Snail Guru

The great thing about being a kid is that you’re not expected to know what right or wrong is. Let me rephrase that – you shouldn’t be expected to know what right or wrong is until someone points it out to you…and even then, what may be right in one situation may be completely wrong in another. Man, it’s hard being a kid.

You see, the biggest thing we do that gets us into most trouble is deciding what is right and wrong. We were never meant to. That’s God’s job. But ever since we ate that apple and decided that we would rather be God ourselves, we’ve been constantly screwing life up ever since. The irony is that God was always offering us the chance to be like him, we just had to go through the whole process of growing up. But no, like some teenager who decides he wants to skip all that bit out and suddenly be all adult, we act all grown up. But the clothes don’t fit.

I did a bit of research recently on cultural values and the process of moving from one culture to another. I came across this quote by a prominent social psychologist, Dr Sussman:

“Through a process of enculturation we learn to think and act similarly to other people…and when the enculturation process is complete, in late adolescence, these cultural preferences and ways of thinking and acting, settle on us like a comfortable pair of glasses. Our cultural perspective on the world, like properly-made glasses, shapes everything we see, how we interpret what we see, and how we act. And our cultural perspective, also like comfortable glasses, becomes invisible. We forget the details of our childhood enculturation process and all the possible ways of acting and thinking which have been discarded along the way. Our cultural perspective now becomes part of our identity.”

Culture has been described as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes one social group from another.” This got me thinking, what does it look like to move from my culture into God’s culture? Paul kind of answers this in his letter to the Romans when he tells them not to confrom to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of the mind. The Message puts it like this, “Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking about it.”

We need a new way of thinking, a new set of cultural values, a new way of thinking of right and wrong, and as in Jesus’ day, this new way of thinking might even surprise some our more established “Christian” cultures.

So perhaps it’s time to go back to our childhood enculturation processes and relearn what God might have to say about how we live our lives. It’s time to say sorry for thinking we know how to live our lives, know what’s right and wrong for us, and to put on a new pair of glasses. I think God might just surprise us as he calls us to become like little children. I truely believe he does so in order that we relearn what it is to walk with him so that he can properly grow us up into the sons and daughters he has made us to be.

My friends have wee girl who turned one the other week and she’s just learned to walk. For her birthday I bought her a pair of shoes. A few days later she took her first walk in the garden, which reminds me of another story…

Once-upon-a-time, Adam and Eve spent their evenings walking in the garden with God. They just hung out and, one can only presume, chatted about the day and what they all got up to. This was home and by all accounts it was a pretty good one. But then something went horribly wrong which left Adam and Eve to walk on their own. But hey, it was their choice. God would have preferred they still walked with him.

I think we have the impression that God was pretty powerless in this whole affair – I can’t imagine he really was. He’s God, all-powerful, all-knowing. I have a theory that I’ll probably share another time, but I just wonder if God in fact set us up for the Fall. Either way, he had a plan right from the beginning to ensure that one day we would once again walk with him in the garden. God, it seems, like gardens. And so should we – it’s our home after all.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that Jesus was mistaken for the gardener that first morning he rose from the dead, as he took his first walk in a new garden. Nor was it a coincidence that he faced his toughest decision, his fiercest temptation in another garden just three days before. Would he submit to God or do his own thing? Would he eat from his own tree of what he thought best or would he hang from the tree of what God knew was best? We’re faced with the same choice – live how we see fit, or die to ourselves and hope that God will raise us from the dead.

We’re all being called to live in the garden, to walk with God, to be home again. The truth is that the garden where God now dwells is within us. It’s up to us to decide if we want to journey there, to make that trip back home. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, like my friends’ little girl, we’re being called to put on our ruby slippers and click our heels and say, “There’s no place like home.” But unlike Dorothy, we don’t just magically get there. It takes a little more than that. For starters, we have to walk.

If we’ve decided to follow Jesus, he takes us on a journey which will eventually lead to our own gardens. But be warned, it might first cost us our lives.

There’s always the potential to become introverted when it comes to discipleship. Reading what I have to say, there will be the possibility that some may consider me reasoning that we cannot make a difference in this world until we are “sorted out.” That is not at all my intention for if we wait till then there will be no need. Besides, we’re not called to make a difference, we’re called to BE the difference. that’s what discipleship is all about.

I read a quote recently by CS Lewis that said “the church exists for no other purpose but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.” We are called to be the sons and daughters of God, to reflect and become all that Jesus is. Wow!

Jesus bases his whole teachings of discipleship on love. We are told to love others as we love ourselves. Do we really know how to love ourselves…with the right kind of love? That love can only come from God which adds to the weight of what Jesus says when he also tells us to love God with all we are. I do not believe we can do either of these things without first experiencing that love from God, the love that draws us into relationship with him, the love that brings out all that we have been made to be and gives us choices about how to live our lives. And that means walking with God…just as Jesus did.

I’ve been thinking about where this would take us and strangely thought about Che Guevera. This guy was so affected by the state of the world he was in that he was prepared to take up arms and kill people in order to change his society. To become such a revolutionary, I believe, was to follow a vision but without the right kind of values to back it up. Is there a better way? I believe there is and I believe Jesus shows us how.

“[Jesus] calls them disciples because they’re learning how to be a certain kind of force, a certain kind of presence for good in the world. They’re working with God to overcome evil with good. They’re working to become people of peace, people of justice, people of mercy andgrace. Followers of jesus are people who are committed to partnering with God to make this world, the world we all live in, the kind of place God originally intended it to be.” Rob Bell, Trees (Nooma)

This is the vision and in order to become part of it we need to live by the values behind it. A vision without values is much like building a house without foundations – and we all know what happens to that when the storms come. This is about building our home on something more solid, then inviting others to share in that. This is not just about “me” or “you.” It’s about “us.”

I just wanted to make that clear. Walking with God is the first step towards walking with others in order to walk together with a mission. It’s just one step at a time.