I met with my spiritual director today. We talked about what motivates me, e.g., to do so much reading, or to be a better preacher, or to try to understand church finances. On the one hand there is an innate curiosity. On the other hand, there is a nagging voice in my head telling me that I don’t measure up and that if I can just be a little bit better maybe I’ll find approval. But that’s not my only problem.
Because I have these motivations, I’ve garnered a fairly wide scope of knowledge. And there’s the rub: it’s impossible to put everything into practice. I know a little about a lot of things, but that knowledge is shallow because it’s not the knowledge that comes with having lived it out. Yet I want to have that deeper knowledge and I want that to be the sort of knowledge that informs my influence on others, but that takes too much time (or so I tell myself). As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, a critique of my sermons is that they’re too heavy on book knowledge and not heavy enough on showing how The Book is to be lived out.
That’s a source of pain for me. I really want to change and to live out what I know about, but for whatever reasons, I just can’t quite get there. St. Paul expressed it well when he said, “O wretched man that I am!” (Romans 7:24 KJV). He said this because “I have the desire to do what is good but I cannot carry it out” (Romans 7:18 NIV).
A phrase that seems to sum it up for me is that “my reach exceeds my grasp” (“or what’s heaven for?” according to Browning). The pain of that distance between reach and grasp varies for different people. Some people resolve the pain by working on extending their grasp. Those are the practical types and their approach makes a lot of sense and avoids a lot of frustration. My problem is that I’m one of those who is always trying to extend my reach and then I’m increasingly frustrated by the growing distance between my reach and my grasp. I’m not a very practical person.
My spiritual director wasn’t much help: “That’s life” she said. Well, actually she said something more profound, like “that’s the human condition” and “we’ll never resolve these things in this life” and things like that. And actually she was a lot of help. She encouraged me to give myself grace, to rest in the fact that God loves me and has made me who I am and that there is something good that comes out of my pain of never being able to achieve the increasingly higher standards that I set for myself. But she never said to quit setting high standards.
“I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:14 KJV
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3 comments:
I think I know what you mean about the frustration of not being able to achieve all that we conceive of. There are so many symphonies to listen to, so many books to read, so much history to learn about, so many cultures to experience! And there are so many lost souls, so many villages needing clean-water wells, so many people dying of AIDS.
I sometimes wonder where the pain comes from that's inherent in reach versus grasp (good way to put it, btw). Is it from our existential limitation as humans? Or is it because we are strangers in a strange land, yearning for our heavenly home? Or something else?
I agree with your spiritual director in some ways – grace for oneself, and that such is the human condition. But I kind of disagree with her (respectfully) in that I think God knows we are limited and yet has promised us that we can achieve wonderful, beyond-all-expectations kinds of things, those good works that He has set before us. When Jesus said, "I have come that you may have life and have it to the full," I think He’s talking about quality rather than quantity. (Your four little basketball players who accepted Christ – wow! That’s quality!)
What keeps me from the God kind of quality living? For example, why do I have a hard time sharing the Good News (the Best News, really) with the nonbelievers in my life? It's frustrating! Maybe I rely too heavily on showing love through silent actions rather than overt words. Maybe it's human nature to rely on doing the thing we do well over and over and over, exercising the well-exercised muscle, because it's uncomfortable to try doing the thing we don't automatically excel at, or to exercise the underdeveloped muscle. But maybe it's that lack of 'balance' that is causing our pain.
Give grace to ourselves. I agree. We are all in process of being shaped into the persons that the Lord has designed us uniquely and individually to become. And from that standpoint, we also have the privilege of watching how the Spirit is changing our brothers and sisters, and of saying to one other, "Praise God! I like who you are becoming in Christ!"
Steve, these blogs are just great! Thanks for taking the time to write them, and the courage to be transparent. I will definitely encourage others to read them.
I love lots of things and running in all directions. I also love doing nothing kicking the can around. There are the big questions such as being restless until I find my rest in the arms of God, there is also the sense that living in our time, everyone needs to be "born again" because 92% of modern living is faux, that is, spin, image, meanness, competitiveness, plastic, convenience, petty, disposable; being born into this vacuum far from a Walden.
I suspect, we are passionate about books, symphonies, even doing nothing because we desire the real, the authentic and the rightness that is present in doing. There may be darker motives explaining our actions as well, ok.
Just be glad that whatever it is we happen to be doing, we can return to the tribe/group(s)/family/beloved community and share ourselves and whatever we may have brought back. BAM, there is the joy. - mike epa
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