Is God Still Awesome?

There are several words and phrases that I don't allow my 10th grade students to use in their essays because the words themselves have become so overused as to not mean anything specific any more; they are mere cliches. Cool, for instance. Or hang out. I've recently had to add the word awesome to the list as well, and that addition is painful to me.

The word used to mean something significant. It meant something awe-inspiring or an object or event that could fill one with awe or wonder. To be awesome, the object being described needed to essentially be so complex, so fascinating, so fearfully-made that it was beyond description. It had to make the viewer pause and just stare, mystified, trying to take it all in while knowing it could never be fully taken in.

Now it means neat, or something I enjoyed, or (to get to the heart of it) cool. It is used to describe video games or a football tackle or a song or the fact that we got out of work early. Meals, movies, commercials, and jokes are all totally, repeatedly, all-together awesome. And if everything can be awesome, then awesome can't mean what it meant once upon a time.

This bothers me most because churches have been heavy contributors to its overuse and abuse. It gets said about youth trips or worship songs or major events. We say that people did an awesome job, or the turnout was awesome, or we had awesome weather for what the church was doing, or we're going to have just an awesome, awesome time. And then, in the next breath, we say or sing about how awesome God is.

So which awesome do we mean? Fascinatingly, marvelously, all-encompassingly complex and wonderful and fearful? Or neat and convenient? I fear the latter. For it is the latter aspect of Christianity that gets much more play. But God is much, much more than a cool guy we can hang out with on a Sunday morning, have an awesome time with, and then move on.

To simplify God and describe Him using cliche is to risk completely missing who God is. C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity that, "God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror; the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion."

Is awesome a word we would use to describe "the supreme terror, the thing we most want to hide from"? If the answer is no, then perhaps we need a better understanding of who God is, or a different word with which to honor Him.

(***Obviously the fact that I'm currently leading a class on Lewis is contributing to a great deal of my thinking. Expect to see many Lewis quotes on the blog in the next month or so. That should be good news to my readers: he's way smarter than me.)