Itsara

I keep finding myself praying about the purpose of this weblog. It sounds stupid now that I say it, but I feel like I’ve wanted a place like this to voice my theological thoughts for so long and now I’m not sure what to do with it. Or rather (I’ve realized), I know what I want to do with it, but when it comes right down to it I want to do what God wants to do with it.

That’s hard. And in the process of praying about such a thing, I’ve come to realize my own mixed motives. You already know I want to change the world, but it’s hard when I realize that I’m trying to do it my way and that it is patently impossible for me to do so alone. I thought maybe I could save the lost with my writings or maybe I could turn a dying church back to its first love. And of course, a decent-sized part of me wanted to be noticed, which, if I did it my way, would be a pleasant side benefit.

I had a really good time talking with God on Tuesday though. I told Him, straight up, everything I wanted to do, everything I was tired of, everything I wished would be different. I felt like He refocused my attention, not on the non-Christians on the Internet, nor on the vague, faceless “American Church” I was trying to change, but on what He really cares about. On the people I actually know and love, the people who have faces (I’m talking about you guys - friends and family), and on the poor and the orphans - not on the Internet (it occurred to me the poor and orphans actually aren’t on the Internet), but in the real world - for me, specifically, in Thailand. If my focus isn’t there, then I’m wasting my time because that’s where God is. And more than anything, I want to be where God is.

It struck me a second time that day as I was reading The Cost of Discipleship (a book that I highly recommend to anyone who’s serious about following Christ - I’m sure I’ll talk more about it later). The chapter I read was discussing Matthew 6:1-4. He’s discussing the apparent paradox of how Jesus says in chapter 5 that we must let our light shine before all men, then in chapter 6 He says to hide your acts of righteousness from them.

“[Jesus] calls a halt to the innocent spontaneous joy we get from making our Christianity visible. He calls us to reflect on what we are doing.

“The disciples are told that they can possess the ‘extraordinary’ [that which makes the follower of Jesus unique and peculiar to the world] only so long as they are reflective…. Of course it has to be visible, but they must take care that it does not become visible simply for the sake of becoming visible. There are of course proper grounds for insisting on the visible nature of Christian discipleship, but the visibility is never an end in itself; and if it becomes so we have lost sight of our primary aim, which is to follow Jesus…. We are therefore confronted with a paradox. Our activity must be visible, but never be done for the sake of making it visible….

“How is this paradox to be resolved?… We are to hide it from ourselves. Our task is to simply keep on following, looking only to our Leader who goes on before, taking no notice of ourselves or of what we are doing.”

Jesus wants our lives to be simple, and the simplicity of it is in looking to Him for everything and leaving nothing for ourselves. Anything we leave for ourselves will complicate and mess up everything. I can’t even think about why I’m doing what I’m doing because as soon as I do that I run the very real risk of doing the thing for my own benefit. Jesus, help me to keep my eyes and get my orders only on and from You.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Terry Pratchett on the complications of the human mind, and maybe why this focus on Jesus is such a terribly difficult thing to obtain:

“Animals have it so much easier than us. They see things as: (1) something to eat, (2) something to run from, (3) something to mate with, or (4) a rock. The average human thinks about all sorts of things, around the clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological calendars and timepieces. There’s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts, and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subconscious thoughts. To a telepath the human head is a din. It is a railway terminus with all the Tannoys talking at once. It is a complete FM waveband and some of those stations aren’t reputable, they’re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas who play late-night records with limbic lyrics.”