The Elephant in the Living Room

We all tend to look at life through filters.

I think it’s inherent in us to look at the world around us and try to make sense of it. We call this a “worldview.” It’s always interesting to me to talk with other people who have a different worldview than I do, because if nothing else, it reminds me that I don’t have everything figured out.

But these worldviews of ours become filters on our minds. We come to the point where we think we do have most stuff figured out, and when we come to that point, we stop thinking about it. The assumptions are made, and we start interpreting life in the light of those assumptions. The filters are solidified. You can tell when a person’s filters are particularly strong when they act as though everyone should share their particular worldview, and you can feel them judging you when you don’t. People who have it all figured out are not particularly pleasant to be around. A lot of Christians have very strong filters.

The only way I have seen that these filters get removed is when something gets thrown into our view that our lens can’t interpret–when an idea, a person or an event totally violates our preconceived notions. Our lens no longer works; it doesn’t add up. At this point, we are confronted with a choice, and we generally do one of two things:

1. We go into denial and discount what we’ve seen, make up some excuse to keep satisfying our ignorance, and continue to wear the lens; or
2. We realize maybe things aren’t so cut-and-dried after all, and we remove the lens.

Some of the biggest filter-busters are things that happen for which we just can’t come up with a decent explanation. Not only does our particular filter not work–no other filter seems to work, either. Sometimes this takes the form of an inexplicable crisis or senseless tragedy, something that by all accounts should not have happened, but did anyhow. It just does. not. add. up. It’s as if someone randomly dropped an elephant into the living room, and everyone is left scratching their heads trying to figure out how it got there, what it’s doing there, and why–and how in blazes we are going to get it out without dismantling the whole house.

For Christ-followers, moments like these are hugely transformational, because they really force us to re-think our mindsets, and even our theology. Nothing rattles the cage of a Christian more than when the elephant drops into the living room, because when we believe that a God who loves us is in control of our lives, and something like that happens, we immediately question why God either did it, allowed it, or didn’t prevent it. And sometimes there is nothing within our reasoning that can produce a satisfactory answer. We can’t explain how an elephant got into the living room, nor can we figure out how to remove it. It’s about as “Twilight Zone” as we can get in this realm.

This post is not to attempt to explain why things like this happen–that would be exceedingly arrogant. But what I can say is that when something of that magnitude happens and our filters aren’t just challenged, but blown to smithereens–when we cannot theologically rationalize the event or God’s role in it–we are left not with two choices, but three:

1. We can conclude that if something this senseless can happen, there must be no God:
2. We can go into what we’ll call “stubborn denial”, where we dig in our heels and refuse to let the event change our religious minds; or
3. We can choose to trust God over our theology. We can come to grips with what we do not understand.

Obviously, I think option three is the best one. 🙂 I can’t explain the elephant in the living room any more than you can, but I do think moments like these have the potential to deepen our faith more than ever–because these are the times when faith stops being theological and starts being personal. These are the times when for our own sanity’s sake, we must lay down our preconceived filters and make a choice to take God’s word for it that He is there, and that He loves us–no matter what has happened, and no matter what will happen next. True faith isn’t a reasoned conclusion; it is a choice to trust when it makes absolutely no sense to do so.

If you consider it, this is really the best choice–because God is the only Person who knows why the elephant is in the room, the only One who wasn’t caught off guard when it happened–and the only One who knows what (if anything) can or should be done about it. It becomes that question of trust I talked about not too long ago, and takes us back to the two foundational elements to faith found in Hebrews 11:6, that those who come to God must 1) believe that He is, and 2) believe that He rewards those who seek Him.

I believe if we can go back to these two basic beliefs, our faith can survive the elephant in the living room. These two foundational truths are an anchor for the soul when nothing else makes sense. Time might eventually unfold the answer to the elephant in the living room, or maybe it never will make sense in this life. But as long as we draw breath, our story isn’t finished. It is our trust in God, both in God’s existence and in His good intentions for us, that give us the courage to keep turning the pages of the book, to keep living out this story line to see what happens next.