"My Christianity Sucks!"

“My Christianity sucks!”

It was a moment of supreme transparency, and I couldn't help but feel a kinship with my friend's sentiments. Several years have passed since that conversation, and that’s the only sentence I recall from it, but those words sunk down deep. Though I'm reasonably sure I've never expressed it quite that way, there have many days when translating my soul’s spirituality into electric impulses would have transmitted the weakest of vital signs. If there had been some device to electronically connect my heart to the keyboard of my laptop, Microsoft Word would have received very little communication. In fact, it probably would have typed just one sentence: My Christianity sucks!

Perhaps you've never felt that way, but I would be bold enough to guess that at some point, during some spiritual dry spell in your life, you were tempted to doubt the validity of your whole experience as a Christian. You know the time. Maybe you put on your church face and no one was the wiser, but when you peeled it off in the mirror at home after the sermon there was that vacuous stare from the eyes on your soul. You didn’t think your prayers would get past the ceiling, even if you could think of anything else to say. You didn’t voice, “My Christianity sucks.” But you felt it.

If you’re hoping for some cushy, feel-good , “this too shall pass” dénouement for the “My Christianity sucks” crisis, you will have to look farther than my blog. I don’t have that kind of solution to write for you because, when you are in that valley, some glib, poetic, philosophical resolution is almost entirely useless. “My Christianity sucks” rarely resolves with beautiful, dramatic closure.

One thing kept coming back to me, though, as I pondered my friend’s exclamation: “My Christianity sucks!” The word my. Is it your Christianity? Could that be the problem? My brand of Christianity could be lacking if I acquired, designed, and fitted it on my own. No wonder it sucks—I suck at creating beautiful things out of the unlovely. But wouldn’t you know…God doesn’t. He’s a master at that.

Does your Christianity suck? Maybe it’s time to exchange it for Christ’s brand of Christianity. Throw out all your failures to attain, all your notions of what you must do, and be an empty vessel for Christ to fill. After all, that’s what He is waiting on anyway.

Yes, it’s harder to do than it sounds. It’s humbling to plead with David through the darkness “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.” (Psalm 51:10) But it’s certainly better than wearing the façade of your Christianity, hiding behind some past spiritual high and hoping you can revitalize it before it withers. Just let go of it, and ask Christ to give you a new Christianity—His version of Christianity. It may actually be more demanding than yours was, but it will also be more rewarding and less fickle. Take His yoke upon you…and you will find rest for your soul.