Karen Spears Zacharias, like other writers, can’t write without it becoming memoir-ish and personal and personally divulging. So, in Where’s Your Jesus Now?, she doesn’t just talk about fear; she reveals her own fears.
I wonder if pastors deal much with fear in the congregation? How do parents deal with fear in their children?
Fears of flying — the chp is hilarious too, fears about public toilets, fears about all kinds of things.
She’s learned about God — that God loves us, that we can come to God, that God listens. That God is not out to get us, that some folks — like the father she tells about who thought his daughter’s near-death when she walked in front of a train was God’s way of getting his daughter’s attention — are sadly mistaken about what God is like.
She finishes off a chp with these words, words born of the learning that comes after one has learned to cease wringing one’s hands:
“I only know that when I pray, God hears me. My doubts. My fears. My cries for help. My gratitude. My songs of praise. And even the most inaudible, inarticulate of prayers, he hears. And never once has he said to me, there’s no room for your doubts. Nor has he ever suggested that I ought to go about claiming stake to anything — health or money or big screen TVs. The gifts he gives are given out of his good pleasure, not because of who we are, what we believe, what we claim. If there is anything I know for sure about God, it’s that he doesn’t barter in Green Stamps” (79).
Theology emerging from experience is a theology that takes on reality.
I think it is Karen’s experience with Christians, with those who suffer, with her own past, with her family … all rolled up into one … that leads her to give an ear-full to Anne Coulter. She calls her the grand poobah.