Lowering the bar

Too often I hear it being said that to be loved by God, or to be a Christian, or to get into Heaven, you have to do this and that and follow all these rules and shove yourself into this tiny little “Christian box” where everyone is the same and no one has any fun and no one is themselves, either.  Which is a strange thing to consider—everyone being the same but no one being themselves.  I’m not sure of the specifics, but if you are going to Heaven, but you’re not yourself…I’m not sure how that works.

Anyway, this is like, really untrue.  There might be religions that teach this (that you have look like a cookie-cutter Christian, or a “CCC” for short) but that’s certainly not what Jesus taught.  Think about this: the fact that God, this infinite Being, put himself in human form is proof that God meets us where we’re at.  He didn’t make all of us supernatural to receive salvation, he made himself natural.  Instead of bringing us to his level, he came down to ours.  And of course, all Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels point to this too.  Can you imagine this, that a Being with no limits and no flaws put himself into the restrictions of such a pitiful species (in comparison, at least) as humans?   This is like bringing yourself to the size and limitations of an amoeba.  I don’t know why you would do that, amoebas aren’t worth dying for, but that’s the best comparison I can come up with.

God meets us where we’re at.  And this is why it is impossible to fail him.  He knows our needs and he knows we’re not perfect and he knows all this, he made us, I assume that he has more knowledge of our shortcomings much more than we do.  Jesus was not about making people into robots and machines and mindless, boring things.  Jesus was about loving people no matter what, and acceptance, and community.  It seems that if God made us all different and put us in all these different places, shouldn’t we prefer his way over making it all into CCC’s?