A few weeks ago I was at retreat with my church. It was a wonderful time of worship, conversation, games, and the forest. I am a woods nut and the times I spent hiking around where some of the best. The places where I hiked weren’t exactly secluded, but they were nice. It was odd to hear trucks roar by just out of sight, or see a cabin through the trees, or a street sign.
And if I slowed down and looked around I could see beer cans, water bottles, scraps of cloth and paper scattered all around. I found myself walking faster when all of these distractions were the worst. And it worked. If I walked fast enough I only saw the creek running past me, and the lovely trees around me. I didn’t hear all of the cars through my heavy breathing, or see the things that were blemishes on the land around me. Everything was shooting past me too fast for me to see the details.
As I sat by the side of the creek for a while I noticed that it did the same thing. I sat watching a single piece of water and leaves just floated by me, pure untainted water. Then a bottle floated down the water and into my view. But it almost seemed like the water was embarrassed or offended by the bottle and it picked up speed to carry the bottle past its human admirer as quickly as possible.
I realized that’s how I often live my Christian life, and how I have even encouraged people to do that in their lives as well. We live in a screwed up world, and there is trash all around us, both literally and figuratively. We have struggles with co-workers, there is poverty on the streets, someone died, drugs are coming into our neighborhood, we’re depressed, a friend killed themselves, we’re questioning aspects of our faith, whatever it is there is garbage all around us. And so often the Christian response is not to pick it up, but to fill our lives even fuller with “Christian” stuff so that we’re moving so quickly through life we only see the good things.
I’ve done that. I’ve encouraged people who are struggling to get involved in a couple more programs, listen to specific music, read more of the Bible and more books, and go to more services and programs. In short, I tell them to make their life rush past them so fast that they don’t have time to notice what is going on in and around it. Make it so that they only have just enough time in their day to survive, and if everything that sucks up their time is Christian, then we’ve succeeded, and the trash is gone.
But the trash isn’t gone, we just swept past it. And when we’re not talking about a trail we can leave but are talking about our lives that means the trash is just piling up somewhere out of sight until no matter how fast we run we’ll have no choice but to face it. And when that day comes, there will be so much garbage from so many years that we can’t do anything but crack under the weight of years of personal neglect. Like the stream rushing its garbage past anyone watching, we push our junk out of our lives by sheer quantity of other stuff we fill its place with. But also like the stream, the garbage never really leaves
So what happens when we stop? What happens if we slow our lives down enough that the garbage can hang around long enough for us to pick it up? Well, first if will hurt. We’ll have to deal with our flaws, our imperfections, our troubles, instead of pretending we’re perfect. We’ll actually have to admit that we aren’t perfect, that our lives aren’t perfect. And that hurts, because we’ll have to also admit that all of the filling up of our lives and running at full tilt haven’t done what we were hoping it would.
But it would also mean we can deal with this stuff. It means that instead of running fast, avoiding our troubles, and thanking God for helping us, we can actually let God work in our lives and help us not just to avoid seeing what is keeping us down, but to actually fix it. It means we can be healed, but we have to slow down enough that we can see what is around us and in us.
I stopped that weekend, just for a moment, and the first thing I wanted to do is start running again. I don’t like having to see the garbage that is in my life, my relationships, my block, my town, my world. I want to pretend it’s all been taken care of. I want to fill up my life with so full of good things I can convince myself there isn’t anything bad in me anymore.
But if we just stop, and let God work in the garbage we find around us as we slow down, we can stop pretending we’re whole and truly become whole. We can stop trying to sweep bottles down our river and instead take them out. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big thing to you, but it is. When we are not afraid of our own lives, when we are so caught up on our baggage that we can deal with things as they come up instead of running, it makes all the difference in the world. We were made to be pristine environments for God to dwell in. we were not meant to push all our junk behind us or pretend we’re perfect when in reality the rivers of our life are poisoned downstream from all our pollution.
