I have lately been hearing two phrases that are beginning to jar against my Christian sensibilities. They are “God’s best for you,” and “Best Practices.” Obviously, these two phrases are uttered aloud in two very different realms. “Best Practices” is the kind of thing you hear when you are looking for help writing a grant or trying to ascend into the ranks of higher academia or trying to figure out how to organize the military. I imagine if I were in a place where HR held sway over my life, “best practices” would be cluttering up my inbox. The first time I heard it I said, “What,” but then I said, “Never mind,” because I knew exactly what was being encouraged.
“Best Practices” is the bane of modernity. It means that almost all the quirks and curiosities have been smoothed away and that whatever you’re trying to do will be made to look like everything else that has already been done. “Best Practices” is what happens when your work is measured against Chat GPT’s marriage to “Human” Resources. “Best Practices” produces box buildings with no visual interest of any kind. “Best Practices” is having to become an expert on zoom instead of being allowed to wander out into the garden to smash slugs.
“God’s best for you,” on the other hand, is a many-layered curiosity. There are a whole lot of circumstances under which one might say, “I want God’s best for you” or “That’s not God’s best for you.” In the latter case, I have heard people say it with true anxiety when someone was about to do something gravely sinful or was facing an unbearable temptation. “God’s best for you,” for example, is never going to include anger, or, bitterness, or, breaking any of the ten commandments. It is a way of trying to say that God has something much better in store for you than whatever you might be contemplating in the darkness of anxiety or despair. It also says, truly, that there is some standard by which God is measuring what you do and who you are. There is a “best.” There is something that supersedes your ideas of “good” or even “better.”
But I am now sometimes hearing “God’s best for you” in a new way. The expression isn’t used in reference to the avoidance of sin. Rather, it is creeping into the more nebulous and ill-defined kingdom of Flourishing. It appears within the subjective morass of ennui, of not knowing what to do or what God might be doing. It is adjacent to the Prosperity Gospel. It has a ring of “you shouldn’t settle for anything less than you deserve.”
I am thinking of it today because yesterday my church lost one of our members unexpectedly. She didn’t leave the church. She died.
This was a person who you—if you have spent any time in the Christian life—would have wondered where God even was. This was a person whose life looked a lot more like Job than Abraham. She was ill in body. She suffered terribly emotionally and spiritually. She lost all her worldly goods. She was plagued with terror by night and by day, no matter what anyone did to comfort her.
If I were God—you can be glad, of course, that I am not—I would have arranged for her life in a very different kind of way. I would have, if I had had the power to do it, healed her mind and body many days, if not years ago. Which is to say, as we have tried to care for and minister to her, I have wondered a lot whether God was doing his “best” or even anything at all.
I know that most people who are thinking about “God’s best” for themselves or other people in the realm of “flourishing” are not trying to be bad. By no means. No one wants to suffer or to see other people suffer, especially at the hands of wicked people. Suffering—emotional, spiritual, or physical—is the very antithesis of “good” or “best” or any of the ways that we, in this broken and ruined realm, measure all our days. Avoiding it is the right thing to do. Keeping others from having it is often the call. Smoothing away the difficulties and troubles of others is good and godly.
But the Christian, if she is going to endure until the end, has to reconsider the human category of “best.” The way that God works out his many works is not in the way that we work ours. We assemble all our “best practices” and then, to our astonishment and horror, God’s best for us includes pain we never thought we would have to endure, disappointment we never anticipated, failure we tried so desperately hard to avoid, defeat, and yes, sometimes even falling into sin.
How can this be? Why would God let someone, no matter the efforts of all those around her, die in trouble and torment? Why wouldn’t she—and everyone—be allowed to “flourish?” For surely, the person who died yesterday did not flourish in this life as I would understand that word.
The only way to understand it, I suppose, is to look at what God did when we had done our “best.” He stood up, wrapped a towel around his waist, knelt, and washed away the grime off the feet of those he had called to walk in his footsteps. And then he stood up and went to his own death.
The cross is such a troubling subversion of all our expectations and ways. You do your “best” and the end result is your certain death. But God, who desires not the death of sinners, but that they should turn to him and live, goes into your place and takes all the suffering and terror and alienation onto himself. He does this for anyone who calls upon his name, no matter the desolations and grief of this dry and barren land.
And then, having died, he stands up again in his body, having destroyed your greatest foe. Your suffering and death, it turns out, was only a shadow, a sigh, a mere breath compared to the glory of a life that lasts forever with him.
Have a nice day!
Amen. As ever, Anne, you are perfectly in tune with my linguistic sensibilities. The expression "best practices" came seemingly out of nowhere toward the end of my teaching career. It was everywhere! Even back then, I predicted that some chucklehead would publish a book called "Best Practices of the Christian Life." I am sure it won't be long now.
Since I started working as an engineer in 1988 (and, come to think of it, even during the 5 years before that as a public school teacher), "Best Practices" has been the bane of my existence, too!
"It means that almost all the quirks and curiosities have been smoothed away and that whatever you’re trying to do will be made to look like everything else that has already been done."
Exactly. Dull people look on creativity as a breeding ground for deviation from the norm and even (gasp!) mistakes. It is an obvious truth that nothing new was ever invented by someone following Best Practices.* Every time (thinking mostly of my engineering career) I have been forced to knuckle under to Best Practices, a little part of me died. Thanks for putting this so clearly.
*Actually, the Best Practices philosophy is so pernicious and invasive, that it has made at least one attempt to govern creativity and invention, through something called TRIZ. It was first developed within the Soviet Navy beginning in 1946, and gives a set of best practices by which you can (supposedly) make new discoveries.