Chosen

Thinking about choice in relationship

Back in October, I was a part of this broadcast of The Psalms in Dialogue. The event was the culmination of a three-year collaborative art project hosted by Duke Chapel. For the project a group of us, including theologian Dr. Ellen Davis, and visual artist Mako Fujimura journeyed together in the book of Psalms in relationship with one another, our crafts, and our lives. During the post-broadcast question and answer session a poignant question was asked:

“How do you interpret the idea of a chosen people as it shows up in the Psalms?”

I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. What does it mean to be chosen? How does one get to be chosen? If I am chosen, does that mean that someone else isn’t? There are so many questions that come up when I think about the idea of being chosen, especially within the context of my relationship with God.

Last week I wrote about the context of relationship and how everything in life happens within this context. As I wrote those words, I began to think of the number of relationships I was in. My family, friends, work colleagues, and students, began to fill my mind. That’s to say nothing of my artwork, work-work, home, car, and other practices, activities, and things for which I feel a degree of connectedness and responsibility. I found myself overwhelmed.

Overwhelm is a known feeling for me. Part of the way I’ve learned in life is to be put in situations for which I felt severely underprepared, and to learn my way out of that feeling. Whether I was underprepared or not wasn’t the issue. That is how I felt. The feeling would hit before every school year began or before new shows debuted. The nature of my practice in the performing arts – short and intense cycles of high engagement, high exposure, high stakes – didn’t help. This pattern ultimately led to cycles of mini-burnouts following the debut of shows and talks or the ending of performance seasons. That all culminated in a massive burnout in the fall of 2019.

For the first time in my life, I had to truly face my limited capacity. My family, friends, co-workers, even strangers couldn’t help. It wasn’t their place to. Something had to shift in me. It was as if I needed a completely new baseline for my life – a new starting place and approach to all my relationships. I entered counseling to help figure this out. One of the main things that came out of that journey was that I had to start making different kinds of choices. I couldn’t say yes to everything and everyone. To build a healthy life, I had to purposefully say no. I had to say no to people – their invitations and expectations. I had to learn to not use an excuse. I couldn’t say no just because I was already committed, or because I was at my own limit. I had to learn to say no because I wanted a different kind of life. I had to purposely miss out on activities. I had to anticipate letting people down. I had to choose one person or activity over another.

Every choice seemed personal. I felt like I let myself down if I didn’t strive for perfection in every activity. I felt like I let others down if I didn’t show up for them in the way they (or I) expected or had gotten used to.

I genuinely disliked much of the process. Change is hard. I felt like I was failing continually. I honestly didn’t even know what I was aiming for yet. Saying yes, fulfilling the needs and expectations of myself and others, was such a big part of who I had become that saying no was a huge challenge. I didn’t know what saying no should feel like. How it could be considered a good thing. But the more I began to do this, the more I began to experience good outcomes. I felt like I had room to breathe. I could see the actual choices I had before me more clearly. I could commit more fully to the things I chose to do and to the people I chose to be with. But I had to choose.

Here’s the thing. My experience of life has deeply affected my conception of God. For a long time, I thought the fulfillment of my being was to be able to provide for the needs of everyone around me. I was pretty good at discerning the need, I often had the resources at hand, and would slip in and try to fulfill it whenever I could. So, when I got the thinking about God, I thought of God first as a provider. Protector was a close second. But providing and protecting can be both accomplished without deeply personal interaction. A lot of needs and basic acts of protection can be fulfilled without having to really know the individual in need. To a degree, that’s where I found myself. The fulfillment of doing the right thing in my mind had slipped somehow into an impersonal act.

When I thought of all the people in need that I would encounter, living and working in New York City for more than 25 years, I found myself becoming overwhelmed. My capacity for doing caring acts increased if I only concentrated on the act (and not the people). I thought this was true for everyone, including God. The only way I thought God could care for all the people is if God was impersonal. This was horribly wrong thinking.

