FIVE THINGS I WISH CHRISTIANS WOULD STOP SAYING:

And why they do more harm than good.

Even with the best of intentions, Christians say some really messed up stuff. And when you dig into the theology of what they are saying, it’s often in opposition to the God they believe in.

Christians say these things to be helpful, but they are actually harmful. These things hurt the person they’re trying to comfort, and they hurt the image of God.

So, here it is, my list of things I wish Christians would stop saying. (And some ideas about what we can say instead.)

1. “God’s ways are higher than our own.”

If you’ve gone through some trauma, some horrific loss, chances are, you have heard this one. I’m talking about the ugliest stuff, the stuff that derails your life trajectory and calls into question everything you thought you believed to be true. That life is fair. That people are good. That if you are a decent person and do the right things, life will go well for you.

And then, a life-altering moment - the sudden death of a loved one, an affair or divorce, cancer, the loss of a child - shocks your system and rocks you to your core. It’s a moment that takes the life you’ve been living, that maybe you’ve even taken for granted, and turns it all upside down. (My good friend Ann calls these “whammo” moments.)

Sometimes, the moment brings with it a kind of pain you had only read about before. Pain that is so visceral, that cuts so deep, you feel you will never, ever be the same. Suddenly you are living life in the “before” and “after.” Before this thing happened, you were a certain kind of person with a certain kind of life. After this thing happened, you are never, ever the same.

Understandably, you search for a reason why. Why would God allow something like this to happen? This kind of pain is simply inexplicable, but Christians love to try to explain it anyway. They mean well. I know they do. But the truth is, people have no idea how to respond to the unfairness of what you’re going through. So they say things like, “God will not give you more than you can handle.” “He brought you to it and he will bring you through it.”

Or my personal favorite: “He tests the strong ones.” I heard that one a lot when I got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a kid. Like, I guess I am supposed to feel proud. Grateful, even. I am so strong that God gave me this. What an honor. Thanks God! I am so glad you believe in me this much. What a gift. Can I please send this gift back, though? Thanks, but no thanks.

I hear these well-meaning platitudes all the time. I’ve been guilty of saying some of them myself. But the truth is, I never believed them. Because these statements run so completely counter to the God I do believe in.

Yes, there are things we will never understand about life and God and why things happen the way they do. But we don't have to assign the blame for bad things to some mysterious reason or some greater purpose, much less a misguided belief that God designed it to be this way, so that we will pass some sort of test.

Of all life’s mysteries, here’s one thing I am fairly certain of: a good and loving God would not intentionally set me up to experience pain. If God needs to cause me pain to teach me something, but I cannot know what that lesson is because his ways are higher than mine and it’s the only way for me to pass his test…then I will pass on that kind of God.

2. “God needed another angel.”

Gotta be honest, I HATE this one. God needed another angel so he caused the death of someone you love. How selfish of God.

When I was in high school, there was this girl named Jessica. I swear, I am not exaggerating, she was Jesus in the flesh. She was kind to everyone. She was gentle. She was patient. She loved everything about everyone and when she looked at you and spoke to you, you knew she had not one unkind bone in her body. When she said she would pray for you, you weren’t even offended because you knew without a doubt that she genuinely would. She was the most Christ-like person I’d ever met.

Jessica died at the age of 21. Know how she died? In a car accident while she was training to become a missionary. She planned to give her life entirely to bringing others to know Christ. She would have been so much more useful here on earth, there was absolutely no reason God “needed” to take her. But I know people said to her parents that “God needed another angel.” I heard it at her funeral service. It made no sense to me then and it angers me now.

You might think we were good friends, Jessica and me. We weren’t. We had one class together in high school and she made that much of an impression on me. She was THAT good. I have never known anyone like her before or since. I have often thought about her and wondered how much better the world would be if she were still in it. If this is how I feel about her, fifteen years after her death, can you imagine how her family feels??

My point is that it makes no sense to say God takes our loved ones because he needed another angel. You think you are saying something helpful, but what you’re saying is harmful.

It’s fine to proclaim that the person who has died is now one of God’s angels, if you believe in that kind of thing, there’s no harm in that. Just don’t say that God caused their death because he needed to fulfill some heavenly quota, like a cop arbitrarily giving out traffic tickets.

Again, I pass on that kind of God.

3. “The Bible says God helps those who help themselves.”

No, it doesn't. Like, that is nowhere to be found in the Bible. But Christians say it, a lot. Not only is that not in the Bible, I would go so far as to say it’s anti-biblical.

The Jewish Scriptures are full of laws to protect those who cannot so easily “help themselves.” Who are at a disadvantage, facing obstacles and hardships that they did not create. The widow, the immigrant, and the poor, for example.

And Jesus, man, he was so all about making sure we denied ourselves and helped others.

What I think people mean when they say, "God helps those who helps themselves," is that we have to put in the work; we cannot just sit around waiting for things to happen. And it’s good old American “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” language. Now, I am a big fan of taking personal responsibility for your life. I just think you shouldn’t say this as a way of preaching at someone, because it’s in direct opposition to the message of Jesus.

And I also really doubt that saying this to someone has ever been helpful. Like, “Oh thanks! I never thought about trying to help myself. I’ll give it a shot!” But I do think many people’s lives have been changed for the better when someone actually helped them.

In his memoir, Born a Crime, Trevor Noah used an analogy that really stuck with me and I think it helps to illustrate the point I am trying to make.

