Sunday, August 3, 2008

Excerpt: Until God Becomes our All

The following excerpt is from the book I'm reading by John Eldridge called "Walking with God" This chapter really hit me hard. It's long but worth the time. Spend some time with this - digest it - let it roll around in your head and heart for awhile (especially the questions at the end). I hope you will enjoy it!

Until God Becomes Our All

"How do we best understand life?"
I was meeting with a young woman the other day talking through some hard times in her life. I don't know yet how to make sense of my accident or the fact that both my arms are now in casts. But life goes on, and I had to go to work. So I was meeting with this young woman who was dealing with some distress of her own, when she asked me what I thought was the truest way of looking at life. "My husband thinks life is just hard. I'm feeling that it's sort of random. We're not really good for each other right now. What do you think? " Oh, the beautiful timing of God. I am suddenly aware that Someone else is in the room. There is a sort of pregnant expectation in the air. What would I say? What do I believe?

"God wants us to be happy," I said. "But he knows that we cannot be truly happy until we are completely his and until he is our all. And the weaning process is hard." Even though I was playing the role of counselor in that moment, I was feeling that God had arranged the whole encounter for me.

"The sorrows of our lives are in a great part his weaning process. We give our hearts over to so many things other than God. We look to so many other things for life. I know I do. Especially the very gifts that he himself gives to us - they become more important to us than he is. That's not the way it is supposed to be. As long as our happiness is tied to the things we can lose, we are vulnerable."

This truth is core to the human condition and to understanding what God is doing in our lives. We really believe that God's primary reason for being is to provide us with happiness, give us a good life. It doesn't occur to us that our thinking is backward. It doesn't even occur to us that God is meant to be our all, and that until he is our all, we are subhuman. The first and greatest command is to love God with our whole being. Yet, it is rare to find someone who is completely given over to God. And so normal to be surrounded by people who are trying to make life work. We think of the few who are abandoned to God as being sort of odd. The rest of the world- the ones trying to make life work-seem perfectly normal to us.

After the accident, I was really disappointed that life was suddenly beyond my grasp. Literally. The forecast for the next several months looked bleak. But do I ever feel this disappointed when God seems distant, when I seem to be losing my grasp of him? What is it with us? I am just stunned by this propensity I see in myself -and in everyone I know- this stubborn inclination to view the world in one and only one way: as the chance to live a happy little life.

Now don't get me wrong. There is so much about the world that is good and beautiful even though it is fallen. And there is so much good in the life that God gives us. As Paul said, God has richly provided us with everything for our enjoyment (I Timothy 6:17). In Ecclesiastes, Solomon wrote that to enjoy our work and our food each day is a gift from God (2:24). We are created to enjoy life. But we end up worshiping the gift instead of the Giver. [emphasis mine] We seek for life and look to God as our assistant in the endeavor. We are far more upset when things go wrong than we ever are when we aren't close to God.

And so God must, from time to time, and sometimes very insistently, disrupt our lives so that we release our grasping of life here and now. Usually through pain. God is asking us to let go of the things we love and have given our hearts to, so that we can give our hearts even more fully to him. He thwarts us in our attempts to make life work so that our efforts fail, and we must face the fact that we don't really look to God for life. Our first reaction is usually to get angry with him, which only serves to make the point. Don't you hear people say, "Why did God let this happen?" far more than you hear them say, "Why aren't I more fully given over to God?"

We see God as a means to an end rather than the end itself. God as the assistant to our life versus God as our life. We don't see the process of our life as coming to the place where we are fully his and he is our all. And so we are surprised by the course of events.

It's not that God doesn't want us to be happy. He does. It's just that he knows that until we are holy, we cannot really be happy. Until God has become our all, and we are fully his, we will continue to make idols of the good things he gives us. We are like the child who throws a fit because he cannot have a toy or watch TV. In the moment, he could care less that his mother adores him. His world is out of sorts. He does not see that his heart is not in the right place. He needs his mother's love and comfort far more than he needs the thing he's made an idol of.

Whatever else might be the reason for our current suffering, we can know this: "the LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul" (Deuteronomy 13:3). We are so committed to arranging for a happy little life that God has to thwart us to bring us back to himself. It's a kind of regular purging, I suppose. A sort of cleansing for the soul. I have to yield not only all my hopes for this fall, but my basic approach to life as well. Of all tests, I do not want to fail this one.

Now, I am not suggesting that God causes all the pain in our lives. I don't believe he pushed me off my horse to make a pint. In fact, I believe he saved my life. But pain does come, and what will we do with it? What does it reveal? What might God be up to? How might he redeem our pain? Those are the questions worth asking.

Don't waste your pain.



Eldridge's blog: www.walkingwithgod.net