Blessed Are the Misfits: An Extremely One-Sided Review

“You know that feeling when God is right there, thisclose, and you can just feel His loving arms around you, and you can literally hear his voice whispering in your ear, telling you how much He loves you?

I don’t.

I never have.

Maybe you can relate. Maybe you can’t. Or maybe, if you’ve gotten the impression you’re too analytical, too logical, too introverted, too just plain weird, or too whatever for God, you’ll let me tell you a quick story.”

Brant Hansen, Blessed Are the Misfits (2017)

I’ll be straight with you: the one solitary goal of this post is to persuade you that you ought to read Blessed Are the Misfits by Brant Hansen. I have a copy if you’d like to borrow it. Otherwise, a copy of your own will be the best eight-pounds-seventy-five you ever spend on Hive.¹

 

This is my copy. It has my name in the inside front cover, so you know you can’t get away with not giving it back.

I first read Blessed Are the Misfits back in June this year, and even then I thought it was the best so-called ‘Christian book’ I’d ever read. This slim little volume was the reassurance I’d been looking for ever since I was a teenager worrying that I wasn’t a real Christian because I’d never really ‘felt’ God’s presence. It was as if pieces of my own brain, my own soul, had fallen out onto the page somehow, and yet here they were being put forward by Mr. Hansen as his – as if they might belong to quite a lot of us, actually. The blurb on the back describes the book as “highly provocative”, but what it said didn’t strike me as provocative at all, just sort of blooming obvious, and yet seemingly never said by anyone else. It both profoundly comforted and unequivocally challenged me.

And so I gave the copy I’d been reading back to the dear friend and sister I’d nicked it from, made use of a book token I had kicking around to buy my own, recommended it to a few people, then stuck it on my bookshelf and left things at that. Until, that is, this weekend just gone, when I was Not In A Particularly Cheery Mood, basically because, by various means, some of which I can identify, I’d the lie creep back in to my internal monologue that how I felt about God had some bearing on how he felt about me. Now, in case you hadn’t noticed, tying God’s view of you – your objective worth – to your own ability to feel certain feelings, or do anything else, actually, is a remarkably reliable way to foster a Sense of General Failure and Worthlessness, so you know, if you’ve ever wanted one of those, you’re welcome for the pro tip. But who am I kidding, you’ve almost certainly already got one kicking around somewhere already, whatever size it might be and whether or not it’s seen much service lately; I’m pretty sure practically everyone has. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

Anyway, rereading Blessed Are the Misfits pretty much demolished my own (admittedly fairly small and brittle) Sense of General Failure and Worthlessness to a basically unbothersome level within a few hours, so I felt strongly encouraged to extend that same opportunity to my lovely readers. I mean, obviously I can’t guarantee that any one of you guys will obtain the same kind of sweet, soothing relief coupled with genuine, stirring encouragement from the book that I did, but the points Mr. Hansen makes are so excellent and so broadly applicable that it’ll be worth your reading it anyway. And if you’re not persuaded merely by my having waxed lyrical about the book’s merits, I’ll now provide a chapter-by-chapter summary of his arguments, followed by some of the quotations from the book that raised the biggest grins from me. I don’t feel as if I’m particularly ‘spoiling’ anything, because it’s the way Mr. Hansen makes these points that makes them so compelling, but if you’re one of those people who’s sort of hypersensitive to having things spoiled for you, you might not want to read any further.

Chapter One: It’s Not Just You

If you feel as if you don’t ‘fit’ in the modern church, as if you don’t experience God’s presence in the way other people seem to, good news: Jesus is for you.

Chapter Two: Together, Yet Apart

The present age is the Church’s betrothal period. We are not supposed to be fully satisfied in our relationship with God yet, because it has yet to be consummated.

Chapter Three: Blessed Are My Fellow People on the Autism Spectrum (and Those Who Can Relate to Us)

Jesus’ approach to stuff is totally different from the world’s, which is pretty fab news for people who don’t really get the world’s approach.

