We come to Christianity with a whole host of problems. We come with the wounds life has inflicted on our flesh and our souls. We come searching for solutions to our pain—a salve to smear over the scars we carry with us every day. We come, because that’s the promise, isn’t it? That there’s a loving God out there who knows us and has a wonderful plan for our lives. That, if we’d just trust him, he’d make it all go away—all the heartache and hardship, all the choices and consequences we’ve been running from. Poof. Like a genie he’ll vanish it all and we can, for once, be happy. Be safe. Be home.

It doesn’t take long for the tension to start twisting our insides, though. Something’s off, we think, as we move onto the road of the Christian life. Sure we’re promised that God is kind and generous and loves us dearly. But our problems don’t go away. The wounds don’t all heal. In fact, we tend to gather more. Just by living we earn lacerations on the deep parts of ourselves. Cancer and death come for people we love. Our children say goodbye on the phone and we have no idea that it’s the last time they’ll say anything to us at all.

But God is good! We say it like a chant as we push our palms into eyes bleeding tears yet again. God is good. We whisper it in the chilling hours of night, when the shadows stretch their fingers for our faces and sink claws into our brains. God is good. We spit it from clenched teeth as rage rips through our chest while we sit and watch justice in our world crumble like a house in a hurricane.

Isn’t God good?

That, at least, is the Christianity that I thought I signed up for as a kid. I grew up the son of a seminarian father and a missionary mother. Their faith was baked into the food we ate and kept us warm at night in the winter. We suffered, yes. I grew up well below the poverty line, wasn’t sure I’d have presents at Christmas, and we made all kinds of sacrifices as a family for the faith. When I was in high school my dad came within a whisper of death’s door, and in college my mom crossed the threshold completely. My whole world—especially when faced with that emptiness we call death—came apart piece by piece. My vision of Christianity wasn’t strong enough to account for my pain. It couldn’t blot my bleeding soul fast enough. The shadows snuck in too swiftly and too deep. I white–knuckled the cliffside of hope, my feet slipping on rocks that suddenly went slick with my own tears. In the face of pain, suffering, and death, it felt like Christianity as a religion, relationship, or ritual simply didn’t work.

The hope that our struggling vision of Christianity offers is that there’s something inside that cave.

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It’s easy to treat Christianity like it’s a therapy—a complex system of exercises and medicines we can apply to our aching selves and find relief. Relief from relationships gone bad or relief from the crushing consequences of decisions we made long ago. Some of us come to Christianity because there’s nothing left in the bottom of the bottle to take the edge off life.

We’re stuck on this road called life, but it’s full of snagging thorns and slicing shale and we cannot get off it. So naturally we turn to someone else to lift our feet and set them somewhere safe. We see the solution to our suffering—to walking this withering road—as the highest good we can get before the reaper comes for us. And the great promise of Christianity is that something hovers there beyond death—a life after death! A second life that won’t leave our skin in tatters and our souls flayed to ribbons.

But this life doesn’t change. This life continues on much as it did before despite the fact that we follow Jesus. Sometimes it gets harder. We feel the biting words of family–turned–enemies. We limp on limbs long left useless by bad genetics. Life doesn’t change. The therapy—if that’s how we use our faith—doesn’t work.

Now, I realize that not all Christians explicitly approach their faith as a contract, expecting God to come through for them when life gets hard and patting him on the back once life gets good again. We have language codified into our rhythms of faith that talks about suffering, about “these present trials,” and about taking up our crosses. We talk about the hardships of life as not worth fretting about, because compared to life–after–death, it’ll all seem like just a dream. But we have to talk about suffering that way because we have no other reason for it to exist in our matrix of faith. Except, well, maybe that it helps make us into a better person.

Everything comes to a head when we face our own deaths. Yes, the little cuts of life bleed us. But only death snuffs out all light. It’s like a cave that looms at the end of this road we’ve been on for twenty or thirty or sixty or a hundred years. We might have climbed through thorns, scraped a shin on a jutting rock, or slipped in the mud. But we kept walking. When we face death, however, the road ends. Only an empty shadow awaits. And we find ourselves clinging to the nebulous hope of a life–after–death and asking for just a few more minutes. A few more breaths. A few more words. A few more moments with the people who’ve made this road we’ve walked a bit sweeter.

Christianity is a way of dying.

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The hope that our struggling vision of Christianity offers is that there’s something inside that cave. That after we go in, we’ll magically materialize in another realm. A place without thorns or rocks or slick mud. Only happiness and the people we loved who died before we did. We hope because that’s what our Christian theology tells us. But that’s all we have—hope. No one in living memory has walked into death’s cave and lived to tell about it.

From the moment we’re born, we set our feet on a road that will end in death. We cannot leave the road and we can’t change its destination. We have no idea how long or short it might be. We get what we get and, as I tell my kids, we shouldn’t throw a fit. Except we do. Often. And loudly. Because there’s something in the human psyche that understands that this road we’re on is wrong. We’re not supposed to be on the path we’re walking, and we riot against it with every fiber of our being. It’s only when we’ve spent our youthful energy raging against the rails on either side of the road that we start rationalizing it away.

But the thing is, Jesus the son–of–Adam, son–of–God removed the burden from our shoulders of dealing with this road we’re not supposed to walk. Christianity—properly understood—isn’t a therapy or a theological matrix to answer life’s most pressing questions. Christianity is a way of dying. But in order to understand how and why, we first need to understand how we got on this wrong road in the first place.