Faith Works 1-26-19
Jeff Gill
Seeking faithfulness
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Two weeks ago I picked up a theme off of the well known hymn "Great Is Thy Faithfulness."
I talked about a number of ways we struggle with faithful living and faithful lives in terms of church attendance and involvement. There were allusions to wider questions of being faithful in our culture, but I didn't go there.
You all did, however. And I'm not surprised.
A number of emails and messages came to me sharing pain and struggles with marital infidelity. As I stated, faithfulness isn't honored as much as it once was, and those who have experienced that most intimate form of faithlessness can see that problem more clearly than most.
Add to marital breakups the increasing infrequency of not getting married, putting faithfulness in a relationship into a more fluid, less trustworthy basis. If you've been together for ten years, own a house together and have a child or two, you don't – as we're told all the time, it seems – need a piece of paper to make that relationship real. But if the conversation's never had, if it's just assumed (and sometimes assumed by one, not the other) that this is now a committed, faithful relationship, without the marriage bond it's much easier for one or both to say "well, we're not tying each other down."
And I appreciated hearing it wasn't just me thinking that there's a link, distant thought it might seem, between a lessening of faithfulness in personal relationships to a loss of faithfulness in some fairly trivial areas of life: and a question about chickens and eggs. There used to be Ford families and Crest toothpaste users and CBS households and Captain Crunch breakfast tables, just as people once looked first for the Methodist or Presbyterian logos before they asked about the youth group or the preacher's politics.
No, I am not saying consumer choice led to rootless emotional and spiritual lives, but I would argue it becomes a large sticky ball of clamorous choices, rolling right over all of us and leaving a certain amount of anxious confusion in its wake. If we are the sum of our consumer choices, in a world of obvious advertising influences, then how can the real me be my choices, when clearly a clever ad with Flo or Tony the Tiger or Matthew McConaughey can cause me to choose differently?
Leaving us with an odd taste in our mouths as we're all encouraged to define ourselves by our choices while the media culture we're saturated in pounds away to influence those decisions, in means both obvious and subtle.
And the larger corrosion of that acid bath into our psyches is to implicitly condemn as false and foolish any sort of consistency. How many different little oblique ways do you feel it communicated that staying in a pattern, sticking with a "rut" (can you hear it there?), continuing with a product line or shopping habit, or even staying with the same partner for decades is somehow a denial of your true self, even your best self? Change is the sign of life, and more change is more lively.
What reinforces that is how the marketplace makes it hard to stick with anything for long. You find a candle whose scent you like, a gum you want to chew, a brand of shirts that works for you, but inevitably, you can't get it anymore. The five types becomes sixteen, and you hunt in vain among the sixteen for the closest to the one you used to buy. Do you notice what that also means? You have bought a product for years, then it's discontinued, and you have to buy a couple of different versions to ultimately come up with the closest match to what you already knew you liked.
Less product gets sold if you keep selling the same stuff. Everyone knows that. So we stay off-balance, vulnerable to impulse, groping for the right new that's really who we are.
So it is with picking a spouse, or choosing a church. Dating apps and cafeteria spirituality allow us to keep on playing the field, checking out what's new. Meanwhile, faithfulness is not just kind of stuffy, but implicitly a bad thing. You might just get comfortable with who and what you have, stay at home, make some bread, throw some things out you don't need, and not replace them.
And you might just develop habits of the heart, towards peace and love. Where's the profit in that?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he usually tries to avoid being too snarky in these columns, but sometimes it's hard. Tell him where you see faithfulness as a blessing at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
