It Breaks When You Force It

Today marks 15 years since I became a person of faith.

Met the Lord, got saved, converted, “made the only good decision I’ve ever made in my life” (as I remember phrasing it at some point, probably with tears).

I know it’s one of the cheesier milestones around, yes indeed I do.

I can remember one (2000ish) when I endeavored to commemorate that day by fasting the entire day. (If I recall, I failed, due to the very real issue of my spending that day under the northern Louisiana sun with some iteration of my former youth group.)

I can remember other ones when I simply didn’t think about it at all. (I’m honestly surprised that I remembered it today; if I could only control the random things that bubbled to the surface of my mind!)

I’m doing a bit of journaling this afternoon, and I’ve been reminded of something my friend Kim and I were discussing last(?) week, with regard to faith.

The gist of the conversation was that, as Kim understands it, whatever a person’s faith “is” sort of manifests automatically; in theological jargon, we’d probably muddy that beautiful sentiment with some jangled train of multi-syllabic circumlocution  like “the outer manifestation of the inner work of God’s Holy Spirit is good works.”

But the fact of what she was saying struck a very deep chord within me (think needle screeching across record player, and my recollection of the conversation stopping precisely there), and that’s been the locus of most all my Dixon-specific God thinking since then.

As I was journaling, I sort of had one of those Plinko moments, wherein everything I was typing, sort of stream-of-thought like, seemed to lead inextricably to the old trope,

it breaks when you force it.

There’s plenty I could suss out of that, philosophically, but how it seems to apply to faith, my faith, is that I’ve spent years now-heck, every single one, probably, of the past fifteen-consciously tinkering with my religious faith, trying to make it “better,” or more “active,” or more well, whatever.

Less Dixon-interested.

More thankful.

Less concerned with beautiful women.

More accepting of others’ taking advantage of me.

It’s always been something of which I’ve been so consciously aware (or tried to be!), but when talking to Kim, it just hit me that I need to just let the consc ious, deliberate outworking of my faith sort of fade into the background.

Just be natural.

Good or bad, hands on or not.

That’d be about as off the charts contrary to how I started on this journey of faith and how I’ve spent the majority of it so far as I could get, I must say.

But hey-now’s as good a milestone as any, right?

All joking aside, as I was journaling just now, I literally typed out that the only way I could see myself caring about this particular calendar date fifteen (or even five) times more would be in my beginning to do just that: letting faith fade into the background, turning into an automatic thing, and seeing  the new places that where I’ve already been might take me.

Because it’s broken otherwise.

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