As promised, I’m going to start dropping insights into my forthcoming book, Resurrection: Breathing With God. Enjoy this first installment and stay tuned for more. 🙂
Recently, a friend of mine shared an experience she had in taking her three-year-old granddaughter to church. During the service, the pastor railed from the pulpit about eternal damnation and the promise of fire and brimstone facing those who didn’t submit to God’s will.
My friend winced at the effect the day’s sermon might have had on her granddaughter’s impressionable young mind.
My next book, Resurrection: Breathing With God is for people who don’t go to church.
Christianity is extraordinarily fragmented. Today, depending on how one defines a denomination, variations number in the tens of thousands – divided over questions as basic as how a person is saved, what actually happens at the communion table, and whether hell lasts forever. Each one is convinced that its message is the correct one. Therein lies the challenge.
What is that message?
It’s a fair question, and a harder one to answer than it should be. Ask a dozen people who grew up in church to name the heart of the Christian message, and you’ll likely get a dozen different answers. Some might name John 3:16. Some name a destination in heaven, and the terrible place you go if you miss it. Others go quiet, sensing the question deserves more than the answer they were handed, and they don’t have a better one to offer.
The version many of us absorbed sounds a great deal like that sermon – behave, or else. This version imagines a God who keeps careful accounts, someone who is more interested in your compliance than your transformation. An irritable landlord with a temper, watching to see if you’ll slip.
It empties pews. It hardens hearts. And it makes a grandmother wonder what kind of God she’s introducing her granddaughter to.
I spent a good portion of my life at a polite distance from all of it. Amidst a cocktail of guilt and shame, I was hedging my bets, all the while searching for something that I believed was outside of me. God felt distant, and I never bothered to consider that my sense of that distance was a reflection of my own receptivity toward and expression of God’s love.
So I kept my distance, the way you might keep clear of a conversation you were never invited into.
What changed isn’t that someone finally won the argument. No one did. What changed is that I began reading for the story for myself – slowly, without a denomination whispering in my ear about what I was supposed to find. What I found bore almost no resemblance to the fire-and-brimstone version I thought I’d left behind.
Yes, there are references to that version, but as the message it is a complete distortion – something that grew louder and more anxious as our imaginations deepened and people wanted to use fear as an instrument of control. The message was always there; the noise just got better at drowning it out.
Underneath the noise is what can best be described as an invitation. It isn’t a threat, or a ledger of debts you can never quite pay down. This invitation comes with a strange, almost unbelievable promise about who you already are and what you were made for. Once you actually see the promise, it reorganizes the entire story. I suspect that’s what my friend already knew somewhere deep in her bones. Some part of her recognized that what her granddaughter was hearing had the whole thing backwards.
This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that my book has the answer that the tens of thousands of denominations missed. I’m not going to insult your intelligence.
Distilling a story that has shaped civilizations into something intimate does not come easily – and yet that is exactly what the story is intended to be; intimate. What I will say is that the central message turns out to be far better, far stranger, and far more personal than the one most of us were given – and that you don’t need to believe a single thing in advance to come and look at it for yourself.
That’s the invitation of Resurrection: Breathing with God. Come and look. Bring your skepticism. Bring your questions. They’re welcome, and you’ll need them.
This book is written for you if you walked away, if you never walked in, or if you’re still sitting in the pew on Sunday, wondering why something stirs in your heart even when the sermon doesn’t always land. This book assumes that you’re curious enough to sit with the question that I began with:
What is the message?
I’ve come to think it’s the best news a human being can hear. As I prepare to launch the book this Fall, I want to show you why – not by arguing you into a corner, but by walking you through a story you may think you already know and pointing out things that have been hidden in plain sight all along. There is a promise that almost no one talks about, and I don’t say that lightly. People have dismissed this promise with the mistaken belief that it applies only to the person who received it.
There is a reason the Bible feels foreign when you open it, and that isn’t your fault. What’s being offered is there the whole time, and it’s being offered to you specifically.
For now, sit with the question that started this post. Notice the answer that rises up in you and notice where it came from. Was it a sermon? A memory from childhood?
I’ll be sharing more details on the book’s release soon!