HO Week 6 (9/30) - Calling

The Audience of One

Bucking the crowd. Marching to the beat of a different drum. Swimming upstream. These are metaphors I find myself identifying with on a regular basis. I’m not an average American 21-year-old (after all, I only joined the 21 club last Sunday). I wasn’t a typical high school teenager either. In Rising to the Call, Os Guinness encourages Christians to live and perform for an audience of one. So I’m on the right track, right?

Wrong. At least, not necessarily right. There are many audiences that the world encourages us to try to please. But the one I want to focus on here is the deceptive audience of one: myself. It’s fairly easy for me to be a maverick and proud of it. However, doing my own thing for the sake of doing my own thing isn’t where I want to be—because if I’m doing my own thing, my focus is off.

The audience of one is not me. The Audience of One is God.

Read that again, Esther. Read it again. {Big sigh} It’s not too difficult for me to do what I want to do, regardless of what other people are doing. What is much more challenging is doing what God wants me to do, regardless of what I want to do. Here I am, back to the same place God keeps bringing me this month: SURRENDER.

I may think I have my life all figured out. But at the end of the day, I am not my most important audience. God is. And when someday the curtain closes on the story of my life, I don’t want my own applause to be the only sound I hear. If there’s only one person clapping, that’s just fine…so long as that person is my Heavenly Father – the true Audience of One.

HO Week 5 (9/23) - Calling

Service vs. Devotion

“Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ. The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him….The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for Him.” ~~~Oswald Chambers

When I read this quote in Os Guinness’ “Rising to the Call” a lightbulb went off in my head unlike either of the other two times I’ve read the book. This quote is applicable to me because it’s a huge temptation of mine to easily get so carried away “serving God” that I have no time simply to be His as my room mate says.

This really dawned on me for the first time last January, I think on one of the days Jill Briscoe came to speak in chapel. Standing there singing, it suddenly dawned on me that there is never never anything I can do to earn my salvation. I shouldn’t try to earn God’s love, because it is a free gift! Everything I do should be a response of love and thankfulness, but not out of a sense of indebtedness. God doesn’t want my good deeds. He wants ME!

It’s super easy for us as college students to get caught up and to busy serving God. It goes back to that article “Human Flourishing” we read the first week. In fact, this issue is my biggest disagreement with that article. There are so many good opportunities for us to serve – especially at a Christian college like JBU. But our number one goal is to be fully Christ’s. We shouldn’t assume our good deeds earn our favor with God when what He’s really looking for is our hearts, yielded to Him.

HO Week 4 (9/16) - Calling

The Story of My Life

Anabel stared up at the mountain peak, just one of a whole range stretching as far as she could see. For days, this view had been on her horizon—threatening her goal by blocking her path. It was as though the mountains knew exactly what she wanted and were laughing at their ability to keep her from attaining it. How long ago had she started on this journey? The weeks and months of toil were blending together…and now suddenly it seemed to be at an end, here at the foot of an insurmountable obstacle.

Each one of us has ambitions. Each has a journey which has brought us to where we now stand. But we rarely see our lives like we see stories. Stories have meaning in every moment—there is rarely a wasted scene in a book or a movie. Thus, we look at our day-to-day existence and think it’s boring. This is the idea Donald Miller wrote A Million Miles in a Thousand Years to combat.

At the risk of sounding “over-saved,” I can honestly say that my main pursuit in life at this moment is to live the life God would have me to live. I know that the best life I could ever live is the one God has planned out for me. He has been reminding me all year that I can trust Him. Sure, I have ideas of the things I would like to do. But if they’re not in God’s plan, He’s teaching me that I can lay them down on the altar. He is my Master, I am His slave.

My life is a conglomeration of many typical story plots…and some which are very unusual. I’ve been impacted by the “good kid from a Christian family” story – the “homeschooled” story – the “love nature & the outdoors” story – the “mid-income, non-extravagant lifestyle” story. Those don’t make me too unique…but then there’s the “I lived in China with my family for seven months when I was in 6^th grade” story. While it was a long time ago…while I was rather young…while I don’t think about it every day…still, this story has had a huge impact on me. God uses all of the stories He has written into each person’s life to create a book that is beautiful, special, and unique. I can trust Him, knowing that each piece of the puzzle that is “me” fits together to create a picture of the “me” He has had in mind from eternity past.

HO Week 3 (9/9) - Calling

[We're reading Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and the prompt was to write about a scene of our life depicting a single memory]

Life as a Movie

June 22, 2003—I remember the day well. It was a Sunday morning unlike any of the past 36 Sunday mornings. That morning, I walked through the doors of my home church for the first time in nine months. {I had not been there while my family and I lived in China.}

There was one thing I wanted to do more than anything else – see my best friend, who had promised to email me every day and had faithfully done so. Glimpsing her walking in the hallway, I moved to intercept her. Evidently she had seen me when I saw her, because she had rushed into the auditorium just as I slipped out. She chased me down and we reunited in a joyful hug there in the hallway.

I can still see it in my mind’s eye – I can still remember my almost euphoric happiness that things had finally reached a conclusion – I can still point to the exact spot where it happened. There have been times since when the building has been deserted that I have returned to the spot and relived that moment. For me, it brought the saga of my Chinese experience full circle. Now, at last, I felt truly home.

Those feelings are what make the moment stick in my mind. The relationship and kinship I felt with my friend are what gave those brief moments poignancy. There was a period of time, however, when the memory was bittersweet – when the happiness of the time was dulled by the regret of the present.

