In His Steps

            I’ve been assigned to read a fictional book called “In His Steps” for my Acts class.  I just finished it.  Perhaps because of the time in my life that I’ve read it, (three months into my missionary apprentice training), I have found it to be inspirational and motivating in a way that I cannot recall ever having experienced so strongly while reading another book.  Briefly, it can be described as the foundation for the nearly out-of-date phrase “What would Jesus do?”  It is based off of an actual story of a minister from Topeka, Kansas who gave consecutive Sunday-night sermons about what would happen in the lives of various people were they to live according to the question “What would Jesus do?”  In short, it illustrates what the first-century church would look like if it were uprooted and set in motion at the end of the 19th century. 

            Now, despite the occurrence of my growing passion for the church, throughout my reading I’d thought of the story as “idealistic.”  And this is because, though it is encouraging to read about the great changes that took place in the fictional Christians in fictional America, the fact of the matter remains that: should the actual society we live in today try to live by this question, it would fail.  There are not enough people in any one place who possess the faith to fulfill this kind of commitment as a community if ever they tried.  Though mankind was not born evil, it has certainly proved throughout the ages that we have evil tendencies that we allow to rule us.  Redundantly, repeatedly, incessantly, over and over, without fail, we’ve allowed Satan to win, and we will continue to do so.  We have made the spiritual battle into something of a joke with Satan nothing more than the fictional bad guy in the book of life.  Because we have belittled him so much in our minds, any fault/wrongdoing/sin we commit we only charge against ourselves.  We don’t attribute any of our weaknesses to Satan, and have, in so thinking, embraced the other side of the spectrum.  We revel in our debauchery.  Inwardly, we applaud our friends when they screw up because on some level it’s almost cathartic.  We can feel better about ourselves, assured that everyone else is just as appallingly inadequate as we are.  The result?  We have sunk into a mire that does not allow for faith.  Faith is only an ideal. 

            Having felt this way throughout the book, I now have to say that once I arrived at the end, there was a decided change of heart.  Somewhere between these thoughts and the end of this novel, I thought back to Dark Knight.  Yes, lol, I thought of Batman.  I thought back to that great scene towards the end where he and the Joker have their final struggle and they’re both practically hanging off the side of a skyscraper, fighting for the detonator to the ferries that, surprisingly, haven’t blown each other up.  Heath Ledger--I mean, the Joker--is certain one boat will surely kill the other.  But Batman, paragon of good that he is, says the Joker underestimates the morality of Gotham City.  There won’t be any explosion.  And there isn’t.  The Joker, though he thrives on chaos, is dumbfounded in this moment.  Gotham’s display of morality is weird, foreign, insane because of its lack of chaos.  It is not in line with the expected lack of virtue the Joker is relying on, and so he then has to try to sustain chaos himself. 

            Through this scene, I realized two things: first, that this movie is a perfect portrayal of The Spiritual Battle and second, that it shows a world that believes in something more than subjective morality.  Why is this a revelation?  Because it shows that our world has not sunk so low as we all seem to think.  The makers of this movie, anyone affiliated with it, believes in an absolute standard of truth.  Like the writer of “In His Steps.”  Like all of humanity.  Faith is not idealistic.  It is epic and revered and told of in every great movie/book/song of good and evil.

            Like Dark Knight, “In His Steps,” remains so embedded in my mind.  It is the first century church brought back to life again for me, and it has spoken to me concerning so many different aspects of what it means to live as Jesus would.  Rid of my thoughts concerning its probable idealism, I can see that instead, it is visionary.  It is filled with nothing but application: it reveals many corrections to the church as we know it. 

            I will speak of perhaps the most important: it nearly shouts out that to follow Christ, a person has to first embrace humility.  The minister in the story is a very well-educated man of high social standing.  He is a man of eloquence in the delivery of his sermons and pride in his identity as the minister of a high-standing congregation with wealthy members.  When he comes to face an extremely poor man who publicly questions what it means to be a Christian and later dies in the minister’s home, the minister realizes how everything in his life had been materialistic and not at all about following Christ.  This changes everything he does.  He leads his life with the question of what Christ would do.  His sermons and prayers become all but eloquent.  They are broken.  He learns what it means to sacrifice and give to people who’ve never lived outside the confines of need.  He learns compassion.  And, he learns that he doesn’t have all the answers.  Even as a minister, he can’t solve the problems of everyone who comes to him. 

            To become humble is demeaning and utterly in opposition to our society.  “Weakness,” as it would be called, is not prized.  It is greatly looked down on, and we struggle our hardest not to let it leak out between the cracks of this great image we construct of ourselves.  It’s true.  In almost everything I’ve ever done, I’ve done my best to do it in a way that conveys my intelligence.  Papers I’ve written, presentations I’ve given, I’ve always tried to make sure that I appear smart.  And this is because my intelligence, since college, has always been something I’ve been uncertain about.  I would cringe to think that someone might suspect my insecurity, that I wasn’t smart.  But it’s something I’ve decided within myself to work on.  So I’m not the brightest crayon in the box.  That’s okay.  It doesn’t mean that I, as a person, don’t have a purpose.  On the contrary, I try to remind myself that there is something to gain by accepting my imperfections and using them in ministry, in helping other people.  Something C.S. Lewis says in his Mere Christianity is this idea that of course people (and he was, I think, speaking of the church) are all at different levels and some of us will be incapable of certain things.  But it is important that we try to make the most of the talents God has endowed us with--an important realization in relation to humility.

            I could go on and on about the different observations I’ve made about this book and my personal application of them.  There are so many things to talk about.  But instead, I will simply encourage you to read it.  See how the people come to a better understanding about Christ through suffering, or how bonds of community are strengthened when they all work towards the common goal of serving Christ.  Again, it was a very inspiring read, and I hope that just in my telling you about it, you might share in my enthusiasm, and that you might go so far as to allow your faith to consider this cheesy, rather ridiculous question, “What would Jesus do?” as a mode for how you live your life.  We are certainly called to try.