Avoiding the Kool-Aid

Avoiding the Kool-Aid

This may be a little heavy.  I don’t think so much in words as I do in pictures and images – and of late my thoughts are an avalanche of cognitive dissonance.  Maybe you’re there too – that feeling you get when something is totally different from your expectations and experiences.  These days, I wonder sometimes if I even understand anything the world throws at me – I find it all quite bizarre.  The latest bizarre episode comes (circuitously) from someone who used to go to church and has stopped.  “Yeah, been there, done that, I’m just not drinking the Kool-Aid anymore.”  Exact words.  To one of her former sisters in Christ.  Huh?

Forget about the insulting implication.  We can expect that from non-believers.  It hurts more, however, when it comes from someone we were close to in the church, when they place us in the same category as a crazy suicidal cult group where over 900 people died for their unquestioning allegiance to a charismatic lunatic.  Sure, it’s hyperbolic and of course they are doing some major self-justifying.  But it makes me think – what was her faith built on?

I’m not sure.  But I suspect a lot of Christians look for easy answers.  They want to put their thinking on autopilot so they don’t have to wrestle so much with how God wants them to live in this world.  The problem with that is when not worked, spiritual muscles atrophy – and when harder questions come, these folks aren’t ready to deal with them.  And today, there are a lot of hard questions – and the easy answers are coming from a pathological world that would have us walk in its well-worn paths.  God answers our questions within the context of the cross – a decidedly hard set of answers requiring sacrifice, endurance, faith, and a kind of love so cosmically mind-bending the world can’t even see it.  We need to avoid those paths of least resistance wherever we find them because in the end, that’s where real destruction comes from.

Einstein purportedly asked, “Are they crazy, or am I?”  I’ve asked that.  But what I’ve found is, the peace I have, the joy I have, the love I’m capable of (and all-to-often imperfectly do) – all these things have all been forged in the pain of the cross – plain foolishness to the world, but rock-solid truth proven over time as I daily discover new ways to love God and my neighbors more perfectly.  Even to those who think I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid….