I guess you need to know the context. It's my fault, I joined this church out of a desire to "pour out my life for God" - all my energy, all my purpose, all my achievement I wanted it to be God-wards. And I think, to some extent, that has come true, though there's massive room for improvement.
Occcasionally I do things like go to see my extended family, take a couple of days away, go out with friends, but in spite of these things I still sometimes feel like a Christian-machine when it comes to church life. I suppose it's just because most of my evenings are filled with churchy things.
And I want it that way too, honestly. I love this life! I want to be flowing in God's joy and purpose (if that's not too weird a thing to say), I want to be loving and serving his church and reaching out to those who seek him and those who want to know him, and even those who don't want to know him if I can help them. But what I don't want is to lose myself in things which aren't of value to God. I don't want to give myself over to insubstantial things. So, yes, I do a lot of church stuff, because I believe it's achieving something for some people.
Yet, at the same time, if you do too much you run out of the energy and the inspiration to do more, and perhaps that's what's happened to me. Sometimes I can feel like I don't need the hassle. Hence my desire to take control of life - a kind of compromise.
Something struck me when I was singing the other day:
"May the words of my mouth
and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in your sight O Lord"
(Psalm 19)
It's got me thinking, all this trying to do the right thing or trying to avoid the wrong thing is not worth a fig really, it's not really what this God-following-life is all about - it's just trying to enjoy the relationship with the one you love as much as possible that counts. The rest of life flows out of that.
Thank you my friend. I got a lot out of what you have said.
ReplyDeleteGod bless!
Just discovered this...
ReplyDeleteGood stuff..
Like it.
ReplyDeleteUp for a fire in the woods sometime?
I love the ancient proverb from the early church: Ora et labora, pray and work. There is so much wisdom in those three simple words.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I think they express the meaning of life. The meaning and puropse of our life is to worship and serve God. Pray and work. Secondly, they express a perfect rhythm for our life. We must breath in as much as we breath out, we have to gather the same amount of power from God that we can give to other. Thus, we have to pray as much as we work (often we can pray and work at the same time).
Maybe you remember me, Tschaka, we had som chats on the mJA-site, and I've visited this blog before. That was a pretty long time ago though. I don't know why, I've been active with my own blog I guess (http://helapingsten.wordpress.com/, it's in Swedish, but if you're intrested I think Google can translate it for you). But you have a really good blog, Tschaka, thank you. By the way, I will visit the mJA on Good Friday and stay until the 6th of april. I'll be living in Kettering. Maybe we'll see each other at the Alive festival in Northampton - I don't know if Holy Treasure is going there but I assume so. If not, I'll follow your blog anyway in the future.
God bless you
Micael
Micael, I'd quite like to check out your blog. I wonder how good a job Google does of translating from Swedish to English...
ReplyDeleteSoupy: Please do! I've checked out how it looks translated to English and you can easily follow my thoughts mostly, however the grammar is horrible ;)
ReplyDeleteYou're blog is very interesting too. We have a great lack of celibacy blogs in Sweden (around zero I'll guess).
You're right. I could read the translation fine. It's a good blog. Thanks a lot.
ReplyDelete