The thing that scares me more than anything is duality.
At the basic level, duality is the separation of the spiritual and the physical. Gnostic Christians took up this idea when they asserted that Christ could not have been physical, because all things that are/were physical are evil.
A form of dualism is still lingering in our world today; it is represented in multiple forms of identity. Notably this is most prevalent within adolescents who create different identities for themselves depending on their environments. Psychologists believe this has to do with the teenage journey to find oneself, yet is it now continuing past adolescence. Identity has become very fluid; different forms of identity are lived out and determined by the environment a person finds himself or herself in. A person’s identities are determined by fluid structures: relationships, consumerism, where one works, and/or where one lives.
I am most fearful when the fluidity of identity does not stop at the larger structures, but continues into more specific environments. Therefore, some continue to live as an actor who plays different roles depending upon their surroundings. At work they act one way, at home they work another way, and with friends they work another way.
Once, while I was cleaning up after youth group a fellow church member asked, “Don’t you ever get tired of this?”
I assumed that he was referring to cleaning up after youth group, but he wasn’t. Clarifying, he said, “Tired of living two lives, one here at church and another while you are not here? I mean, I tried to explain how hard this was to my girlfriend the other day and she didn’t get it.”
I carefully responded, “I try to live the same way whether I am at home or I am at work, whether I am hanging out with students or my friends.”
My answer surprised this person. He looked at me questioningly and said, “Really?”
If I were totally honest, I would say that living out my identity in Christ is challenging thing to do. I mess up a lot, but I believe that God is concerned with how we live and how we act in every part of our lives, not just on Sunday, or right before we sit to partake in a meal.
My wife found a quote by G.K. Chesterton that reads, “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the play and the opera, and grace before the concert and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing; and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”
Maybe I am being presumptuous, but when I read this quote I see Chesterton taking the idea of duality head on. In his own way, he reinforces that God is everywhere and is deeply concerned with and deeply involved in everything we do.
When I was in high school I used to surf a lot. Every Sunday morning I would leave church right after youth group to drive down to the beach with a couple of my friends. Every time we went surfing, we would pray before we got into the water.
When I joined the leadership team in my youth group, my youth pastor asked me why I never stuck around for “big-church.” I still remember the conversation and my response; “I go to the beach and experience and worship God in another way.”
Now, I am not saying my teenage self was right to not participate in “big-church,” but my statement about God was not far off.
What would it look like if believed that God was everywhere? Not just everywhere, but that he cared about how we acted and what identity we confessed as we went about our days, weeks, and years?
One of the hardest things about the Christian life is realizing that in Christ our identity has not only been redeemed, but that it is also in the process of being transformed. The ultimate goal is that everything previously held as “ours,” would be let go of, and that selfishness would turn into selflessness as Christ sanctifies us completely.
Imagine what the world would be like if people stopped living in duality and started living in Christ.
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