On the corner of first and Amistad...

I love the Fray. I heart them in fact. I do not love William Young's book The Shack. I just didn't think it was that great, it wasn't that well written. Sorry, William. I'm not saying I could write a better book, I'm just saying I didn't think you wrote yours very well, even if your intended audience was children and a bunch of adults started reading it. I still think it was written poorly for children...why would they want to read something so non-descriptive and full of run-on dialogues that don't capture the imagination. A book that makes you want to turn the pages quickly not because it's so interesting, but because you feel bored?

What do The Fray have in common with The Shack? Well, as my husband so aptly puts it "It's a good thing we aren't living during the reformation or they'd both be dead by now." It's representing God in such a way through your art form that you leave out reverence. It's crafting an image of God with your art form that leaves your audience with an impression of a god who is like us as humans, but too much like us in that he is just like us in our sin. It's funny, because a lot of things that become really popular do just that.

So suddenly in an seemingly abandoned shack, God the father, is now a large, Southern black women who reminds me of Mammy from Gone with the Wind. Jesus is again a carpenter. And God, the Holy Spirit is a ghostly, Asian male/female type of apparition who floats alongside the other two changing colors as he/she goes. Or on the corner of First and Amistad, God is smoking a cigarette. Does anyone else see the trouble with representing a Holy God with these images?

I think something both these writers have in common is a desire to relate to a God who they are able to understand. I personally am fascinated by the story of Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis. The question that always lingers in my mind is "Why?" Why did God come down to earth to complete a wrestling match that took the entire night with Jacob? It just doesn't make sense.

In the Fray's song and in The Shack I get the feeling that both these writers want to do the same thing that Jacob did, they want to wrestle with God. They want to wrestle with the hard "why" questions: "Why did you let my girlfriend leave me?" "Why did my daughter become the victim of a serial killer?" "Why does all this evil stuff keep happening, why do you let it?" "God, why are you so hard to understand?" Unfortunately, unlike Jacob's story, God is not left with the final word in either the Fray's music or in Young's book, so He's left to look like Mammy.

Recently in Sunday school, our teacher made the comment that Jacob wrestled with God so that he would learn that he could not accomplish God's will for God, that only God would be the one to accomplish his will. I seldom think of Jacob's wrestling match this way. I think about Jacob being wounded by God during the match. That he received a new name after that match. But I overlook the fact that Jacob received a new heart and a new understanding of how to relate to God as well.

The fortunate thing about living where we are and when we are living is that songwriters and authors can wrestle with God in their writing without fear of reprisal. (Except of course the reprisal from snotty blog writers who think you can't write worth a dime.) The unfortunate thing is that the interpretation of these songs and books becomes the listeners interpretation of God. Unless of course, they wrestle with scripture and form their interpretation of God not from pop culture but from His word.

The unfortunate thing about living where we are and when we are is that we all have the idea that we should be able to understand God, fully understand God. Yes, I think we should understand God. Yes, I think He's understandable. But fully understandable, no.

What I do like about both the Fray song and The Shack is that neither writer tries to say that God can be fully understood. At the end of both the song and the book, you're still left with questions. But those questions are ok. Anyone who seeks to ever fully understand God will find that they will always be left with questions. And in the end, knowing God and having wrestled with Him was probably the whole point from the beginning.

So those who truly seek Him will be able to sing, despite their questions, with great joy:

Lost and Insecure
You Found Me
You Found Me

And they will also be able to ask a God who is not afraid of our questions:

Where were you when everything was falling apart?
Why'd you have to wait?
Where were you?

What they won't be able to do is find him looking like Mammy, smoking a cigarette or doing anything less then being the God who is utterly separate from all parts of humanity that are sinful. And that's where the rub comes in...I'm not sure we really like that God is so separate from us. It requires too much worship.

Well, with that last ramble, I think I'm going to go now and download the new Fray cd.