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
Monday, March 9, 2009
party time
On Sunday we had the awards ceremony for the basketball league that 2 of my kids participated in. There were over 300 grade school-aged kids in the league, so there wasn’t a whole lot of “ceremony” about the awards: it was craziness and screaming and high energy for over 90 minutes. I had signed up to coach my 6-year old’s team, so I got to be part of the craziness. “Every kid’s a winner” in Upward Basketball, so I got to give ribbons and gifts to all my guys.
There were times during the season when I wondered why I’d signed up to coach. You can’t really teach 6 and 7-year olds how to run a pick-and-roll or run a 3-man weave (at least, not in one hour a week). But it was all worth it when 4 of my guys prayed to ask Jesus to be their Savior last night. The only thing louder than a bunch of 6- and 7-year olds screaming is the party in heaven when the angels rejoice over a 6- or 7-year old praying in earnest faith to become God’s child.
There were times during the season when I wondered why I’d signed up to coach. You can’t really teach 6 and 7-year olds how to run a pick-and-roll or run a 3-man weave (at least, not in one hour a week). But it was all worth it when 4 of my guys prayed to ask Jesus to be their Savior last night. The only thing louder than a bunch of 6- and 7-year olds screaming is the party in heaven when the angels rejoice over a 6- or 7-year old praying in earnest faith to become God’s child.
memories
This past Friday the Executive Board of the Pacific Southwest Conference of the Evangelical Covenant Church said good-bye to me and Valerie McCann-Woodson because we are “terming out”. Our chair, Will Davidson, asked the other board members to share their thoughts and reflections about our terms of service on the board. It was a wonderful time of hearing how others saw us and the impact we’d had on the conference and on the members of the board.
I got a chance to see myself as others saw me. People told me about things that I didn’t even know I’d done. They had memories of me that I wasn’t at all aware of. But because they told me, these things have now become a part of me, shaping who I am.
The church is a community of memory. As individuals we forget things. But as a community we can remember things for each other that we may have forgotten or didn’t even know, especially things like how much God loves us and the fact that he takes delight in each of us, his children (Zephaniah 3:17). This is something we often forget, or at least we live like we’ve forgotten it. But we can remember it for each other and help each other live in the joy of being God’s beloved.
I got a chance to see myself as others saw me. People told me about things that I didn’t even know I’d done. They had memories of me that I wasn’t at all aware of. But because they told me, these things have now become a part of me, shaping who I am.
The church is a community of memory. As individuals we forget things. But as a community we can remember things for each other that we may have forgotten or didn’t even know, especially things like how much God loves us and the fact that he takes delight in each of us, his children (Zephaniah 3:17). This is something we often forget, or at least we live like we’ve forgotten it. But we can remember it for each other and help each other live in the joy of being God’s beloved.
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