I Wouldn't Read This If I Were You

I have recently and rather unintentionally fallen into a sabbatical regarding writing about my life and my faith in intelligent design, immaculate conception, Bigfoot, and his Arctic cousin Sasquatch. Please don't be alarmed. This is not a cry for help. I am not depressed. My faith is not in crisis. However, my ability to write about it currently is. I am unable to produce the voice you are looking for without sounding tired and worn out. Even writing fiction, which I hold dearest to my heart, makes me queasy and sea sick upon this unsinkable Titanic that is the Internet. So I wouldn't read this if I were you.

My otherwise loquacious nature has been subdued in recent weeks from not what one would call writer's block – something I believe was invented by my fellow writers to excuse our over-indulgent drinking habits and often depressing auras – but from what could very commonly be said is a lack of something to write about. It could also be uncommonly said for those of you who are writers of the religious: a lack of desire to write about anything Christian ever again.

I could certainly talk about my wife, the challenges of being married, our sex life, and what it's like adjusting to living in an apartment after nearly 14 months of homelessness on the road. However, not only do I have no interest in writing about these self-help topics, I also talk about these quandaries enough in therapy each week that I don't quite have the energy to recant them here a second time.

I know, I know, maybe I should go read my Bible, plug into community, and pray about it. But I am feeling very un-Christian lately. Not by my definition of the word, but by society's definition of the word.

Mind you, I am not attempting to make up my own version of Christianity here. I just like to keep things simple, and I am finding it very, very complicated here on Planet Social Network. Someone once asked me what my theology was to which I sat tongue-tied and unresponsive. I barely understood the word and couldn't deduce in the damnedest why it mattered. My then-girlfriend, now-wife, spoke up in my defense, "Max doesn't have a theology," and I knew I loved her right then with all my heart and limited brain capacity for maintaining conversations about Zeus-Almighty, Evolution, and Hell, whereupon I mustered up the response and macho bravado to answer semi-intelligently in hopes of making my beloved swoon and this Biblical Investigator nauseas, "Jesus is my theology."

I thought right then, for a fraction of a second, I'd started a revolution. I half-expected the patrons of Starbucks to stand up and start applauding. And I waited, smug and smiling, for the rebuttal.

It never came.

He just nodded and the conversation moved on. I wasn't challenged, scolded, scoffed at, or ridiculed for speaking such blasphemy. I like to think right then he accepted the fact that what I believed about my relationship with God was exactly that: My relationship with God. And who was he to judge it? In the end it'll be God's business to deal with me, not his.

A few weeks back someone poetically told me, and I quote, "I'll take an axe to your face," because of my belief in the Gospel, and I didn't even mention the word, "theology," to him.

I fear being a writer who is so open about his faith on the Internet isn't bringing us together, but it's tearing us apart. Just look at the articles on Relevant Magazine, The Good Women Project, my own blog, or everybody's favorite pastor to hate, Mark Driscoll. We call ourselves Christians, but we aren't responding with love when we disagree with someone. Myself included. We're responding with a disgusting dosage of desperation to be right.

I haven't been writing on Make It MAD because I'm officially praying about taking myself out of the equation.

I've intended to make you uncomfortable here from the very beginning, but I never intended to pretend I know better than you. "I have a blog and a lot of people read it so that makes me an authority on the subject," is how I've secretly lived the last year of my life. But I don't know better. My heart is a time-bomb. I'm just a fucked-up as the rest of the world. The only difference between any of us is who is and who isn't trying to prove they're okay.

I need a break because Make It MAD is becoming more and more about me than anything else. Maybe from the comfort of your chair it doesn't seem that way, but I can't go to sleep one more night wondering how many "likes" my post will have in the morning, or how many comments will be here. Ah, the crux of the matter. If you're a fellow blogger, I commend your resilience to keep going and reach thousands, but I don't envy the stress of expanding your readership. I've got enough of my own over here. I have become so obsessed with reaching millions of people at once that I am neglecting my own relationship with the very God I am trying to introduce you to.

I had no intentions of writing on here today until my friend Nick from Salem, Oregon passed through Los Angeles for 48 hours on his way to Taiwan this weekend. Over conversations of the impending-Apocalypse, conspiracy theories, and coffee, I found myself telling him of a woman I met in South Carolina. Her name was Alexa, and on my last evening there, Alexa told me I could have turned around and gone home after my first week on the road because God used my very first blog from that trip to change her heart.

As though the entirety of my 10 months on the road happened simply so God could encounter the heart of one individual on the other side of America. When Nick and I first met, he told me he believed God was that big. Big enough to send one man across the country to impact the life of one person. "What if God loves us that much?" he had pondered. All of this while I was still 3,000 miles away from Alexa in South Carolina.

Maybe it's not about reaching thousands of people in church on a Sunday morning, or reaching millions of people through the Internet. Maybe it's about reaching each other one at a time.

Make It MAD doesn't need to impact all of you. Maybe just one of you.

I made a promise to a friend once that I'd never change my voice on this blog, but I clearly broke it. If you followed my adventure across the country, you know I experienced a multitude of mental breakdowns and forgot who I was as I muddled out sorry excuses for blog posts like, "A Gentleman's Guide to Periods, Punctuation, and Communication" because I thought I was funny. I'm sorry for all the times I took my writing back from God because I thought I knew what you guys wanted better than He did.

If you're reading this today and something within this incoherent verbal mind vomit stirred your heart, fantastic. And if it impacts a million of you, brilliant. But I'd question the lot of you because I'm pretty sure none of what I wrote here makes any real sense at all.

I guess what I am trying to say here is my problem isn't really with Joel Osteen or Christianity or fame. The problem is with my own blackened heart.

Because you, me, Joel, and the rest of these carbon-based bodies calling this place home are equally responsible for the mutiny of the human race against God. Every last one of us. We're just too afraid to look inward because it's scary in there. It's easier to point fingers and say this wasn't our fault.