I decided last week that I’d post something from my new book – Leave a Footprint, Change the Whole World. Here’s a second excerpt. The book is published with Zondervan/YS and is available for purchase on Amazon, and Youth Specialties. A free chapter is available directly from Zondervan.
Here’s the beginning of Chapter 10
When I surrendered my life to Christ, I soon found myself treading water in a deep pool of “do nots.” The version of Christianity I was taught as a teenager focused mostly on a long list of things Christians weren’t supposed to do. Dancing got you pregnant, short shorts led to sex, and men who wore their hair long were rebelling against God. We were told most popular movies were birthed within the church of Satan, and that any kind of music with a beat was probably hand-delivered to our houses by the devil himself. As kids in youth group, we attended seminars where adults spent hours spinning records backward for us, helping us hear garbled messages they believed were laced into the songs, and convincing us that record companies had special rooms where they prayed demons into their records and tapes. Listening to AC/DC would make you bisexual, and jamming to KISS told the world you really were a “Knight In Satan’s Service.” Acoustic guitars could honor Jesus, but electric guitars were a sign that you’d sold your soul to Beelzebub. Being a Christian meant memorizing as much of the Bible as possible so you could argue it with that other Christian kid up the street.
My Christian college experience was the same, filled with tons of “do nots.” Good Christian girls always wore dresses and never walked on the side of the street where the boys’ dorm was. Good Christian boys wore shirts with collars and kept their hair cut short and neatly combed. And, even though I graduated six years after I became a Christian, girls were still getting pregnant from dancing. Hadn’t they found a way to prevent that yet?
Popular Christianity is too often ruled by pointless, silly, and empty rules. We spend so much time focused on should nots, can nots, and better nots that we end up never really experiencing anything. Maybe we set up these strict rules because we want some way of measuring whether we’re really holy. Maybe we fear that the “do nots” in God’s Ten Commandments don’t quite cover all the bases, so we think we need to create a few more lists of our own. But our desire to fill our lives with lists of limitations affects both our passion and our ability to shape the world the way God planned us to shape it.
Imagine a baby taking its first steps, only to have one of its parents standing next to it with a ruler. Each step the baby attempts, the parent slaps its feet and lets out a stern “No!” That’s the way a lot of us imagine living for God. We hear God’s call to step out, but then something slaps us back—either an old family rule, an ancient edict, or our own fears. The result is a lot of believers who have all the courage they need in God, but none of it in themselves. These Christians stay packed away safely in churches, reading through their do-not lists, but never really impacting the world around them.
You know, it’s possible for us to live our entire lives without ever really making a difference, walking from garage-sale spirituality to prepackaged answer to just-add-water theology. But then we wake up ten years later and realize we’ve spent our days without any real purpose, having never really lived. Do you want to live your life in God like that? I don’t.
