Deconstructed

Our pigs have torn one wall off of their only shelter.

The chickens are just about as bad, having picked the insulation out of one side of the chicken house.

The cow continually breaks the hay ring so she can lay on her food and peer witlessly at the unused bedding in the barn.

North Dakota winters prove the costliness of their ignorance. Their deconstruction arises from instinct, perhaps, but it is no less deadly if we leave them as they are. 

It is popular nowadays for young people who claim to be departing the Christian faith to talk about it as a “deconstruction.” They are dismantling, piece by piece, the faith that sheltered them, thereby distancing themselves from every cultural reminder of it.

Jude mentions the same problem in the early church: “These people are destroyed by everything that they understand instinctively.”

I learned about deconstruction philosophy in a college literature class where my professor couldn’t define it any better than its creator, Jacques Derrida. They didn’t want to define any terms that might only be deconstructed later.

The only instruction given was “Read this and then pick out words that could make it mean the opposite of what the author intended.”

It was a pointless exercise, and I think of Derrida and his absurd literary theory every time I watch my pigs shivering in the splinters of their former shelter.

Even sadder is to look at my contemporaries who have deconstructed their faith to sit in the ruins of divorce, homosexuality, emptiness, and loneliness. They have dismantled every semblance of hope that was available to them.

Jesus’s disciples must have felt like that after the failed Last Supper and mock trials. When Christ was dead, their shelter had crumbled down and they sat in the mud of despair. Their instincts told them God was dead, they’d wasted years of their lives, and that Jesus wasn’t who they thought He was.

But Jesus, the Good Shepherd, knew exactly where our instincts would take us. He knew that the shelters we would destroy would have to be remade and that we would need to be redeemed and given a nature contrary to our instincts. He is so much more than we thought He was!

When Jesus rose on Easter Sunday, He showed every victim of deconstruction what it meant to really live. 

With the Psalmist, we can then say, “I was brutish and ignorant. I was like a beast toward you. Nevertheless, I am continually with you; You hold my right hand….my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

Are you sitting in the pigpen of deconstruction? In following your instincts, have you torn down the shelter that Christianity built around you?

Let Jesus take your hand and remake you into so much more than just your instincts. Up from the grave He arose to give you new life and to live through You. 

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