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What if it's not really about being good?

There’s a photo on a dusty old CD-ROM somewhere of me giving a joy-filled hug of celebration to a friend at church camp.

It was just after answering a particularly difficult question in Bible trivia. You could see on my face the victory I felt as I enjoyed the moment with the friend I’d known for years through camp.

Years later, on the phone with that same friend, I told her the “correct” good-girl advice to a problem she was facing, and our friendship ended.

The details are foggy. I think she was feeling stretched between the pain of wanting to live within her beliefs and values, please her family, engage with the church, and start a romantic relationship. Good little girl with the right answers that I was, I told her she had to decide between God or someone else.

What’s still clear in my memory is the disgust in her voice when she got off the phone. We haven’t spoken since.

Growing up in Sunday school, we used to sing a song: I’m in the Lord’s army. Yes, sir!

All I knew was that it felt good to be part of something, to have a mission, to fight for what’s godly, to be on the right side. But the underlying message was defense, domination, disconnect. There is little room for muddled middle (emotional) matters; there is only black and white.

I’ve seen in myself then what I now see in others who rail against empathy: a steadfast devotion to an ideal. Along with it, a panicked fear for what happens when that ideal is challenged.

Because of my fear, I couldn’t handle well the hearts and hurts of others. Not that one were always right and the other was always wrong--but there was little room for compassionate curiosity and a willingness to engage with the uncomfortable aspects of simply being human and making choices with all kinds of outcomes.

I was a good soldier, but not a great follower of the example of Christ: the very human Jesus who bent down and looked in eyes and reached out and touched and fed and healed and celebrated with and sat with. I was a good soldier, but I wasn’t a great friend.

It’s interesting how Jesus has many more references to farmers and shepherds and everyday peaceful occupations than being a soldier or going to war. And those he does reference? A king who counts the cost and chooses surrender (Luke 14:31-33), a reference to the practice of the Romans where soldiers forced common people to carry messages at their own effort in Matthew 5:41 (imploring his followers to go an extra mile than what was demanded), and saying that people who “draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). The references are countercultural, not something to imitate. (I’m looking forward to reading Kat Armas’s Liturgies for Resisting Empire because I’m sure she talks about this quite a bit. I’m feeling like she has a Substack post on the Lord’s Army song as well, but I can’t find it.)

Lately I’ve had some songs from Florence + the Machine’s Everybody Scream album on repeat.

From the consensus I’ve seen on social media, there are some lyrics that are resonating well for many of us like they do for me:

“I do not find worthiness in virtue

I no longer try to be good

It didn’t keep me safe

Like you told me that it would”

I don’t mean to tell anyone how they ought to interpret these words, but here’s why they affected me so personally: I’ve tried so hard to live up to the standard of good at my church, often in the hopes that I would be accepted and rewarded for my good behavior, by people and by God.

This thinking is faulty in so many ways: people-pleasing never provides lasting fulfillment. You will never live up to everyone’s standards. Also, God does not operate that way, like a checking account--you get out what you put in.

And then there’s the ultimate conundrum: bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. Goodness doesn’t keep us safe--something particularly striking in an era of the sins of church leadership being covered up. Not even church is safe.

Basing our whole theology on our own goodness saving us is exactly contrary to the point of the gospel.

Grace meets us in the places that our goodness alone could never reach. Better still, grace means we are able to put on God’s goodness and to walk in it instead of our own shortcomings.

For so long, my religion was behavior modification, or sin management, as Sarah Bessey appropriately puts it in her book Out of Sorts. The meticulousness of this lifestyle, the gatekeeping, the judgment, made me feel panicked and paranoid and rigid and small. But I was fully invested in the “battle”. To question it was sacrilegious. It was going against God.

But at the end of the day, what if the whole point is not to be “good”?

Psalm 34, one of my favorite verses, says this:

“I sought the Lord, and he answered me;
he delivered me from all my fears.
Those who look to him are radiant;
their faces are never covered with shame.
This poor man called, and the Lord heard him;
he saved him out of all his troubles.
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him,
and he delivers them.

Taste and see that the Lord is good;
blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”

Notice how it’s not about the writer’s goodness. The goodness is God’s - God’s response to our seeking, the delivery from our fears, his radiance reflected in our faces.

Maybe goodness is a matter of proximity to God (and God’s goodness), not improvement of behavior, actual faultlessness or trying hard enough. What if the good we can do is to keep turning back towards God, to keep drawing near to the One who is actually good?

Even Florence ends the vibrant, thrashing album Everybody Scream with unexpected calm, a song so soft it could be a lullaby,

“And love was not what I thought it was

It crept up on me despite myself

And it was not a love song, it was something else

More like surrendering to something

And more like resting than running

Peace is coming”

Peace is coming. It comes with rest, not with working harder. It comes enveloped in the safety of God’s presence.

You and I are not meant to be good soldiers, mindlessly following orders and taking on a pattern of defense and destruction. We are meant to engage with our whole hearts in a journey of healing, restoration, and reconciliation, of well-being for all. We are meant to know God intimately, becoming more like in the drawing near.

God’s hunger for relationship with us is mirrored within us. We want to be close, connected, seen, known, offered safety and rest. The more we draw near to God--finding God in the everyday, listening, stilling ourselves in the Divine Presence--we’re finding goodness all the time. We’re becoming more like the true good we’ve always wanted to resemble.

These days, I’ve taken off the mantle of being a good soldier.

It became too heavy a burden to carry, or to force on to someone else, where Jesus instead said, “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”.

I’m giving up my good girl answers; I’m setting down my sword; I no longer try to be “good” to fit a church cultural standard.

God is good. We find goodness close to him. And God’s goodness never fails.

Photo by Zach Miles on Unsplash