Chapter Four: Blessed Are Those of Us Who Apparently Landed on the Wrong Planet

Humans make no sense, and human cultures make no sense. But God loves humans anyway, and came to live among them anyway. We’re called to do the same.

Chapter Five: Blessed Are the Unfeeling Faithful

Not hearing God’s voice audibly or experiencing his presence emotively is normal, not an indication that something is amiss in the relationship. More remarkable and desirable than either of these things is when he fosters obedience in us.

Chapter Six: Blessed Are the Unfeeling Faithful, Part 2: Real “Fruit”

How we deal with the people around us is a better indication of God’s work in our lives than how we feel.

Chapter Seven: Blessed Are the Introverted Evangelical Failures

Evangelism is not the Christian’s main duty. Building a Church where all its members, with all their various gifts, are united in love, is more important.

Chapter Eight: Blessed Are the People Who Can’t Pray Worth a Darn

Prayers don’t have to be long; the Lord’s Prayer isn’t. Praying briefly and inarticulately is good – way better than not praying. God actually wants us to pester him.

Chapter Nine: Blessed Are the People Who Just Read That Last Chapter but Still Have Some Questions

Prayer is action. God grants our prayers a role in his plans. You can’t really fail at praying except by not praying.

Chapter Ten: Blessed Are the Wounded

God is glorified in making something beautiful out of all the sucky stuff that’s happened to us; in healing us so we can help to heal others.

Chapter Eleven: Blessed Are Those Who Don’t Have Amazing Spiritual Stories

Inspiring testimonies and sermon illustrations do not accurately represent real life. Our stories are not yet resolved, because the resolution is yet to come.

Chapter Twelve: Blessed Are the Impostors

Constantly remind yourself that, however rubbish you might be at doing God stuff, you’re invited to be in his presence.

Chapter Thirteen: Blessed Are the Introverts Who Keep Trying

Dealing with other people is hard. We’re to love them anyway, because God does, and he changes us to make us able.

Chapter Fourteen: Blessed Are the Perpetual Strugglers

It’s easy to settle for the cheap imitation that is sin, because pursuing what’s real requires commitment, and results in struggle. But commitment brings true freedom, and the struggle is proof of God at work in us.

Chapter Fifteen: Blessed Are the People Who Do Church Anyway

Each of us really needs Christian community – to participate in it like family. Other Christians may be hard to deal with, but it’s a glorious thing when the family stays together anyway.

Chapter Sixteen: Blessed Are the Melancholy and the Depressed

It’s possible to be joyful even when depressed, because you can counter what your feelings tell you (often not true) with what God tells you (always true).

Chapter Seventeen: Blessed Are Those Who Don’t Take Themselves So Seriously

We can afford not to take everything so seriously, because we already know how it’s all going to end.

Chapter Eighteen: Blessed Are the Skeptics and Those Who Don’t Know Where Else to Go

Christianity is the most compelling worldview out there not only because it makes the best sense but also because it makes the best offer.

Chapter Nineteen: Blessed Are the Unnoticed

God doesn’t favour the sort of people we think he would; he favours the humble. We need less setting out to change the world and more doing little acts of obedience today.

Chapter Twenty: Blessed Are the Lonely

In the present age, it’s inevitable that we’ll feel more distant from God than we want to. But the wedding is coming, he is with us even now, and he has not forgotten us.

Chapter Twenty-One: Blessed Are the Misfit Royalty

Unlike the world, God elevates, even identifies with, the weak and the poor and the marginalised. We are to do the same. That’s our team. And it’s the winning team.

So there’s a summary for you. You’ve probably got a sense of some of the big recurring themes. Obedience trumps feelings; so does truth. Dissatisfaction and struggle in the present age is only to be expected.² Loving one another is fundamental, all the more because people are hard to deal with. And above all, God loves the misfits. None of this, to my mind, is “highly provocative”; it’s no more than what the scriptures say. But Mr. Hansen manages to show incredibly incisively how modern church culture fails to reflect these principles, all while refraining from turning the thing into an irritated tirade of the sort I’m prone to going off on when the issue of modern church culture comes up in conversation. As I say, the book contains both massive reassurance at being loved and massive exhortation to love – which sounds a lot like the Bible, really, so that kind of tells you why it’s so good. But as a last bit of persuasion, and to give you a sense of the totally charming tone of the thing, here are a few little extracts that I think are particularly nicely put.

