Work and Play

This was written a while ago, but upon reading, it seemed good to share.
------
On Sunday, the YearTeam folks who have chosen to go to Nicaragua in March gathered to tell each other our stories.  It was a powerful time, and deeply challenging.
I was to share second to last. As my turn drew closer, I found that I desperately wanted my story to live up to theirs.  But, in my eyes, it did not.  My life against of all theirs suddenly seemed inexperienced, and sugar-coated.  Through what has God led me, except disasters of my own making?  My life has been easy, simple and relatively painless.  What have I been through, really?  My entire family loves God and breathes in remarkable health.  I was raised with a strong work ethic, in grace, in a house on a river-side farm.  I have been encouraged and mentored through each step, in every choice and pursuit, and yet still I have sinned.  Yes, I have wrestled with doubt, depression, fear.  But not because I lost a father.  Or a mother.  Not because I was abused or neglected, nor because of peer pressure or ignorance.  With the best of circumstances, information and influences, I still have managed to hurt God and those around me intentionally.  My weakness is mine.  My sin is of my making, of my hands.  There is no pleading for merciful understanding, for circumstantial excuses.  My sin is simply mine.

I woke up anxious on Tuesday.  On Tuesdays I Sabbath, take a day to read/pray/write/walk/woodwork/etc. (basically a day in which to remember God and to cling to Him).  But this week I felt anxious.  I had planned to go to Francis Marion Forest to Hike, but felt like something was wrong. Perhaps the way I had chosen to spend my day? I could thing of nothing better to do, so I drove north.  Somewhere on HWY17 in Mt. Pleasant, Sunday afternoon filled my focus.  I realized that in some way I had entered the meeting feeling like I was present to pull others up to my level of faith and understanding.  Really, feeling a sense of superiority with accompanying responsibility.  But by the time my story turned around, I had been humbled by the magnitude of God's work in them.  And then, as I told of my life, what God has done appeared so small.  I made a big deal of things that, compared to the stories of my compatriots, seemed miniscule, nit-picky, miniature.  He has not saved me from burning buildings and collapsing relationships and poverty and drugs.  He saved me from my the consequences I brought on myself, from my immaturity and sinfulness.  That doesn't seem so attractive.  Certainly not as attractive as a God who heals bones, and families, and hearts.  Honestly, mine did not seem a testimony worth sharing.  God never fixed my circumstances- they were never that broken.  The pit of my testimony, that from which I was saved became, in the presence of these stories, a puddle amidst canyons.  I saw myself smaller, my story insignificant, unmoving, unrelatable.  How can this testimony be of any worth at all?  Who desires an intimate salvation from the God of a sheltered life who saves the one without excuses?

I arrived in the forest and walked and prayed.  The ranger had an incredibly loud indoor voice.  It would not have been out of place at a dance, trying to speak over the music.

I walked around well kept trails in less-than-engaging scenery, stopping to sit and pray, to kneel, to walk blindly into the woods in the hopes of stumbling across some missing tent poles, stopping to read at a picnic table.  I knew I wanted to read Paul's words to Timothy.  Don't let them look down on you because you're young.  That at least disarms the inexperience attack.  Next my eyes wandered to the reading from the day before, saying "the weaker parts are indispensable".  That disarms the feeling of a worthless testimony.

Yet I was still unsatisfied.  Something was still amiss within me.

Next to 1 Chronicles.  The Lord says to David, I will build you a house.  I will covenant with your family.  And then Paul again. He gives gifts to all.  The 'same God', it says, gives gifts to all.

There it is.  Subtly.

My anxiety surges when the Kingdom resists obliging my outstretched hand.  Like when I pray for healing and it doesn't happen, or when I pray to love someone and grow still more frustrated with them.  It frustrates me, and places my heart in a defensive stance.  I know I cannot be 'good' enough to earn my place at the Lord's table, but for some reason I still try to claim my righteousness through spiritual endeavor.  If I ensure that my faith is radical, if I am pushing the limits, then I can know that I am secure.  Sturdy calls it my spiritual resume-  I fill it out to make sure I know that I am saved.

But what can I conclude when I am surrounded by those whose hearts betray a radicalness and who know a revealed Comforter and Redeemer in participatory intimacy far deeper than mine.  I have spent the semester often seeking to raise these brothers and sisters up, and only to see them bloom as eight-foot sunflowers, towering high above my head.


I will build you a house.  I, the same God, gives to all.

Suddenly, sitting in Metto off Coleman BLVD, the connections meet.  Like parallel truths, the product of one mirrors that of the other.  My work is my constant striving, constant recalculating for the highest spiritual track.  My fear is the finding that my track is not so high after all.  But my rest, and my play, is in this.  That the same God that moves in my friends moves in me, and that my story is not about what I do for God, but about what He has done, who He is.

Very often my eyes remained focused on myself, on my needs, on my failures, on my strivings and on my faith.  But, if my eyes are leveled upon the very presence and nature of God in my life, there is freedom, play and worship.  Be my story a blockbuster full of car chases and betrayal, ending in peace, or a footnote, ending in peace, no matter.  Because my glory is Christ, the Lord.  The holiness of my story is not determined in the magnitude of that from which I have been saved, (though my sin is immense, and does reveal God's ability to heal.)  Instead, its holiness is determined by Who has saved me.  For the Lord has made a covenant with me, to build me a house.  He has invited me in to eat with Him.  This, the same Lord as the giants of the faith, of Calvin, Luther, and Peter, Stephanie, Edy, Jason, and Tripp, and the rest.  He that liveth in them, liveth in me.  Dead for me, alive for me, here are the rules, the limits and definitions.  All else is merely play.