Convictions

What are your convictions?

No, I’m not asking you to describe the beliefs or values or worldviews that you hold to be certain. I am speaking of something deeper.

So let’s use metaphors and symbols. They can help. What are convictions?

I think for many they are a safe for valuable items. Or a fence to keep in your livestock. Or they’re the airplane mode on your phone.

But I wonder if that is how we kill convictions. By imprisoning them. What a dry life - imagining living in airplane mode. Protected but asleep. Protected but slowly becoming a wilderness.

Then again. For others, convictions are a bird we let lose from its cage to roam the world. Becoming a stranger to us and others. They’re a sword released from a stone. They’re a painting born from what resonates with us.

But for me, convictions have rarely felt like that. They’ve been more like a tree growing roots. Or more it is as if the convictions I’ve received have grown like trees. Yes, what if convictions need to be more like ecosystems? Just look at that - my parable needed to grow to encapsulate and propel itself forward.

Notice how Jesus called us to be good soil. Good soil is what is needed to contain convictions, which for the Jesus followers, is to be the convictions of Christ. They flow from him. They must. He is the gardener.

The students I know who have been given buckets to contain the Kingdom of Jesus, as if the Kingdom is a mere springtime rain shower, always come to a crossroads. Either they learn to become co-gardeners with Christ and his people or their convictions burst within them. Sometimes this happens by choice, and often because of their inaction to learn to slowly tend convictions or risk taking them out of their safes. Sometimes this happens immediately, but more often the convictions burst suddenly in a moment that neither the student nor I could have foreseen.

Learning to hold convictions like a garden constantly in need of watering and sunshine and weeding is so much healthier. A springtime rain can get softer or harder. A garden can grow. A garden can have a plan and can have structure, but it can also change and grow with context. A gardener can be both an architect and a biologist and a storyteller and a painter.

But we can be lazy with our spiritual formation. This takes too much work. So we give folks prisons for truth. But that teaches them that once they’ve received a conviction they are done. They’re not. We are not. That is how convictions stagnate or explode. Convictions must grow. That doesn’t mean they must change essence or form. Such convictions are mere fancies and fantastical beliefs. Steadfast and loving convictions don’t morph into other beasts.

But neighbourhoods can grow around our convictions. They can change to adapt to changing weather. They can be replanted after they have been burned to the ground. Often those become the strongest and most flourishing forests of convictions.

Here’s a reality check. Those who treat their convictions like safes often have the most fragile and insecure convictions. Their faith is so easily toppled. Jesus spoke of building upon sand. Let us stop calling our sandy foundations diamond-strong.

Gardens are full of resilience.