September 7th, 2008

My whole family made it to church this morning. It may not seem like a huge accomplishment but I assure you it is. It only happens that way once in a blue moon. These precious blue moons may become fewer and farther between than they already are with Chris working. Being the new guy he gets to work on Sunday mornings because no one else wants to work on Sunday mornings. That may change but for now that’s the way it is.

The service was good. For the longest while I haven’t been able to touch base with God during worship. It takes me so long to clear my head, to be still and just to focus on Him. I find myself getting frustrated and unable to keep my scattered thoughts from roaming onto other places and other subjects. So I struggle through that part of the service because there’s so much else going on that I get distracted by. I want to worship but my heart just isn’t in it lately. Whether that’s good or bad or inconsequential I haven’t yet determined.

Pastor began to address the topic of maturity. It's going to be something that we'll be looking at closer over the next little while. Maturity, in particular 'spiritual' maturity, is an interesting study. It gave me something to think about, something to apply, consider and weigh. Right now I am in an interesting place on a lot of different levels. I'm dealing with making big decisions, decisions that I can almost literally 'afford' to make. I'm struggling relationally with friends. I'm in a comfortable place when it comes to work, but I'm feeling really restless. I'm seeing resolution come out of the fall out from bad decisions I made in the past. Internally I'm being convicted and held accountable for my attitude and my perspective on the world around me. This inward conviction and unstoppable flow of thought would be hard enough to digest if it were merely a contained thought, but it colours every other thing that I'm dealing with and that makes it huge.

When it comes right down to it I am extremely performance driven, and that makes me selfish, and that makes me a slave. The worth of a slave is judged by the quality of its work. Whether the slave completed the tasks he was given, how long he took to do it and whether he did a quality job are all considered. Someone who has the mindset of a slave is out to get results. They're 'performing' task after task with the goal of being acknowledged, praised, denoted as worthy based on how well they do.

That is how I thought about God and who I was in God all through high school. God was master and I was his slave. It wasn't a very warm relationship. I was continually tugging up my socks and marching into his presence with my list of accomplishments, my requests and my plans for productivity. There was a lot of 'me' involved because, technically, it was my neck on the line. I had a quota to meet and my time was running out. I am not a very spiritually mature person. I don’t know who I am in Christ well enough to allow myself to ‘just be’. I know that God’s love is free and that he is continually offering it to me but I don’t know how to receive it. I don’t know how to truly accept it. I can speak it. I can say that I accept it but the way I react, the crazy, erratic things I do to ’earn’ that love speaks volumes about how I’m not able to truly receive it.

And soon it will be morning… Way too late for me to be up.
Work was good by the way. :)