In my opinion and experience, the Evangelical Christian concept of faith is a trap.
In the doctrine of faith one is taught that great faith leads to deliverance. If you don’t have enough faith, you are responsible for your own suffering.
God’s people are chosen, and his rescue will come if they believe with all their heart. If the needed deliverance, help, or healing does not come, it is because the believer’s faith faltered. God has a plan, he is concerned with the most minute details of the believer’s life, the believer just needs to believe.
This way of thinking traps the believer in the paradox between self-righteous entitlement and paralyzing shame. It is at once victim blaming and superiority complex. This type of Christian is in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. They take pride in the struggle they are begging their god to release them from.
I am not trying to bash these people, hear me out.
I asked for wisdom, and my house burned down.
My house burned down. My father became terribly ill. I received a promotion at work that gave me considerably more responsibility and decision-making power than I previously held. People in my life died. My mother had a terrible mental health episode that resulted in the loss of a great deal of money that I ended up having to replace.
Through all the difficulties, I found myself praying and making offerings to my gods, asking them to change it, take it, fix it, magic it, whatever, just take it away, deliver me.
I didn’t realize it, but I was praying like a Christian.
When my mother had her episode, I was so scared. I found myself not only praying but yelling at my gods. Then, when I finally fell quiet, I heard the Old Man say,
“You asked for wisdom.”
You asked for wisdom, and that is not the same as knowledge.
You asked for wisdom, and you can’t get that from a book.
Wisdom comes from experience.
If you want wisdom, you have to have the experience.
Be careful what you ask for.
It was a hard and unpleasant truth, and I had to sit with it for a long time. In doing so, I came to a few realizations.
I run from fear. Wisdom comes from sitting with your fear, being devoured by the wolf, facing it, passing through it, and learning from it.
Life happens to people. People get old, people die, and people lose control of their faculties. Wisdom comes from helping them face it with dignity and grace, holding space and facing fear with them, and holding their hand through their trials. We celebrate joy, sit with sorrow, and demonstrate custodianship of each other.
Facing life is how community is built. It is how we, the colonizers, will decolonize and reconnect.
My gods don’t require performative acts of belief. They don’t hold out on me until they are satisfied that I have abased myself and begged them hard enough. They value my capability and willingness to solve my own problems.
I am not a Christian, removed and thinking of myself as separate and above everything and most everyone around me.
I came to the other side of these realizations free of an enormous burden I didn’t even know I was still carrying.
A vestige of my evangelical days. I felt such a sense of relief that I could simply live my life. I don’t have to constantly prove I am deserving of help. I will live life, I will learn from it, I will serve others using what I know, and in a few critical things, the gods will help me out. They have, they do.
As I sat, I saw myself standing at Mimir’s well. My sacrifice was leaving behind a broken way of thinking. My reward was a small drop of wisdom.
I felt more of the old scales of that Christian life falling away; I felt my mind and my practice moving a little farther away from colonization.
I am glad I asked for wisdom, although it doesn’t look the same on this side of things as when I first started.
I will definitely be a hell of a lot more careful what I ask for in the future.
.
