Motive for Moving?

Ah, Thanksgiving Day (or any vacation day for that matter). What a wonderful opportunity to do nothing all day…or so I thought. After laying in my bed and watching the clock tick the morning away, I started to feel kinda bad. Not the kind of bad that made me feel like I was missing something by laying in bed all morning, but the kind of bad that starts with a small pain in your head and soon increases in intensity as you continue to let the day slip away while you do nothing. I had received a headache simply for staying in bed too long that morning.

It seems to me that the reaction my body had to laying around all day is one that God instilled in us from the day He created man. God did not create us so that we would be idle, and do nothing all day. God created us to go out and do things in the world, specifically, things that would bring Him glory. Try as I might, I can not think of any way in which laying in bed all thanksgiving day would bring glory to our Creator. If God is calling out to me to go and do things in the world that will bring him glory, who am I to keep him waiting…vacation day or not.

Fame

I recently became famous. I didn't star in a famous motion picture or pose for pictures for the cover of People Magazine, but still, I became famous. It happened when I went to exercise my right to vote last Tuesday. At the polling place I was handed my ballot and marker to carefully fill in the ovals and after dropping my ballot on the floor (probably drawing all the attention in the room to me), I finally got over to one of the empty booths to cast my vote. Across the room there was a guy with an expensive camera in his hand and he made his way over to my side of the room, obviously drawn by my clumsiness. After filling in my ovals, I then got in line to hand my ballot to an elderly lady who was feeding them into a huge machine. As I got close to the front of the line I heard her saying to each of the other voters, "Let's see if [the machine] will accept your ballot, sometimes it doesn't like them." Finally I come to the front of the line, having already drawn some unwanted attention due to the earlier ballot spillage, and I hand the lady my ballot. As she gives me her rehearsed greeting she feeds the ballot into the machine and wouldn't you know it, it came back out, rejected. I am sure that it was then that the photographer chose to raise his camera and snap a picture of my puzzled look as my ballot was denied by the machine. I am convinced that the rejection was due to feeder error because all it took was to refeed the ballot into the machine for its acceptance, but the picture had already been snapped, a moment frozen in time by the camera. As I started my exit, the photographer rushed over to introduce himself and get my name. The next morning I found my picture in the paper with that puzzled look on my face. Fame. Don't worry, I won't let it go to my head.

Last night I taught the youth about the value of the things that God chooses to give us, instead of the value of the things that we think we want. We all made lists of things that we wanted, our all-time want list. When I looked at those lists, much of what I found on their lists, as well as mine, seemed to say, "Give me fame, give me money, give me more stuff." And God looks at those lists and He tells us we don't need those things. In fact, He tells us that we are missing out on the things or experiences that He has planned for us because we are too busy asking for things that we don't really want. We can't really want them because they will never satisfy our hunger. God is trying to tell us that our hunger is fed through our relationship with him. The things that He will give us, things that we really want because they satisfy our hunger, will help us to have a closer and better relationship with him. God wants to give and He wants us to ask. He doesn't sit up in heaven and gleefully deny all of my prayer requests. He is sitting up there trying to show me the things I should be asking for. God challenges us to look at the lists of things we have made and ask if those things will help us maintain a closer relationship with him or if they will pull us away. Things like money, stuff, and my newfound fame aren't always what they are all cracked up to be. Fame might be as unsatisfying as a picture of you with a puzzled look on your face.

God hurts

After being out of town for the weekend I returned to some saddening news. On the front page of Saturday's Visalia Times Delta newspaper was a story about a church in town who was going through a split. After reading the article I realized that the church was actually in my neighborhood. Before I knew it, I found myself in my car, driving out to the split church. I am not sure what caused me to take this little trip because I am not sure what I was expecting to see but a church building standing there as it had always been. As I slowly drove by the church grounds I half expected to see an actual split down the middle of the church building, dividing the two sides physically, or maybe I was expecting to see tears flowing down the side of the church building for all the sadness and anger that must have preceeded the actual split. Either way, I became captivated by the story and had to see for myself what kind of damage had been done at ground zero, and how bad the fallout had been after the bomb had been dropped. I didn't find any feuding families, or lines drawn with duct tape, or even so much as one person sheding a tear over the apparent divorce of a family of God. I drove home somewhat disappointed that I had not seen to my satisfaction what I had gone out to see...some form of sadness, anger, or anguish as the result of the split (nevermind the fact that I was looking for it in the physical characteristics of the building).

I decided that what I was looking for was not that odd, because certainly all those emotions had been expressed by the people involved, right? Well, maybe not. When I look around at the world today I find that family divorce is so common that no one even bats an eye at it. No longer is it news to anyone, and certainly no one is going to shed a tear when both sides are fighting to get ownership over everything that was once held as common. I would hold that the only reason that the newspaper found it a story good enough to print on the front page is that they wanted to show to the world that even the good Christian church has deemed it okay and sometimes necessary to go through a family divorce. We have fallen to the standards of the world, and God's heartburn becomes too much for a roll of Tums to handle. We can't keep turning to God with our intentional sin and say, "just take two Tums and you'll feel better about it in a few hours." We have been called to a higher standard, as evidenced by the life of Christ, and yet the world only sees us as a bunch of hypocrites. Why? "[We] acknowledge He is with [our] lips, and walk out the door and deny Him by [our] lifestyle" (dc Talk). God has never stood for our excuses, and He only gives forgiveness for those who sincerely regret. He is the only one sheding tears these days, and its because we give Him heartburn so bad no antiacid will cure it. The solution? We must be in the world, but not of it.