Spilled Out

This spilled out after a group meeting some time ago. I happened upon it today. I tried explaining this one night but didn’t feel satisfied at my own efforts to illustrate what was going on in my soul. I wrote this hoping to clear it up. I think I meant to bring it back up the next week but never got to it. I came across it today and rehashed it.

The desert, and my time there, visits me constantly. A theme that seems to walk hand and hand with my time there is the desert’s apparent indifference to my presence there. What’s strange is I found the indifference comforting and peaceful. It didn’t need me there, yet my presence made the desert that day unique.

Also, being such a desolate place the presence of life may only be described as hopeful. Hopeful everyday for sustenance.

However the world I live in daily is devoid of much hope. There is too much sustenance readily available. So what do we do with ourselves in light of such “provision”. The world tells us to make more of ourselves so that we could make the world better for more people. We owe it to everyone who longs for our blessings to make the most of ourselves. Most of what meets my eye and ear everyday is focused on me. It’s a hopelessness that is constantly calling my name.

Be this, says a picture that has been digitally “enhanced” beyond what is real. Be more educated, fit, cultured, well read, tolerant, emotional, in control, affluent, important. The desert is a comforting antagonist to such cancerous focus. Live says the desert, if you can.

Why did Jesus retreat to the desert? I think it was to be in the midst of place which so overwhelmingly lacks the world. The fasting even exacerbates that worldlessness, which I believe leads to focus on the things that are not of this world. And how did the devil tempt Him, with what did he tempt him with? With the world, with greatness in the world. And what is it that tempts us from the billboards and T.V. and magazines? Ambition of greatness, but that ambition is a hopeless one. We are all on our way down. We are all aging. Growing slower mentally and physically. Losing our youthful glean. Our world has been so infatuated with being great and the worldly aspects of greatness that its focus has intensified on youth and achievement and merit. The world has learned that only so much is humanly possible in one lifetime, and hoping to avoid alerting people of their inhuman possibilities in the Lord, it has refocused its distractive efforts to feeding our hopes in a fabricated potential. The potential of a fake youth, full of maturity, brilliance, and knowledge.

It’s no coincidence that with age comes the realization of the closeness of Jesus. When the world abandons us to wrinkles and aching joints what are we left with? Hopefully Jesus. For those who do not know Jesus they are merely left with the Hopelessness of lost potential.

I think such an environment leaves us with a certain affinity for distinct types of depression and desperation. Such as my desperation with rest. I feel like I shouldn’t. When I hear that God has prepared good works for me in advance I assume it means every waking moment that I am not working to better myself should be filled with His good works unfolding before me for completion. How I despair when I spend the day doing, as I put it “nothing”. Nothing? Nothing worldly yes, but what is transpiring spiritually when I am doing nothing? Much I should think. Is it not the Lord that calls us to stillness?

Why do I agree with the hopeless pressure to better myself and struggle against the hope found in the stillness of the Lord? In the garden, I assume there was not so much focus on us from the rest of the Lord’s creation as there is from our own. What monuments we build of ourselves with our billboards and T.V. and self improvement tapes and charity tax write offs.

At first I stated that the desert’s indifference depressed me. But I was wrong. I feel depressed when I am still because the world tells me to achieve and be meritous, most of all with the Lord. And it is mostly only when I try to apply that meritous drive to the Lord that I become depressed. Because I know it’s something with no hope. I can’t do that. I’m not supposed to do that.

I feel some hope in my drive for fitness and mental quickness, but that will fade with age and with it’s fading will come a similar desperation of losing something I thought I had the potential for. That’s what I’ve heard all my life. I grew up thinking that if I tried hard enough my name would be in the history books.

The book of life has no such qualifications. But I feel desperate sometimes for it to have some sort of merit base. Thank God it doesn’t.

The desert is indifferent to many things. My beauty and mental agility falls short of impressing the desert. The desert will quickly destroy them. My very life is unimpressive. But that’s the comfort, it’s appropriate to the desert for me to be unimpressive. Nothing I can do out there is impressive. Nothing that is outside of the works of Jesus at least. Making the rain come and go, moving mountains, giving life in a place that is so good at taking it; those things are impressive.

The world I live in though, specifically at my age and my current profession, is mounting an enormous assault on the peace of such indifference to the world that the desert illustrates so well. This attack was launched so furiously, and with a banner of evangelism and spiritual greatness that we found ourselves beyond the front line and deep into enemy territory.

Most of the past 500 years has seen the greatest assault on the peace of the Lord. The segmenting of life, and specifically the spiritual life and “everyday life”, the industrial revolution is guilty, the protestant work ethic is guilty, the very American spirit of American independence is guilty, the information age is guilty.

We have idols of beauty, intelligence, youth, and conspicuous kindness. Why else are our old left in Old Folks depositories to die alone and unheeded? Why do Christian missionaries long for the wildernesses of South America and Africa? They think it’s because that’s where their potential will show itself most apparently. Their greatness among the lowly. What numbers would come to the Lord in light of our advanced greatness and knowledge! In reality third world countries are a retreat from the blistering spiritual attacks of the “advanced” countries. Young Christians today yearn for the simple life and death struggles that they leave America in search of potential hunger and lack of shelter.

My depression on days when I don’t do much is this world applying its meritocracy to my faith and relationship with Jesus Christ. It’s nothing more than the hopelessness of the world’s ways tainting the promises of the Lord.

The amassing of government and cities and concentrations seems to take us further and further away from the wild life in the garden that we were intended for. With the amassing of people comes culture, and society, and the rules of being high society. Beauty becomes more important than goodness. Fashion, which has no place in nature, begins to consume people.

The assault by the evil one has been so ferocious that fashion has even begun to infiltrate the wilderness. REI, green peace, conservation and preservation issues, eco tourism and the organic craze are evidence of such an assault. Merit has infiltrated our rest as well. Who rests the best? Who has the most eco friendly, cultured, physically fit, enlightening vacations? Traveling is chic, and the “wilder” the places traveled to the better.

The desert has no time for such trivialities and offers no hope for those who long to hold on to such things. The beautiful dies just as quickly if not faster than the ordinary. Fashionable gear won’t help you find water when you need it, and it won’t make the rains come.

Our fight is not in the world, but with the world. What does the world have to show us? The places in ourselves where the world reigns indicates the casualties that we are taking because of its assault. The condition of the church in America, which has more sects than any nation in history, is a blatant prognosis of the wounds we have sustained.

The hope comes with the pain in those wounds. The pain forcing us to look for remedies, and that search is quickly wearing out the hopeless facilities of the billboards and magazine covers. How much harder this fight must be for the beautiful and rich.