Returning to my first love

I remember when I first became a Christian, I was very black and white. The Bible was full of answers, of surety, of promises and reassurances. I was enthusiastic, unstoppable, tactless and naive. It was a simple time.

Questions, complications, unanswered prayer, unanswerable questions, theological debate and doubt. Moving into complexity was difficult, but necessary. The simple black and white no longer satisfied me, and I moved into a world with shades of grey.

Apart from a few moments in the sun, most of my life is lived in the greyness now. This is a good thing, I think. I see nuances, shades of meaning, delicacy, tension and balance which I would not have understood previously. I thought for a while that my early naivety was a phase to be got over as quickly as possible. I heard one older priest say "New converts should be stuck in a barrel for ten years, until they get over it!"

Now I wonder. Everyone goes through that "first fire" stage. It seems to be somehow necessary. John in Revelation Ch 2 talks about how they seem to have lost that first love, as if it were a good thing which is now gone, rather than a difficult phase which is now past.

Strangely, I feel it coming back now, in a rather different form. The love and desire I have to know God better is coming back just as strongly, but now in a more experienced mind which is able to bear complexity. I am equally keen to learn, to know God better, but less fixated on being able to understand it all, less sure that there are "right answers" to find.

I remember still, how distressed I was to hear a 70-year old Christian woman say that she was "still learning". "What!?" I gasped "You mean you don't understand it all yet?" I was horrified that you never "get the degree" in Christian living. That you never get it all right, get it all together and move on to teaching others, secure and sure in your own correctness. I wanted that surety!

Ha! It seems funny to me now to have ever wanted to be so sure. It sounds pompous and self-righteous to think that I could ever achieve that - I hope I was understood to be just shallow and naive instead. No, I prefer the uncertainty, the journey, the greyness, to the black and white end of the answer. It would be sad to reach the end of learning, for there to be an end to understanding, to reach the bottom of God's depths - presumptuous thought!

I find it infinitely more reassuring and exciting to know that our God is deep enough to swim in for our whole lives and never reach the bottom! To know that our God sees in endless shades of grey, and is not captured in any system of black and white rules, written down in any book, closed into any box in a pigeonhole on a shelf.

And it is this endless love of God (I believe) which protects new believers from knowing all this too early. The answers we are given then are the answers we need, and they are true and real and reassuring. As we grow into the bigger answers, start to see the shades of colour and variety which God has written into the world, then we see that our little answers go deeper than we realized and there is more yet to explore.

What an exciting God we live for!