American Girl

Living in Italy, you expect to learn about Italian culture. However, living here, I’ve actually learned more about American culture. I’ve learned more about myself. 

I’ve learned that my primary motivator, the basis of most of my decisions, is my culture. I am not so much a Christian as I am an American. I approach God like a capitalist and a feminist, an entitled individual who believes in hard work and freedom and production and justice and morality. 

I’ve learned a lot about my personality, too. So now, when I look at myself, the person I am and the decisions I’ve made, all I see is flesh and bone and culture and chemicals. That’s all I see in everyone else. 

We’re all the same. We live and get sick in these magic, mortal bodies: God the Father, the Creator, in his common grace, keeps this whole place running moment by moment for both the sinners and the saints, so we and the trees and the stars don’t implode. 

We, the sinners and the saints, with our cultures and DNA, are the same under God—there’s only one difference. Some of us, with the breath and blood that God provides, sing a song of dire need. The singing makes it a praise, but the words are a desperate request: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” We praise Him with the futility and helplessness and desperation. We are the sinner-saints, the ones who recognize their brokenness and need and dependence on a Savior and Creator. We do and sing nothing else. 

Nothing else. 

Because we have nothing else. 

My culture—a mixture of capitalism and feminism and American church-ism—tells me to go, go, go, and do, do, do and achieve—

But it’s missing the point. Like love and knowledge, a relationship not guided by cultural norms and ideals.

Taking a step back, my cultural ways of being aren’t so hot. They are driving me to my knees. And Christian culture? American Christianity and the church? I’m so tired of it. 

I’m so tired of books telling me what to do, and sermons, and pulpits on stages, and organizations and affiliations and reformations and counter-reformations and articles and blogs and magazines and all that when all I want is Jesus. 

The thing is, they can’t give me Jesus. I should not expect them to. It's my own damn fault if I'm not letting Jesus in my life, claiming dependence on Him, reading the Bible for myself.

We’re Americans, though, and we can sell anything and buy anything, if we work hard enough, so let’s keep selling and buying Jesus to and for each other. After all, we are all entitled to Jesus! Fake Jesus. Fake American Jesus. 

So tired.

I’m tired of people like me who are tired of it and blogging about it. Because at the end of the day, we kinda need the books and the sermons and the preachers and the small groups and the bake sales, no matter how screwed up, no matter how elementary, because in these bodies, it’s all we have. Yes, it’s all shadows—but I am not a singularly spiritual, metaphysical being. Being a Christian doesn’t put me on some transcendental plane. 

I need to pick up the shadows and try to stick them to myself like Peter Pan. None of us knows how to perfectly merge the sacred and secular, culture with biology, how to perfectly live—so we need to keep trying. We need to keep searching. We need pages of real books and buildings to gather in on Sunday mornings and someone to get up in front— 

Because there is nothing else to do. 

Except maybe abandon it completely. Declare anarchy. Kamikaze. 

And I know that would not be good. Because though it might be a shadow on a rainy day, that wet shadow on blood-stained pavement is better than living alone in my own head with my own ideas of what is right, or throwing a pity party with a few other people who agree with me, or running away out of spite to a different culture. "Maybe I should just be a missionary to Italy or Africa my whole life” is what I’ve said.

Or…not. Not with my current motive.

I’d rather put up with dirt and hurt and disagreement and pain and yes, even foolishness and childishness, than give up on the culture of Christianity; than drive it into the ground with cruel words. My capitalistic Christianity needs to go for sure, but American churchy Christianity?—in addition, so importantly, my perspective needs to change. I need to see the church for what is, yes, but love it anyway.

Because within that culture of hypocrisy, there are threads and particles of Light. There are people who, despite all their corruption that they should be shot for, or at least given a time-out for, love Jesus. They are pretty bad at loving Jesus, but you know, I am too, so I think I can extend a little mercy. I won’t extend it very well, but I’m gonna try. 

And I’m going to keep searching. I am never going to stop searching for Jesus in everything my whole life long. I will search dark places and light places and in-between places, and never really get anywhere and never really find what I’m looking for— 

But when I die, when I’m done spending my life sifting through dirt and am myself buried under six feet of the stuff— 

I will be with Jesus. I will be loved. I will be pardoned. I will not be alone.

I will be home.

Maybe I’ll be given an answer for why I had to live on earth in the first place and couldn’t forsake myself and come to Him immediately, fully, but even if I don’t get to know, that’s okay. Because I trust him. 

I trust him with my life. 

I am that desperate for Him.