Messy: God Likes It That Way

Musings of a post-modern pastor. Swoboda had a lot of excellent insight on various topics ranging from church, prayer, family, sex, suffering, and theology, just to name a few. Drawing from both Scripture and real life experiences, Swoboda does an excellent job in achieving his point. Namely, that many aspects of our lives are messy and God works through these messes to make us more into the person He wants us to be. Not sure God would have it any other way. Easy and quick to read, entertaining, many times comical, and definitely not academic. I highly recommend this refreshing read for all of us who have messy lives... one way or another.Some of my favorite quotes include:"Preaching a beautiful message of grace, we so rarely, if ever, practice it on each other. Let alone ourselves.""Frankly, I sometimes worry that people sell Christianity because they've conjured it up in their mind as this solution that'll fix the mess of our life like some kind of drug with the long commercials. Jesus becomes almost therapeutic; like a vapor rub. With few to no side effects (that we know of)... But, honestly, my life is way messier after I started following the Jesus I met that it was before.""Jesus asks people to be past tense people in the present for the future.""We begin to see the Spirit at work in the church when we choose to take our idealized views of what church should be, with all of its holy trappings, out into the backyard and shoot them between the eyes.""Paul could have started one church, stayed, grown it to be a megachurch, and been invited to speak at all the best pastor's conferences. But he didn't. He started a church, brought people to faith, then left... But, he had to be gone. It was brilliant because, had he not done that, they would have done to him what we do to pastors today. They would have started to worship Paul instead of Jesus.""The Gospel is Jesus eating really really good food with really really bad people.""Communal prayer is authenticated when the person you are praying with knows all the dirt on your life. All of it.""God seems to be the sort of God who likes to move down the ladder of success for the greater purpose of redemption, to die in our shoes.""Jesus gets humanity in a really special way that the other gods can't. Prayer is way easier when you know you're talking to someone who, like you, got in trouble for peeing on the sofa and not in the toilet. I can pray to that guy... It's the very beauty of God in the flesh that makes the gospel, the story of Jesus, so intriguing. Isn't it? Because God in the flesh has experienced the worst of everything we have had to experience.""God is closer to you than you are to yourself.""Conversion might take a second. But salvation takes a lifetime.""If we can't make God love us more by doing really good things, then we can't make God love us less by doing really bad things.""Sure, God hates sin. But I'm rather sure God hates sin the same way I hate dirty diapers. I'll always hate their diapers, but I'll never confuse the diaper with the baby.""Christian spirituality goes wrong when we compare all the things we are good at with the world's sin.""You know you have created God in your own image when God approves of everything you do.""Jesus did have revenge. On everyone. It just looked different than our concept of revenge. The human version of revenge looks like retaliation. But, Jesus' revenge is very different. He called it resurrection. His way at getting back at the world for killing Him was by being raised from the grave.""Because we can touch it, feel it, and flip through it, we accept our Bible as our personal Lord and Savior and turn it into our God.""Christians are repentant atheists.""Worrying about what God's will is often keeps you from doing God's will."

I thoroughly enjoyed Messy: God Likes it that Way by A.J. Swoboda. A.J. is funny, simple, honest, and writes with a thought-provoking style. You'll feel like you can now ask the very questions you've been afraid to ask. Contrary to us believing we have to have everything figured out in our life, our relationship with God, and what we believe about the Bible, we realize that God knows what he's doing much more than we do--oftentimes it looks really messy and not something that is easily categorized. We have to simply trust God in the midst of the mess. It's not that God is continually changing (because he's not), but it's just that how we view him, how we understand him, and how we relate to him are constantly evolving. Talking about the inherent messiness with how our relationships, sin, families, prayer life, Bible reading, suffering, and theology works, A.J. leads the reader down a path of both laughing and crying, making you feel somehow normal in the messiness of life.

The author made me think about the deepest parts of my life by bringing me into his. Approachable but dense, this book asks courageous questions and doesn’t try to dress them up with trite response.

Don't read Messy if you are looking for answers.Or do read it if you are looking for answers -- as many will, as I did to an extent -- but don't be disappointed when you don't find them, or when they're incomplete, or when they're different than what you expected. Instead, revel in Messy's overarching theme: that following Jesus is often both difficult and confusing. If that statement comforts you, you should read this book. If it upsets you, read the book. Because it's true: church is messed up, the Bible is confusing, relationships are difficult, Christians are hypocritical. It's all a lot messier than most of us were led to believe. But there's good news, and it's news that this book shouts: that God gave up his deity and sacrificed himself to rescue the messed up, the confused, the difficult, the hypocrite. Maybe once we realize how transient everything else is -- how our theology is always changing, how Christian fads grow and then wilt with the seasons, how we don't have adequate enough words or brains to even begin to comprehend our God -- we can focus on the significance of God's love for us. The questions remain important, but they no longer hinder us.With that in mind I'll rescind my opening statement: Go ahead and read Messy if you are looking to answers. You'll find some, but I think you'll find something even better: a renewed desire to focus on the important stuff -- love God, and love the people he made (see also: everyone). Get that right and the mess starts to matter less. That's what Messy argues, and it's a cogent argument. Read it!