cup a joe

Cindy and I went last Friday to see Blue Like Jazz when it opened.  I had read the book several years ago (as well as several other Donald Miller books) and had been really affected by them.  I felt for the first time someone was speaking to my generation and our experiences in Christianity.  I'm a Gen Xer - meaning that I'm not a Baby Boomer and I'm not a Millennial.  I'm stuck in the middle.  We are kind of like a bridge generation - we have one foot in the values of the Baby Boomers (because they wrote the rules and controlled the game when we became of age to play), and we have one foot with the Millennials (because we really don't like the game we were forced to play).  We were the first "Post-Moderns" in some ways.  Like it or not, the society that most of us were born into does not exist any more.

Those societal changes also happened in the church during our generation.  A change in the way we worship, the music we sing, the view of the gifts (especially healing), the way preaching is done, the way we dress for church, the birth of the mega-church, the way evangelism is done, the way missions are done, even how and when we attend church.  Everything has changed in the last thirty years.  Now I'm not saying that the changes were good or bad - they were just changes.  And for a time, very early in my faith, my generation experienced the tension of being caught in the middle of those changes.  It was coming out of those experiences that the book "Blue Like Jazz" really spoke to me.  I read it and I related to it in a way that few "Christian" books did at the time.  So of course, I went to see the movie.

I enjoyed the movie for the most part.  This is not a blockbuster with a huge budget.  It's just a simple, nice movie.  That's the review - go and see it.  But that is not why I'm writing this post.  Once again, in the middle of his "nice" movie, Donald Miller places a quote that completely messes me up.

Quick premiss: the lead character, Don, grows up in a stereotypical Southern Baptist home and church.  The day the he is to leave for a good Christian College, he has a realization about his family (don't want to be a spoiler here) that shakes his faith.  He instead runs to a stereotypical liberal college and begins his backslide - fully rejecting his faith.  In the midst of this he meets a girl named Penny who he likes and further discovers goes to church.  When Penny is confronted by Don about why she goes to church she says something like this: "I read the bible in one of my classes and discovered I really liked Jesus."

Pow...think about that for a while.  "I really like Jesus."  That line has been haunting me for the past few days.  We preach all kinds of stuff - heaven and hell, get saved, get forgiven, get set free.  And most of the people in our church believe most of the stuff in the bible.  They are trying to be good Christians.  They love God, they come to church, they do the stuff.  But do the like Jesus?  The more I thought of that, the more I got scared.  Because the reality of it all is that we can go through this entire Christian life and not like Jesus.  We can ask him to forgive us, we can get "covered in the blood", we can get saved, we can even decide to follow him, giving him our entire lives but not like him.

The longer I try and follow Jesus, the more I'm learning that it's not about decisions, it's about relationships.  I think that is where "liking Jesus" comes in.  The problem is that I'm not sure what that looks like.  What would it look like if we acted in a way where we really liked Jesus?  How would we tell others about him?  How would we treat others?  How would we treat ourselves?  What would our walk look like?  What would the church look like?  I don't have the answer to this, but I think I want to spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out.  I just want to really like Jesus.