To Be Holy

“Holiness, holiness, it’s what I long for.

Holiness,  it’s what I need.

Holiness, holiness is what You want from me.”

~Holiness, Sonicflood

            If you grew up in the church then you probably have heard that song before. You’ve probably stood in front of a pew, or sat in one, and sang the lyrics. You’ve probably acted on auto pilot, knowing that once you sang the song you’d be moving on to the next thing in the service lineup. But have you took time to think about those lyrics? Take a moment and look at them. Notice something? Do you notice how the word holiness is repeated five times in those three lines?

           What is holiness?

           

 This isn’t an easy question to answer and, for the longest time, I didn’t have an answer to it.

  

          I grew up in the church. From the time I was a baby I had heard of holiness. My mother was known to sing the song Holiness while doing housework. She’d sing it to me to get me to fall asleep. It is one of those church hymns that have always been present in my life.

            My friends and I would stand between our parents in church. Our eyes trained on the hymnals one of our parents held. We’d read the words. Sing the words. We’d sway a bit to the soft music. We never questioned their meaning. I guess it was because, at the time, holiness was something we associated with goodness. If you were holy then you were good. Being told to be holy was the same thing as being told to behave. Wasn’t it? That’s what we thought. In our young years we comprehended that eight letter word as meaning the same thing as a four letter one. We didn’t understand the true depth of it.

            As I grew up, that word made multiple appearances in my life. I still didn’t think about it much though. That is until I reached my teen years. The teen years are a hard time in anyone’s life. Changing, growing, trying to figure out where you fit in and wondering if it’s worth it to have a certain reputation if the cost of it is yourself. It’s tough. I know. I’ve been there.

            At about fourteen is when everyone started asking questions. I have to admit, I never really voiced my own. I felt as if I should already know the answers, what with growing up with the parents I did. You see, my parents were the people my friends were asking the questions to. My dad was the youth pastor and he explained to my friends, and I considering I was listening, what certain aspects of our belief were.

            By seventeen, my dad and one of my friend’s moms were my youth pastors. Again people were asking questions. We had lived through three more years and wanted more in-depth answers than the ones we had been given before. No surprise there. As one grows they yearn for knowledge and we had reached the age where we could fully understand the answers to our questions. I didn’t though.

            I could explain to you what entire sanctification was. I could tell you why my denomination doesn’t use wine for communion. I would have debates with my friends over whether or not once-saved-always-saved was legit or not. I was a Nazarene girl who went to a Lutheran high school. I had plenty of opportunities to talk to my friends about our different denominations’ beliefs. But every Wednesday was when my youth group would meet. We’d all pile into the upstairs room of our church and gather around a pool table, or chat on the sofas for a half hour, until our leaders announced it was time for the lesson.

            I remember one night, sitting on a worn green couch. It was seriously one of the ugliest couch ever, but it was comfy and soft. One of my friends were sitting beside me as I leaned against the arm of the couch and our leaders sat among us. I can’t tell you what the lesson was that night. We hardly ever finished a lesson. We’d start talking on one subject, then someone would have a serious question, and we’d spend the time discussing their question. This suited us. Though not all of us were the best of friends, none of us were too afraid to ask ‘hypothetical’ questions. We knew what was said in that room stayed among those gathered.

            That night, one of the leaders used the word holiness and one of my peers asked what exactly holiness was. I wish I could tell you what answer was given, but I don’t remember. That’s because it wasn’t an answer I understood. My peers seemed to understand it. They seemed to grasp the concept and move on, but to me the answer might as well been, “Holiness is a purple elephant that lives in Indonesia and dances the cha-cha on the weekends.” Seriously, I didn’t understand holiness, but I wasn’t going to ask my youth leaders for further explanation. I never even asked my dad when we got home from the meeting. I just dealt with it.

            Holiness wasn’t something I was that concerned with. I was curious about it’s meaning, but not curious enough to forget that voice in my head that was telling me that I would look like an idiot if I asked someone what it meant. So, I went on with life. I went to school, I went to youth group, I talked about Christianity and beliefs with my peers, but holiness wasn’t really thought about again.

            “Holiness, holiness, is what I long for. Holiness, is what I need.” I sang those words in church on Sundays. I listened to my Sunday school teacher talk about what it meant to live a Christian life and I asked questions on occasion. Holiness though…that question remained on the back burner, simmering away underneath the protective lid I had placed upon it.

            A year went by and I graduated high school. I had gotten into the college I wanted and was ready to leave everything in Nebraska behind. I’m going to be flat out honest, I wanted a change. I wanted to be out of my comfort zone. I was aiming for complete and total unrecognizable surroundings. That’s why I planned on going to California. It turned out that my decision to not go to California and stay a little closer to home was a good thing.

            I ended up going to a university in Kansas. I’m still there and still in love with the campus and all the friends I’ve made. It was in my second semester of my freshman year there that I took the holiness pan off the back burner.

