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“When you know better, you do better.” I’ve known better for a long, long time; I’m ready for the doing-better part to begin.
This is what I’m after: Feeling not empty, but full. Living not at full throttle, but at rest. Letting whatever abundance God has in store for me come in, sit down, and be at home.
But I liked how success felt.
Truly, when things are shiny and wonderful, there is no better role in the world than that of a megachurch pastor.
But back to my loving diatribe aimed at people like me, people who tend to willingly sign up for craziness, who tend to intentionally live chaotic lives: we are not doing as well as we think.
With my phone handy, I never have to think. It tells me what to think. I don’t even have to wonder what to think about, because it tells me all the time. There is seemingly nothing this thing can’t do, and all with just a little more than a swipe of my thumb. Which is why I’m so attached. Why we are so attached.
Interestingly, I’ve found that most people tend to think of God as the first type of person, someone who is perpetually preoccupied, who doesn’t really have time for them. We race into his presence, toss a few prayer bones his way, and rush on to the next thing on our agendas, hoping something good or godly got attached to us, which will then carry us through our day.
This one little conversation, this one extra phone call, this one quick meeting, what can it cost? But it does cost, it drains yet another drop of our life. Then, at the end of days, weeks, months, years, we collapse, we burn out, and cannot see where it happened. It happened in a thousand unconscious events, tasks, and responsibilities that seemed easy and harmless on the surface but that each, one after the other, used a small portion of our precious life.4
We do this, you know. We spin and whir and run and race and then, at last, look up from
all that speed and see we’ve become someone we never wanted to be.
We’re breathing, yes. But are our souls even remotely alive?
We tend to attach our self-worth to these roles,
We do this, I think, because things can be controlled but people cannot. Things can be accomplished; people are never complete. Things can be kept neat and clean; people are messy every day of their lives. And so we opt for the tidier, more predictable path.
And when senior leaders don’t rest, nobody rests.
rest is freedom; the unrested live unfree.
Jesus was at home not being seen.
If there’s a reason we prize our social-media structures, it’s because they allow us to be seen, to be heard, and to be adored. This is what we’re after, isn’t it?
In his book Prototype, Jonathan Martin wrote, “The only real antidote to the clamor of the crowd is time in the wilderness, where our true identity can be established and we can hear the still, small voice of God.”5
I think being able to handle praise well in public has a lot to do with embracing obscurity in private, with periodically hiding oneself away in God.
It’s a good test, that of seeing how well you do when you’re praised publicly, as a determinant of how faithful you’ve been to hole away with God. Does praise puff out your chest, elevate your self-concept, and make you start to believe your own press?
The spotlight is a cunning adulteress; we don’t believe this, but it is true. But because we don’t believe it is true, we continue tooting our own horns. Because we fear God will slack off on his promise to promote us at the right time, we insist on promoting ourselves.
Oh, sure, we’ll do the thing. But then we’ll burn with the need to tell somebody, to review why all this godly grease is all over our hair. We’ll refuse to rest until the points get put on our scoreboard, until everyone who may be watching knows just how awesome with a capital A we are.
perhaps we can do better about running our “testimonies” through a motivation checkpoint first.
“My advice to you is to go hide yourself in your church. Serve well in obscurity, and let God promote you at the right time. Don’t go pursuing it on your own. The path will make you far less popular, but it will be worth it in the end.”
This is always the tension as Christ’s followers, isn’t it? In our heart of hearts, we want to make God famous, even as we crave a tiny little bit of that fame for ourselves.
Challenge #1: Hide Yourself Away Today, dare to choose obscurity. When the opportunity presents itself for you to
offer a kind word, do a good deed, or lend a helping hand, take it. And then comes the hard part: Don’t brag about it, tweet about it, tell your spouse or friends about it, or insist in any manner on receiving glory for this very good thing you’ve done.
Whenever you’re tempted to self-promote today, focus on promoting God instead.
How we love it when everything adds up.
we reduce the human experience down to formulas, forgetting that life won’t be contained in simple math. What this man and his wife were saying was, “God owes us better than this result. X plus Y is supposed to equal Z.”
“This may be one of the reasons we are so averse to play and prefer the tedium of work,” wrote Allender. “Freedom scares us. We demand freedom, yet we fear the risk required to recreate in a manner that has such openness, vulnerability, and potential for failure.”3 We want freedom—yes. But will we know what to do with it once it’s ours?
“Ethics become a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases.”5 In other words, we don’t have time to be do-gooders, when doing good will take too much of our time.
What does exploring those unforced rhythms look like? It looks like bringing life to those around us, not out of obligation, but out of overflow.
Think about it. If you and I had margin, if we weren’t chronically stressed out, if we weren’t forever dashing from here to there to there … I wonder what we’d do differently, what we’d attempt, who we’d become.
“You’ve got to know what makes you come alive.”
You and I are overflowing with something; I’ll guarantee you that. Either we’re overflowing with peace and rest, or we’re leaving turmoil and chaos in our wake.
