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March 3, 2020

I'm in the process of unlearning most of what I'd formerly known from being steeped in Western Christianity, and certainly all I'd internalized about "American" Christianity. I grew up knowing of "the Jesus of suburbia" and then when I was sixteen I was introduced to him. But it turned out that Jesus never lived in the suburbs.

The way of Jesus is so counter-cultural because what we think is the way of Jesus is really just some of his watered-down sayings slapped over top our American priorities. Some sugar-coated, "well that's not really what that means" Bible verses on our bumper stickers and even tattooed on our skin. Crosses and crucifixes everywhere you look, "God bless you" ringing out in public spaces after sneezes, and scores of children growing up knowing that some invisible person named Jesus loves them but having no clue that, without surrender and obedience, they're actually opposing him. And finally, surprise surprise, believing that you're a good person doesn't mean you're going to heaven.

Forgive the sarcasm, but the deeper I get in the reality of who Jesus is, the more I find myself scoffing at the impostor we've settled for. (And the scoffing is just a symptom of being deeply grieved. A defense mechanism. I'm working on it.) In just 25 years of life, I know I've barely scratched the surface of God's truth, and yet for so long I was seemingly content because I was ignorant. I was encased in an American, pseudo-Christian bubble, and it had next to no bearing on how I lived my life. 

Was I taught the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule? Yes. Did I have some frame of reference for the standard of behavior a Christian person was supposed to exhibit? Yes. Did that shape my interior life in any dramatic way? Sadly, no. It just force-fed me more guilt than I could swallow, and petrified my outsides, making me more concerned with looking acceptable than knowing Jesus and being known by him. I didn't know how. I was only shown how to do "Christian" things, rather than how to become a true disciple following the very real example of Jesus of Nazareth with my whole life.

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