Ann Voskamp, Pierre Bezukhov, and the Instagram Bible: The False Search for Emotional Fulfillment

I read two very different things these past weekends in the midst of cramming for midterms. The first is my favorite novel, Leo Tolstoy's immense War and Peace, and the second is well-known Christian writer Ann Voskamp's blog. One is something most will never read, and the other is a great source of encouragement to many.

Ann Voskamp is well-intentioned. She is a very flowery writer, and paints cinematically idealistic pictures of sorrow and joy through photography and videography. I first grew hesitant and skeptical of her when I noticed how borderline sexual her writing is when it comes to her relationship with God ("making love to Jesus, spirit-skin to spirit-skin" *shudders*). It is very mystic and rarely scriptural, though undoubtedly well-intended and thoughtful. In her newest video promoting her newest book, which admittedly I have not read and therefore will not judge, she suggests that the way to find the life we crave is to love the brokenness that we are and spread love to those around us. That, she says (without quoting scripture and mentioning Christ as a sort of postscript), is how we will find true fulfillment. Through our brokenness in a broken world through God's "broken promise" (a bad analogy, sadly. God has broken no promises and everything He does is perfect).

My mind went straight to War and Peace. The main character, Pierre, spends a part of his life with such a conviction. He slaves away working for his serfs and spending money on charity, and constantly tries to reach out to his adulteress wife to heal their marriage as she continually rejects him. He works to help his best friend Andrei and everyone around him with the best intentions of fixing himself and finding purpose in life and enjoying it more. But then when Andrei asks him how he is doing and what he is doing, Pierre responds starting by listing all of the charitable and selfless things he is doing, stutters, and then says hopelessly, "I have no idea what I am doing."

And a few months ago, I had a very similar answer.

Contrary to what Ann Voskamp says, life is not only about loving others. You will not find satisfaction in that alone. I was struggling with what was sometimes dark depression last winter, and I tried to solve it in this very way, just as she suggests and just as Pierre attempts in Tolstoy's novel. While spending time to help others certainly gave me brief pleasure and a sense of satisfaction, I still wasn't, as Voskamp puts it, "Finding the life I craved." I wanted that picturesque life in my mind, all full of lovely lighting that photographers love and quotable moments and happiness, all full of beauty and serving others, but like Pierre, I only found myself more exhausted and I had no idea what I was doing.

Here's why.

The reality is that if we are seeking a better life for ourselves by helping others, if we are seeking to perfect ourselves by helping others, if we are seeking a aesthetically pleasing, pretty, romantic life and happiness by the brief emotional espresso shots/pat on the back sensation of helping others alone, we will never, ever be satisfied. If we are claiming to find perfection and happiness in our own brokenness and sin, we will definitely never be happy. Why? Because our first purpose is not inward, but rather it is to glorify God.

If we are getting our scripture and God's holy infallible word from the Instagram Bible alone, if we are depending on aesthetically pleasing and pretty motivational blurbs with vague and fluffy words to push us through our first world lives and problems, we are not really looking for a relationship with God. We are looking to feel okay with where we are at. We are looking inward for emotional fulfillment. We are looking for our own idea of perfection. Hence the mysticism of Ann Voskamp's writings.

The reality is that our only perfection is found in Christ. As I said in my last post, we are all failures and will only ever be failures apart from Christ. God does not love our brokenness. He loves us despite our brokenness. He does not look to make us complacent in our brokenness, but rather works to (often painfully) burn the rotted dross of sin and sanctify us. This is not pretty. It is not aesthetic. It has no pretty soundtrack and has no script and will almost never fit our ideal. This reality will not make us New York Times bestsellers and it is not the reality the world (and probably not us either) wants to hear. We need to ask... are we actually seeking God first? Or are we seeking pleasure and putting Jesus as a postscript in pretty handwriting?

It is good to help people. It is good to love life. It is good to love the beautiful and good. But this should all be the fruit of seeking to glorify God and follow His Will first. And quite honestly, as someone who tried to find the aesthetic, emotional, Instagram life, I don't want that kind of first world, lavender lotion, piano riff, VSCO cam, and local coffee someone-give-me-motivation-to-do-my-laundry-and-homework-oh-life-is-so-hard Jesus. I want the almighty King of Heaven whose bloody, painful, violent death saved me from the depths of the fiery and damning hell where I deserved to go (and still deserve to go, except for His mercy). I want to glorify and sing the praises of the God who gave Paul and Silas the strength to sing loud, fierce praises at the bottom of a filthy, nasty-smelling prison cell with their legs jammed into stocks for the entire night. I want the Lord and Savior whose astounding grace motivated Ignatius of Antioch to suffer through being dragged three thousand miles with ten abusive Roman soldiers to Nero's Colosseum to be eaten alive by tortured lions in front of a jeering unsaved crowd and to write that he longed for eternity. These are true instances of brokenness, but instead of letting these situations break them and then holding on to their brokenness and saying "Oh! Look what I'm doing for Jesus!", these men set their eyes on Christ and sought to glorify God and not themselves and certainly not their lives.

Faith is not pretty, and neither is life. Making it pretty by embracing our sin and the effects of sin around us and photoshopping it will not help us, either. Trying to find satisfaction through charitable acts will not help us either, if we are not seeking and embracing Christ and His Word (His true Word, not Jesus Calling, not Hillsong United, not A Thousand Gifts. Time to put down the lens flare and flowers and pick up a Bible) first. For we do not find Christ in our brokenness. We find Christ in His Word and through there, realize our brokenness and the horror of it and seek repentance and sanctification. We are to rejoice in our suffering, as Paul calls us in Romans 5:3 and 4, but because of our hope in the glory of God. We are not called to revel in our problems and look for emotional nirvana. We are to look upward.

Call me Puritanical, but there really was something to the Puritans' plain methods of worship. While they may have stretched too far into rigidity, they focused more on God's Word and the preaching of it than on frills and feelings. Our Gospel is not an emotionally-driven, lacy one with nebulous, made up language that sounds pretty but means little. It is plain, simple, deep, unfathomable, yet within our grasp thanks to God's grace. It does not focus inward or outward but rather from our knees and upward, with the fruits therein extending inward and outward. It demands of us to work hard with a cheerful spirit, not to struggle through simple tasks while looking to other people for motivation. It is not pretty. It is glorious. And in it alone will we find true fulfillment, spiritually and emotionally.

Time to put down the chocolate milk of feel-good, pretty, vague devotional books, and time to open up the meat of the Word.

Romans 8