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February 20 - February 22, 2020
Wayne Muller observed: A “successful” life has become a violent enterprise. We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond their limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid, and need our company; war on our spirit, because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and
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Mary Oliver, not a Christian but a lifelong spiritual seeker, wrote something similar: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
God is omnipresent—there is no place God is not. And no time he isn’t present either. Our awareness of God is the problem, and it’s acute.
So many people live without a sense of God’s presence through the day. We talk about his absence as if it’s this great question of theodicy. And I get that: I’ve been through the dark night of the soul. But could it be that, with a few said exceptions, we’re the ones who are absent, not God? We sit around sucked into our phones or TV or to-do lists, oblivious to the God who is around us, with us, in us, even more desirous than we are for relationship.
Because what you give your attention to is the person you become.
Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.
John Ortberg framed it: “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”13
William Irvine called “misliving.” In his book A Guide to the Good Life, he wrote: There is a danger that you will mislive—that despite all your activity, despite all the pleasant diversions you might have enjoyed while alive, you will end up living a bad life. There is, in other words, a danger that when you are on your deathbed, you will look back and realize that you wasted your one chance at living. Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.14
Jesus of Nazareth: “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”15
Think about it: even if God were a Robin Williams-esque genie in a bottle, there to make my every wish come true, and he were to alter the structure of the universe to give me ten more hours in a day, what would I likely do with those ten hours? The same thing most people would do—fill them up with even more things, and then I would be even more tired and burned out and emotionally frayed and spiritually at risk than I am now.
Here’s my point: the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.
We’re like God. We were created to “image” his behavior, to rule like he does, to gather up the raw materials of our planet and reshape them into a world for human beings to flourish and thrive.
We’re also made from the dirt, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: we’re the original biodegradable containers. Which means we’re born with limitations. We’re not God. We’re mortal, not immortal. Finite, not infinite.
Peter Scazzero’s line: “We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.”
Henry David Thoreau, we have to “live deliberately.” I just finished reading his famous memoir, Walden, about going into the woods for two full years to slow down and simplify. Take a look at this line: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.14
Chu lamented: Here’s the simple truth behind reading a lot of books. It’s not that hard. We have all the time we need. The scary part—the part we all ignore—is that we are too addicted, too weak, and too distracted to do what we all know is important.16
Paul said: Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.17
How do we “live deliberately” without going off into the forest to scavenge our own food or abandoning our family? How do we slow down, simplify, and live deliberately right in the middle of the chaos of the noisy, fast-paced, urban, digital world we call home? Well, the answer, of course, is easy: follow Jesus.
First, he had a yoke. Not a literal yoke; he was a teacher, not a farmer. A yoke was a common idiom in the first century for a rabbi’s way of reading the Torah. But it was also more: it was his set of teachings on how to be human. His way to shoulder the (at times crippling) weight of life—marriage, divorce, prayer, money, sex, conflict resolution, government—all of it. It’s an odd image for those of us who don’t live in an agrarian society. But imagine two oxen yoked together to pull a cart or plow a field. A yoke is how you shoulder a load.
To be one of Jesus’ talmidim is to apprentice under Jesus. Put simply, it’s to organize your life around three basic goals: Be with Jesus. Become like Jesus. Do what he would do if he were you.
Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.4
Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
I run a cost-benefit analysis and quickly decide, as great as their tights look in the morning fog, it’s not worth the pain. So I simply spectate. The reality is, I want the life, but I’m not willing to adopt the lifestyle behind it.
We read the stories of Jesus—his joy, his resolute peace through uncertainty, his unanxious presence, his relaxed manner and how in the moment he was—and think, I want that life. We hear his open invite to “life…to the full” and think, Sign me up. We hear about his easy yoke and soul-deep rest and think, Gosh, yes, heck yes. I need that. But then we’re not willing to adopt his lifestyle. But in Jesus’ case it is worth the cost. In fact, you get back far more than you give up. There’s a cross, yes, a death, but it’s followed by an empty tomb, a new portal to life. Because in the way of Jesus,
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The Jesus way wedded to the Jesus truth brings about the Jesus life…. But Jesus as the truth gets far more attention than Jesus as the way. Jesus as the way is the most frequently evaded metaphor among the Christians with whom I have worked for fifty years as a North American pastor.7
Your life is the by-product of your lifestyle. By life I mean your experience of the human condition, and by lifestyle I mean the rhythms and routines that make up your day-to-day existence. The way you organize your time. Spend your money.
But Jesus realizes that the most restful gift he can give the tired is a new way to carry life, a fresh way to bear responsibilities…. Realism sees that life is a succession of burdens; we cannot get away from them; thus instead of offering escape, Jesus offers equipment. Jesus means that obedience to his Sermon on the Mount [his yoke] will develop in us a balance and a “way” of carrying life that will give more rest than the way we have been living.