A couple years after our reunion, my friend and I had pretty much gone our separate ways. We still saw each other, but I no longer counted her as a close friend. Just this summer, thanks to her initiation, we finally reconnected on a deep level. Suddenly, I again feel that close bond I felt with her so long ago, and I am thankful. It’s a reminder that things don’t always stay the way they are…but that I shouldn’t give up easily on something good either.

Questions about Chapters 1-10:

1. On page 7, Miller says "You get a feeling when you look back on life that that's all God really wants from us, to live inside a body he made and enjoy the story and bond with us through the experience." What do you think of this theologically? I just heard something else like this today...maybe in Integrated Theology...about how God became incarnated to share our experience of life with us.

2. "Without story, experience are just random," Steve tells Don (27). Later, Miller talks about a man who changed his daughter's heart towards him through story. "He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family" (51). We clearly don't want our lives to be meaningless, but to what extent should we try to plan/map out the story of our lives? How does God fit into this picture?

HO Week 2 (9/2) - Human Flourishing

What is True Success?

The school year has started up again, and with it comes another semester of mentoring for Honors Orientation! Here's my blog post responding to the first article for that class.....

College students are busy people—super busy. I’ve been told “College is such a great time of life, you should take advantage of it and experience everything you can!” However, juggling too many balls can result in a feeling of being completely overwhelmed. The arms flail, the balls fall out of control and scatter.

We aren’t supposed to be in control of our lives. Part of the Fall was choosing to believe we know better than God, so the flesh will always struggle to convince us to take things into our own hands. When we yield to the quest for worldly success, we enter into an unending cycle of trying to claim to the top of an ever-extending ladder.

Danielle Sallade says basically the same in her article “Human Flourishing.” She says our work is to be centered on service to Christ and others rather than our achievements. While I agree with her, it’s important for us to also realize that it is just as easy to run ourselves ragged by participating in too much. If I try to serve in every capacity, I will feel just as exhausted as someone constantly striving for human success.

The danger of over-serving is not something Sallade really addressed in her essay. That is what I often find myself caught in. I love helping people. But I am not called to fill every need of each person. That’s Christ’s role, not mine! Sallade does talk about how we should look at our gifts and see how we can best use those in Christ’s service. We are to offer our abilities up to Him, to use as He desires to accomplish His plan. Searching out the will of God and trusting Him is the only way to find true satisfaction in life—not trying to gain all the secular or Christian accolades for being a “successful” person.

{If you're interested in reading more, this is simply the abridged, HO-sanctioned (ie, closer to 250 words) version of a post on Thrive80, where I am a contributor. You can see it "here"}

Classifying Sins: Pets or Monsters?

We humans can be very inconsistent creatures. We like to think that we have things all figured out and are always reasonable……but we most certainly don’t and aren’t. I was thinking about this while making lunch today. What brought it to mind was thinking about how we inadvertently and perhaps unconsciously classify and think about sin/sins. Everybody has at least two classes into which they group types of faults: pets and monsters. {In this post, I use “we” because I think everyone does this. But each of us as individuals has our own pets and monsters.}

Pet sins are those ones that I might admit I do but that I make excuses for or try to explain away. They’re like my pet bird Bluebonnet. As I was trying to type the first part of this post, he was running around on the keyboard, playing with my fingers and wanting me to pay attention to him and give him kisses. Sometimes our pets can be so very annoying! Sometimes we may even despise them. But other times we love them and anything they do seems cute.

Now to the monsters. This group is for those sins we always recognize as horrible—the things that we would never never do, try to avoid at all costs, and are always quick to judge others for doing. Things like (in my upbringing) getting drunk, gambling, murder, adultery, etc. We view this class of sins as horrible villains, like Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, Sauron in the Lord of the Rings, or any other classic nemesis—things that are clearly evil, non-negotiable and unacceptable.

This system can be very comfortable for us. It can make us feel good and self-righteous. There’s just one small problem with it: God doesn’t see sin that way. He doesn’t acknowledge or identify with our classification scheme. To God, ALL sins are EQUALLY reprehensible and disgusting.

I can be standing where I am critically judging a fellow brother or sister in Christ because they choose to buy a lottery ticket, drink or go clubbing. At that moment, what I am failing to recognize is that I have equally atrocious sins which I have grown to accept in my own life – be it gluttony, gossiping or harbored anger. Each of us has villainous sins in our life—horrible addictions which we have come to see as cute little pets. What’s even worse is when I despise others for the very things I am myself guilty of doing.

Hmm….this concept reminds me of a Bible verse! In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” Matthew 7:1-5, NIV (emphasis mine).

There’s also this: Some things like gambling are not mentioned or directly prohibited in the Bible. So on what basis have “good Christians” made these activities such a marker for judging others???? Gambling may be unwise and a poor use of the money which God has given me to be a steward of, but so is spending all my money on food or entertainment. Although we see it as such a “bad” thing to do, it’s not listed in the Ten Commandments. But honoring my parents is, and so is coveting. Have I ever dishonored my parents? Definitely. Have I ever been envious of what others have? You betcha I have. If I can’t even fulfill the ten most basic rules God gave men to govern their lives, what business have I to criticize others so strongly for their faults?

This has been a convicting post for me to write. I don’t always choose to remember how serious my sins and faults are. I much prefer keeping my pets. But when I take a step back and remember how God sees my sin—just as evil as the monsters I judge others for—it makes me feel quite ashamed of myself. But at the same time it makes me feel very grateful for Christ’s love and sacrifice for me.

Lord, teach me to recognize the evilness of my own sins. Remind me that I am no better of a person than anyone else. Through Your power, may I choose to say no to my entangling snares and also show others the same grace and mercy which I have received.