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Most Christians have a codependent relationship with God. I believe it is the number one reason many Christians, especially fundagelicals, cannot grow beyond their beliefs of "us vs them."
The ability to incorporate healthy perspectives of another is co-opted by a singular perspective of what they are taught "God wants."
Wikipedia:A codependent is someone who cannot function on their own and whose thinking and behavior is instead organized around another person, process, or substance. They place a lower priority on their own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others."
Doesn't this sound like every evangelicals relationship with God? Gods "needs" take center stage in their life and bit by bit the "self" is chiseled away till there is only a hollowed out cistern where doctrine, dogma, and the preferred interpretation of those things fill it.
The very thing that I believe makes us precious, our uniqueness and humanness and desires, we dismantle and consider trash. We trade it for a very narrow, colorless, interpretation of "what God wants."
We are not valuable because we are image bearers. That is a watered down, thoughtless definition of our value. I believe we are valuable because in our uniqueness we have the ability to create and make choices just as we say God does.
We are valuable because we are finite beings. We are expressions of love and creativity within ourselves. Not because someone "chose" to make us that way but because we are. I don't need God to tell me you hold immense value.
If my value as a human was dependant on those who made me I'd be up shit creek with out a paddle or boat. I'd be drowning.
It is such common practice in the church to trade away our needs and desires for a dogmatic ideal based on some narrow interpretation of an ancient cultures religious way of life. We literally give away our power and agency when we do this. We become codependent acolytes.
None of this is the way of Love. Love says I want you but codependency says I need you. How many worship songs have you sang where you are desperately needing God? That is codependency.
We forever stay in this state of obsessive needing and don't heal those parts of us that would navigate life well through Love. If we healed those parts we wouldn't need someone else to tell us what love is or what right and wrong is.
The divine in us, that we are, would be activated and we could trust ourselves to decide what ever decisions need to be made.
We need to come back to ourselves. We need to rediscover our needs and desires and hear the spirit within as she whispers what Love is. We need to stop giving away our agency and power to any system that demands obedience at the expense of who we are as humans.
