What does it feel like to be a Christian?

What does it feel like to be a Christian?

I’ve been a Christian my whole life and nobody ever asked me that.

I’ve never asked that of myself.

I’ve never even thought about that question until just now.

People have asked me what it means to be a Christian.

I ponder that myself several times a day, every day.

In the fundamentalist Christian church that raised me, we obsessed about how to become a Christian and how to stay a Christian.

But I don’t recall anyone ever asking what it feels like to be a Christian.

One of my old Sunday school teachers, Mrs. Abels, appears beside me now.

“Why, Brad,” she smiles. “You know the answer. Being a Christian feels like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

“Ah, Mrs. Abels,” I say. “Good to see you again after all these years. You look exactly the same. Yes, of course, the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ from Galatians 5:22-23. You taught that well when I was in your Sunday school class as a kid.”

Mrs. Abels asks if I would like to sing the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ song with her.

“I would,” I say. “But my eight-year old son and my wife are sleeping. I’m afraid that singing a Sunday school song with a ghost would wake them.”

She turns to go, but I ask her to stay a moment.

“Mrs. Abels,” I say. “I believe in the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’. But now that I’m a grown man, things like ‘love’ and ‘joy’ and ‘peace’ seem a lot harder than they did back in Sunday school. I don’t just mean harder to do, I mean harder to understand. It’s one thing to know that a fruit of the Spirit is love, but it is another thing to know what Christian love is supposed to feel like and look in the real world.”

Mrs. Abels gazes at me with a gentle stare.

So I go on.

“Back when you had me in Sunday school, I imagined growing up and falling in love with a girl and getting married,” I say. “Imagining love felt so good. But, as a kid, all I had to go on was little snapshots of what I thought love looks like. Han Solo and Princess Leia were my idea of love back then. I knew what it felt like to look at these little snapshots and imagine myself in them. I thought that feeling is what I would have all the time when I grew up and got married.”

Mrs. Abels nods. “Did you?”

“No,” I say. “I’ve been married for 12 years. A lot of times, I do feel that little thrill. I’m crazier about my wife than I was crazy about Princess Leia and that feeling comes through sometimes. But a lot of the time, marriage is a chore. There’s the way to love that feels natural to me. Then there’s the way to love that my wife actually wants from me. Figuring out how to love her the way she needs me to love her is hard. I’ve been in therapy for the last 15 months so that I can get better at it. I’m literally deconstructing myself so that I can put myself back together again for her.”

“So, how does that feel?”

“Are you my Sunday school teacher or my therapist?” I ask.

“Neither,” she says. “I’m a figment of your imagination. Please answer the question.”

“Well, the truth is that it sometimes feels disappointing or exhausting or frustrating,” I say. “I turns out that it is really hard to love somebody. I don’t mean that I have a hard time choosing to love my wife or that I don’t feel love for her. But learning to love her the way she needs and wants to be loved pushes me to my limits sometimes. I feel disappointed with myself when I let her down and I let her down a lot. I feel exhausted when I have to work very hard to understand her and frustrated when I can’t quite do it.”

“So why do you keep going?” asks Mrs. Abels. “Why bother?”

“Well, her,” I say. “She’s worth it. I would rather wear myself out learning to love her than take it easy and not have her in my life. We’ve gone through some bad times, times that felt like drought or stasis, but I think those times only made me love her more. I mean, I was so crazy about her when we first met that I thought I was going to burst into flames. But how I felt then is nothing compared to how I feel about her now.”

“So, you’re saying that love feels better now than what you daydreamed about back then,” says Mrs. Abels. “But that love now comes with a lot more stuff that doesn’t feel good. Sometimes it feels really bad. You’re saying you can feel both of those things at the same time. Times that feel good are so good that they make it worth the times that feel bad.”

“Yes, I think so,” I say.

“This sounds like an addiction,” says Mrs. Abels.

“Because it seems like I’m putting myself through bad stuff just to get an occasional hit of the good stuff. Is that right?” I ask.

“Some would see it that way, yes,” says Mrs. Abels.

“The difference,” I say, “is that what is growing between my wife and me is not artificial. It’s real. All of those bad feelings that come from trying and failing and trying again are building something indestructible. Loving someone, even loving someone clumsily, is life-giving. Addictions aren’t like that. Love is one of those things where even losses count as wins. Where love is at work, there is always hope. Even if hope seems far off.”

“It sounds to me,” says Mrs. Abels, “that you are saying that love is like having everything and nothing at the same time.”

“Yes, I think that’s it,” I say. “It’s tension, but a hopeful kind of tension. It’s a tension that a person can learn to enjoy because he gets to go through it with the person he loves. As long as they have each other, they have hope that they will somehow gain everything in the end, that it is all leading to a final release of the tension.”

“Is that what it feels like to be a Christian?” asks Mrs. Abels. “After all, didn’t Jesus teach that Christianity is really all about love?”

I think about that for a long minute.

“Yes, I think it is,” I say. “Being a Christian feels like tension, ‘having everything and nothing at the same time,’ as you say. It is exhausting and frustrating, but also hopeful and thrilling. It is like a marriage that is building toward something in love, but we can’t make out what the end looks like. We just keep going in faith and hope because we know who we are loving and who is loving us back.”

“I hear sounds coming from upstairs,” says Mrs. Abels. “It sounds like you need to start making breakfast.”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s Waffle Wednesday. I need to get the waffle iron hot and mix up some batter. Thank you for having this talk with me. It’s good to be taught by you again after all these years.”

“It’s been my pleasure,” says Mrs. Abels. “Please promise me one thing.”

“Yes, Mrs. Abels. Anything.”

“Promise me you’ll teach your son the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ song I taught you in Sunday school,” she says. ‘It will serve him well all of his life.“

"Yes, ma'am. I promise.”

Grace and peace.