I wanted friends. I wanted their excitement about God too. They told me I needed to “plug in” to everything. All of it. I would need to square-dance with strangers, “share” in intimate small small groups, and go up to people I didn’t know on campus and tell them about my faith.

This sounded fantastic to me! … Except for the square dances with strangers, the sharing in intimate small groups, and also the part about going up to people I didn’t know on campus and telling them about my faith.

Imagine if Noah wrote a book: How to Get God to Speak to You Five Times over 950 Years.

In Genesis, we get Abraham going decades without God’s audible voice. Isaac apparently heard it twice in his lifetime. Rebekah? Once.

Maybe God is like one of those Food Network master chefs, on one of those shows where they give cooks some random, odd ingredients and then challenge them to make a gourmet meal out of them. (“Okay, here’s a halibut, a gourd, and a Hostess Ding Dong.³ Go.”)

Maybe this is why Jesus’ stories are metaphors. Maybe you noticed He rarely picked individual people and didn’t name anyone to make his point. He never said, “Let me tell you about that time that Andrew here was really awesome and helped an old lady across the street and…”

I suspect He refrained from doing that because He knows us so well. He knows we’d instantly start missing the point and worshiping The Perfect Andrew and reenacting The Holy Crossing of the Street in yearly festivals.

Jesus takes the idea that we should treat some as more important than others and He burns it down, salts the fields around it, dissolves the whole thing in acid, and then hits it with a hydrogen bomb … and then we decide to do it anyway.

For example: He says we shouldn’t use religious titles (Matt. 23:8-12). I’m but a simple man, so I don’t understand all the theological and cultural complexities. But apparently higher minds than mine have unpacked the nuance behind, “Don’t use religious titles,” and found that He meant, roughly, “Hey, you guys should totally use religious titles!”

Well, I couldn’t really agree with that last one more if I tried, so let’s leave things there – with a thank you to Brant Hansen for writing the book, and an even bigger thank you to God that the conclusions reached in the book are true. To all the misfits out there: welcome to the club. We might be a weird bunch – weird and annoying and incapable, with too many ongoing struggles and no great spiritual achievements under our belts – but I can tell you for certain, our God is truly spectacular.

Footnotes

¹ Eight seventy-five? Bargain and a half. https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Brant-Hansen/Blessed-Are-the-Misfits--Great-News-for-Believers-who-are/21004854

² I blogged to similar effect in ‘Blessed Dissatisfaction’ back in July. I probably owe more of my argument there than I even realised then to having read Blessed Are the Misfits.

³ Apparently a kind of small, round, snack chocolate cake, with a cream filling and a chocolate glaze (I had to look it up).

Social Media, Sin, and the Spirit

Bethany:          Where is my phone?

Fridge:             Who cares?

Martha:           We are in different bodies! It doesn’t seem like the most pressing concern at this moment.

Bethany:          Really? You don’t think this would be a good moment to make a call, or text somebody, or change your status to “stuck in a video game”?

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)¹

 

What a lot of likes. Like, you’ll notice, is a noun now, and friend is a verb.

I had it all figured out.