People all over the world—outside the church and in—are looking for an escape, a way out from under the crushing weight to life this side of Eden. But there is no escaping it. The best the world can offer is a temporary distraction to delay the inevitable or deny the inescapable. That’s why Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape. He offers us something far better: “equipment.” He offers his apprentices a whole new way to bear the weight of our humanity: with ease. At his side. Like two oxen in a field, tied shoulder to shoulder. With Jesus doing all the heavy lifting. At his pace. Slow, unhurried,
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And this story isn’t a one-off, outlier, or enigma. Jesus was constantly interrupted—read the Gospels; half the stories are interruptions!—yet he never comes off as agitated or annoyed. (Well, he does with religious people—that’s yet another book—but not at interruptions.) Jesus’ schedule was full. To the brim at times. In a good way. Yet he never came off hurried.
This rootedness in the moment and connectedness to God, other people, and himself weren’t the by-products of a laid-back personality or pre–Wi-Fi world; they were the outgrowths of a way of life. A whole new way to be human that Jesus put on display in story after story.
Think with me about Jesus’ lifestyle for a few minutes. Jesus made sure to inject a healthy dose of margin into his life. It’s been said that margin is “the space between our load and our limits.”4 For many of us there is no space between our loads and limits. We’re not at 80 percent with room to breathe; we’re at 100 all the time. Jesus’ weekly schedule was a prophetic act against the hurried rhythms of our world.
No, he lived “freely and lightly.”5 Free of all the discontent and distraction that comes from too much money and stuff we don’t need.
You take his life and teachings as your template, your model, your pattern.
Over the last few years, there’s been an explosion of chatter in the self-help world over this idea of a fixed-hour schedule. Basically, you write up an ideal day or week or month on a blank calendar. You start with all your top priorities: the spiritual disciplines go in first if you’re a follower of Jesus, then sleep, exercise, work, play, reading, margin, etc. And within reason you stick to it.
A rule was a schedule and set of practices to order your life around the way of Jesus in community. It was a way to keep from getting sucked into the hurry, busyness, noise, and distraction of regular life. A way to slow down. A way to live into what really matters: what Jesus called abiding.6 Key relationships with family and community. The work God has set before us. A healthy soul. You know, the good stuff.
Think of Jesus’ teaching on abiding in the vine from John 15, one of his most important teachings on emotional health and spiritual life. Now think of a pleasant wine-tasting memory. What’s underneath every thriving vine? A trellis. A structure to hold up the vine so it can grow and bear fruit.
What a trellis is to a vine, a rule of life is to abiding. It’s a structure—in this case a schedule and a set of practices—to set up abiding as the central pursuit of your life. It’s a way to organize all of your life around the practice of the presence of God, to work and rest and play and eat and drink and hang out with your friends and run errands and catch up on the news, all out of a place of deep, loving enjoyment of the Father’s company.
Most of us have more than enough time to work with, even in busy seasons of life. We just have to reallocate our time to “seek first the kingdom of God,”7 not the kingdom of entertainment.
The point of a trellis isn’t to make the vines stand up straight in neat rows, but rather to attain a rich, deep glass of wine. It’s to create space for the vine to grow and bear fruit.
discipline in general. Here’s a pretty standard definition: A discipline is any activity I can do by direct effort that will eventually enable me to do that which, currently, I cannot do by direct effort.
Dallas Willard’s definition of a spiritual discipline: The disciplines are activities of mind and body purposefully undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order. They enable us more and more to live in a power that is, strictly speaking, beyond us, deriving from the spiritual realm itself.
Jesus’ original language is “Apprentice under me.” Here’s another option: “Copy the details of my life. Take the template of my day-to-day life as your own.”
Jesus isn’t anti-command, not by a long shot. But for Jesus, leadership isn’t about coercion and control; it’s about example and invitation.
All those little moments of boredom were potential portals to prayer. Little moments throughout our days to wake up to the reality of God all around us. To wake up to our own souls. To draw our minds’ attention (and, with it, devotion) back to God; to come off the hurry drug and come home to awareness.
I allow myself that brief rant just to say that all this has profound implications for our apprenticeships to Jesus and our experiences (or lack of experiences) of the life he has on offer. How so? Simple: this new normal of hurried digital distraction is robbing us of the ability to be present. Present to God. Present to other people. Present to all that is good, beautiful, and true in our world. Even present to our own souls.
Andrew Sullivan, in his manifesto for silence in an age of noise, wrote this: There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived…. This new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.
Ronald Rolheiser, “We…are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.”
But many who saw them leaving recognized them and ran on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things. By this time it was late in the day.13
You ever feel like, try as you might, you just can’t get time to rest? You’re in good company with Jesus himself.
