… is to live.
I am becoming weary of so many books and contradictory “truths” out there, it seems that wherever I turn there is another Christian or spiritualist out with a new book/church/sermon/TV story on how to live.
When I turn to God’s wisdom, the quiet sense I get is this : the key to life is living.
That is, really living, not just breathing in and out. Living with a passion, a dream, a verve, a desire ardent, a heart that beats in rhythm with God’s chaotic Spirit.
When I turn to God in my spirit with confusion over a particular opinion or criticism of how to live, wondering how really should I live, the answer I get is this quiet encouragement to stop worrying about how NOT to live and start actually LIVING.
I waste more time worried about how much I am NOT living than I do in actually living.
I just read a quote out of an interview by the Wittenburg Door with yet-another-pastor-author Mark Buchanan, who wrote a book called “The Rest of God”, in which he encourages people to enter the Sabbath Rest. He was asked about living the “purpose driven life”, and he had this interesting take on it, contrasting living with a purpose against living with a driven agenda:
DOOR: What does it mean then to follow God’s will?
BUCHANAN: I think partly we’ve got a North American and western Christian addiction here. Suddenly, we’re kind of twisting our guts, and reading enormous amounts of books and going to conferences to try to figure this thing out when there was this simplicity about it in an earlier time. While all this technology and mobility has given us such a variety of options, the reality of it has provided an enormous dissatisfaction of life as we know it. The will of God doesn’t have to do with us finding the needle in the haystack or reading the tea leaves kind of pursuits. We tend to think there is some mystical bidden will that God invited us to kind of discover what this thing is, and we’re going to be perpetually unsatisfied until we get it. In Romans 12, you “offer yourself in worship,” and then sort of your life is conformed to Christ. In other words, if you want a key for discernment just be God’s man and woman right now right here.
DOOR: What concerns do you have about those Christians who are committed to this “purpose driven” life?
BUCHANAN: I think, first of all, Rick is a great guy, and Purpose Driven Life is a fine book that I’ve put it in the hands of many people. At the same time, I hate the title because every time a person gets driven, they lose purpose. So if they start a business, and they have a grand vision, idealism, all of that driven-ness will kill the purpose of it, and therefore, it will kill the dream. I think that we have to distinguish between this sense of driven-ness and purposefulness.
DOOR: Well, how DO you propose that we do this?
BUCHANAN: I use Jesus as an example. Who was more purposeful than Jesus?
DOOR: Is this a trick question?
BUCHANAN: OK, who was less driven than Jesus?
DOOR: Our brains hurt.
BUCHANAN: There were certainly moments where He was heaven-bent on getting down to Jerusalem. But even though He’s on a death march, He’s meandering and storytelling, stopping at any old whore, beggar or blind man to fix something. I just think there’s a magnificent portrait of a person who lived a life on purpose, but who wasn’t driven.
I love that image of Jesus - a heaven-bent meanderer 
Maybe I don’t need to live a planned life after all, maybe I can meander…
I think this might have been what God meant all along when he commands us to choose LIFE - a life truly worth living. I think this is what the good news is - that I can truly LIVE with God’s rhythm, a heaven-bent meandering rhythm beautiful in simplicity yet perplexing in depth and vibrance.
I find cues and clues to God’s way of living in what I observe all around me in the “natural” world - a dynamic, organic, chaotic, evolving, seemingly unstructured wildness that has some very simple underlying rhythms that keep the whole thing ALIVE.
I wonder if I really need to understand the mechanics of how life works in order to live it “correctly”.
Maybe the good news about the life that Jesus extends is that I can simply … live.
October 3rd, 2006 at 11:25 am
Hi Hari,
First, I think that the abundant supply of spiritual books and spiritual teachers out there represents good news and bad news.
The good news is that there is a serious spiritual awakening on planet earth. The bad news is that there are layers upon layers of conditioned “unconciousness” that have accumulated since the fall of man (separation from God).
So, as we awaken as a race, and start to make our way home, sometimes it does feel as if it’s looking for “a needle in a haystack” as you reference above. The result is that many of us seekers fell world-weary from peeling off the centuries-old layers of conditioned unconsciousness.
One of the relevant parables that Jesus taugh on this subject was the one about the lost son . First there was the “son”, who was given a share of his Father’s estate (God creating man in his image). Then came the part about the son squandering his wealth (separation from God, living in sin). Lastly, is the awakening to conscious perfection and the ensuing celebration of life.
In my opinion, that is our divine purpose while here on earth….1.) to be that son/daughter who is finally returned home and reunited with the Father 2.) Be the teacher to others of this divine purpose in themselves.
Al