Our perspective matters for more reasons than scientific accuracy, though. If I believe that, because my life is hard, God does not love me, then I’m going to start to do a few things. First, I may ask why he doesn’t love me. And, because of my personality and particular struggles with the darkness, I’m going to conclude that if I do enough good/right things, try hard enough, and punish my shortcomings more severely, then he will love me. In short, I’ll blame myself for my difficult circumstances and set out on a quest to control the outcome of my life. This isn’t a totally bad idea, which is why it’s a horrible lie.

Consider your most recently stained garment. How did it get that way? Who was responsible? What were the circumstances? Was it really 100% your fault? I’d wager it was a combination of your own ineptitude to keep things clean (or maybe that’s just me?) and a world full of chaos that you have no control over. Unless you’re going to seal yourself inside some sort of stainless steel bubble and rely on Alexa to get everything right, then you’re going to have to deal with people. And, I’m about to blow your mind, people are messy. Me. You. All of us. We’re hopeless when it comes to a white sweatshirt and spaghetti sauce.

I think that, in an effort to make following Jesus more palatable, many well-meaning Bible teachers and evangelists focus on the “good things” that come with following Jesus and they fail to mention the devil, difficulty associated with being a Christian, and regular life pain and suffering that are sure to come, even to those who follow Jesus. It’s like a recruiter for a job telling you all about the benefits package, but leaving out the best part- your salary.

And so, out of fear rather than faith, the first group of people decided that they would start teaching that there was a best way to follow Jesus. If you made the same lifestyle choices that they did, then you were certainly honoring God with your life, but if you didn’t, then your very salvation and faith were thrown into question.

Say the person who taught you about Jesus turns out to be a complete fraud and so you, understandably, decide that everything they taught you is trash. It seems like a logical jump if you have characterized people and ideologies as either all good or all bad. But this doesn’t make sense when held up to the light of reality because, even if you discover that most of the ideologies that you once ascribed to turn out to not make sense of your life, world, or experience, that doesn’t mean that it’s all trash. Ideologies, just like people, are complex. It’s unfair to try to characterize the whole thing as good or bad just as it’s unfair to do that to people.

Regardless of how spiritual or absurd your anchor strands are, you’re going to be better off if you choose them on purpose, rather than just kind of letting them happen to you. If you do that, you’ll end up with your phone and cheetos being the anchor points of your life and those aren’t going to hold up when I come darting out the door after Charlie.

We can’t help ourselves: we can’t wait for the next thing and, thus, we miss the glory of the present. I’m the chief offender and, I hope, that you’ll allow me to invite you into a different way.

But the two go together. If it’s always sunshine, I might think too highly of myself. If it’s always foggy, I’ll dive into despair. We need both, the sunshine and the fog, to grow into the people we were made to be.

My point is: fractures are everywhere, even when you can’t see them. They’re all different, they’re all painful, and they’re all caused by different forces with the same effect: destabilizing and weakening the thing they’ve fractured. Whether you know it or not, your soul, your very identity and deepest self, has been fractured by forces outside of your control.

When the authors of the Biblical story talk about hope and rejoicing no matter what, they’re remembering, like Sam Gamgee, that they were once so badly off that they thought they were dead. And more than thought, they actually were dead inside, deep down in their souls where it matters most, and they were rescued. Through no effort or merit of their own, they were rescued, healed, renewed, and restored to a life “between bewilderment and great joy,” to quote Tolkien once more.