In computer programming, there is a language called HTML. You've probably heard of it. It's the language that nearly every website is built on. In fact, if you right-click on this page, and go to "view source," much of what you'll see is HTML. Since the very early days of the internet, HTML has been a staple. Through most of the 90's, the adolescent years of the internet, those blocky GeoCities sites, Myspace, and AltaVista were all coded in pure HTML. Then something almost magical happened. The advent of CSS. It's been called the "Holy Grail" of website programming. It ushered in the modern era of the internet. Sites looked astonishingly better, were much easier to navigate, and gained a level of visual engagement that had never been accomplished before.
At the risk of putting half of you to sleep, I tell this anecdote because it parallels my spiritual journey. CSS does not replace HTML, it breathes life into it. There was once a language that was adequate, that no one really minded, that was serviceable, but looking back, was just a shell of what it someday would be. It took something outside of itself to radically alter the landscape and forever change the experience.
For a long time, I lived with an HTML spiritual reality, where vanilla was the flavor of the month, every month, and the people around me looked like me and functioned like me, and it was nice. It was serviceable. But there were holes in the tapestry (sorry to mix metaphors), there were bugs in the code. I knew that there were unanswered questions that my spiritual life to that point couldn't address. If God is a God of wonder and might and amazing revelation, why wasn't I experiencing any of that?
My code had been written, from the moment of my birth, to experience God. But over time, that experience became more and more limiting. The politics of faith, the pretense of every question already asked and answered, the scaffold of a culture built to reinforce the spiritual status quo. All of this left me with a benign faith. Then, maybe ten years ago, I got my first glimpse of someone doing faith differently. It was my CSS moment. It was the first time I realized that God was not limited by the constraints that we put around him, that my boring faith wasn't a result of a boring Jesus, but that truly seeking him could breathe life, CSS-style, into my HTML existence. I felt free to ask the questions, seek the truth, and shed the falsehoods I'd long been believing.
I am still the same person I have always been, just like eBay has always been eBay. But looking at eBay form 1996, it is more than evident that something is different. CSS changed everything. In my life, discovering the Jesus I'd never known, has been the CSS to my HTML.
