At the end of my last blog, I wrote about how the practical implications of my only New Year’s Resolution (let out a rebel yell for God) would hopefully become more and more apparent as the semester progresses. The first concrete example of this is that I am trying my hardest to reorder how I spend my time. It is not a far-fetched assumption to say that, other than sleep, which naturally takes a long time, one way we show our true priorities is in how we spend our time.
I tell my friends (and myself) that my top priority in life is pursuing God’s own heart, yet I have found that I spend more time on Facebook than in a given day than I spend in prayer in a given week. To put it most simply, if I think my current top priority is pursuing God’s heart, I am kidding myself. I have a sign taped to the end of my bed that I printed out a while ago that says “Relentless”, to remind me to be relentless in my pursuit of Christ, but this is and will continue to be a meaningless piece of printer paper unless I actually live relentlessly.
If Jesus Christ comes back as I am writing this, how will I possibly justify my lack of time with Him and his father? “I’m sorry, Jesus, that I never spend nearly as much time with you as I do on Facebook, but I’m sure you understand, right? After all, it naturally takes longer to browse a friend of a friend’s seventh photo album than it does for me to thank you for dying on a cross and to ask you for guidance. “ No, Jesus will never buy that ridiculousness. As exaggerated in rhetoric and as sarcastic as that justification was, is there any other justification?
Because my brain is too small and God is too great for me to ever comprehend his love (or any of His other qualities, for that matter), the best I can do is to try to explain Him to myself with the analogy of human relationships. If I had a girlfriend that I talked about all the time, bragged about to my friends, defending in tough times, bought things for, yet never spent much more than ten minutes with her a day, she would be emotionally famished and desperate for my love. God is not famished, but He is desperate for my love. I’m sure God likes it when I brag about his greatness to others (Isaiah 45:25 says we will boast in the Lord), and I’m sure He really does like it when I defend Him in tough times and don’t “deny him before men”, yet without spending time with God himself, how will we ever have a healthy relationship?
After realizing this, I found that the easiest way to realign how I spend my time would be to take a “ground up” rather than a “top down” approach. When I first tried to find little areas in my life to cut back on and shave off, I found each area incredibly hard to cut, and minimal in the difference it made. Finally, I decided to turn the whole process on its head. I started thinking of when I could pray, read God’s word, and worship Him and, for the last few days, have placed those times into my schedule by default, before making everything else fit if and only if it could.
This Sunday was the second time in the last few days I’ve gone to the Riverwalk by the Black Warrior River just off campus to give the entire time to God. I turned my cell phone on silent, literally took my watch off of my wrist and locked it in my car, and just started walking. I started at about 2:30 and walked until 5:30, with the only break being a twenty-minute phone call to my mother. It was no surprise that after spending three hours with God, I was in one of the best moods I’ve ever been in my entire life.
As I walked one way, I would pray for God to pour out the finances for The World Race. As I walked the opposite direction, I would listen to a worship playlist I had made, before repeating this cycle with different prayer focuses each time. It was amazing how much more meaning I got out of the lyrics “lift my hands, open wide, let the whole world see, how you loved, how you died, how you set me free, free at last!” when I wasn’t looking at my cell phone in between. Unadulterated time with God brought unadulterated joy.
As the songs I listened to got progressively “deeper” (I ordered them on the playlist that way on purpose) it literally became hard to keep walking at times. When I was listening to the lyrics “I love the way the stars shine for you, I love the way the mountains bow down”, I could walk along with a spring in my step and just smile at God’s creation, and I would even pump my fist when I heard “all of creation, sing with me now, lift up your voice and lay your burden down”, but as I got down to Tenth Avenue North’s “Beloved”, I just had to sit on a bench and take it all in until the song was over. Even walking, at that time, felt trivial compared to what I was hearing through the song.
“Love of my life, look deep in my eyes, there you will find what you need. I’m the giver of life, I’ll clothe you in white, My immaculate bride you will be.”
There is something about that verse that just paralyzes me physically. I’m not going to try to explain it in this blog, because I don’t have an explanation. I simply don’t. I can say, however, that God rewarded me for my time with Him with such incredible joy. I know joy is a word so overused that it almost has no meaning anymore, but when you have it, you will know it.
Though not every day will be an empty Sunday, I hope I will continue to keep radically re-aligning my schedule so that time with God is a given and all else is a “maybe”. I’d love it if you’d help keep me constantly accountable for that by emailing me through this blog.