Maybe we can’t imagine a god that would pursue us on an individual basis. Maybe it is easier to imagine the universe as having a personality, than a god who has name, and who knows us by name. Maybe it’s difficult to imagine a god who has limitless resources, sight, knowledge, and who uses what they have to pursue individual relationship with individual people. It’s probably even more difficult to imagine a god who doesn’t end up leaving someone out while they are pursuing individual relationship with someone else. After all, we often choose one relationship over another, right? I can’t pursue all the relationships I want to. I have a hard enough time showing up for the ones I have. Then again, I am not any kind of god. Thankfully.

No, I believe God to be able to choose to pursue individual relationship with every single person on the face of the earth. God can speak to each one of us in a language best suited for our hearing. God can provide words, images, music, and even activities, that are individually crafted to draw us towards Him¹. This intimate nature of such a big God baffles me when I think too long about it. The two characteristics – intimacy and greatness – seem incongruent. Like, if you are that great, I shouldn’t be able to get that close to you. Whenever I do experience God’s personal love I am overwhelmed, but what an amazing thing to be overwhelmed by.

I’ve experienced God’s personal nature most clearly in the context of listening journeys hosted by Goldenwood. Groups of us would listen for God’s voice for one another. Without fail, each member in the group would receive words, images, and ideas individual tailored to the person we were listening for. This happened in groups where members knew one another, and in groups where members were complete strangers. It was a wonderful experience to learn the relevance of the words and images and ideas from the person being listening for. It was like magic, only real.

This confirmed for me the reality of the proposition of a god who pursues relationship with people – all people – on an individual basis. The God that is revealed through Jesus, is one that knows his people by name. God may change their name to help them understand who they really are – a wonderful act of love encouraging transformation. Regardless, God knows, calls, speaks, writes, and hears our name. What an image of intimacy. God knows me. Not just me the human. Me, the gray-haired son of Joseph and Marlene, who tap dances and writes and talks, who can wiggle his ears, and has a weird bendy thumb. Me, the sometimes anxious and easily overwhelmed enjoyer of legos, who still is sensitive to failure, and finds it hard to say no (but I’m getting better). God knows me.

God also chooses me. In every relationship there is a choice by each party to be in the relationship. The relationship doesn’t happen in a good way without the choice. God chooses to draw me toward Him, and reveal His character, personality, and will to me on purpose and with intention. It is God’s choice to do so. God could choose not to but doesn’t. God chooses.

Unlike us, however, I don’t think God has to choose one person over another.

This idea is one of the most radical aspects of the main proposition presented by Jesus. That is that the Kingdom of God – living within the effective will of the creator of the universe – is accessible to everyone. God has made His choice. This proposition sounds like a wonderful free ticket to paradise for everyone. The reality is equally wonderful and daunting.

Relationships are personal, affecting, and will change us. Living within the Kingdom of God is to be in personal relationship with God. God has chosen to provide this access to you and me personally. We will be affected by our relationship with God. God’s presence in our lives affects our being and we will be changed. Changed for the good, no doubt, but changed nonetheless – and change can be hard. Relationships can be hard.

The hardness that comes to mind may bring up some very important questions. Questions like “Do I trust God to change me?” or “Who does God have to be for me to think Him trustworthy?” and “Do we even want to be changed?” These questions are important because we too have a choice in this relationship. Sometimes it might not feel like we do – overwhelmed as we may be with being drawn towards something greater – but we do have a choice. Just as God has chosen to be in relationship with us, we can choose to be in relationship with God – if we want to.

1. Pronouns are hard. As I’ve written about God in past articles I’ve done my best to avoid the need of pronouns. It’s made for some clunky writing, and I’ve realized it’s almost unavoidable. So here is a quick take on pronouns and God so you know where I’m coming from. I think pronouns are fundamentally impersonal. I’d much rather call someone by name than use a placeholder. In writing about my thinking about God, I understand that using the traditional male pronoun can also bring to mind images of dysfunctional relationships (toxic masculinity, patriarchy, etc.). It also may deny us the awareness of God’s ability to express love in ways that we categorize as feminine. While the image of God as the best possible Father has been a big deal for me (and may need to be an image we contend with), I don’t think it need be the only image. After all, God is love, and love expresses itself as it needs to for the good of that which is loved. All that to say that moving forward, I will be using the traditional “He” for the sake of continuity in my own writing. What we think about God is quite important, and if you’re interested I’ve put together a more explicit list of some of my guiding thoughts here.