Yearning

Yearning by M. Craig Barnes

Like all of you, I have been making my way through reality.  Ouch!  In the process, I discovered another traveler, Craig Barnes.  His book mentioned above contained some sentences which have really given me a shake.

“Undertaking Christian discipline is not a way of getting life right.  It is a way of confessing our inability ever to get it right, .. . .

“and that means that not even “finding God” ever makes the Christian whole or totally together”

I have often felt that if I could only perform enough, be spiritual enough, be kind enough, be something other than what I am presently, then the balance of life – that state of perfected bliss where troubles cease to penetrate – would somehow be mine.  I have always believed that this is somehow intimately connected to God.  But what Barnes suggests is that I have failed to appreciate the truth of reality – and that truth is that I am human, made for troubles and cares, thrown into a world full of disrupted agendas.  God is not present to save my dreams.  He is present to save me.  If my view of “saving” is to be rescued so that my dreams come true, I am very unlikely to find what I seek as long as I am human.  And since I most likely will be human all of my life, I had better face the reality that life will most likely always be a series of disrupted agendas.  God’s grace, if I am to experience it at all, will be experienced in the midst of troubles – not as an escape from them, but as a way to go through them, as a way to find that His agendas are not necessarily mine at all, no matter how much I would like to think that I can somehow bend His plans to my desires.

“Shit happens” is probably a lot more theologically sound than we would like to admit.  If I am totally honest about myself, it certainly has happened to me and seems to be unrelated to either my good deeds or my bad ones.  The lesson for me is this:  if my God is only the genie of my desires, I have not understood God’s grace.  If I can look life squarely in the eye and say, “Yes, things will happen to me that I neither wanted or deserved”, then perhaps I will have the courage to ask God to take me His direction, instead of the self pity that says “Why didn’t it go the way I wanted”.