The Library Session #2

 Packing light 

I wish I could have known my internal world was telling me lies about my external world and what was happening in it. I wish I could have grabbed myself by the shoulders, shaken myself, and said "No one has anything you don't have! You have everything you need. You have as much control over your life as anyone! If you feel depressed, do something about it. If you feel stuck, flail around for a while until you get unstuck. If you feel trapped, kick down the doors that are keeping you in. Make messes. Make mistakes. Just make a decision, for heaven's sake! Quit waiting for life to happen to you. Whether you're sitting in a cubicle, or on a fifty-state road trip, it's no different. The control over your life you long for, it isn't elusive. You already have it."

It's a very Christian idea to think that God has everything under control and we don't have to worry about it. It sounds really nice, but I sometimes wonder if we have misunderstood its meaning. I wonder if sometimes we we take this as an excuse to do nothing.
I think about how it was the "rich young ruler" who came to Jesus, and not the other way around. It's he who acknowledged his own need ("What do i have to do to get eternal life?") and he who, when Jesus gives him the answer, responds by walking the other direction. Jesus doesn't even go running after him, which I've always found interesting. Doesn't Jesus love him? Doesn't He want him to experience the kingdom of heaven? I think He does. But I think He gives us more control than we like to admit. He leaves the final choice up to us.
It's not just inaccurate to believe we have no control -it's dangerous too. After a while you start to believe that nothing you do matters, that nothing you do will change your circumstances. If you get stuck in this place, you end up sitting around waiting on God to do something you could have done for yourself all along.
If we believe God is a dictator, barking orders down from above, after a while we start to resent Him.  That's where I was. No matter how "obedient" I was to His orders, things didn't turn out the way I had planned. I've done this so many times in my life. I've turned what was always meant to be a relationship into an obedience-reward system, in which i was being obedient just to get the prize at the end. If we're being obedient to get a reward from Jesus, we'll never get it. We've missed the point. I wonder if that is what happened with the "rich young ruler." I wonder if he was worried he'd give up all of his stuff and wouldn't get rewarded.
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...If we want to be truly alive, truly awake to the reality of the world around us, packing light will be a continued, daily struggle...
Sharaya and I sat still for a moment, just enjoying our Diet Cokes and the roar of the jet engine.
"I think sometimes when things get hard, too many of us assume we're moving the wrong direction," she told me. "Like if we're doing life right, it's supposed to be easy."
I nodded.
I couldn't help but think about how i was as guilty of this as anyone. I wouldn't have said it out loud, but this was the way I was living my life, before the road trip at least, if not after. I was living like it was going to get easy one of these days if I just kept following all the directions. I had bartered with God: promised that if He did something for me, I would do something for Him, and the same was true the other way around. If I did something for Him, He had better do something for me back. It wasn't two people giving freely and openly. It wasn't a relationship; it was a business partnership. It was cold and stilted, when I allowed it to be.
I think we all go through seasons like this with God. It's a relationship, after all, and relationships go through rich and dry spells. It takes some time to figure out how to abandon yourself to someone, or to something, to trust in it completely -even if it is completely trustworthy. I wonder how many of us aren't leaning yet, not totally anyway, into what we know to be true about Him. He's shown up when no one else did, carried us through an experience that threatened to steal us from the inside out, healed us, and put us back together when we didn't even know we were broken. I wonder what it will take for us to finally decided it's worth it. 

- Allison Vesterfelt