Boxes

Let us, then, go to him outside the camp....

I believe it was CS Lewis who called God the great iconoclast. He was not speaking of the destruction of natural or sacramental symbols of God in the earth, but of our propensity to shape God in our own minds based on what we are taught, or even on our own experience of him. Inevitably our inner concept is smaller than the Person himself, and as we grow as Christians, our concept has to break in order for God to carry us to a new and broader understanding of him and of ourselves in relation to him. The fathers spoke of this process as the kataphatic/apophatic tension. We are much simpler—we use the term “think (or live) outside the box.”

That’s a wide topic, one that affects all age groups. I want to apply this to the group I know the best: older people. I am grieved at how people in their sixties plus not only live in unperceived boxes but have developed “life boxes”—what I like to call “baptized neuroses.” Timid, fearful folks are “peacemakers,” lifelong control freaks are “prophetic,” etc. I know too many of my peers who are stuck in some box, and can’t see their position. I am angry at the lack of growth in people that by now should be models of Christian experience. But of course I am really angry because I’ve struggled with my own box and the fear of dying in it.

My box is shared by a lot of Christian men my age: “th’Ministry.” It was a standard joke in Seminary that we all wanted to become “a world famous, humble country preacher.” Funny, yes, but true. That’s exactly what I wanted—to be like the pastors I revered as a child.

Evangelicals can revile the Roman hierarchy all they want, but there is no group that separates the “religious” from the “secular” more than they. To be a pastor or missionary is the apex of God’s approval. To fail in either is to be out from under that approval. With all our mantras about varieties of gifts, and blossoming where you’re planted, we still know there’s “something wrong” with the guy who used to be in th’Ministry. The evangelical world is full of a whole class of men who in their own minds bear the stigma of being less than something.

Of course, I just described a box. Younger people have the advantage of larger boxes to help them out of their smaller ones. We call it vision. A vision for a greater project, a different and more challenging ministry, makes it easier to leave the old one behind. But the older guy isn’t quite so visionary. I am not going to be an apostle to East Tennessee or take Sevier County for Jesus. There are younger men who can beat their heads against those dreams.

So, are the old guys left out where vision is concerned? In a way, yes. The vision for projects dies. But it is replaced by a Person. When I drove away from my last pastorate, my mind was full of anger, resignation, self-recrimination, and fear. But my heart was full of such an exhilarating freedom that I was afraid I was lapsing into licentious paganism. It took an effort to look solemn and not burst out laughing. I kept thinking of B’rer Rabbit: “Please don’t throw me into the briar patch….” Somehow I knew, along with the author of Hebrews, that there was something exciting out there--outside the camp.

Older guys finally have the opportunity to throw themselves on the breast of Jesus and let it all go—th’Ministry, the failures, the visions, the projects, the BOX—and come to Christ without encumbrance. And out of that comes life. Nature reveals God again. Love can flow because there’s nothing to lose. A man ceases to do things for God and simply walks with him. Funny. That’s what I was looking for in the first place.