The God Box

Every one of us are carrying around a God Box.

It doesn't matter what religion you are, the belief system or spirituality you do (or do not) practice, you have a box. Everybody does. Some carry this box around like a badge of honor, proudly sharing the contents in all the arenas of their lives. Some keep their God Box private and keep their beliefs in silent, sacred space, sharing only with a select circle.  There are others who keep their God Box stored in the backroom of their mind, rarely giving it a thought as it sits on a shelf collecting dust. 

A God Box contains all the "stuff" you have experienced, currently believe or at one time believed to be true about God and spirituality. This box might even contain the beliefs and experiences of others in your family, your church or spiritual exposure. Your God Box may have been passed down from generation to generation, full of legacy and tradition that has been practiced in your family for many years.

As a child, my grandmother was a person who made many deposits in my God Box. Many Sunday mornings she would pick me up from home, drop me off at Sunday school and then we would go to the service together at her church. The halls of the church smelled of crayons and coffee, the pastor dressed in his white robes and worship involved a lot of standing, kneeling and sitting during the prayers, hymns and liturgies. I was in awe of my grandmother as she recited the prayers and creeds from memory, and I loved sitting beside her and listening to her sing the hymns. We would walk up to the front of the church and kneel at the altar as she would take communion. I was too young to partake of the elements and instead received a blessing as the pastor would make the sign of the cross on my forehead.  As a child, my God Box held this beautiful legacy of my grandmother's faith as well as the awareness that church meant something to her.  Because church was important to her, (and she loved me so well), it was important to me too. I didn't fully understand her beliefs, yet her commitment to church and her faith in Jesus made an impression on me. It was a sweet deposit in my small God Box that I still treasure to this day.

Attending church with my grandma as well as Christmas Eve and Easter pretty much sum up the contents of my God Box when I was a child.  As I grew, my God Box landed somewhere in the back of my mind on a shelf and aside from some teenage curiosity in world religions and Wicca, it pretty much stayed there.

It wasn't until later in high school that this dusty God Box was taken off the shelf and opened again.  A girl at school befriended me and she invited me to church with her family. This church was nothing like the church of my childhood. Rather than organs and hymns, there was a full band and church felt more like an interactive rock concert.  The pastor wore casual clothes and there wasn't a rhythm of standing and kneeling during service. Even communion was more like a party than a somber tradition. This was all very new to me.  The messages were all about sin and salvation, relationship with God and a need for a savior. As a child I understood Jesus in the context of Christmas and Easter, I could recite the stories. Yet for some reason, this presentation of their "Gospel" made sense to me, and for the first time I was challenged to consider my own connection to God in a relational way that wasn’t just Bible stories. I was intrigued, and almost felt like I had missed out on something important. It felt like a mystery that was being revealed. These people understood and experienced God in a way I had never even heard of, and I was curious to understand. 

I was offered this "gift” of salvation. It was presented like a perfectly wrapped present that contained all the blessings, provision and promises of a wonderful plan for my life and a God who loved me enough that He was willing to die a terrible death on the cross and give His life for me. All I had to do was receive the gift by praying a prayer, and it could all be mine. If I didn’t accept this gift, I was destined to spend eternity in hell. Seems like a simple choice, right?

What I didn’t know at the time is that this “gift” they were offering me contained more than just “salvation”. This gift also contained subtle yet impossible expectations of the life I was supposed to live and beliefs I was expected to accept about God, people and the world around me. The Bible was now an obligatory handbook that I needed to navigate life. It contained every answer and everything I needed to live a life worthy of God.  I was challenged to reconsider the influences in my life and whether they were “Godly” enough.  Jesus gave his life to save me from hell, was it too much to ask that I give up my “non-Christian” music CD’s and R rated movies? Was I ready to surrender my life and plans to the perfect will of God for my life?  Who were my friends and were they encouraging me to follow Jesus and live a Godly life? Was I doing my part in sharing this “good news” with my loved ones to “save them” from eternal suffering? Was I ready to be rejected and ridiculed for my faith, just like Jesus was?  If I didn’t have concern for those who were “lost”, was I really even “saved” myself?

As I grew in this lifestyle of faith and branch of Christianity, I realized that the “gift” of salvation that I now carried in my God Box was so much more than a “get out of hell free card.” Attached was a worldview that was filtered through the lens of a literal interpretation of the Bible full of rules and expectations.  In addition to depositing this salvation prayer/experience into my God Box, my box was now filled up with exclusive theology, expectations of political allegiance and false promises of safety, provision and blessing for a faithful life of service to God.

For a lot of years, I treasured the contents of my God Box.  I spent hundreds of hours studying and wrestling, convinced that I was simply missing something if I disagreed with any of it.  I attributed my “doubts” to a lack of spiritual maturity and faith foundation.  I asked a million questions as I tried to accept these spiritual, civil and political “truths” that had been dumped into my God Box.  Traditional marriage and family values, the roles of women in church and society, abortion, authority & submission, gender roles, dating, the LGBTQIA+ community, government and political values, world religions, the end times, sin and suffering, heaven and hell, etc. were all to be interpreted through a Biblical lens clouded by literal interpretation of scripture.  

These beliefs were harmless if they were simply kept in the box, yet the pressure of “sharing the good news” turned many of these beliefs into weapons of destruction, and people were getting hurt.

At some point, I realized the contents of my God Box were getting too heavy to continue to carry. I needed to take an inventory of all the things I was holding space for in my box. What began as a “free gift” that I had been given had somehow turned into something that was “taking” from me. I had spent so much time trying to accept and measure up that somehow, I lost sense of myself.   It had taken my reason and logic, my capacity to make space for other beliefs, new ideas or experiences. The exclusivity of this belief system had taken my capacity to trust myself and be open to the possibility that there was so much more to a relationship with God than these interpretations of faith in Jesus that I had been given.

Upon honest reflection and years of sorting and inventorying I realized that a large percentage of the contents in my box belonged to other people. I was warned by others as I started this process of deconstructing my faith that abandoning these beliefs could lead me to paths of deception and destruction. It was scary unraveling ideas I had once held so close; it felt like a house of cards that could come tumbling down at any moment. The hardest part of this process was that I was still convinced that the God of the Bible loved me and that the life and message of Jesus mattered. I know I am called to ministry and to the work of the church.  It would have been easy to throw the whole box into the fire and start over. Yet I couldn't do that and be true to who I know I am created to be. I had a lot of work to do to untangle these cords. The good news is that this untangling is not just an intellectual exercise, it is a work of the Spirit.

I am not the same person I was 12 years ago. Really, I’m not even the same person I was 12 months ago. This is a good thing.  My faith continues to evolve and grow as I have both emptied out and made space for wonder, possibility and curiosity in my God Box. I hope this rhythm continues for the rest of my life of learning, even into eternity. 

The big question is, what do you carry in your God Box?  My hope is that you find the inspiration to take a good look into your own box and consider the things you carry. Hold fast to the things that bring life and love and find the courage to reconsider and reimagine the things that do not. Give yourself permission to grow and change and evolve into all that you are created to be.