Mercenary Faith

C.S. Lewis says, "Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire." I say the same is true with God here on earth. If you go after God with the sole purpose of gaining his blessing, my guess is he won't just give you what you want. Or maybe he will, but one thing is sure: if you're not seeking God, he's not just going to impose himself on you.

I usually go after God seeking to resolve some issue I have or for help processing some information or generally just to feel better. He doesn't always buy off on that. In fact I don't know if he ever does. I think he wants me to seek him rather than just all the perks. After all, the greatest blessing is probably God's presence with us, a.k.a. Jesus. It's just that sometimes we'd rather have God's blessing than God.

Resolution

I keep watching these depressing movies - you know the kind where people die and there's no revenge and no justice for the killers. We live in this age where things don't seem to resolve (maybe they never did) - like Donald Miller talks about in Blue Like Jazz. He talks about it in a good way though - God doesn't resolve, he's not easy to wrap your head around. He's creative and he's dynamic - you can't pin him down easily with logic or explanation.

We live in a world that doesn't resolve either. Things happen - good and bad - that make no sense. People say everything happens for a reason. I don't know about that. At least I'll never understand why certain things happen around these parts.

So what's the goal of this life then? To trust a God who doesn't resolve, who's active and creative even though he doesn't always let you know what is going on or clue you in to the inner workings of the universe? (It's probably a good thing he doesn't - you'd probably explode.) Maybe the goal is to learn to trust each other too - to walk together through darkness - to not need to get to a place of final understanding, but to be comfortable with the process. See, once you get to a point where you understand everything, you don't need anybody anymore.

Spirit

Anyway, back to stuff that happens without us knowing it happens - you know how weirdo psychologists and therapists talk about "unconscious" thoughts and drives? And there's that rumor going around that we only use like 10% of our brains. Well that makes me think that there is a lot more going on than just what we say or think, or at least than we know we think. What other thoughts are bouncing around in our heads that we have no access to? And what of dreams? Those are weird - where do they come from?

Part of developing a spiritual life, then, might be to gain more access to those parts of your mind - the parts of who you are just waiting to be developed. The goal is definitely to connect with a different realm than we are used to living in. How much is out there (and in there) that is yet to be discovered because we are so focused on the temporal, the material, the verbal?

Words

Oh yes, I was thinking that there is so much that happens in the world that happens without us knowing that it happens. At times, we treat the world like everything can be explained. I mean, so much of our effort and energy goes into trying to put words to the human experience. We have the news, which drolly reports all sorts of inane as well as some important happenings. There are billions of books that try to explicate what is and imagine what isn't. Then we beings here fill up the air with rantings and retellings of all we have endured. There's some blogs.

The air and the ground get full of words and all the while, more often than not, it seems that God is silent. I start to think that maybe God wants to reach us, touch us, and commune with us on a different level, that he gets tired of all the words and just wants to move in spirit within and around us without having to explain everything. There is the whole spiritual realm that we don't talk about because it's really hard to. You have to feel it.

Reconcile!?

We're really bad at relationships. I mean, do you ever think about how much shear force it takes just to keep a family together? You have to work at it (I mean, at least I do) like all day everyday. It's like treading water. You can't just lay there and let it happen. You have to do some serious maintenance like, constantly.

And then we go and try to live in community and look what happens - it just compounds the problem. You take people with their individual issues and struggles and hang-ups and pet peeves and you combine them with other people who have some other baggage and then you put a bunch of those groups of people together. I mean, that's just stupid if you think about it, but that's what we're called to.

I'm thankful for it at times. There's nothing more interesting than a relationship and there's nothing else worth fighting for. The problem is, we get to the point where we just give up on relationships because there are too many problems. We go looking for new ones or look to things to fulfill our need for connection. It's a good thing God's all about reconciliation. He's better at it.

More on Poor

It's true, we are all "wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked," but we spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince other people and ourselves that we're doing alright. People even try to convince themselves that they have a good life because God has blessed them, when Jesus says that the poor are the blessed ones.

So, does that mean we're all supposed to become financially destitute? No, but it does mean that we should realize what's true - that we already are poor. Then, we should start acting like it. Poor people are grateful for what they do have and they have a knack for realizing what's important in life. They also use what they have to help others because they know what it's like to need a hand. If you're poor, you don't mind being around other poor wretches and you know that anything you have can be taken from you in an instant.

Calculated Risk

Most of us are not the ones to tempt fate. We don't rock the boat cause we're afraid everything will turn upside down on us. So, most of us spend a lot of time trying to make ourselves happy and everyone around us happy. It really gets kind of boring. That's why I appreciate Jesus so much. He did things that really made people mad. He didn't spend a lot of time smoothing things over, sugarcoating them, or making peace.

And I don't have a Messiah complex or any delusions of grandeur, but I would like to be like Jesus in ways. Jesus was calculating. He knew that certain things would make people mad and he did them anyway to teach them important things like what is important. I guess it's true that Jesus did not worry so much about what people thought about him. He just did what he thought was right. If people got offended in the process, it was because their hearts were in the wrong place - not his.