            At my university, everyone has to take Bible classes. Two of those required are Old Testament and New Testament. It was a couple weeks into my old testament class that my professor walked in and said that he heard a song on the radio that he thought we should all hear. The song turned out to be an Addison Road song, called What do I know of Holy.

            My professor, who I won’t tell you the name of because I don’t have his permission to use it, played the song for us all to hear. As I sat there, watching the video and listening to the lyrics, that old question resurfaced. The song had a point. What did I know of holy? What was holiness? I still didn’t voice these questions however, and my professor never brought them up.

            Almost every class, my professor played that song. He taught us our lesson, show us clips from the brick Bible (it’s a pretty cool thing, actually. It’s the Bible, using Legos) and prepare us for our quizzes. After every class, he’d dismiss us with a four word phase. He didn’t say goodbye, or you’re dismissed. He didn’t tell us the class was done and to remember to study. He’d do all his quiz reminders than look at us, his eyes scanning over the full desks, and say, “Go and be holy.” Every time. Every single time, he’d say the same thing. “Go and be holy.”

            I found myself thinking about holiness more and more. I ended up buying Addison Road’s song from Itunes and listening to it on my daily walks. I became entranced by the song. There was something about it that had me captured. I realize now what it was. That song was saying, asking, the very thing I had been for years. It didn’t really give an answer to what holiness was. It didn’t say to be holy is to….it just asked, and that’s why I liked it. I spent an entire semester listening to that song, learning that song. I felt the need to learn it, to memorize it, to engrave it on my soul. I listened to it in class, on my walks, and thought about my professor’s words. Still, I asked, what is this holy you speak of? And still I never voiced that question.

            Finals rolled around and between packing, working, and finals I didn’t take as much time to ponder over holiness. I cared more about passing classes. People kept freaking me out. Freshman year, I was new, upperclassmen thought it was fun to terrify us of our finals. “You need to study really hard. His finals are super tough.” Just so you know, they were all lying. So far, I’ve only had one time that someone has told me a teacher was a living nightmare and I ended up agreeing with them.

            On the day of my Old Testament final, I was tired. I had stayed up all night the night before, working on an extra credit assignment for the same class because I didn’t know how well I’d end up doing on the final and I wanted to make sure I had some cushioning. Don’t call me an over achiever. I see you snickering. I don’t do extra credit often. I usually spend any extra time I have writing or hanging out with friends. As it turned out, I didn’t really have to fret over that final.        

  

          I remember walking into the class, sitting my stuff down, pulling out a pencil and staring down at a piece of paper in front of me. The test was turned over, I couldn’t see it, what the Professor said instantly had me nervous.

            “You’re going to have an essay.”

            “Oh crap. Oh crap. Oh crap.” That’s what was going through my mind. A first year English student and I already dreaded essays. Why? Because when you’re an English student your essays are practically papers. I’m not talking your normal two paragraph writing explaining a subject. I’m talking full on introduction, body, and conclusion. If you really wanted a good grade on an essay you shot for three or four paragraphs. I was worried that I’d run out of things to talk about the subject given, but when I turned over that paper, my professor started playing that Addison Road song again.

            At the top of the paper, typed out in black Times New Roman font, was this question, “What does it mean to be holy?”

            Now, with as much as I asked that question without coming up with an answer, you’d think I’d be freaking out even more at that point. I wasn’t though. I was calm. I was actually relieved. As the song played I picked up my pencil and kind of stared around me for a bit, gathering my thoughts. There were a couple Ministry majors writing away in front of me. Their hands were working quickly over their page. Then there were a few people staring blankly down at their pages, and those writing at a relatively normal pace. I set the tip of my pencil to the paper, allowing myself to soak in the lyrics of the song filling the room, and I began to write.   

            I won’t tell you all I wrote, for I ended up writing one and a half pages worth of an answer, but all I wrote could be summed up in the first sentence of my essay….

            To be holy is to be all you can be for Christ.

            You may disagree with me. You may think I’m a crack, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but to me that was the first time I grasped that concept. I’m still young. I’m only in my twenty-first year of life, and the things I experience and learn from this point on could end up shaping my view of holiness. I might come back to this writing in five years and think, holiness is also about….or to be holy you have to…I really don’t know, but right here, right now, to be holy means to be all I can be for Christ. To be myself, and nothing but myself, and to use all that He has given me (my likes, my dislikes, my talents, and my weaknesses) for Him.

            After nineteen years of wondering what holiness actually was, I grasped onto a part of it. All thanks to a professor and a song. I’m going to leave you now, and I may be leaving you even more confused than when you started reading. If I am, I’m sorry. If you disagree with my thoughts, anything that I’ve said, than good for you. I’m not asking you to accept my views. I’m not asking you to say that my definition of being holy is right, but I am asking you to think about holiness. I want to ask you something. One, simple, six worded question….

            What does it mean to be holy?

            And I am giving to you the same challenge my professor gave to my class each and every time we met….

            Go and be holy.