I love gardening, and a friend asked me what kinds of things she should plant at her new house.
“It depends on how much time you want to devote to a garden,” I told her. “I love my flowers, but they are a lot of work. If you don’t enjoy the process, it won’t happen.”
And I listened to myself say these words and contemplated how that’s true about a lot of things.
I’ve been asked several times for advice about starting a blog. “Don’t bother if you don’t love writing,” I tell them. This doesn’t mean that writing isn’t a discipline. There are plenty of times that I have to pick myself up by the scruff of the neck and force my fingers to start moving. But I want to write. I am motivated to do it. So I find the time.
We can complain that there’s never enough time, but the truth is that we find time for what is most important to us.
As a mom, do I have a control problem? Maybe. Do I have a responsibility problem? Definitely.
I’ve taken the StrengthsFinders assessment twice in the past twenty years; both times, responsibility was way up near the top. If I agree to do something, I will do it, and I will do it well, so help me God – or lose my sanity, my sleep, or my good sense in the attempt.
Raising teenagers makes me lose all of the above.
I tried so hard to do All the Good Parenting Things. I made them drink Kiefer, read countless books with them, prayed and played, showed and shared. I taught them to come when I called; I re-learned pre-algebra twice; I put limits on their screen time. I take my job so seriously. I am the Responsiblest Mom of them all.
And now I have four teenagers, with adulthood lurking around every corner, and I feel the desperate urgency looming over me that my time left with them is short. So Gil and I made an Adulting List that they must check off, and we are teaching them to drive, interview, clean, and budget. As they begin to make their own choices, I warn and cajole, nudge and prod.
“One of the house church leaders actually asked me, ‘Do you know what prison is for us? It is how we get our theological education. Prison in China is for us like seminary is for training church leaders in your country.’” (From The Insanity of God by Nik Ripken)
Sometimes I wonder how persecuted Christians would feel about some of the stuff we non-persecuted folks say and sing and do.
This song came on the radio:
So I throw up my hands And praise You again and again ‘Cause all that I have is a hallelujah And I know it’s not much But I’ve nothing else fit for a King Except for a heart singing hallelujah I’ve got one response I’ve got just one move With my arms stretched wide I will worship You
I wondered what my brothers and sisters around the world would think about this song when they’ve lost jobs and gone to prison and faced threats and harassment and sometimes even death because they’ve chosen to follow Jesus. I don’t know if they would agree that all we can give to our King is our outstretched arms and singing voices.
I want to be careful in sharing my thoughts on this song. There is indeed nothing we can offer God to repay Him for our salvation. It’s a gift that cost Him everything and us nothing, and our response should be a profound and reverent sense of gratitude and awe. We are unworthy. And in moments when we grasp the depth and width of that gift, worship should be spontaneous. Which is, I assume, what this song reflects and why it resonates with so many people.
But my concern is with the narrow definition of worship that’s implied. And it’s not just this song: guys who lead the singing in our churches are called “worship” pastors, and the woman on Christian radio demands “WORSHIP NOW” and then plays a song. I wonder when it happened in our Christian culture that we began to equate worship with music.
We can worship through music, of course – it’s one of my favorite things to do. But when I hear a song on repeat that tells me that the best I can offer the king of the universe is a hallelujah and outstretched hands and singing loudly (after all, you’ve got a lion inside of those lungs!), I ask myself if we’re missing something. Is this all that worship is?
Jesus told his followers that they would be hated because of him and that obeying him may mean that they leave their families and homes. He said they would be ostracized and insulted and that anyone who wants to follow him must deny himself, pick up his cross, and follow him.
Following Jesus means our lives mirror his. And that means willingly embracing – even walking into – unselfishness, humiliation, sacrifice, and pain. Yes, resurrection is coming – that’s our daily hope – but may we never fail to remember that the cost of following Jesus is so much more than singing and lifting our hands.
When we tell ourselves that worship looks only like singing, then it’s easy to ignore that God made it clear that worship looks like:
Choosing integrity over a job promotion Fighting for sexual purity Being generous until it hurts Showing kindness to a nasty person Finally forgiving Sacrificing free time to volunteer Caring for someone who will never reciprocate Texting a neighbor Doing a job to the best of our ability Creating beautiful things: books, gardens, spreadsheets, cakes…and songs, of course Starting a Bible study Opening a home to visitors Putting down the phone or changing the channel Learning a language in order to make a friend Risking humiliation to have a spiritual conversation Intentionally embracing the messiness of community Uprooting for a workplace, neighborhood, or country that needs the gospel Praying for someone right on the spot
Every day, every decision, every action, gives us a chance to worship God. Music is a powerful tool for reminding us who we are living for, why we chose Him, and why He’s worth it. But our response to the King who gave us everything should never just be a song; it should be a willingness to lay down our lives. Just ask the Christians in China.
I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the more I feel like I’m walking in darkness. People say the world is getting darker, but when I contemplate all the horrors of the past that I have not experienced (World Wars, the Great Depression, a pre-antibiotic or anesthesia world), I will venture to guess that an intensifying darkness is only my perception. The world has always been dark. And since I had an abuse-free childhood, it makes sense that with age and wisdom comes a deepening understanding of the depth of the evil that has always shadowed the earth. Shadows my own heart.
Of course, I love more people more intensely than I used to, and thus, the more burdens I carry. I keep thinking that once my children are healthy, thriving, and successfully launched into the world, some burdens will be relieved. Until that is, I hear folks in the season above me praying for their grandchildren. Even Paul, who experienced shipwrecks and floggings, starvation and prison, lists his concern for those he loved and invested in as perhaps the heaviest burden of all (II Cor. 11:27-28).
It’s too bad that so often, the emphasis at Christmas is on all those warm fuzzy feelings that go along with family and parties and merry-making. We imagine that our lives in December should look like one big Norman Rockwell painting or Hallmark movie; when it doesn’t, those images mock us. How dare they look so happy when the world is so heavy? Maybe I’m just not in the Christmas spirit this year, we think.
For the past few years, my health hasn’t been great. I’ve had a lot of pain and not a lot of energy, a lot of the time. Sometimes it felt like my legs had 50-pound weights on them, walking up the stairs. I often had to consciously push myself to do what I needed to do.
Then, in December, I received surgery that made all this go away. I’ve felt back to my old self again. I’ve felt years younger.
But what astonishes me is how quickly I have forgotten this. There are days when not one memory of how I used to feel crosses my mind. I forget to be grateful that my health issues had a solution, unlike so many who don’t. I forget to be grateful that I have health at all, unlike some who have never had it.
