I Don’t Care What You Won’t Do

I came of age to a line-in-the-sand piety of resistance. Being a person of faith meant maintaining clear boundaries about the things one would and wouldn’t do, praying for the strength, and constructing mechanisms of accountability, to keep oneself unstained. In college this resistance had mostly to do with alcohol and making out, and it was accompanied by well-rehearsed rituals of guilt, absolution, and recommittment when–not if–one failed.

Faith is resistance.

I’m tying to resist different things now.

But I’m also more attuned to the element of faith that demands embrace, not resistance. It is a stilted faith that exhausts itself in line drawing and boundary building. There is a world of hurt and love and redemption humming beyond where we now are, and the life of faith requires following Jesus into that mess and saying “yes” at least as often as we say “no.”