Slouching Toward the Kingdom

Right around the time our daughter turned two, people started asking us when we were going to start potty training. To me, it was all too soon. We were still in the thick of sleep training and now another hurdle was bring presented to us? I delayed as long as I could. I blamed it on awareness. Could she even tell when she had to go, was going, or had gone? As much as I wanted to hide behind my daughter’s lack of readiness, the truth was that I wasn’t ready.

When my wife and I finally hunkered down and bought the stool, sticker charts, and treats and committed to not going anywhere for the next few days, it was messy to say the least. Accidents happened everywhere. I would ask if she needed to go to the potty only for her to tell me no and go in her underwear shortly after. Sometimes I’d drag her to the potty kicking and screaming, force her to sit down only for nothing to happen and her go in her underwear the second I wasn’t looking. Occasionally, we’d put her in timeout for bad behavior only to find, upon taking her out, that she had gone on the floor. It wasn’t long before our daughter started specifically requesting mommy take her to the potty. If I even so much as asked about it, she would cry, if not run away. I had effectively been fired. Within a couple days I sent messages to my close friends that I wasn’t nearly Christian enough for this. If you ever want to test your sanctification, try potty training.

All this to say, my kids have reached the wonderful age where as much as I’m trying and would like to believe I’m raising them, they are, in fact, discipling me. I know that’s a cliché thing to say, but that doesn’t negate its truth. My kids have shown me what it means to be loved by God for no other reason than being his child, for his mercies to be new every morning – except usually for me it’s because they’ve exhausted their mercies for that day. Sometimes I just look at my kids and am in awe of the reality of their existence. It boggles my mind that God might do the same to us.

But as much as my kids have acted as a window into the heart and mind of God, they have also acted as a window into the human condition. My kids have shown me that we tend resist what we need most (usually sleep and food in their case) and that no one has to teach us to lie or manipulate. It’s innate to hide when we’re doing something we know we’re not supposed to. But these days, watching my three-year-old and my one-year-old play with each other, they are showing me another thing no one has to teach us to do: destroy. Our natural predilection is toward entropy, chaos, and disorder. It’s only as we grow, we learn to build; only as we mature do we learn care and maintenance.

Perhaps this sticks out to me because these days it seems we live in an age of unmaking. Everywhere we turn we are awash in calls to de-fund, de-colonize, de-center, de-construct, and dis-mantle. It would seem the virtuous thing to do is to take everything apart. If you aren’t actively trying to disassemble something, you either aren’t paying attention, are part of the problem, or both. But if kids really are a looking glass into the human condition, then I’m not entirely sure that’s true. What if our unmaking is only as virtuous as what is put in its stead? What if our deconstruction is only a steppingstone to the more honorable work of creating something more beautiful? To demolish a house is only part of the job. Necessary to be sure, but only part of it. What we do with the debris and space is infinitely more telling. The real task is to replace it with something better.

As a Christian, I believe Scripture speaks to this. The cry of our hearts isn’t just that the old order of things would pass away, that tears and death and sickness would disappear, but that God would make all things new (Revelation 21). We yearn him to replace what is for what should be. There is an act of purging and cleansing but it’s to make way for a new heaven and a new earth. Paul doesn’t just implore us to not to return evil with evil, he tells us to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21). It’s not an empty space. It’s filled. Perhaps this isn’t revelatory to anyone, but it seems to me that we can get so fixated on the work of undoing we fool ourselves into believing that is the work when, in fact, the work is to bear witness to a better way. It’s not that we want to de-construct our faith so much as we want to re-construct it. It may mean returning to the foundations, but we return to the foundations in hope of building our lives on it.

Even as I reflect on the organization I presently work for, I am reminded how pivotal the deconstructing process was for our community. It allowed us to get to the heart of what we believe it meant to be the church and has formed the DNA of our network. Still, that deconstructing process would’ve meant very little if someone didn’t act as the mature voice calling people to shift from throwing stones to trying their hand at constructing something more honest.

But here’s the kicker: whatever we build will also be imperfect. It might be better (if only marginally), and it might not commit the sins of its predecessor, but it will still be imperfect because we are imperfect human beings. Our best attempts to solve today’s problems only creates new problems for tomorrow. However, this isn’t cause for giving up or never trying. Some things do genuinely need to be done away with. It is, however, cause for humility. We build knowing that a new generation will emerge who will want to disassemble what we’ve built. They will have to try their hand at making a better world and discover new problems. The beauty of building is that in doing so we become humble. Things are more complex than we thought, and we are not enough. We need the belief that you can change the world to start, but we are not the solution to all of humanities maladies. At best, we can play our part in slouching toward the kingdom.

This is why I think our binary between good and evil people is much too simple. Growing up, we were taught that there were good guys and bad guys. The motivations of the bad guys were always simple: they were out to hurt people and only cared about themselves. As we get older we realize bad guys are complex characters and part of what makes them so fascinating is that oftentimes they believe, somewhere in the heart of hearts, that what they’re doing is right. Even if they know what they’re doing is “wrong” or how they’re going about it is wrong, they feel justified in doing so. In their stories they are the heroes and it’s the people we deem as heroes that are the actual villains. So it is with us. As much as we perceive ourselves as heroes, we are the villains in someone else’s story and the people we see as villains understand themselves as heroes in theirs.

As Jonathan Haidt discusses in The Coddling of the American Mind, one of the great untruths of our time is the notion that there are good people and bad people. How much easier it would be if there true. The reality is as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.” Good and evil exist in all of us. We are capable of both. We may think we’re on the right side of things but there’s our side, their side, and the truth of what God knows which will only be revealed in the world without end. This, also, is cause for humility.

To be clear, I do think there is such a thing as real evil and that we are plenty capable of it. But I think humility is more important than we realize. You may feel justified, and I might too, but to someone else it is something else. This means we must be patient and wait for the ultimate vindication and ruling of all things. We may find that we are both right and wrong. What if the most prophetic thing we can do is to humbly construct something beautiful knowing it will face its own reckoning?

Going back to the image of children, kids are balls of erratic movements before they gain some semblance of motor control. They wave their arms and everything around them gets destroyed. It’s only later they learn there are other ways to use their hands. Should they decide to take apart, it’s intentional and, sometimes, deliberate. So it is with us. As we grow, we learn that there are more sophisticated ways to dismantle a system, cleaner methods that show a level of precision. To get rid of a knot, you could either cut it out entirely or untangle it. One requires more motor functions and cognition. Moving from destruction to deconstruction might yield similar results in the end but they are different. Sometimes in deconstructing, we can appreciate the complexity and nuance of a thing. That that being said, our ability to deconstruct and reconstruct doesn’t guarantee goodness. It could just mean more ingenuous ways to be cruel. What we do with the skills we gain says it all. Hopefully, we put it to good use. But I suppose only God can judge in the end.