Children of the Mud

An article by Don Quixote    8 Comments

I’m angry today. No, I take that back, I’m downright pissed off. No, I take that back too, what I really am is sad and hurt, and that makes me feel angry.

I do my best to try and read all the blogs from my friends from GLCC. Tom often bores me with baseball, but that’s Tom, Eric always has something interesting to read, Jamie cracks me up with how he jumps from thing to thing, and sometimes I get a little bogged down in Regan’s blog, but I slog through them on daily basis. The one that I have been returning to time and time again is Bradon Caroland’s. It’s been quite a while since he’s written but I keep checking back on a daily basis to see if there is something new. Today was the first time since May that he wrote and he shared the following words:

“I know what it is to be broken. Truly broken. The churches I have been in have never been a safe place to be broken. The church is for fixed people, or at least people pretending to be fixed enough to be able to serve. People in service can’t be broken. They have to be above reproach. Which means, they have to be better than other people at hiding their faults. Faults make you unfit to serve. Even if the faults are beyond your control. That is too bad. Because I have lots to offer. I have training, talents, abilities and desire. But I don’t have a perfect family life. My wife left me. Imin the divorce process, and my dream of being a minister is pretty much shattered. I just need a little hope offered. I don’t have the strength to hope on my own. I just need someone to believe in me. Give me another chance. Then i could believe in a church of grace.” – Brandon Caroland

I just want to cry (and I’m not ashamed to say that I have) for Brandon. I can feel how broken he is, and when it turns to the one group of people who should love him more than anything else as God’s instruments on earth, what does he find from them: rejection. I’ve had many of the same feelings that Brandon is feeling. I know that some of them come from within, we push them away because of our hurt, because of our fear of rejection, but I know that we aren’t the only ones pushing; the church is as well.

Perhaps it’s the denomination that we attend (oh wait, I forget, we’re not one, it only seems like that on the outside), or perhaps it’s just the area we are from, but I fear that the church as a whole has become this way. I’m mad at the church, I am mad at it’s people. I am angry that my brothers and sisters in Christ would make my wounded friend feel like crap. I just want to scream!

How can we do this? We do it every day, I’ve done it myself back in college, we ignor the wounded man, the one in pain and hurting. We made comments about his faith, that perhaps if he had a bit more, perhaps if only he would pray a bit harder, perhaps if his bible time was better then things would be different. Those of us who are no longer in ministry because of various reasons are marked men, we are broke men, we are the hollow men:

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us — if at all — not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.” – T.S. Elliot

Perhaps I am an idealist (I always have been), but I my heart cries out that this isn’t the way it should be. The church is not for the perfect, it’s for the broken, the wounded, the sinner. That the church exists for making mankind whole again that we might make others whole. Yet we sit there in our polished shoes, our pressed pants and our painted smiles and we pretend that we are fine. WE ARE NOT FINE. The man next to us is not fine. We are all so scared at being exposed for who and what we really are. We perpetuate the myth of perfection out fear of rejection or redicule. We, the church, we are the hollow men, filled with nothing of substance. We stand around and discuss those things of great importance as to our stance on the time of tribulation, we read our trendy Christian books, and parade around as if we are all the perfect image of Christianity. In the car we scream at our wives and kids, we steal stuff from work, look at porn on our office computers. We nit pick the man singing out of key, or how the new guy stumbled in his prayer at offering time (which is right after communion, right before special music which is right before the sermon). We march through our litany without feeling the words there. They mean nothing to us because we are nothing more than a shell consumed with hiding the cracks from those who might peer too close.

I pissed off. I know that these are possibly unfair generalizations, that not everyone is fake, but let me tell you it feels that way from the other side. We are so “busy” in our “ministries” increasing our numbers that we forget we we are here for. The church has become a members only club, nothing more than a gloried country club for all the “right” people, and those people how have problems aren’t them. And so a person like Bradon, my friend, who has offered insights to me on so many things is treated the way he is. They think the are all different, that some how they are better than the rest of us, and by rest of us I mean those of us with known sins (in the end, that’s the only thing that makes us different, our sin is known). But in the end, we are all Children of the mud.

We were born of the mud when God created us, we live in the mud, and one day we will die and rot in the mud. I look at the picture above and I long for a day when the church feels like that. That we are one army marching together, carring our wounded when they can no longer walk for themselves, instead of leaving them to die on their own. What kind of church are we if one of our own is made to feel like that? What kind of Christians are we?

It’s time for a change. It’s time for something new. It’s time for the restoration movement to begin again. To restore the church to what it should be instead of what it has become. Perhaps it’s time to crawl out of our protected holes that we have dug for ourselves and get down in the dirt with humanity and lift them to higher ground, to actively man the pits that we might save as many as we can before Christ returns. We are all children of the mud and it’s time we strated to live that way. When a man falls down, when a person is broken, we lift him up with kindness, we restore him and we put him back to work. No longer should we let talented men and women rot in our pews because they are scared from the battles of the past. The church has got to change and we have to be the ones to do it.

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. To seek treasure where these is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” – Cervantes, Man of La Mancha.