Free to Fail - From Anxious, Stressed, and Lonely to Captivated by Beauty
It was a great plan. I’d gotten up ridiculously early to bring a housemate to the airport and was desperate to deliver the diamond ring in my pocket to Sophia, along with the invitation to marry me. Sophia is not a morning person. I got breakfast, fresh flowers, and drove to Sophia’s only to discover the impossible had happened. Sophia left early. I tried to surprise Sophia at mid-day, but missed her again, this time by five minutes. It took four attempts before finally, exasperated, after 7oclock that evening… Sophia and I were in the same room.
The story has a happy ending. This week Sophia and I celebrated twenty years of marriage. But, as far as I know, I’m the only person who has 4 failed engagement attempts in the same day. I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t like failure.
When I fail, I feel anxious, stressed, and lonely.
The American Psychiatric Association published an article last July describing college students with three words, anxious, stressed, and lonely. That was last summer before a global pandemic exposed the failures and fissures in our healthcare system. It was last summer, before a global recession put more than 16 million people out of work. That was last summer… before the simmering racial injustices we’ve watched on our screen boiled over into a moment of racial reckoning.
If we were anxious, stressed, and lonely before…
Where is God in a confusing world out there and a restless world in here? In moments like this we know we need God. Our need for God in moments of fear and failure is not just a modern problem. As my friend Calvin Chan would say, it’s an ancient problem, because it’s a human problem, because it’s a spiritual problem.
But, reflecting on Colossians 1:15-23 we can discover how fear and failure lose their fangs when we behold God’s beauty.
Where is God?
Until we know where to look for God, we’re guaranteed to miss him. In the ancient world there were three places where people looked for God; temples, palaces, and contemplation.
Temples were full of statues, images, or idols that were thought to bring the presence of God into contact with people. If you asked an Ancient Roman, “where is God” they’d say, “which one,” and then point you to a temple. Temples were supposed to be places where heaven and earth came together. Temples were common, but they were also treacherous. You didn’t want to ignore the temple too long and risk the wrath of the gods.
Another place ancient people looked for God was in politics. Homer and Virgil had written epic poems about how the gods were intimately involved in the outcome of war and peace, in the establishment of one kingdom or another. It wasn’t that much of a stretch for the Roman empire to begin worshipping its emperors. If power comes from the gods, and Caesar has the most power, Caesar must be a god, or maybe the son of God.
There were people who were skeptical of all this temples and politics. They thought the place to find God was in contemplation. They thought, if human beings really gave themselves to observation, reason, reflection, and learning then, we could discover the divine principles that hold reality together and make existence what it is. If we can plumb the depths of creation we could discover the divine.
Not much has changed in the last 2000 years. Our temples tend to be full of mirrors and screens rather than statues, but they are places we go to worship. Our temples are treacherous. Don’t neglect to work out regularly or you’ll risk the wrath of the body image gods. Don’t neglect your newsfeed or you’ll risk the wrath of the social gods. Don’t be the last one to see the avatar or you’ll miss out on the experience god. In a season of diminished summer internships and study abroad how many of us are quaking in fear of the wrath of the success gods?
We also look for God in politics either hailing this, or that, leader as ‘god’s anointed’ or else hoping against hope that the next election will bring about the long-awaited peace and prosperity every candidate promises and none can deliver. We look for God in our movements for social change and are discouraged to discover they are imperfect too.
Still some of us give ourselves to contemplation, pursuing academics, studying the enneagram, or spiritual life hacks, hoping that contemplation will lead to divination and truth to transcendence.
Christianity says, we don’t find God through temples, politics, or contemplation, we find God by looking at Jesus. Colossians 1:15 – 23 says, “He (Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation;”[1]
Christianity starts with Jesus. We say, “where is God?” The New Testament says, “look at Jesus… he’s right there… everything we need to know about God we can see by looking at Jesus.” Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God, not etched in stone but living and breathing, flesh and bone. A person that can be seen and known.
This is why we in intervarsity establish and advance witnessing communities so that students and faculty can meet God in the face of Jesus.
I’ll never forget talking to students at Hunter College with my friend Ashley a number of years ago. We were doing a survey like the ones you can get on our evangelism website. We’re talking to lots of students when, Tom cocks his head, and says, “I got a question… how do you know God even exists…” Ashely doesn’t skip a beat, he says, “because I’ve met him…”. Ashley then goes on to tell a story about how the Jesus who he’s encountered in the New Testament is actually knowable in the present. Tom had tears in his eyes as Ashley prayed for him that day and offered a word of blessing and invitation.
Where is God? He is in the face of Jesus Christ.
Who is God?
When we look into the face of Jesus in the pages of scripture what do we see?
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.”
This is important because although we know Jesus through his life, teaching, death, and resurrection, God himself, Jesus himself, is so much bigger.
He is the source of life, existence, and being. He is the source of love and rationality, of justice and mercy, abstract thought and mathematics. He is the source of all spiritual and physical reality. Everything is from him. Everything is for him.
