Lately, I've been growing a lot in my experience of Christ and his blessings. I've felt the Lord working holiness in my life more than ever before. Paradoxically, I've also felt less holy. In view of our ongoing struggles with our oldest daughter (which you can read about here: ), I have become aware that I have been hiding from the presence of the Lord and supressing my emotions towards him. Consequently, I had felt more of a distance from him over the last couple of years. In God's good providence, he reminded me again of my utter helplessness and of the ways we avoid coming to Jesus with our hearts, especially our hurting hearts. In the following post, I will provide two extreme behaviors we as believers often engage in in order to avoid the person of Jesus. While the behaviors may seem to be completely antithetical to one another, they really have the same goal: distancing us from our savior.
Busyness
How much of our lives are characterized by a mission-oriented, goal-directed, task-focused kind of mentality? In the wake of consumerism and capitalism, we have turned the Protestant work ethic which we inherited from our Puritan forebearers into a kind of workaholic disposition. How do we imagine to experience the presence of Christ if we are continuously distracting ourselves with more projects? Often, we busy ourselves to avoid what the misery that silence brings, the onslaught of what C.S. Lewis called, "the Kingdom of Noise." We are too uncomfortable with ourselves in solitude and so therefore we lack true fellowship with the divine Son of God. Abandoning our work and experiencing Christ's presence is awkward, difficult, and troublesome to our consciences which are crowded with a thousand voices. When it seems as if the White Witch of Narnia has cursed our hearts with a perpetual winter, if we would but seek silence in the Lord, we might, like Edmund, finally hear the other noise properly: the running water of Spring. Instead of turning to returning phone calls for business, staying late in the office, mopping the floors, cutting the grass, raking the yard, we would be better to seek the uncomfortable quiet and authenticity of being before the Lord. Such an experience requires that we admit our vulnerability and helplessness though.
Bailing
If busyness tends to be the sinful proclivity of the Type A personality, bailing is the sinful proclivity of the Type B personality. By bailing, I am referring to escapism. There are many ways we can bail in today's modern world: e-mail, I-Phones, I-Pods, video games, e-books, actual books (a bygone relic), and the internet (more specifically for many: pornography). But really any of God's gifts can be turned into a form of bailing if we are avoiding an authentic, prayerful connection with Jesus. And this form of escapism that I have just mentioned is a more base or convenient kind of bailing. There is a more refined and subtle for which takes primarily in the mind and I call this abstraction. Abstraction is when we detach from the external world and live a life that is entirely in the intellect and world of ideas. Seminary students are excellent at this. I am excellent at this. I can get so attached and obsessed to an idea that I will neglect responsibilities God has placed right in front of me. More importantly, I can idolize my ideas so much (even my ideas about God) that I, ironically move further away from God and not closer to him. I place God in my theological categories and therefore I can harden and distance my heart from him over the real pain I experience over the sickness of Karis. Abstractions are safe. Suffering is not. I feel shame and hurt even writing this but I must repent.
Basking
If we are not to busy ourselves and if we are not to bail, then how do we relate to Christ? How do you relate to a friend? Do you treat that friend like a mission to be accomplished? Do you say, "Let's go to the park so I can check that off my list"? Do you bail from that friend by putting him in an abstract category (hipster, jock, intellectual, leader, etc.) that allows you to pigeonhold him but prevents you from appreciating him in all his variety and versatility? Jesus is not an assignment and he is not an abstraction. He is a Person. May we by God's grace get to know him.
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