Tuesday, March 1, 2011

L-O-V-E: Part 4

If you are a good Christian, you should feel close to God all the time, right? Wrong. It is too hard for us as humans, to maintain a close, emotional connection to someone we are physically close to all the time, let alone God, who we can't physically feel or see.

Mother Teresa, someone we would assume lived her entire life feeling incredibly close to God, revealed in letters that were published after her death that most of her career she felt alone and unsure of God's presence or leading in her life. There were times when she actual had serious doubts and questions about her faith. That should make all of us feel a little better about our spiritual temperature, right?
It is normal for our spiritual lives to ebb and flow. Sometimes we have those mountain top experiences and other times we find ourselves in "the dark night of the soul." Most of the time however, we find ourselves somewhere in the middle where it is easy to drift away from God because life is going on as usual - nothing too great and nothing too terrible is going on. It is in these 'life as usual' times that we need to work a little harder to connect to God.

It is really easy to fall victim to the belief that we don't need God in our everyday ordinary lives. Things putter along and when there is nothing pressing that we need help with, God sort of drifts into the background. Sort of like a friend we used to talk to every day but when things get busy we scale back to once a week or even less; eventually only talking once a month.

God loves us and God will meet us right where we are - but we have to put in a little effort. He will draw close to us but we have to respond. Our job is to hold up our end of the relationship - talk to God every day, read the Bible on a regular basis - and he will do the rest.

CS

"For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." Matthew 7:8

1 comments:

Anonymous March 12, 2011 at 10:06 AM  

This is a blessing for me to read today. My son is home from college, and has immersed himself in his studies, philosophy, business classes, economics.Much of our conversations have revealed that he feels that he does not need to draw his fortitude and direction from God, that his success depends entirely on his own ambitions and desire. He thinks that it is more pleasing to God that he excel and become a success living up to his potential based on his own goals as the impetus. He does not feel that God rally plays a role in his success, nor would he want to. He says that God would rather that he independently be a success, rather than have him be a sniveling, failure constantly sitting around praying. All I could say to him was that God does want for him to live a life that is rich and full of accomplishment, but that he created us in order to have a relationship with him. I tried to compare it to what it would feel like to be a mother who raised her son, providing love and guidance, and provided for all of his needs, including an education, and then watching her son leave to pursue his life of "success", but never hearing from him again. I tried to explain that the profound grief that the mother would experience to have that relationship come to an end, because she was no longer needed, would be somewhat like the grief God would feel to no longer be relevant in one's life. I explained that even though the mother would be in constant worry over a son who was the sniveling, dependent one who couldn't seem to get his act together, at least having the relationship gives her the opportunity to have some influence and guide the dependent son to achieve, and become independent in achievement, but still connected so that there is always room for growth. My son is exactly like the person you have described in your blog. He has drifted so far from his relationship with God because he has done nothing to nurture it. So, I will share what you have written with him. I also, painfully, know how to pray for him. Thanks.