Think about it. The very act of being itself, which we take for granted, is dependent on a myriad of interlocking forces that are themselves held together by energies and motions we’re only beginning to discover. Barbara Boyd used this example years ago, but it helps me understand something about the scope and majesty of God. If we were to take the almost 93 million miles between the earth and the sun and reduce them to the size of a sheet of paper, it would take a stack of papers from here to the moon to model the distance between earth and our next closest star. That star is just one in a galaxy of stars, in a universe of galaxies. The scope and magnitude of creation is beyond our imagining. And Jesus holds all of it together with a single word of his power.
17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. [2]
Let me ask you a pointed question, is this Jesus, the kind of being you invite into your life to be your personal assistant?
We treat God like he’s an app on our cell phone, something to make our lives more convenient, less painful, and more optimized. Jesus is not an app! He is the creator of heaven and earth, of outer space, inner space, and even cyber space.
If we understood for a moment the vastness, power, and total uniqueness of Jesus through whom and for whom all things were made, who holds all things together we would be undone by the sheer magnitude of it. Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes, most blessed, most glorious, the ancient of days, almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise!
How on can we even stand in the presence of someone so immense? The answer is again Jesus.
What is God like?
The God we see reflected in the face Jesus is the creator God, but also and most beautifully, the God who reconciles us to himself.
18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. [3]
The story of the bible could be told as the story of three trees. The tree of the tree of life with God, the tree of independence from God, and the tree of judgment. The tree of life captures God’s intention and longing for his creation. God creates life in love for love. God sustains life. The longing of God’s heart is life in love with the people God has created. The longing for home, for belonging, for justice, for harmony, for beauty, is the longing for the tree of life in the presence of God.
The tree of independence contains the fruit of trying to be God instead of being in relationship with God. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil turns into gallows where relationships come to die. Man and woman kill their ‘one flesh’ unity and begin to envy and blame each other. Creation groans in agony as humans begin to exploit rather than steward. Human beings judge themselves unworthy of relationship with God having sacrificed their relationship of trust and intimacy.
Cut off from the source of life humanity is locked in a pitiless, cutthroat, competitive world knowing there is no way home.
The tree of judgment is the last tree in the story. We fear failure because we’ve colluded with death and injustice and forfeited life. Death is the debt we owe. Jesus, the image of the invisible God, hangs his own life on the gallows in order to break the power of death forever. The cross of Jesus is the cleft in the pitiless walls of the world where life with God starts anew.
Colossians assumes we understand this story so that we can recognize Jesus as the leader of this resurrection community, the one who, though holding all things together with a word of his power, stretches his own flesh between heaven and earth to bring earth and heaven together. This reveals God’s incredible self-giving love. The reason we can stand in the overwhelming presence and power of the God of creation is because of the uncontainable self-giving love of God we see in Jesus. This is what it means that the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in him.
It’s not enough for us just to know this conceptually. The invitation is to respond to it personally. (Even now I’m going to invite you to respond to Jesus by clicking the link.)
Living in Freedom
And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22 he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him— 23 provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven.[4]
Notice how Colossians pivots from a cosmic view of who Jesus is and what God has done in Jesus, to you. The invitation is to see ourselves.
We live in a culture where it’s considered blasphemous to describe ourselves with words like, estranged, hostile in mind, and doing evil. We’re supposed to protect ourselves and one another from such negative talk, but I wonder if our sensitivities reveal something important. Perhaps, we’re like the main character from the Broadway musical Evan Hansen, a young man who’s desperate to connect, but terrified to say the wrong thing. Evan scrambles to write a story of himself that will make him free him of the anxiety, stress, loneliness, and failure he feels, but underneath it all is primal fear.
'Cause what if everyone saw?
What if everyone knew?
Would they like what they saw?
Or would they hate it too?
Will I just keep on running away from what's true?
Colossians call to Evan Hansen and to us is to say, you were these things, but now, because of Jesus. You are holy, blameless, and irreproachable. This call summons us
to faith, a faith that comes rooted and established in the good news of the gospel.
I remember teaching my toddler to climb in the park. As she stretched her body to reach for the next rung of the ladder, she would freeze in fear. I would put my hand on her and say, “it’s ok, Papa’s got you.” She learned to climb, and I stepped further and further away. One day as she was climbing a new part of the apparatus I noticed she was talking to herself. She’d reach, stretch, and freeze. Leaning in, I overheard her say, “it’s ok… Papa’s got you.”
God’s posture towards us, even in our failure, is to stretch out his arms and say, “It’s ok, Papa’s got you.” In an age that is anxious, stressed, and lonely, fear and failure lose their fangs when we behold God’s beauty.
[1] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (Col 1:15). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[2] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (Col 1:15–20). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[3] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (Col 1:18–20). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[4] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (Col 1:21–23). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.