I was going to write a post called ‘If You Think Social Media Is Bad, You’re Doing It Wrong’, and I was going to talk about the good and helpful and uplifting things that using social media can achieve. I was going to talk about how easy it is now to keep up with friends that you no longer see in person – perhaps you only really hung out with them for a year or a season, but you still care about how they’re getting on – and find out when they start a new career or move country or get engaged or whatever else. I was going to talk about how helpful it can be to be able to check out people’s profiles: with people you’re going to meet in person shortly, to get a sense of what to expect, for instance, or with your friend’s new significant other to see whether or not you approve. I was going to talk about how thought-provoking it can be to read news articles and opinion pieces that pop up on your timeline because someone you follow shared them; it gives you a window into perspectives you wouldn’t necessarily seek out for yourself. I was going to talk about how much beautiful artwork and hilarious memes can brighten up a dull moment of the day, and how the global nature of the Internet means it can connect you with people whose interests and tastes and sense of humour nestle in almost exactly the same weird niche as yours.² I was going to talk about how much fun it is to be able to chuck requests for recommendations or suggested meet-ups into the digital ether and see how people you’d never have thought to ask in person respond; this year, for instance, I ended up going round the British Library’s summer exhibition on the history of writing with a random assortment of ten of my friends as a result of a Facebook post in which I wondered whether anyone would like to go with me.³ I was going to talk about the vast support networks one can call upon through online means, the way one can mobilise people all over the world to pray for a very specific concern. I was going to talk about all these opportunities social media gives us to be more and better connected with one another.

And I was going to shrug off all that stuff people say about how social media fosters jealousy and insecurity, as you watch everyone else showing off how brilliant their lives are and feel that yours fails to match up. It’s not something I’ve experienced very much – probably to some degree because my newsfeed tends to consist more of thought-provoking opinion pieces and hilarious memes than other people’s photographs of their ostensibly perfect lives, and to some degree because my aspirations and ideas of perfection are a bit off-piste – and so I sort of don’t see the problem. If it makes you sad, well, stop looking at it. But you know, why should hilarious memes make you sad? And I was likewise going to shrug off the complaint that we’re all glued to our devices all the time, that our private digital universes are killing off face-to-face interaction: I might not be that old but I’ve lived long enough to know that people have always wanted excuses and pretexts to escape human company for a bit; a phone is surely just a very effective and conveniently pocket-sized excuse of this type. If it’s getting in the way, well, stop looking at it. If the thing’s got out of hand, just stop. Don’t blame the product, with all its myriad benefits, for your own lack of self-control. If you think social media’s bad, you’re doing it wrong.

I had it all figured out. But then it suddenly hit me that actually, I was doing it wrong. I’d let it get out of hand. I couldn’t stop.

I’d got to a point where scrolling Facebook was essentially the default resting state of my brain. Every idle moment, there I was opening the app before I’d even realised what I was doing. It’s funny how it starts to feel like a need – how if I spend a few hours away from my phone, I get this strange sense of relief when I go back to it and start scrolling. Does this sound alarmingly like an addiction to you? Because once I actually started articulating this stuff to myself, it certainly sounded alarmingly like an addiction to me.

I hadn’t expected this. I suppose because I didn’t really relate to the problems people most often raised in connection with social media – the jealousy, the comparison, the pressure to present perfection – I thought I was immune to letting it foster sin in me. I wasn’t that girl. My Instagram consists primarily of pictures of interesting things I’ve found in museums; I think I’ve only taken one selfie in my life; I didn’t even have any social media accounts until I was sixteen, or a mobile phone until I was eighteen; I sometimes feel as if I would fit more easily into the society of a hundred years ago than I do into the current one.⁴ I couldn’t end up addicted to social media, in slavery to it, ruled by the need to look at it and letting that, rather than love or fear of God, shape my behaviour. Some people could, granted, but surely not I.

Well, that was blooming stupid, wasn’t it? It’s the sins you don’t think will ever get you that’ll do the most damage when they do. And make no mistake, every addiction – every way in which our attention is demanded and our affections diverted and our actions dictated by something other than God – is slavery and idolatry and sin. And sin must be killed, resolutely and ruthlessly. But that isn’t necessarily as straightforward to actually achieve as it sounds. Social media isn’t inherently bad – everything I said above about its benefits remains true – so just cutting it out altogether and calling the problem fixed is no real solution. The problem isn’t the product; it’s I. But of course, I, my heart and soul and self, am rather more difficult to fix than a mere product would be.

