Hypocrite Me

I am a skeptic and a cynic.  My grandpa just finished reading this book about a little boy who dies, goes to heaven, and then is resuscitated.  Grandpa is over the moon about this book, and raved about it to me.  My response?  "Well...kids have crazy imaginations, and I'm sure his pastor father had told him about heaven.  Anyway, it would be more convincing if everyone who died and went to heaven experienced the same thing.  And what happens to Muslim or Hindu people when they have near death experiences?"

He was not pleased.

BUT I have found my soul mate!  Jason Boyett wrote O Me of Little Faith, and within a paragraph or two, I knew I had found a C.S. Lewis friend.  ("Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What!  You too?  I thought I was the only one.")  Boyett is funny, doubtful, intelligent, skeptical, and devoted to Jesus.  I intend to write more about his book in a later post.

What I want to talk about right now is how I am a hypocrite.  One of my favorite passages from the beginning of the book is this:

"If my flight gets canceled, perhaps it's just the result of a backlog of delayed flights thanks to a major storm somewhere.  I'm seriously hesitant to assume a master evangelistic plan behind flight delays, but many well-meaning Christians really do place so much value on a single soul that they have no problem believing that God whipped up a thunderstorm over the Dallas/Forth Worth airport, piled stress on airline employees, and inconvenienced hundreds of travelers for the purpose of engineering a conversation of eternal significance.  My honest assessment of most 'divine appointment' language is that it is self-centered.  Especially if your divinely appointed evangelism is at the expense of a bunch of other people who just want to get home in time to tuck in their kids.  (Right: I'm a soulless twit.)"

I laughed and mentally fist-bumped Boyett.  So funny!  So accurately conveying my own confused opinions!

And then tonight I totally pulled the divine out of the mundane, and I knew I was lying the whole time.  In Team Kids, we talked about being lonely, and how a little MK prayed that God would give her a friend, and she made a friend!  One of the adults asked if I was lonely in Senegal, so I said, "I was so nervous to leave all my friends and family!  I prayed really hard that I would make new friends in Senegal.  And it turns out that I clicked with my housemate, and she became one of my closest friends!  I really believe that God gave me a friend because I prayed."

That is all true, except for the last sentence.  I made it up because it sounded spiritual and lesson-centric.  But that is ridiculous to even the most uninformed listener.  Liz would have been my housemate whether I'd prayed about it or not.  We still would have had similar personalities whether I prayed about it or not.  So we would have been friends whether I prayed about it or not.  I don't think my prayers kept her from being killed in a freak horse-cart accident, thereby leaving me friendless in Senegal (and this is all not even considering my friendships with Holly and Kim etc).  My prayers are not that powerful (or self-centered, see my agreement with quote above).

I don't understand prayer.  The best I can come up with is that by praying, we open our eyes to see God working.  My prayers didn't cause anything to happen, but it made me turn to God with 1) my problem, and 2) my praise.  That's enough for me for now.  There might be more, but I don't get it.

So why did I claim more?  Because I was raised to think that's the sort of thing spiritual people say, and I wanted to look good.  Instead, I was a hypocrite.  I'd really like to stop that, and I want to try to own up to my failings and my doubts.  Coming soon, I guess...