When Life Is Too Busy To Actually Live...

I think I've posted about this before, but I am definitely feeling the weight of the "tyranny of the urgent".

How do we slow down? How do we say "no" to more things and prioritize which things to say "yes" to?

Life is too short to live it without knowing what you're living for. That's what I'm trying to figure out. What will make my life worth living?

Deism?

To you who may read this, in your experience, what helps you recognize and put rational faith in God's active intervention in your life? How do you have sense of God's working in and around you? How do you know what prayers God "answers" and what to do with those "answers"?

I feel like God is pretty passive, or at least that's how I tend to interpret the events of my life. It is ridiculously difficult for me to see/recognize/believe that God is engaged and active with me. In my experience, sometimes I feel like I am a deist. I believe God exists, but I have precious little to go on that says He is alive and active in my life today... I believe He IS, but that belief hangs on a thread most of the time and is so hard to put words to...

If God IS truly working in and around me, I want to recognize it more. I want my senses and mind to be trained to distinguish what is His activity versus just life happening. Or is God active in everything? Is this email divinely directed? Are the words I'm choosing to type pre-planned and part of God's plan to bring about good? I've been really wrestling lately with my own personal experience with God. The head knowledge is strong and logical, but the spiritual experiences are flimsy and sporadic, stained with doubts and questions. And my inability to find solid experience to stand on, tends to erode at the things that I think I believe to be true. Then everything starts to get weird and existential and exhausting.

Any thoughts?

Or is all of this just a weird emotional by-product of being too busy and not spending time with God?

Practical Agnostics

This is from the Daily Reading email I got a few days ago:

"So long as we imagine it is we who have to look for God, we must often lose heart. But it is the other way about—He is looking for us. - Simon Tugwell

Can it possibly get any more uncertain than this? We so long for life to be better than it is. We wish the beauty and love and adventure would stay and that someone strong and kind would show us how to make the Arrows go away. We hope that God will be our hero. Of all the people in the universe, he could stop the Arrows and arrange for just a little more blessing in our lives. He can spin the earth, change the weather, topple governments, obliterate armies, and resurrect the dead. Is it too much to ask that he intervene in our story? But he often seems aloof, almost indifferent to our plight, so entirely out of our control. Would it be any worse if there were no God? If he didn’t exist, at least we wouldn’t get our hopes up. We could settle once and for all that we really are alone in the universe and get on with surviving as best we may.

This is, in fact, how many professing Christians end up living: as practical agnostics. Perhaps God will come through, perhaps he won’t, so I’ll be hanged if I’ll live as though he had to come through. I’ll hedge my bets and if he does show up, so much the better..."

This really captures a lot of the subconscious struggle I have with God. I don't particularly want to be a deist, but I am really bad at seeing and recognizing God's action around me. And I understand that it is faith either way, to say "God provided this opportunity" or to say "This just happened to fall into my lap". So, how do we choose to take our faith in the direction of believing that God is intervening in our lives, actively and attentively, without surrendering the rational, intelligent part of ourselves that needs some logic on which to base decisions on.

Why does it matter, you ask? It matters because so much of Christianity is predicated on the active love of God, pursuing us. I don't want to diminish Jesus' death on the cross to pay for my sin at all, but... how do I put this without sounding heretical... It's a starting block. Or at least, it should be, in my eyes. Take it to a marriage analogy. If the husband signs the marriage license, what kind of husband would he be if he never spoke to his wife, never cared for her in ways that she recognized? And when she would question or ask about his lack of affection or visible signs of his love, what if he would bring up the fact that he signed the marriage license and would shame her for being ungrateful? I can't picture God being that way. Even if the initial act was so powerfully loving, initiating a potential lifetime of intimacy and joy, if he didn't continue to show and express love to her in ways she recognized, what kind of husband would he be?

That seems fairly accusatory of me and that's why I can't really get behind that sentiment. The next logical conclusion I come to is that I really suck at listening to and recognizing God's current care for me. Or, allowing for the spiritual realm to be real, the devil is also actively warring to keep me from sensing and knowing God's active love for me.

Underneath all of this, I feel like I am just too busy. I am not making time to be still and quiet, so I don't feel any deep peace or centeredness. I am just running from task to task, conversation to conversation and I think over several weeks, I've just lost my bearings a little bit.

Christian or Secular?

I had someone ask me today, if the music I write is Christian or secular... and I was dumbfounded for a split second. It caught me off guard and I didn't know how to answer. I don't mean this to sound condescending at all, but it has just been so long since I've interacted with anyone who operates in those categories in relation to music that I probably looked at her like she had two heads at first. My response was a question, hoping to clarify what she meant, "What do you mean? If I'm a Christian, does that mean the music I write is Christian?" I think she wasn't expecting a question in response, because it took her a second to answer and she definitely seemed like she hadn't been asked to expand on what she meant before that. As I somewhat anticipated, she went on to distinguish between songs about God and living life for Him, versus songs relating to relationships and love, etc.