I tried a few things. I uninstalled the Facebook app so that I’d have to go through the mildly more inconvenient process of opening the site in my web browser in order to start scrolling, which I hoped might make me think twice rather than just start doing it automatically. And yeah, that helped a bit. I also imposed a rule on myself that I mustn’t let going on my phone be the first thing I did in a day – my morning routine, including devotional time, was always to precede it. And yeah, that helped a bit too. I tried to impose another rule that I mustn’t do any mindless scrolling after a certain point in the evening, but I found it impossible to enforce, because I use my phone for so many things (including as an alarm clock) and so there were just too many exceptions for the rule to do the job of covering any particular territory properly.

 

Not sure I’m ready to revert to this sort of thing having got used to my phone’s gentle waking tones of a morning.

So if you were hoping for an inspiring rehabilitatory journey, or a step-by-step self-help precedent, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you. I don’t yet know how I’m going to continue to treat the problem. But what I am certain of is the need to continue to treat it. Sin must be killed. I may at some stage, therefore, end up trying a slightly more extreme solution than the minor adjustments I’ve made so far. Still, even if I do, that won’t really be the solution as such. It’ll be a tool in my hands – any more than that is just replacing one slavery with another.

Rules don’t make anyone righteous. If even the perfect Law, as directly revealed by God himself, couldn’t do it because it was weakened by the flesh, what chance does any other command or regulation stand? The law to which we are now subject is the law of the spirit, by which we are set free from every slavery. To live according to the law of the spirit is to set the mind on the things of the spirit. It’s not to impose constraints on the impulses of my flesh; it’s to drown them out with something better. If your spirit’s not alive, your flesh is all you’ve got, but we’ve been made alive in spirit, and so we can put the flesh to death because we have something better to fill up its place. Our old selves are already dead with Christ, our new selves alive in him; we don’t put the former to death in order to die, but in order to live more fully by clearing away the dead stuff.⁵

This is true in all areas of life, no less online than anywhere else. I’m never going to stop scrolling Facebook from being my default resting state by just forcing myself not to scroll Facebook; rather, that impulse needs to be usurped by something greater. I need to set my mind on the things of the spirit and let them clear away the dead stuff of the flesh. How? Well, scripture, prayer, meditation, and the encouragement of the saints, of course. How else is one supposed to get anything done?

I was going to write a post called ‘If You Think Social Media Is Bad, You’re Doing It Wrong’. But in light of what I’ve talked about, I would have had to subtitle it ‘If You Don’t Think It’s Bad, You Might Still Be Doing It Wrong’. There are a heck of a lot of things in the world that aren’t particularly good or bad in and of themselves, but that will nonetheless ensnare us in slavery and idolatry and sin given half a chance – not because of what they’re like, but because of what we’re like, weak in the flesh. But the remedy is always the same: to set the mind on the spirit; to consider what God has done for us in sending Jesus in the likeness of sinful flesh to condemn sin in the flesh, to leave the flesh dead and make our spirits alive with him – and thereby to have our attention and affections and actions realigned to reflect that phenomenal, earth-shattering, splendid and glittering truth. Mere rules won’t make us any more righteous, but wonderfully, graciously, the law of the spirit will. My old self is doing social media wrong; my new self is as perfectly righteous in all spheres of life as her Saviour. The nature of the task now is only to nourish and grow the latter so as to clear away the dead stuff of the former.

Footnotes

¹ Thanks as usual to Springfield! Springfield! for the script: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=jumanji-welcome-to-the-jungle. I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve ascribed all the lines to the right people, as I was doing it from memory, so apologies if not.

² A recent discovery I’m pleased to have made is Steve the Vagabond and Silly Linguist: https://www.facebook.com/stevethevagabond/.

³ The exhibition is closed now, but to give you a sense of it, here’s a very fun article about the development of the alphabet: https://www.bl.uk/history-of-writing/articles/the-evolution-of-the-alphabet.

⁴ Though I can’t say I fancy the idea of living through two world wars, so you know, I’ll take what I’ve got.

⁵ I’m basically getting all this out of Romans 8: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+8&version=ESVUK. Do check it out, a) to see whether you think I’m handling it legitimately and b) because it’s kind of the best chapter in the whole Bible.