But it means we have to stop, and that is scary. It is scary to actually trust God instead of just claiming we trust God. It is scary to deal with our past instead of pretending that we have. But it’s worth it. I encourage you to slow down, and let your garbage catch up with you for a little while, so God and you can pick up that trash together and make you clean.
And if I slowed down and looked around I could see beer cans, water bottles, scraps of cloth and paper scattered all around. I found myself walking faster when all of these distractions were the worst. And it worked. If I walked fast enough I only saw the creek running past me, and the lovely trees around me. I didn’t hear all of the cars through my heavy breathing, or see the things that were blemishes on the land around me. Everything was shooting past me too fast for me to see the details.
As I sat by the side of the creek for a while I noticed that it did the same thing. I sat watching a single piece of water and leaves just floated by me, pure untainted water. Then a bottle floated down the water and into my view. But it almost seemed like the water was embarrassed or offended by the bottle and it picked up speed to carry the bottle past its human admirer as quickly as possible.
I realized that’s how I often live my Christian life, and how I have even encouraged people to do that in their lives as well. We live in a screwed up world, and there is trash all around us, both literally and figuratively. We have struggles with co-workers, there is poverty on the streets, someone died, drugs are coming into our neighborhood, we’re depressed, a friend killed themselves, we’re questioning aspects of our faith, whatever it is there is garbage all around us. And so often the Christian response is not to pick it up, but to fill our lives even fuller with “Christian” stuff so that we’re moving so quickly through life we only see the good things.
I’ve done that. I’ve encouraged people who are struggling to get involved in a couple more programs, listen to specific music, read more of the Bible and more books, and go to more services and programs. In short, I tell them to make their life rush past them so fast that they don’t have time to notice what is going on in and around it. Make it so that they only have just enough time in their day to survive, and if everything that sucks up their time is Christian, then we’ve succeeded, and the trash is gone.
But the trash isn’t gone, we just swept past it. And when we’re not talking about a trail we can leave but are talking about our lives that means the trash is just piling up somewhere out of sight until no matter how fast we run we’ll have no choice but to face it. And when that day comes, there will be so much garbage from so many years that we can’t do anything but crack under the weight of years of personal neglect. Like the stream rushing its garbage past anyone watching, we push our junk out of our lives by sheer quantity of other stuff we fill its place with. But also like the stream, the garbage never really leaves
So what happens when we stop? What happens if we slow our lives down enough that the garbage can hang around long enough for us to pick it up? Well, first if will hurt. We’ll have to deal with our flaws, our imperfections, our troubles, instead of pretending we’re perfect. We’ll actually have to admit that we aren’t perfect, that our lives aren’t perfect. And that hurts, because we’ll have to also admit that all of the filling up of our lives and running at full tilt haven’t done what we were hoping it would.
But it would also mean we can deal with this stuff. It means that instead of running fast, avoiding our troubles, and thanking God for helping us, we can actually let God work in our lives and help us not just to avoid seeing what is keeping us down, but to actually fix it. It means we can be healed, but we have to slow down enough that we can see what is around us and in us.
I stopped that weekend, just for a moment, and the first thing I wanted to do is start running again. I don’t like having to see the garbage that is in my life, my relationships, my block, my town, my world. I want to pretend it’s all been taken care of. I want to fill up my life with so full of good things I can convince myself there isn’t anything bad in me anymore.
But if we just stop, and let God work in the garbage we find around us as we slow down, we can stop pretending we’re whole and truly become whole. We can stop trying to sweep bottles down our river and instead take them out. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big thing to you, but it is. When we are not afraid of our own lives, when we are so caught up on our baggage that we can deal with things as they come up instead of running, it makes all the difference in the world. We were made to be pristine environments for God to dwell in. we were not meant to push all our junk behind us or pretend we’re perfect when in reality the rivers of our life are poisoned downstream from all our pollution.
But it means we have to stop, and that is scary. It is scary to actually trust God instead of just claiming we trust God. It is scary to deal with our past instead of pretending that we have. But it’s worth it. I encourage you to slow down, and let your garbage catch up with you for a little while, so God and you can pick up that trash together and make you clean.
No comments:
Post a Comment