Throwing Christ Over the Cliff

How the church can help the faithful stay faithful.

My family and I are headed to our Alaskan fish camp this month, where we commercial fish for salmon every summer. This time last year, I was happily stripping out the season's first king salmon to put in our new smoker. When I was done, I set the white bowl piled high with carmine flesh on the counter, then called my two youngest sons, ages 8 and 10, to dump the carcass over the far cliff, where all our organics go.

 

A few minutes later they handed me the bowl, now empty, and turned back to their play.

 

"Thank you," I said unthinkingly. As I stood there with the bowl in my hand, I realized something was wrong. 

"Boys!" I shouted. "Did you just dump all the salmon over the cliff?"

They came running, looking up at me with innocent eyes.

I pointed to the carcass still in the box on the floor.

"Ohhhhh." Their eyes went wide, their faces burned pink.

I calmed down—eventually. I've lost a lot of things out there, including all my journals and my wedding ring, which went down one year on a sinking fishing boat.

 

In such times, I can't help thinking of the poet Elizabeth Bishop's famous villanelle, "The Art of Losing": The art of losing isn't hard to master; / so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster."

 

But often losses are disaster. I frequently run into people who are losing and throwing away treasures far more precious than salmon and journals. A lifelong friend who grew up in a Christian home and went to Christian colleges wrote recently to tell me he no longer believed Jesus was the only way to God. Yesterday, I talked with a woman whose son had found faith in high school, but who now believed in kung fu instead. In Costa Rica, I met two young men, missionary kids, who had both abandoned their faith. "God didn't really do much for me," one said.

I'm always saddened by these encounters, but I'm not surprised. As evangelicals, we believe that faith is more than rote ritual, that God can be known intimately through Scripture and the Spirit, so we urge believers toward "a personal relationship with Jesus." But from what I've witnessed, it can become so personal it ends up being about the wrong person—me. Read more