The best way I can describe my recent spiritual life for you is to say that some mornings I’ve woken up and struggled to remind myself why I’m a Christian at all. Why am I doing this again? echoes through my mind as I imagine everything else I could be doing free of restriction and rule and delayed gratification; I’ve indulged my mind in conjuring my dream life and let what-could’ve-been take its toll on my heart.
Because of a book I read called Desire, I’m revisiting the question of getting what I want in life. More problematically, I can’t address this question without getting furiously angry with God, who has more often been responsible for the putting-off of my desires than their fulfilling.
My friend Nicole asked me another question the other night after I shared my story with her, in particular a few things I’d given up to be a better Christian (or whatever my logic was), and it struck me in a similar way. She looked at me and honestly inquired,
So, is it worth it?
I understand the rich man’s sadness when Jesus told him what he had to do to inherit the kingdom.
I’ve given up things and people and opportunities that still are painfully dear to me because I felt God was asking me to, and some days I couldn’t tell you that it has been the better choice. Lately I’ve been wearied trying to seek fulfillment in the Lord, to find joy and satisfaction in him alone and I’ve wondered why it was so difficult and why he didn’t seem more ready to be the sole source of my joy like I’ve been practically begging him to.
Those moments make my dream life seem so much better, because I can’t tell you what following Jesus offers me that’s worth giving it up. I wish I could carry you with me to the pit of my stomach so you could experience the depth of the emptiness I feel sometimes thinking about what I’ve lost in exchange for something that doesn’t always make me feel whole. There are times it’s hopelessly overwhelming.
In journaling about this, I decided that I’ve followed Jesus because I am nearly unmovable in my conviction that God is the world’s only hope.
When I play with the kids at Phumlani, when I see the impoverished conditions they live in and their soiled clothes and the way they tackle each other scrambling for food, I thank the Lord that one day he will bring the restoration and justice they deserve. I know he is it for the world and that there will be no other solution for these children than the coming kingdom God has promised. Somewhere deep in my soul I know that.
But when it comes to me, it’s difficult to bring that close to home. God as my only personal hope seems to be a detached idea; to say that God is my only hope is weird. Sure, I’m part of the world, but to personalize it makes it feel more like fairytale than truth.
However, Desire concluded that God is our only hope for a full life because everything else in this life will eventually fail or die, and I was intrigued. So, I wrote this in my journal.
Maybe I feel hopeless because somewhere I do see God as my only hope, and he doesn’t always make me feel great, so that’s not really satisfying or promising, like – that’s it? That’s what my hope is, something that makes me feel marginally okay at best?
I think that’s why I’ve sought hope in other things like relationships even though they end, because God just doesn’t do it for me all the time and I’d rather hope in something that’s satisfying. Knowing God as my only hope has left me, ironically, even more hopeless.
I wish I could leave it there for you, unresolved, so that every blog I wrote didn’t seem so Christiany-quick-fix, but God has a way of working things out when we’re willing to struggle with him. This has been a three-week process that has had me crying and angry more times than I could count, and I hate that there are no blogs that capture the depth of my despair in those moments because they would’ve perhaps been more vulnerable left with no answer.
But the reality is that I have my answer now, at least partially, and my answer to these things came in remembrance.
Two days after what I journaled above, I wrote again.
I forgot.
There is a reason that God commands the Israelites to write his words on the tablets of their hearts, to inscribe it in their homes and to sing it in songs to their children. There is a reason that he commands them not to forget him amidst all the blessings of the Promised Land, to remember that he is the one who took them there in the first place. (Check out Deuteronomy 4-8.)
There is a reason Jesus broke bread and blessed wine, making ordinary things extraordinary, and asked us to remember him each time we eat them.
It is only in remembering who God is – not what he does or provides or how he makes us feel – that we know our efforts to obtain our dream lives here, to get what we want, to be completely useless. God is our only hope for lasting, true fulfillment because God is the one who will bring lasting and true fulfillment to all of creation when the world is restored.
Does that make me feel great and happy and better than some of the things I gave up to follow Jesus? No, not at all.
What it does is give me eternal perspective.
Maybe I don’t feel awesome now, but I will.
Maybe I don’t feel euphoric or full of adrenaline now, but I will.
Maybe I’m not super happy now, but I will be.
And apart from God, I can have none of those things for more than a moment. Isaiah wrote, “[The idol worshipper, the one who seeks to worship what this life has to offer] cannot save himself or say, ‘Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?’”
I forgot that everything I was holding in my hands, mad at God for not allowing me to have, was just a lie. What I want in this life is a lie – it can’t do anything for me past death. I can be happy for a few years, maybe even a lifetime, but if I forget God in the meantime, what happens in eternity?
We must remember God, and we must be eternal people. For whatever reason, that gives me hope. That makes it all worth it, at least enough to make it through. It's enough in the mornings to get me out of bed, into a hot cup of coffee, and into a spirit of journaling, studying and praying.
Even if it’s not really what I want right now.
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