Hands Behind Your Back
We sit in a circle and answer questions laid out by a nine year old. Kestae, the one with the questions, made a poster for us to look at; even drew our pictures on it. My hair is four months ago short but I’m not mentioning it. Only Samia, my friend who also has short hair, who savors every inch would understand. The questions Kestae asks are hard in a good way, in a make you think about your life way. “Why did God make us in His world?” Mouths open and people share. Mostly they talk about how God made us to use us; how He made us to work, to create, to build.
I sit and think about Adam and Eve and how in the beginning they had no interest in working so hard. I imagine they had soft hands and gentle smiles. They never had those nasty bags under their eyes or tired feet. The picture, the things that come up in my mind paint a story of people enjoying God. And that, that enjoying God notion, that’s first and foremost why God made us in His world.
And so that’s what I was thinking, that’s what I was going to say. But you know that thing that happens when you slightly open your lips and someone talks before you do? It must have happened three times. In the moments where I kept silent I began to think more about my answer. I began to ask myself, what does it even mean to enjoy God?
Sunshine on cold bones. Sharing a meal with friends. Wandering through bookstores. The first few minutes of a plane ride. Modern Japanese architecture. Those are things I enjoy in life. If my enjoyment of them was always intrinsically tied to a whole lot of hard work and perpetual failure, I might not want them as much.
The person to my left spoke up and answered the question. “I also think we’re here to enjoy God.”
It’s just so difficult because this isn’t Eden. Sometimes it feels comfortable to earn affirmation from God, even if it’s just an illusion. We cover ourselves with more than clothes everyday. We hide behind fig leaves and wrestle with how much we’re willing to let people know us. And it doesn’t end there; most of us spend our time serving a god who says salvation is found in our hard work, in our effort to be perfect. There’s a lie that says grace is good, but hard work, that’s the stuff that counts. So move those chairs and sign up to serve here, run yourself to the grave. At whatever cost, keep busy and save yourself.
As the story would have it, Adam and Eve forgot how to enjoy God. We aren’t excluded.
We have to go back to the beginning. I have to see how things were meant to be before everything got so messed up; before everyone got so confused. We have to go back to the place that frees us to enjoy God. We can’t do that where we currently are. How can we enjoy a god who is a slave driver that wants us to get up at 5am everyday to read the Bible? Spoiler alert: The god who is going to call you to Mozambique and marry someone you hate does not exist. We have to see that God’s original plan is to be with His people and for His people to enjoy Him.
John Piper is some sort of “let’s enjoy God” renegade. He coined the term “Christian Hedonism.” It’s a fairly common philosophy that says “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” Piper doesn’t note that being happy is the aim of our lives. Instead, he looks at the beginning of humanity and seeks a relationship with God that’s closely aligned to that. It’s true, God doesn’t hate us, he’s not plotting or seething; breathe a little and venture towards the life in Him that is good.
That’s what so much of this comes down to, believing that God really is for us. He’s fighting for us not against us. He’s committed to seeing us become the people He already sees us as.
The ironic part is, is that similar to being loved by God, when you are able to enjoy Him, holiness and goodness become that natural outflow of your life. You lose concern over moving to Mozambique or your plans for the future or your being safe at all times; you’re free to live, perhaps for the first time. That’s how all of this works, in absolute paradox. When we are free to enjoy the Father as intended, we are more influential and effective than we could otherwise ever hope for.
C.S. Lewis wrote,
“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and to earnestly hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I suggest that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
So what does all of this really look like, this enjoying God idea?
Nathanial Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter, paints a vivid picture for what all of this looks like for us. In the novel, a character named Dimmesdale grapples with the weight of guilt for having had an affair with a married woman. Dimmesdale is so broken over his sin, so ripped to shreds that he burns an “A” for adultery on his chest. But that’s not enough; he goes on to whip himself at night in order to show God how remorseful he is. The thing is, that’s not enough either. Why? Because our guilt and shame and self-hate will never be enough. They won’t actually propel us towards life found in God. In fact, all they’ll probably do is keep the cycle of repetitive sin in full swing.
And that god, the one who tells you to whip yourself at night, tells you freedom comes after you hurt yourself, that isn’t God. That’s not the one who loves loves loves us, unto death even.
The God who asks us to enjoy Him sees beyond our fractured state of being. Enjoying God means letting the wounded “A” on our chests heal- even more so, it means allowing God to be the healer of those wounds. Enjoying the God who already loves us requires that we get rid of our whips and never fashion new ones. We’ve got to let our tired hands rest; we’ve got to rest with the Father. Enjoying God means a brand new existence, born of hope for who we can be and hope for the world around us.