“People love to say, 'Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime.’ What they don't say is, ‘And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.’ That's the part of the analogy that's missing.”

And therein lies the truth: God helps those who have fishing rods.

But seriously, the actual truth is that sometimes, the odds are stacked a little higher against certain people. Some people need an extra leg up. Christians should be first in line to offer that support, but often times, they’re the ones falsely quoting scripture to judge, instead.

“I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!” -Matthew 25:40

4. “Hate the sin, love the sinner.”

Speaking of judgment, this statement right here is just loaded with it. I could write an entire book about how much I wish this overused saying would be eliminated from Christian lingo. But I am writing a blog, so for now I will just say this: it’s one of the most unloving and judgmental things I hear in Christian circles.

The most obvious problem is that it puts amazingly flawed people (which we all are) as the determiners of what sin is. And people’s beliefs about sin differ vastly because people are vastly different. And I just think we ought not to be in business of going around ranking sins. You know, specks and planks and all.

Make no mistake, people don’t say this when they’re talking about things that are legitimately, unquestioningly sinful, like ignoring the poor. Usually, this remark is spoken when someone has already made their opinion known on the matter, and they might even display a smug superiority about the particular “sin.”

And the ironic thing is that it’s said under the guise of “telling the truth in love” (another saying I’d like to erase from Christian verbiage), yet it does not make anyone feel remotely loved! If you say to someone, “God hates your sin, but don’t worry, he tells me to love you anyway!” I promise they are not thinking to themselves, “How kind and generous of you!” They are feeling judged and powered-up on. And so if your goal was to show love, then it was not achieved. Quite the opposite happened, actually.

Really it comes down to this: Love the sinner. Just love. That’s all.

5. “Everything happens for a reason.”

This is the most used and most harmful phrase, in my opinion. When terrible things happen, Christians tend to say some version of this. “It’s all part of God’s plan.” Or, they direct us to “Let go and let God.” They remind us that “God is in control.”

If “God’s plan” was to give me a child to adore, only for cancer to cause his death at the age of two… or for my daughter to be raped by a trusted family member… If God “brought” me to a divorce to teach me something… If the war and genocide that has plagued our history and continues even today, is all part of God’s greater plan, then frankly, that’s a pretty evil plan. And a pretty evil God.

Kate Bowler has this book called Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved). I highly recommend it. Instead of saying “Everything happens for a reason,” Bowler suggests this simple edit: everything happens. Period.

Stuff happens. Good stuff, hard stuff, painful stuff, amazing stuff. Both inexplicably wonderful and inexplicably horrible stuff happens. All of it happens. That’s life. It’s not God.

Ironically, I think our need to believe God is in control comes from our own need to be in control. It’s human nature to want to explain things away. We like orderly predictability, which is why we love labels. Labels allow us to categorize people and events into neatly defined boxes. But it’s problematic when we attempt to put the Creator of the universe into a box.

See, the thing is, we humans (who like to be in control) have created a God whose defining attribute is control.

But I believe God’s defining attribute is love. And love does not control. (For more on this, I’ll recommend another book, God Can’t by Thomas Jay Oord. It was a game-changer for my faith life.)

All of this is just my opinion, of course. I am not suggesting I have all the answers here. But I do have a theory, which is that we get these phrases from a misrepresentation of one of my personal favorite Bible verses, Romans 8:28:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Christians have taken this text and interpreted it to mean everything that happens is part of God’s purpose. But that characterization misses the point. The point is that God can and does work IN our situations to bring good. It is a leap to take this text and say that God causes all things. And it is not helpful, nor is it loving, to suggest that he does.

So, why do we say these things about God?

Well, probably because we don’t know what else to say. And we want so badly to believe God is in control and everything will some day make sense. I understand why we say the things we say, but my point is that I don’t believe any of them to be helpful or true.

I’ve said a lot about what I don’t believe. Here are some things I do believe...

I believe there are things we may never understand. I also believe that some day all will be made right. That’s the hinge point of my faith and that is what Jesus did on the cross. He defeated the forces of evil and conquered death, so that the heavens and the earth that had been separated could be reunited. So that we will once again dwell in the garden with God in the cool of the day, like it was in the beginning. Like it was always meant to be. I believe that with all of my heart and soul.

I don’t know whether or not I believe our loved ones become angels when they die, but I do know for sure that we are meant to help one another and to love our neighbors as ourselves during our time on earth.

I believe that God loves us, and therefore cannot control us.

I believe that God works in and through everything to bring about good, and that any plans he does have are only good.

And I believe that nothing can separate us from the love of God.

I’ve said a lot about what I think Christians should not say. So, you might be asking, “What should I say then, if not these things?”

Here are a few suggestions:

That sounds really hard. I am so sorry you’re going through that. What do you need? Can I pray with you? I love you and I am in your corner.

And when the unspeakable happens and there are no words, then just sit with the person in their pain and grief. Just be with them.

There are some moments when the best thing you can say is nothing at all.

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Books I mentioned in this blog:

Kate Bowler's book: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Happens-Reason-Other-Loved/dp/0399592067

Thomas Jay Oord’s book: https://www.amazon.com/God-Cant-Believe-after-Tragedy/dp/1948609126

Trevor Noah's book: https://www.amazon.com/Born-Crime-Stories-African-Childhood/dp/0399588191/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1661047192&sr=1-1