Year-End Musings

I've been thinking about spiritual practice (aka 'my religion') of late. As the New Year looms, we tend to do these inventories, as a matter of course.

One of the things I've been thinking about lately is, reflecting on my consumption levels. Recently, we installed a new hot tub and deck out back of the house. It's been glorious to just jump in after a hard bike ride or just whenever you get a chill in the house on one of the recent spate of bitter cold winter nights. But as I sit there, luxuriating in the tub, my mind often turns to how others are suffering around the world, and why we should be so comfortable.

Some of my religious friends would say that's appropriate of course, in light of the fact that you live the way you live, at the level of comfort you do, and yet so many suffer. You SHOULD be uncomfortable about your...well, your comfort level. And I'd say I can't entirely disagree with them. And mind you, this all has been going on in my mind and heart long before this week's tragic tsunami in Asia and Africa. I've long had those regions of the world on my heart--China, the Sudan, Vietnam, Nepal, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran. Anywhere in particular where the Gospel is hard come by, where my brothers and sisters suffer under enormous oppression, where even those outside the Church suffer injustice and oppression.

I regularly pray for these people, even give from time to time, as we will certainly to CARE or other relief efforts for the tsunami victims. But God, would You direct my thoughts to other ways to release Your power through my agency? Move in my heart and mind to extend Yourself through me, my wife, my family, to "re-present" You to my friends, neighbors, and those in my own Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.

I also weekly (at least every Tuesday, my regular day for prayer for family) wrestle with my misgivings about how I am (or am not, as the case may be) leading my family toward a deeper commitment to living out a life of discipleship.

This blog entry itself is the result of receiving a year-end fundraising letter from Mars Hill Audio Journal, in which host Ken Myers treats on discipleship, what it entails, and I am convicted of my lack of commitment. Lord, have mercy! Grant me redirection in this area of my responsibilities.

Still, much of what Myers says resonates so completely with me. Myers says, for one example:

"[The] radical work of God in conversion and discipleship is nothing less than the making of a new creation, and to the extent that our cultural lives are extensions of our engagement with creation, the patterns of our cultural conventions require transformation as well. Jesus did not die, rise, and ascend to change something in our hearts and leave it at that, but thereby to change everything."

Now, as Myers goes on in the next paragraph, I'm with him. He discusses how people escape "the ramified demands of discipleship" by what has been termed "compartmentalization" of the faith. We separate out our lives as "spiritual" (discipleship...of the mind, at least) and go on living our physical lives according to the "priests of our age," the "allegedly neutral, value-free, mechanical principles established by economists, sociologists, and other scientific experts." And I think to some degree, we're (that is, I and my family) guilty of doing that. But not entirely, or else I don't think I'd be a regular subscriber to Mars Hill Audio Journal, in which such criticisms are leveled regularly by Mr. Myers & co.

But then, my old, almost Catholic guilt arises...Why don't you pray more regularly with your wife and children? Why do you not limit (seriously) what you watch on television (I do, but not to the extent my former, more fundamental churchmates would approve of) or the movies? The magazines you read, the DVD's and CDs you purchase, why are they not all "sacred" and not increasingly "profane" (in the classical sense, if not in the literal)?

Why don't we give more in tithe and time to our church? (I can tell you some of the reasons for this, actually, but am not sure it's such a great place to here)? Why don't we give more to charity and voluteer at places like soup kitchens, or seek ways to do short-term missions work? Why ?

Well, I don't know the answers to these questions, but I hope and pray that in 2005, I'll get the answers to some of them, and I aspire to draw nearer to my Lord in disciplining myself, in His disciplining me to walk closer with Him in to the future. One thing I do know, and that is the character of the 'good and loving God' (Thanks, Sheldon Kallevig!) that I worship, however weakly. He is faithful (1Timothy 2:13)

Grace & peace in 2005!