Driftwood & Piledrivers

Lord Jesus, where am I? Help me to give you praise in everything that I do. Speak to me, work through me, minister to my broken heart. I need you—more than anything else, I need you. Come to me, my Lord & give me life.

Picture with me, if you will, an expanse of windless ocean. There are no clouds in the sky; there are no waves on the surface of the water. The only thing around—besides the warm, noonday sun—is a piece of driftwood, minding its own business as it wanders through the endless expanse of liquid hydrogen hydroxide. Now, imagine as though you are lying in the water right next to that piece of driftwood, having not a care in the world that could shatter the relaxed bliss of that moment. As you smile, lying on the surface of the water, you close your eyes & daydream for a while—maybe you're even the type of person to take a short snooze. Seconds mature into minutes, and the minutes pile up like the sand on the shore. After all sense of time has been successfully removed from your consciousness, you casually open your eyes. That piece of driftwood which was right beside you is no longer around. In fact, the two of you have meandered far enough apart that you can barely make out its shape far off on the horizon. "How in the world did that happen?" you muse to yourself as you lie back again and rest on the surface of the seas.

It truly is an amazing phenomenon, the action of drifting. You don't have to do anything at all, for just by the very nature of a fluid, you will ultimately end up moving. I don't know what to say. I think I was given a rude awakening yesterday evening, when I realised that I myself am very much like that piece of driftwood. The duration of time, however, has been much longer than a few minutes, and it is not you that I have drifted from in this my most recent realisation. I got smacked across the head last night & realised that my relationship with God has become so long-distance that I can barely see Him in my life anymore. What caused this realisation, I'm not all too sure: it just was, and that's as best as I can explain it. Needless to say, I found this realisation very, very unsettling.

If I actually asked myself the hard questions, how would I respond? Honestly? If I were to ask of myself, "What impact does your relationship with God have in and on your life?" or "Do you love God?" or "Do you love others?" or "What is the most important thing to you?" or "Where are you at with God?" I know that I would come up very short. And it makes me want to weep.

Today and yesterday, I have been questioning myself as to whether I have been living a lie for the past several years. Has Christ truly been central in my life? After serious thought about it, I would have to conclude that He hasn't. What does God mean to me? I know how I should answer. Heck, I even know how I would answer, but if I actually sat down & truly considered the question, how would I answer? Is God my security blanket? No. Has he become that to me in my drifting? Maybe. Is God living and active & central in my life? Living, maybe; active, maybe; central, doubtful. Has he been any of these in my life before? Hell yes. Do I know who my God is? Definitely. Is my heart his? That's questionable & uncertain. Do I want it to be? Consciously & verbally, yes I do, but in my daily living...?

To be wholly honest, I love my God more than words can express. I desire him more than wealth, fame, power, comfort & even others. He is a living, compassionate, love-filled, super-awesome everything. He is the one thing that I could not continue living without. God makes my day; He comforts me in my deepest, darkest moments & he celebrates with me in my victories. He is with me when I don't feel Him; He is with me when I do. To try to define who I am while leaving God out of the picture would be like trying to define a word while leaving out the vowels & consonants. And this, I hope, will help you appreciate better the crisis that I currently am dealing with. How would you react if one day you woke up and the one thing in your life that you absolutely love without limit, that you define your life by, that you live for—that most dearest thing—what if you woke up one day only to notice that it was almost completely out of sight because you were taking it for granted or because your were focusing on something else for a while instead.

What is love? I know there is a definition for it in I Cor. 13, but what is it really? I say I love, but do I really? When the mass-market media-frenzy tragedy of the year hit a few weeks ago, many people around me were shocked & dismayed. I? Numbed & unmoved. As hundreds of thousands of people experienced a life-shattering event, I was saying in my head "whoop-de-doo!" and to be honest, my attitude still hasn't changed that much (if at all). A cutting edge theory of emotions states that love is a rational construct wherein an object is recognised as being central to the advancement of one's personal strivings for eudaimonia (good spiritedness) that is not fully under one’s control (Cf. Nussbaum, 2001). I think that that is a good definition—no, it is an excellent definition. Thinking about love this way, it is no surprise that the tsunami effects have had little impact on me: those effected by this disaster simply have not preconsciously been recognised as central objects of my personal strivings. I don't love them because they mean nothing to me. Is this bad? Some would call me a monster, I think. I would just say that my emotive worldview has been constructed in such a manner as to localise my extension of love, and that the formation of these constructs are not done consciously, but pre- and sub-consciously, hence how we can grow to acquire new emotions for things & how others can fade away. Okay, forgive my large, theoretical bunny-trail. I will get back to the core of my content & try to wrap up shortly ;). But if you want to read more about this theory of emotions, I suggest you pick up a copy of Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought. Excellent read.

Alright. Here's the gig, in a more succinct fashion: My life has been plagued with distractors for the past several (5 or 6) years, and I hadn't really realised how much of an effect this has had on my relationship with God. Much of the space created by this inattentional drift has been caused by my attention on personal preservation—"the fear of man." A huge portion of my life has been characterised by rejection, attack and dismissal of me as a person or of that which I say/stand by. Times that I have tried to overcome this inhibition to community in the past have been met by just more of the same. This has caused scarring, hardening of my heart & vehemenent reluctance to be open & "real" with people, especially when they are unwilling to take that step first themselves. Now, me worrying & fretting about how people will react/respond to me has (duh) taken my attention off Christ (wow, this sounds a whole lot like my original post back in July...). Placing the focus back on Christ in my life has been good, but I never really surveyed the extent to which I had wandered, and now looking at the expanse between where I was with Christ & where I exist now, things seem rather daunting & very, very disparaging. So? What to do? There is a nasty voice in my head—one that I recognise—that is telling me that the distance that I have "fallen" from is too great to surmount & that I might as well give up. This voice of our beloved friend Satan has been haunting me for, ohh... The past 24 hours or so, and the a-hole is very very convincing. But screw that junk! Like I said before, God & my relationship with Him is too dear to me than words can describe. I cannot give up on my Lord. I love Him too too much to walk away, even though I have been drifting away for soooooooo long. Instead, there is only one thing that can & must be done: get back to the grindstone, even though the journey is difficult & even though it seems impossible & unrewarding. In the end, the reward is intimacy with Jesus. Nothing, nothing is better than that. I want Him, I need Him, I long for Him, and the only way to get to Him is to go to Him. I'm off.