Sinking Islands and the Kingdom of God

Can we ever get anywhere worthwhile outside of relationship with God and with others? It is spiritual commonsense that we cannot, but for some of us it seems nearly impossible not to try. We stubbornly, if subconsciously, cling to self-effort to make us into the people we think we want to be. We rely on ourselves to pick ourselves up by our own bootstraps and ascend to a place of peace, confidence and joy even when we know from both the Bible and experience that it is a patently futile act.

Many of us “talk a good game” about our dependence on the Lord and our interdependence vis a vis other people. We talk of being saved by the grace of God and sustained by our human relationships, but we still are wracked by fear, doubt and depression. To the degree that this dichotomy is true we are deceiving both ourselves and others.

Of course no one can sustain their sanity for long living purely as an island. Those who are completely bereft of the company of both God and man, and persist in that condition, die emotionally, spiritually and often physically sooner rather than later. But such an extreme state is not what we are primarily speaking of.

The vast majority of Westerners today are people who have some degree of connection with other people. Western Christians add to that some degree of connection with God. But for far too many Christians both the horizontal and vertical relationships are kept at a manageably controllable level. We give ourselves partially over to relationships, but not so much that we consciously depend on them for both a full temporal life and for the changes we must allow ourselves to experience to attain to eternal life. What holds us back from full membership in “the Blessed Community” is a mixture of pride and fear.

The pride aspect of this unfortunate reality is inherent to fallen human beings and is exacerbated by the hyper-individualism of contemporary Post-Modern society which tells us we do not need to depend on anyone or anything. The fear component may have less to do with our flesh and more to do with wounds we have sustained from other people early in life, although it still reflects distrust for God’s ultimately redemptive purposes for those wounds. These pride and fear barriers to deeply sustaining and transformative relationships can, therefore, only be removed by a combination of profound repentance and healing.

In both cases it is only the loving grace of God that enables real change and our reception of that grace is, to at least some extent, dependent on our choice whether or not to accept it. Even once we do choose to accept it the process of change is just that, a process, and most likely will involve a slow movement towards authentically deepening relationships with both our Lord and our fellows. In the meantime it may feel like our relationships continue to be inadequate. This is not necessarily something to be alarmed about. The important thing is that we are finally moving in the right direction. Relational perfection is not fully obtainable on this side of Heaven. What matters is that we are no longer holding God and His human agents of growth in our lives at arm’s length. We are no longer a sinking island but, in increasing measure, part of a continent known as the Kingdom of God.