2013 was a big year. My husband, Josh, and I packed all of our possessions into my boxy blue 1999 Honda CRV, bid farewell to Seattle, and set out to drive two thousand miles on I-90 until we hit Chicago to get married. I sobbed when we hit Spokane. Leaving can be so terribly difficult. When we hit Montana, it got hot. Josh changed from the Seattle uniform of jeans and a black zip-up hoodie into shorts. Three hours later, we were searching the car for his flip phone when it dawned on us. He left his phone in his pants, and he left his pants at a rest stop in Montana.
We didn’t turn back to get it the phone. Instead we, like the other 50 percent of Americans, decided to join the iPhone revolution. On our honeymoon, I got a photo-sharing app to keep in touch with the community we left behind in Seattle. My first post was of our dumb happy faces at a spectacular vista in the Rockies. A few months into my life on the app, I realized that everyone, including myself, was only posting the best pictures of our lives. We were posting not just our highlights, but our beautiful highlights. Which was great because I had a honeymoon to show off.
Before IG (that’s Instagram, if you’ve been blessedly spared), it was frowned upon to brag too much. If you sit around the lunch table and talk endlessly about how amazing your life is and how you are just so blessed to have this job, or that house, or this partner, or those kids, folks around you would tune out and roll their eyes behind your back. Up north I would sarcastically snip, “Wow. Your life sounds ahhhmazing.” Down here in the South, I perhaps would say, “Honey, bless your heart.”
Well, the honeymoon didn’t last forever. A few months later, Josh and I moved to North Carolina for seminary. We had no money. A new school in a new state and region were hard transitions and our neighborhood crawled with cockroaches at night. So one night after killing one on our stoop, I took a picture, used the best possible filter, and posted it with the caption. “Some things are too beautiful not to share.” And neither I nor anyone else ever exaggerated how great their lives were on social media ever again. Of course not. The next picture in my grid was probably about how I was so generously giving to the local food bank with the caption, “Give us this day our daily bread” — read ridding cans of food I never cook with from my pantry. Social media or not, none of us want to be known by our unredeemed worst moments or looks.
But that’s what I love about scripture. It’s not an IG highlight reel of two hotties on a glamorous all-inclusive honeymoon. It’s often a story about dumb people doing dumb stuff to get dumb things. Or as my Theology of Trauma professor would say, “People doing the best they can with what they have to get what they think they need.”
When people level the criticism that Christians are hypocrites, I often say in my best valley-girl voice — uhhh duh. If an outsider thinks Christians have it all together or are supposed to have it all together, I need only crack open just about any page of Scripture to find a sacred story about foolish, embarrassing, cruel, cringy behavior. The first family? Murder. Noah gets drunk off his naked ass. Sarai abuses Hagar. Rebekah helps her youngest son deceive her husband. Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery. Moses murders a guy. The newly liberated Israelites complain incessantly in the wilderness. They make a gold cow to worship, they don’t get along, they blame Moses for their problems. It ain’t pretty. That’s only the first two books of the Bible. I could go on with New Testament examples like cringe-master Peter, snotty Nathaniel, competitive James and John, or greedy Sapphira. It’s the kind of stuff you do not put on your highlight reel, but there it is right above their grid, saved as a highlight for generations to watch.
The very descendants of these people doing their best and still ending up messy, dumb, and hypocritical have preserved these stories about their families and faith for hundreds of generations. Why? Not because they’re good, but because God has been good to them. God has been good through their dumb, embarrassing mess.
Take the story of the Israelites in the wilderness after they’re freed from slavery. Does God quit on them? No, God instead says, “Sit down. Have a snack. Here are some meat and manna.” What do the Israelites later call their time in wilderness? What do they name this highlight at the top of their IG? “Throwback to when we were outdoorsy?” “Embarrassing Self-Disclosure?” “Real Talk?” Nope. They call it their honeymoon with God. Because through their struggles and sin and suffering God is faithful.
The miraculous thing about scripture and the church is that God should bother with us heaps of humble hummus at all — let alone with grace and mercy and steadfast love. If God can stick it out with the people in scripture, then thankfully, God will stick it out with me and my imperfect church and my messy broken family and my now ugly Instagram. Because it’s not about my beautiful highlights. It never was.
Tullian told this story to his congregation years ago. It goes along with your point on social media. His family wanted some beach time, so they gathered up the kids, grabbed water, food, umbrellas, beach chairs, all the beach paraphernalia, got the kids in the car and headed to the beach. Finding a parking spot was a royal pain. Once their car was parked, they gathered up their stuff and trudged several blocks to the beach. It was packed and HOT. They found a spot and settled in. Shortly after, they had run out of water, food and the kids were whining. So they gathered everything up again and dragged their butts to the shower to wash off the sand. Before leaving the beach, they decide to take a family photo. The kids are bellyaching, but they get it done. Everyone put on their best smile. Then they slog to the car, hot, thirsty, hungry and griping. They get to the car and there is now sand deep in their car carpet and on their seats. Those showers didn’t quite do the job. They arrive home, unload and after hosing everything off and being completely exhausted, they get back in the house. The first thing they do is get online, upload the photo they took before leaving and post this caption:
“Great family time at the beach!”