Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Spewing my thoughts from 12/19/06

I've nearly killed my desires. Depression is a lot of things, but it is very much learning how to kill healthy desire and replace it with something else. I've nearly achieved that.

How do I know? Yesterday Jud challenged me. I was whining about something I haven't whined about since the last time I was severely depressed and that is not being in a relationship. The reason I was whining is that I feel like I've achieved all these trophies that are supposed to make me desirable. Honestly most of them I tried because they were supposed to make me happy on their own, and I think some of them might have done quite a bit for me. ( Godliness IS a means of great gain when accompanied with contentment. ) But I began to realize that I'd checked off quite a list of "dateable" requirements such as faith, a good job, a nice house, good looks, nice attire and a sports car. Most of those, especially looks and the sports car I didn't even do myself. I'm not sure I would have tried to make most of them happen except maybe faith. But their on the list and you'd think I'd feel good about that.

The problem for me is that with the faith and being born again there's a hatred for doing things the way the world does that's part of the territory. Add to that the fact that I do NOT like doing things the same way others have done that. Individuality is a big desire for me. And the fact that God sees through all our attempts at worldly gain and says things like "apart from me you can do nothing". There's a point where my desire to feel good about my life keeps me from seeing God as a giver of grace and starts me seeing Him instead as a being with just as many rules as the world, just that the rules are the opposite of what makes sense to us. That would make His burden heavier than the world's. Not only is it a lot of rules, but they are counter to everything we see.

Of course that would be contrary to Matthew 11:28, but...

So Jud asked me why I didn't ask God for a girlfriend? He pointed out that in John 16:24 Jesus says "Ask whatever you wish in my name and it will be given to you so that your joy may be made full." He had no explanation for why that doesn't always seem to be true, and he conceided that too many people have misused that verse to "claim" things that even contradict God's will. "But..." Jud said, "the bible said it" and to loosely paraphrase my friend, sometimes you just have to start there.

My excuse is that I feel often like I'm inconvenienceing God with my requests; that I have to re-percieve my relationship with my heavenly Father. Also that I hate feeling manipulative. Really I'm just afraid. (Side note: at that moment and even now I realized how tired I am of using that word to describe myself and I'm just about to the level of my friend Matt, on a personal vendetta against fear)

Jud told me that if I wasn't willing to ask God for a girlfriend for me he was going to. If you'd been there you'd be laughing.

So, today I decided to meditate on that and the two verses before so that I could... I'm not sure. Contemplate the irony that Instead of actually asking God for what I wanted I decided to memorize some of scripture. It's quite funny. I don't know why that was my idea of listening to my friend.

Well as I did try to memorize that scripture on my walk back to work, the first thing I noticed was that joy is brought up twice in three verses. I thought to myself "I'd almost rather have the joy than the prayer request answered."

What?! Somehow inside I felt like I had to choose between joy and having my desires which means, first of all that I have some serious baggage about getting what I want and having it make me at least less happy and probably a lot of more unhappy.

There's also absurdity in this: What kind of Father am I dealing with that I have to choose between joy and fulfillment. Isn't this the God who promises abundant life, the one who says "Delight in Me and I'll give you the desires of your heart"? Have we become so accustomed to settling?

Apparently I have. The fathers of faith are proven over and over again to be very impolite by my standards because they refuse to settle. Abraham, Jacob, David, Jonathan are all fairly impulsive and demanding. One teacher once illustrated Abraham as figuratively grabbing a hold of God's coat and saying "It doesn't matter how much you bless me if I don't have a son to pass it on to."

That takes some of what the Hebrews called "chutzpah". You won't find chutzpah in your Bible. They change it to "faith". But the connotation of the word is something like "guts", "courage" or, if you'll forgive the brashness, "balls".

My friend, after years of crying out to God for a woman of faith to date, is finaly pursuing a great woman. He cried out for years, but he still wasn't sure if he should do this. It took a friend of his to say "You've been crying out for so long. Is it possible that this is the answer to that cry?" before Todd actually stepped out in faith and pursue her.

All this meditation on the spiritual fathers and my friend's dating situation made me see that I pray, but I don't stick with it very long. My prayer has no chutzpah. I ask a few times then, if it doesn't happen I just smother the desire in lesser things.

So as I walked in the December sunshine and unseasonably warm Michigan weather, I suddenly thought of requests I would try to "taste and see that the Lord is good"; to reconvene my walk of hopeful faith. I thought of what I should persist in asking for (again paused by the absurdity of having to choose just one) I thought of what might happen should I actually fall into love they way I want God to provide for and I nearly began to cry with a combination of the obvious joyful beauty of such a moment and the sorrow of seeing what I'd repressed for so long. How much had I held back from those around me by my lack of joy.

I began to realize that I had shortchanged a lot of folks by not asking God to love me and answer all these desires in His way and I began to see that I needed Him to give me much more than I'd been willing to ask for. I'd settled that much. For me to give to those around me I have to ask not for enough to get by, but for enough to thrive so that I can be the same kind of blessing that Joseph or Jacob or David had been to those around them.

I've heard a lot lately about prayer being, not a way to get what we want, but a way to open ourselves up to seeing the way God does. This world is saturated with a spiritual reality that we are too "focused" to see most of the time. If that's the case then how much will God bless the world by my learning to "Ask whatever you wish and you will receive so that your joy may be made full"?

Lord, let me live like You have abundance despite loudness of the voice that says you don't and the fewness of the people willing to believe you. Do what it takes no matter how dangerous to bring me to the place where I feel as safe as a child with a father so that I may receive my peace in that abundance.

posted by Scott # 4:29 PM

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