Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Pacifiers

Hello readers.  Welcome to my heart.  Let's begin. 

If you all haven't noticed yet, I like to probe.  I like to press and wonder.  So, let me just probe and provoke a little bit. 

I'm learning that I'm on this quest, a journey with Jesus and I've reached a new patch of ground without any footprints to follow anymore.  And I'm exhausted with always have to trailblaze my own path, but I forget the main point of the journey is that it's with Jesus.  Is that not enough? Lol, that's the point of this blog. 

What is my true goal?  To enjoy the journey or to reach the destination?  I've been reading the book of Ecclesiastes and...let's just say King Solomon can sound a little nutty.  He almost sounds suicidal, with his exclamations and slippery slope fallacies showing up consistently throughout the book.  I even had a discussion with a friend of mine and she agreed that the book sounds like a serious joke.  But let us not forget that 2 Timothy 3:16 says that all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.  So even though King Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes sounds a little bit cuckoo, the scripture is God-breathed and is useful for us. 

With that being understood, I feel like underneath the surface of King Solomon's words, his deep frustration is in the realization that nothing in this world is worth the fuss we make about it.  I've carried on countless conversations with people about their lives and watched people beat themselves up trying to figure out the unknown.  But let me speak from my own heart.  I've noticed how I can be so up and down and beat myself up about the unknown.  I can be on such a great spiritual high, nothing can touch me, Jesus is awesome and King, Lord of all, crying in worship, blogging, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I'm back with the worrying about my future and my future wife and bills and money and school and whatever.  And this thought hit me,

Why? 

Why does my faith fluctuate?  Why does our commitment to Jesus fluctuate?  Hey, we are happy to be on His team when things are going well with us, but when it gets a little challenging, we're quick to run back to our old ways of worrying and wrestling within ourselves. 

I was listening to my coworker talk about her misery here in Auburn and how she wants to move to a big city and have her life start and this negative thought came into my brain, "You'll be just as miserable there as you are here." 

But is it not true?  Nothing really brings us joy like we expect it to.  I've watched people in my family want so badly new furniture for their homes, or the new iPad, or new cars, and you can see the hope and excitement in their faces and then when they get it, they're so excited and thrilled about life and have a great purpose and perspective on life, and then a few weeks later, not even a long time, but a few weeks later, they're back realizing the same struggles exist even with the new furniture or when whatever they hoped in proved that it was just a pacifier.  This truth hit me the other day.  I'm so hoping in a new season of my life and things will be better, but is that really true?  Because just like I have worries now, like right now, I couldn't see these worries last year.  So every season of your life has worries and discomforts, so maybe we should stop looking for seasons to make us better, or pacifiers to soften the hunger. 

Pacifiers.  These are the temporary things we find and seek to satisfy our real issues.  A pacifier is given to a child to make him or her think he or she is actually eating or it's used to ease and comfort his or her crying-----truth is reader, we are all hungry for something!  We're all crying out about something!

Aren't we?

Are you not hungry for something?  You want your life to change so bad its killing you isn't it? It's driving you insane, you're crying out desperately, Please Jesus, where's my husband? Where's my wife? Why am I so broke? Why God why!?  And, here is what cracks me up about us, is that we have no idea how to change it. 

I've had countless conversations with people, and you can even give them like a slide show presentation of what to do next and they still won't do it.  The truth of the matter for pastors is that so many of the people listening to him will not heed his words.  I've seen time and time again every semester, Pastor Chris, (my pastor at Church of the Highlands) tries to emphasize small groups as of great importance just so people can leave the church that day and never even think twice about the message--or joining the Dream Team only for people just to ignore the truth of the call of getting plugged into the local church. 

What is this all about?  I wonder have we gotten so used to the pacifier and the benefits of sucking on it that we've forgotten how starved we really are. 

There's something all of us are missing.  I think this quote from C.S. Lewis sums it up. 

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” --C.S. Lewis. 

Stop being content with the pacifiers.  Let's eat from the fullness of God. 

To be continued.......

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