Making Room for the Divine....

At its very heart, Christianity is therefore a messianic movement and it seeks to consistently embody the life, spirituality, and mission of its Founder. We have made it so many other things, but this is its utter simplicity. Discipleship, becoming like Jesus our Lord and Founder, lies at the epicenter of the church’s task. It means that Christology must define all that we do and say. It also means that in order to recover the ethos of authentic Christianity, we need to refocus our attention back to the Root of all it all, to recalibrate our work and our organizations around the person and work of Jesus our Lord. This will mean taking the Gospels seriously as the primary texts that define us. It will mean acting like Jesus in relation to people outside the faith…

This chapter in “The Forgotten Ways” by Alan Hirsch has really challenged me. What would my life look like if Jesus were really Lord of all of it…if I didn’t have a compartment that was “spiritual” and a compartment that was “the rest of life”…if there was no line between the sacred and the secular? To the ancient people, the people who God chose to reveal himself to, there was no separation. But here, living in America in 2007, I have a hard time imaging what it would look like for life to not be segmented. I am so used to the part of my life that’s really mine and the part of my life that belongs to God. Now of course I would say, Jesus is Lord of my life. I don’t just think about him on Sunday morning or from 9-5 during my missionary work day….but does my life reflect Jesus is Lord when I’m on hold with a certain company that keeps messing up my internet service for 30 minutes? Does my life reflect Jesus is Lord when my sweet neighbor wants to chat but that’s cutting into my workout time? Does my life reflect Jesus is Lord when I turn on the TV night after night to be entertained? Does my life reflect that Jesus is Lord at the grocery store, in the car; in the way I love people? There are times during the day that I really seek to embody the life, spirituality and mission of the Founder of my faith, but most of the day I consider mine, I plan my tasks, I do what I need to do, and I occasionally throw up a prayer for Jesus to show up or to open my eyes to what is really happening. How much do I miss because my life is centered around me and not on him?

Last week my friend Dawn and I went out to eat. Dawn loves to talk to people whereas I’m usually not a chatty person with people I don’t know. While we were ordering, Dawn started to strike up a conversation with our waitress. Again, I usually just order and go on with things…but Dawn asked her what her name was, asked her opinion on different menu items and was overall just friendly to her. When our food arrived, Dawn asked Mercedes (our waitress) if there was anything we could pray for her. Mercedes looked very surprised (I can imagine that doesn’t happen often in New Orleans) and said, “You can pray for my Road Home money and my rebuilding”. (The Road Home is the city of New Orleans very SLOW recovery effort). She then started to tell us that just she and her husband had been working on their home for months and were ready to gut it. Well, with Campus Crusade we just happen to have hundreds of college students descending on the city of New Orleans in the month of March to gut homes and serve the community. I immediately asked Mercedes if she needed help. She gave me her phone number and was so thankful! The next day, a team of 20 students worked into the evening to gut Mercedes home. God had a divine appointment planed for us during that dinner! Later I started to wonder, would I have missed that opportunity if Dawn weren’t there? Going out to dinner for me is about my time to catch up with a friend, to maybe encourage that person and hopefully leave feeling a deep connection and fulfillment in my life. I rarely think about the person serving me unless they do a bad job – then I grumble. But if my mission really is to represent my Lord in every part of my life, the sacred and the secular, then the way I sit at a restaurant should be different…not only that, but I should expect divine appointments to happen every day. All weekend I’ve been thinking, God must want to use my life in so many more ways, but they are outside of my compartments, so I miss it.

Finally, today this has led me to really start to consider the culture of my organization. We are a feedback rich environment, which I like. The feedback that I’ve been given in my life has opened my eyes to some blind spots and it has helped me grow as a person and as a leader. On the other hand, our feedback tends to be very “us” focused. It’s about how we are doing as leaders, it’s about how we are doing in developing a team, it’s about how we can balance all the roles and best use the strategies within our ministry. None of these things are things that I think are bad within themselves, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that they are feeding into this idea that life is about our roles rather than about our faith. I talk to friends who work with me all the time who say “I’m just trying to make my life more normal”…I wonder, is life normal for some one who is fully devoted to following Christ? It doesn’t seem like it should be. Normal life for those around us is focused on what makes me happy, what brings me comfort, security and stability. But when I read the Bible, Jesus is challenging us to live a life that offers none of those things. It means being unconvinced to love some one who bugs me. It means moving toward people even when I’m tired, or when I “need” some alone time. It means forgiving those who hurt me even if they never change. It means that my rights are gone and life isn’t about me. So, I recognize that my deepest problem is my own lack of faith, my own compartmentalization of the gospel, but I also see another problem…the culture of the organization that I work with that seems to promote life being about my development and using the best strategy to get the job done. I love this organization – it’s the vehicle God used to change my life. I’m just beginning to wonder if we’re playing too safe, trying to have too much of a normal life, a life that Christ never called his followers to live.