying or slurring my words.

When I moved downtown to attend Imago-Dei, the church Rick started, he was pretty serious about loving people regardless of whether they considered Jesus the Son of God or not, and Rick wanted to love them because they were either hungry, thirsty, or lonely.  The human struggle bothered Rick, as if something was broken in the world and we were supposed to hold our palms against the wound.  He didn't really see evangelism, or whatever you want to call it, as a target on a wall in which the goal is to get people to agree with us about the meaning of life.  He saw evangelism as reaching a felt need.  I thought this was beautiful and frightening.  I thought it was beautiful because I had this same need; I mean I knew I needed Jesus like I need water or food, and yet it was frightening because Christianity is so stupid to so much of our culture, and I absolutely hate bothering people with the stuff.

     So much of me believes strongly in letting everybody live their own lives, and when I share my faith, I feel like a network marketing guy trying to build my down line.

     Some of my friends who aren't Christians think that Christians are insistent an demanding and intruding, but that isn't the case.  Those folks are the squeaky wheel.  Most Christians have enormous respect for the space and freedom of others; it is only that they have found a joy in Jesus that they want to share.  There is the tension.

     In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity.  I told him that I couldn't do it, and moreover, that I didn't want to defend the term.  He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes.  "Then why don't you want to defend Christianity?" he asked, confused.  I told him I no longer knew what the term meant.  Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent.  To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend.  By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry.  I won't do it.  Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers.  How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people?  I told the radio show hos that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me.  The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes.  When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together.  He told me how much he didn't like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe that Jesus was the Son of God.

     For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.  Christianity, unlike Christian spirituality, was not a term that excited me.  And I could not in good conscience tell a friend about a faith that didn't excite me.  I couldn't share something I wasn't experiencing.  And I wasn't experiencing Christianity.  It didn't do anything for me at all.  If felt like math, like a system of rights and wrongs and political beliefs, but it wasn't mysterious; it wasn't God reaching out of heaven to do wonderful things in my life.  And if I would have shared Christianity with somebody, it would have felt mostly like I was trying to to get somebody to agree with me rather than meet God.  I could no longer share anything about Christianity, but I loved talking about Jesus and the spirituality that goes along with a relationship with Him."

I love how he puts this stuff.  If you are a person who has committed their life to learning about what it`s like to have a relationship with Christ and have never read Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, you should.  If you are someone who has questions about Christianity (Christian Spirituality) I really think this book delves into a lot of the questions and doubts people have about it.  I just love the book.  Just love it.