Catching up

It's been a long time since I posted last. The last month or so has been exceedingly busy, but at the same time it's been one that's taught me a lot of important things about myself and where my heart is. I've been on both coasts, performed before thousands, explored new places and extended the list of places I'm able to say I visited. Most importantly, though, is what God has taught me and where He's brought me in all this time.

I've always prided myself as being an intelligent, reasonable person, although in my darkest moments all that can go out the window. In the course of reading Mere Christianity, one passage struck me (the citation for which I can't remember at the moment). Lewis noted that one of Satan's favorite strategies was to get us to argue with each other (and, I would extend, with ourselves) over two equally wrong things.

While I was on the road, I had time to catch up on sermon podcasts from my church for the period I was away. One that really struck me was this one, a sermon by Paul Matthies entitled Sincere Love. I'd encourage you to listen to it, and if you already have, listen to it again. It brought back to my mind something that had slipped away in the course of battling with my personal issues.

I spent the first few years of school in a Christian school, and in later grades you had the opportunity to memorize what was for a kid a lengthy passage of scripture; those who were able to memorize the whole thing by the end of the year got to take part in a trip to Valley Fair, the big amusement park up where I grew up. One year the passage was one that I always find myself coming back to, 1 Corinthians 13. It is the Bible's manifesto on what love is and how we as Christians, as those who seek to make God our central point in life, and for me in the course of my walk, it's a huge conviction on the issue of how valuable my efforts are, even in a place as full of God's love and mercy as the Village.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Nothing. The implications of that to me are huge. I feel like all of those things cover what I've tried to do in one way or another in the course of my last year and some months at the Village. I've worked to become more knowledgable on the issues and had a lot of discussions about theological issues and their impacts on us, so as to discern the Bible and its meaning for my life, and to help teach others. I've prayed for greater faith, especially in the face of difficulty in my life. I've pushed myself to be more generous even with what little I do have.

But it's all for nothing, if I do it without love. If I'm not seeking and giving and working in a spirit of love, I'm engaging myself in another heart-hardening exercise that will bring me right back to where I started: focused on myself, devoid of compassion, angry at God's unfairness when things don't go the way I want, merciless to those who cross me.

My pastor uses the phrase "meritless salvation" to describe the Christian situation. No matter how successful I am at putting away the things that pull me to overt sin and pouring myself into good actions, it's key for me to recognize that none of those things are what make me saved or what bring me closer to God--except in that I do them out of love for God, and for the people around me, whether friend, enemy, or unknown. I pray to God that He continues to pull my heart to a place where this is the norm for me.

There's a lot going on right now, including something that just saddens me to the core of my being. In spite of it, though, God is bigger and His love sustains me in ways nothing on Earth ever could. I am incredibly thankful to all the people around me who have shown me that love, and that have helped me to learn what it means to have it and to live in it.