I hope I am bringing those two worlds together under the same roof. I don't want to operate in a secular mode and then a Christian mode. I want to find God's presence in all of it, without losing my ability to relate with the physical and emotional realities around me. I'm not sure about how to gently prod and push those who still operate in this mindset. There are probably some benefits, some glimpses of good intentions behind it. On the whole, I think it is a harmful and divisive way of viewing the world and I have a hard time accepting that it's a biblical view. Music is a gift. For me, it's a medium for expressing my thoughts and emotions. I have no agenda. I hope it is consistent with who I am and who I understand God to be. But is this post Christian or secular? Is my job Christian or secular? Is the last conversation I had with you Christian or secular? If we are truly following Christ and experiencing God in our daily lives, then everything we do should have the scent of heaven in it. There should be an intentional union between the mundane and the holy in our lives. I have not arrived at this, by any stretch. But after this morning, I'm reminded that I want my life to be this way. I want my ordinary daily interactions and actions to be honest and unpretentious, but at the same time, soaked in or haunted by God's reality and presence. Especially for the Christ-follower/believer, God is always with us, so nothing should be considered "secular" and everything should be "Christian" which would make the label unnecessary. It would be like asking if my music is human music...

Assumed Expectations = Irrational Fear of Failure

So I've had a bit of a revelation lately. Perhaps an epiphany, if you will.

I've continued to question and search through the reasons why I am single as I approach the ripe old age of 30. Not that 30 is a magical number, because I would be asking the same questions if I was still 27 or if I was single and 34. Relationships have always been difficult for me, for some reason. Exploring "why" has been a vague, convoluted and often discouraging process. But I think I'm coming to a light at the end of the tunnel (hopefully, not a freight train coming at me, like Metallica sang). There might be some more turns and introspective discoveries left to unearth, but the past couple of days have been shedding light on something for me.

I am afraid of failing. That might not be so abnormal for men, since we are typically very task-oriented, rather than relational (stereotypically true of women). When it comes to relationships though, for whatever reasons, I have a deep fear of failing that keeps me from opening up and letting my heart love/trust, etc. And—this is the epiphany part—I'm pretty sure it's because, in my task-oriented brain, I assume women have an expectation of me. They expect something of a boyfriend. They expect something of the pursuit. And the source of my fear comes from not knowing what their expectations are. They don't hand out a Expectations and Requirements Document on the first date! So I have spent years and years, basically guessing at what various women want, trying to be "successful", trying to be what they want, but never settling into a peaceful, joyful relationship of honesty and intimacy. This insatiable need to be what someone wants has only led to heartbreak.

The freeing part of this epiphany is that my assumption is wrong. Women may have expectations, desires, etc. but it is not my place to guess what they are OR try to fit into what they want. I need to learn to be myself and be okay that if it doesn't work out, it is an okay kind of "failure" (in the sense that the relationship didn't end in marriage). Like Einstein or Bell said (I forget), when asked about the thousands of failures when trying to discover... a conductor for the light bulb... or something, "I didn't fail, I found X thousand elements that don't work". I don't know why I have tried to be what a woman wants. I suppose it is a form of validation, a desire to be liked. Understanding that it really doesn't count and is artificial if I'm not being myself is crucial. So I am still processing this, but I feel like this is an important discovery about myself. I don't need to try to guess at whether or not I will say the right thing or do exactly what's necessary to "win" a girl over or whatever. I will probably be awkward. Or forget a birthday. Or completely disagree on something. That's okay. I'm not perfect... I shouldn't expect myself to be, because no realistic woman is expecting that of me, either.

The convicting part of this epiphany comes when I take the plank out of my own eye... Do I expect things of other people? Is that why I assume women do the same for me? Is expectation the wrong word? Is it simply that we all have desires and wants and that's okay when they don't mesh and result in marriage? It's challenging to consider that I might hold people up to a standard of perfection that isn't fair...

In any case, I feel a small burden lifting in this area of relationships. I'm thankful to God for even this seemingly basic revelation. Maybe most of you readers are thinking to yourself, "Duh.", but for those of us who missed that bus back in high school, it's amazing the promise of freedom that is offered when I start believing I don't have to guess how to get a girl to like me, do everything perfectly so she doesn't stop liking me, etc. I can just be myself... Strange. So cliché, but so necessary and for me, hard to do.

Eat My Flesh, Drink My Blood

I read something in "Battling Unbelief" by John Piper the other night and it really got me thinking. He was talking about how believing, if we view that as agreeing with certain facts, does not equal the same thing as... finding satisfaction in something. In the Bible, Jesus talks about being the Bread of Life and about being Living Water. He said crazy things like, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you". What does that mean? He didn't say, unless you believe that I am the Bread of Life. He said, "Consume me! Let Me satisfy your hunger and thirst." There's something about consuming, enjoying, experiencing, partaking in, being satisfied by God that goes way above and beyond just agreeing with facts.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I know it helps put words to the typical discontented feeling I have towards Christianity in general when it is reduced to believing certain statements and doing certain behaviors. There doesn't seem to be anything life-giving in that. But, in those times when I question where the substance of those things lies, I remember the stories of Jesus talking with the lady from Samaria, and Him telling her, "but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again." There's something satisfying and filling that we should experience with God that goes so much deeper than thinking that something is true. I believe we landed on the moon (mostly) and the Bible says that demons believe in God and tremble at Him... so there has to be more to Christianity than assenting to a set of ideas.