The Bag On My Shoulder

I want to make my life into a music video.

Then, I can finally have images for the thoughts and feelings floating around me every day.

Swimming without surfacing. Running as pictures of important people, places, and events fly silently by while some dramatic music plays in the background giving a beautiful tone to a lack of control. The breaking of strongholds met with a deep melody. Rich piano sounds giving meaning to an average task. A deep cello noise convincing me that there is much meaning to practicing my purpose every day.

It seems nice to listlessly stare out the window of a bus traveling from nowhere important to somewhere else of equal or possibly lesser relevance while a great instrumental runs carelessly in the background.

The music makes wasted time seem important and meaningful. It makes waiting seem beautiful. And it makes a struggle seem more like a story than a feeling.

At a Christmas gathering over the weekend, a question was posed to the group: Looking back to this time last year how has your life, your faith walk changed?

Pause. The music has gone quiet.

The last year was a strange one. I confess I may have meandered through it without as much intentionality or purpose as I would have liked. For it struck me seconds after that question that I am not sure a whole lot has changed. For days, I’ve pondered quietly what that could mean in terms of my faith and relationship with Jesus trying to convince myself that this was not a lost year.

I read somewhere in the bible that if we worship worthless things we will also become worthless.

I’ve decided that comfort is worthless. Pride is worthless. And all the goods I have attained are worthless too.

In my mental music video, this is the climax of the song. I am putting these things into a large black garbage bag and throwing that bag over my shoulder. See me walking out the door and walking past the people I know and love too busy to stop because I am laboring with my bag. Struggling, I continue on. It’s windy. It’s uphill. It’s probably raining.

The bag makes me a cynic. I wonder why I have to carry this when I look around and everyone else seems bag free. My pace is slow and my gait far from straight. I walk with a divided purpose and pray half prayers as I fight with the will I have retained versus the will I have finally given over.

If I consider hanging on to the bag, I will possess more. If I leave it, then I will control less. It’s a bittersweet conviction.

Perhaps this is why A.W. Tozer said that there is a blessedness in possessing nothing? Or maybe, this is what the author is getting at in Hebrews 12:1 when he pleads with us to throw off everything that hinders us?
Carrying this bag is exhausting. And, carrying this bag is not my
job. I think I’ll leave it at the cross.

I am undecided about resolutions in 2011. Except I resolve to let Jesus do His job and try my best to respond with expediency, joy, and an attitude of thankfulness.

As the days close quickly on the end of this year, I hear this comment meander through my head with a great deal of frequency: “You don’t need __________. God has got a plan for your life.” It’s not always easy to resolve that at the end of a year like this. But, as a wise friend once said, “Thank God for new days, new weeks, and now new years.”

I’m looking forward to leaving this bag in 2010 and cashing in on new mercies every morning. I’m looking forward to a new song and not meandering through the year to come. I am grateful to this God I serve. I am thankful that my soul delights because I am his and that my strength in life is that I am his.

May this year’s bags be filled with hope, with truth, and the knowledge that God can make a garment of praise for a spirit of heaviness (Isaiah 61:3).

Merry Christmas, everyone. And, even more, a happy NEW year.

Fellows Reflection: December 2010

After a month of studying humility, I have yet to resolve whether it is valuable to have goals in this area or not. See humility, to steal a common analogy from a good friend, is sort of like driving a building. And goals for humility are kind of like the toll booths along the road. It’s not realistic or practical to think that I can fully stop the moving building before barreling through the gates. My intention: to pay the toll. My goal: to navigate a vehicle that I am incapable of stopping on my own. I’m sure that sounds odd, but through the readings this month this was the theme that seemed so prevalent – that humility is not about being occupied with controlling the tempest within the machine, but rather to take the focus off of the machine completely. To quote CS Lewis, “To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.” In that, I have come to a better understanding that humility is less about me and more about God. Throughout the month, I was inculcated by the notion of self-forgetfulness though I found this to be quite hard as it seemed wholly contradictory. The more I tried to forget myself, the more I considered myself. Although, in putting the curriculum of the institute together holistically, I did recognize it that this is an appropriate topic in response to the memory verse of last month from Matthew 22. First commandment: Love the Lord… Second commandment: Love neighbor… The two commandments being inherently self-forgetful if acted out both swiftly and sincerely.

We see this further communicated through the development of understanding that humility has its only advantage in an empty vessel – Not in a self-loathing one. As such, humility is, at its root, the very recognition that we are at our very best when we are completely bare, suggesting that the baggage and burden of titles, expectations, barriers, etc. are the very things that “make” us in this world, but also the things that prevent us from being completely available to godly conformity. Pride renders us as God in parts, which was never the way it was intended to be. Truly, it is pride that keeps us from who God wants us to be.

Andrew Murray says it like this: “And every, even the most secret, breathing of pride in self-seeking, self-will, self-confidence, or self-exaltation is the strengthening of that self which cannot enter the kingdom or possess the things of the kingdom, because it refuses to allow God to be what he is and must be there: the All in All. “ We spend so much time in puffed up posturing without realizing it will never have its way in the end anyhow. These are not the things or qualities that we’ll be showcasing in the heavenly realms and it is with much certainty that I conclude there will be no benefit of displaying them during our time in the world either. We must embrace an attitude of yieldedness to humility in order to encounter it with any intentionality at all. Murray continues by imploring us to “use every opportunity of humbling yourself before your fellow men as a help to abide humble before God. God will accept such humbling of yourself as the proof that your whole heart desires it.” Thus, it is important we seek out opportunities to be humbled and to know Christ through this blessed medium. For as we read in Philippians 2, it was through this vehicle that we ever came to know Christ anyhow. Though we may find ourselves on the doorstep of the humble more frequently than feels comfortable, we continue to knock there in anticipation that a lower and lesser self will rend a more glorified God and conformed likeness through this difficult pursuit.