Spiritual Birth Control: Why Passing on Pain Isn't A Good Idea Confession. I have attempted - more than once - to abandon the Church. However, as it turns out, I am not particularly successful at running away.

I feel less like the actually-missing person on the Amber Alert and more like the kid who got mad at my parents, packed up my backpack, and took off to live in the tree fort in the backyard.

I may be camping on the outskirts of the church sometimes, but I have never managed to get out of the country. Fortunately, before I packed my U-Haul and relocated to some distant philosophical peninsula far away from the Church, I figured something out: progress is not painless.

Life bears out this principle time and time again. Take birth pains for instance. I've yet to attempt childbearing myself, but I've watched enough women gritting their teeth while hissing "hee-heee-hooooooo" on the big screen to know if my house ever catches fire, the first thing I'm saving on my way out the door is my birth control.

You can't give birth to life - to beautiful newborn babies - without physical and emotional struggle. That is an accepted fact.

And yet, in my more immature moments, I expect my church to grow - in relevance, in compassion, in authenticity - without ever experiencing any birth pains. I expect the humans who make up the Church to function healthily - teaching small groups, preaching sermons, belting out worship tunes-- without ever disappointing one another.

I wish for some sort of miracle spiritual birth control where we can fast forward through all the church's failures and frustrations to being this deeper, wiser, group of God-like beings.

However, just because church people have the ability to match their clothes, facilitate a killer book discussion, or belt out on-key worship lyrics does not necessarily mean they have pure thought lives, a solid marriage, or the ability to always - without fail - act like true representatives of God.

This should be obvious. However, whenever I experience pain at the fallibility of the church, I am surprised.

Apparently, however, the fact that the humans who run the church are flawed is not a new revelation.

While imprisoned by other Christians, the 16th century priest St. John of the Cross, wrote a series of reflections entitled Dark Night of the Soul. In it, he described how the pain present in our normal life routines is a useful element of the Christian experience. As the pain slows us down and forces us into sometimes tense reflection, we often see things in the darkness that we would never see in the light.

After reflecting on this suffering leads to hope equation that the apostle Paul also mentions (Romans 5:3-5), I've come to suspect that the painful moments define the Christian church just as much or more than the bright ones. As a result, I've decided to end my quest for spiritual birth control and a painless spiritual journey.

After all, the pain part has been there all along. We often find ourselves walking in the valley of the shadow of death or eating in the presence of our enemies. However, in these contexts God can still somehow get us to the place where goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our lives.

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