Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.
My family and I are in the middle of a move. Another move really. In our 16 years of marriage my wife and I have moved every 2-4 years. Our next address will be our twelfth together. We love the adventure that these years have brought us, but we also just want to settle into a place and stay put for a while.
The market we are moving from is hot. Our house sold in about a day at a price about 26% higher than we paid four years ago. That means that suddenly we were looking at a large bit of cash coming our way after the sale is final.
Almost a year ago now, the leadership of our church asked us to leave. We did. In the midst of an already chaotic, pandemic year, we lost our jobs. (My wife and I were co-pastors.) All that to say, the last year has been full of uncertainty. I mean deep uncertainty. Uncertainty like I have never experienced before. The months have been full of doubts. Doubts on just about every subject you could name: God, the Church, myself, my wife, my family. (Peter Enns’ The Sin of Certainty has been helpful.) It has been a rough year. A year where we have longed for certainty and stability.
The money from the sale of our house seemed to provide a piece of that stability. A load of cash is great consolation after a year of feeling like your life is slowly unraveling thread by thread. It gives the illusion of control and a false sense of permanence.
But of course, it is an illusion. We are in the process of buying a new house in a new town and our load of cash has been converted into a down payment. Now don’t get me wrong, we love the house we found. I mean really love it. The house came up on the market at just the perfect time and is far more than anything our family asked for or even imagined for our next house. It seems like a gift. But as excited as I am about our new home, a piece of me would still prefer the cash.
I can’t help but remember the parable that Jesus told about the rich man who acquired a great amount of wealth and built a secure building to keep it all in. And then he died. I take this to be a parable illustrating the illusion of finding security in wealth. There is no permanence in money.
Or I think of the line in the Lord’s Prayer where Jesus teaches his followers to pray to God, “Give us today our daily bread.” The request is for the means to get through the day, that’s it. Not give me enough to live on for the next year and I’ll make something happen in that time. No, give me enough to survive today. That is how Jesus told us to pray.
This is a huge shift from the modern world of insurance, pensions, 401k’s and all the other ways that we try to secure our future. It challenges, if not condemns, our culture’s idolization of security. And to be honest, I don’t really know what to do about it.
Personally, I have found that my desire often mirrors the original sin of Adam and Eve who wanted to be like God. I would rather have a load of cash so that I can feel in control of my life. I don’t like to be a dependent creature. I have found that the attitude of my prayers has basically been, “God, Bless me so that I no longer need you.” Give me enough security and control so that I can do things on my own. It’s like I’m trying to trick God so that He works Himself out of the picture.
Our load of cash is now a down payment on a house we really love. It comes with monthly payments and that requires income. So my wife and I are scrapping together jobs. But again, what I really want, more than anything else, is a secure, full-time, good-paying job so that I can once again feel in control. So that I can live with the illusion that I am not dependent on anything but myself.
And that is one of the great lies of our age. That we are independent creatures making our own way in this chaotic universe. There is a certain romantic appeal that this myth has, but it is a myth. We are dependent creatures, created by the God of the universe. We are not our own. Which also means that we are not on our own. This could be a terrifying reality, if God were a big angry brute who hated His creation. But that isn’t the God of Christianity.
The Christian God knows how to give good gifts to His children and desires what is best for all His creatures. The problem is that the Christian God is most interested in relationship. We’d often prefer a kind of generous-grandparent-god who stops by once a year at Christmas and loads us up with enough goodies to last well past the next visit. But there is little relationship there.
I do believe God knows how to give good gifts. There have been three times in our marriage when both my wife and I have been unemployed for a period of time. But we have never lacked for anything that we really needed. Neither have our kids. We have always had all we needed, and often more. But things have rarely come on my timetable.
So, after all our struggle for the last year, we are facing a choice. And I think it’s a choice that we all face to some degree or another. We can choose to accept the gifts as they come. To accept relationship and dependency and all that comes along with it. Or we can choose to cling to our cash. To try to go it alone, to keep a death grip on our illusion of security and control in the world.
If we want to be able to accept God’s gifts, we have to first open our hands.
