Cliché

Click the following to read chapter one of "Searching For God Knows What" before reading the lesson: http://www.donaldmillerwords.com/pdf/searchingchapterone.pdf

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In this search of something more, something that will truly satisfy us and give us meaning, it seems like the only answer is a relationship with God. So, how do we form a relationship with Him?

You might be thinking, "I have a good relationship with God, I go to church every Sunday!" You and me both know that there is so much more than that to a relationship. But this isn't what I want to address. I'm talking about the box of formulas that Christianity has been shoved into. It seems like our faith has become a list of tasks that we have to complete. It turns out there is nothing further from the truth.

Donald Miller spends the first chapter of his book talking about a Christian writer's seminar he attended. While he was there the seminar instructor shares the formula to a Christian book. She says that there needs to be a story of a deep misery, then there needs to be a resolution in which the character discovers happiness and joy through God, the third step is to give a three or four step process on how that character reached God. Don couldn't believe that this lady was talking about fitting the Gospel of Jesus into a formula involving three or four steps. He says, "My friend at the Bible college believes the qualities that improve a person's life are relational, relational to God and to the folks around us ... So it made me realize that either God didn't know about the formulas, or the formulas weren't able to change a person's heart."

Think about how many formulaic things you do in attempts to come closer to God. Maybe you listen to Christian music, the kind that all has the same structure and chord progression of G, D, E minor, C. Maybe it's worship on Sunday where the song leader gets up and shouts a number to the congregation and everyone opens up and blankly stares at the hymn book in song. Maybe you try reading the Bible in search of some sort of three or four step process to find God.

Me and some friends even noticed at Soul Link that there was a formula for the perfect Christian skit. They all consisted of a bunch of completely random scenes and actions that don't seem to be connected to each other at all, and then at the very end it's all tied up with one short simple line about God. Yes, it's a good idea and it works very well, but at some point it becomes a cliché, the same thing that our relationship with God becomes after a search for formulas to reach Him.

What we need to do is seek God, not this idol we've made that responds to clichéd formulas and three-step processes that turn misery into joy.

"I know that people have actually gone from misery to happiness, but they didn't do it by walking through three steps; they did it because they had a certain set of parents and heard a certain song and knew somebody who had a certain experience and saw some movie, read some book, had something happen to them like a car wreck or a trip to Seattle. Then they called on God, and a week later read something in a magazine or met a girl in Wichita, and when all this had happened they had an epiphany, and somebody may have helped them fulfill what this epiphany made them feel, and several years later they rationalized this mystic experience with three steps, then they told the three steps to us in a book. I'm not saying they weren't trying to be helpful; I bring this up only because life is complex, and the idea that you can break it down or fix it in a few steps is rather silly.

The truth is there are a million steps, and we don't even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse, they are different for you and me and they are always changing. I have come to believe the sooner we find this truth beautiful, the sooner we will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us to not rely on easy answers, bullet points, magic mantras, or genies in lamps, but rather in His guidance, His existence, His mercy, and His love."

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Quotations taken from: "Searching for God Knows What" by Donald Miller pgs 12 and 14-15

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