September 8th, 2008

I'm in the middle of cleaning and doing laundry. All things considered doing laundry is not very difficult, just time consuming. And, honestly, it would probably go faster if I wasn't so easily distracted.

I work later on this evening, closing as usual, and I need to remember to call Bethany some time between now and then. She's called at least 10 times this weekend and I haven't been around to talk. She's probably just bored and kind of lonely so she would probably appreciate my calling just to talk.

My room is starting to feel crowded again, so I think it's time to get rid of some stuff. I need to do something with all of my books. I either need to find more space to put them or I need to give some away. I have books that I have never and will never read because I was given the library when Papa Calder died. Several enormous text books with names like, 'Vpialogy Illustrated' or 'Pathologic Physiology- Mechanisms of Disease'. Huge books that were probably really expensive when he bought them but I have no use for them. I also have a sizable collection of novels and children’s books. I must admit a sentimental attachment to them but if I'm honest I probably won't read them again until I have kids of my own. So I think it's time to start sifting through and picking my absolute favourites. Right now Mr. Popper's Penguins and the Narnia books are on my keeper list which is a good start.

Yesterday's thoughts were kind of scattered and I didn't make a whole lot of sense. Shall I translate? I think to do that I need to back track and explain what lead me to get to that line of thought in the first place.

I struggled through my last year of high school. I spent most of the time stressed about what to do next. I worried about test scores and grades to the point where I made myself sick over it. In my mind success in the future depended solely upon how well I did on provincials. I was convinced that I hadn't accomplished anything that would last after I was gone. This made me really overwhelmed, depressed and frustrated. Any ambition or passion that I had got sucked into my feelings of angst and became awful, twisted caricatures of what they had been before.

Everything was dark, ugly and disappointing. God was present in my life but I was so bitter that I couldn't look at him without feeling sarcastic and cruel. So I just didn't look at him. I served him half heartedly, just going through the motions. So much had been turned upside down and my understanding of who God is was no exception. But God wouldn't just let me sit in the ashes and misunderstand him. He came and sat in the ashes beside me. For an entire year he told me over and over again that he loved me. I had heard it a million times before, 'Jesus loves you', but I had never been able to receive that love. I was a Christian. I do not doubt that even for a moment, my salvation experience was real, but the way I loved God was superficial and immature.

God was different from anything I had previously imagined him to be and it caused me to think about why I couldn't accept the love he offered me. God started to show me what our relationship actually looked like. What was going on between us and the things in my life that were hampering the intimacy and love that comes from close relationship with him. That’s where the idea of slavery comes into this. My perspective of God dictates how I respond to him. I’m performance driven. I can’t accept and simply enjoy being loved by him because I feel that I should be ‘doing’ things to prove that I deserve it. I’m like Martha rushing about getting things ready for Jesus and scolding Mary for simply sitting at his feet, listening while he talks. I felt that it was important to listen to Jesus too, but I should be doing something useful while I listen, I shouldn’t just sit there.

So, like a slave, I find worth in what I do and I treat God as a task master. I must ‘do’ to please him and I’m wary of his opinion of me. How much he loves and favours me depends upon how well I do. That’s a lie. It’s a lie because I’m not to be a slave. I was never intended to be performance driven. God isn’t in the business of obtaining slaves, he wants sons and daughters. He wants us to find worth in who we are in him, not in what we do for him. He wants to work with us and he wants to rest with us. And he would prefer it if we didn’t spend days on end bashing our heads against the wall while praying for relief. That’s just hard to watch and it hurts.

I have realized that I know less about God than I ever knew before. But somehow, in some twisted way, my knowing next to nothing places me ahead of the pack. I’m back to square one and my steps are cautiously taken. All of the things that trouble me now, everything from finances to friends, are all proving themselves to be symptoms of my wrong perspective and my selfish agenda. It grieves me that I have hurt so many with my aggressive actions and spoken so often in a way that I’m now recognizing as very unlike God. He is full of so much love and I was so full of myself.

Spiritual maturity… Yes, it’s a good topic. I’ve been as genteel as a bull in a china shop and the destruction in my path speaks volumes about how needed such a topic is.