“God loves Nathan!” “Benjamin is going to heaven!” “God loves everyone!” So proclaimed the sidewalk of a nearby church in brightly colored chalk. These and similar words jostled among rainbows, filled the outlines of small bodies, curved around hearts and lopsided worlds. Apparently, Vacation Bible Camp had gone outside to bring their message to passersby.
My negative reaction to this primary colored missionary activity surprised me. Why shouldn’t children receive such comforting promises, and why shouldn’t this reminder of simple faith touch rather than irritate me? Maybe what I experienced was a weary knowing regret similar to that of Adam and Eve as they peered over the garden wall.
“God loves Nathan!” This is love of a different order than being loved by one’s relatives or friends. A mother’s love is tangible. We sense it in her look and caress. We reassure ourselves of it a dozen times a day as we test its boundaries and receive its bounty. The love of our friends and relatives we also experience concretely through visits, letters, calls, and shared experiences. In contrast, the love of God remains abstract. I chase after it the way I pursue a floating seedpod. As I grope for it, it rises and dances just out of reach. I close my fist, certain I’ve got it, only to open an empty palm. Perhaps the only way we can experience the love of God is through concrete relationships with other human beings. Yet people often are selfish, insecure, and fickle. We disappoint and let each other down. The love of God can be elusive if we have to search for it through such contacts. Moreover, if one doesn’t feel particularly loved, what can it mean to see the message “God loves you”?
“Benjamin is going to heaven!” This is another stopper. If I had to rank my anxieties, what will happen to me after my death doesn’t rank very high. Perhaps I’m just not old or ill enough to fear this yet. Plus, I’ve always struggled with the concept of heaven, especially with the notion of heaven as a “place.” If it had an ambiance, I worry it would reproduce the shiny superficiality of the post church coffee hour. I can’t get beyond the dread that all of us there will congratulate ourselves like those who’ve made it past the bouncer at a trendy club: “We’re in. We did it. We must be really something, hey?” This suggests that other people are not so lucky. They didn’t pass muster and are still outside on the stinky street while we’re in here dancing. I just spent a few days with a close friend decidedly not a Christian but one of the most intentional human beings I know. I can’t imagine a heaven closed to this guy, just as I can’t imagine one with me inside. Who can say which of us is going to heaven? Who even knows what heaven is?
“God loves everyone!” I hope the people who write this so easily really understand what they’re saying. God loves even the people we hate, the people we can’t stand to be around for one second, the people who scare, disgust, and appall us. Do we believe it? Can we stomach it? Won’t we be like the resentful elder brother in the story of the prodigal son, or the protesting hired hands who sweated from the earliest morning in the story of the vineyard workers all paid the same? In the face of such all-inclusive love, won’t we feel cheated? The truth we are proclaiming is much bigger than we intend, and we rarely act as though we understand our own message.
There’s a lifetime for the children at Vacation Bible Camp to grapple with such ideas, and with luck, maybe they’ll remain unscathed by cynicism and doubt. Perhaps these sunny words chalked on the pavement were not meant to speak to pedestrians at all, but were merely an in-group amusement. I suspect that only a few could take them in without ambivalence. For most of us, Christian or not, faith is anything but simple and certainly not able to be reduced to a few aphorisms. Along with the reds, blues, and yellows, we’d need muddier browns, blacks, and grays to do it justice.
