II heard a sermon at the end of last year that talked about how this woman had been training for a half-marathon and she was ready for the race but somehow the day of she didn’t stop when it was the half but did the whole marathon. At the end of it, she was totally beaten and worn out. She had run the wrong race.
I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be running the wrong race when that’s not where God wants me to be. Even if God places us somewhere, when do we know when it is time to continue there or to leave? I find that I am eager to rush, as if movement is progress, and I when I am not, I wonder if I am being still or stagnant.
My life is b.u.s.y. And they are not all bad things that it is filled up with. Good things, bad things, indifferent things, and the I-don’t-know-how-to-classify-it things.
Recently I have been reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. I was enjoying the book and then he began a chapter that I was not at all prepared for. I know that if I type word for word people probably won’t read this, so I will summarize.
Rob Bell started a church and a few months into its miraculous beginning and growth he finds himself in between services ready to run away, uncertain if he is even still a Christian.
He realizes that he needs to take step back and talks to a therapist. The first time he goes he is spilling out all his stuff, “I was making lists of all the people I was working to keep happy.” The therapist stops him and says that his problem is sin and that, “Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.”
Rob Bell goes on to say, ”I started identifying how much of my life was about making sure the right people were pleased with me. And as this became more and more clear, I realized how less and less pleased I was with myself. What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split.”
When I read that I felt as if for a moment the world stopped turning. I was split. So split I wasn’t even sure I recognized where I was split.
Rob Bell goes on to say, ”I started identifying how much of my life was about making sure the right people were pleased with me. And as this became more and more clear, I realized how less and less pleased I was with myself. What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split.”
When I read that I felt as if for a moment the world stopped turning. I was split. So split I wasn’t even sure I recognized where I was split.
Then he goes on to explain how he had this idea of a superpastor--someone who was always there for everyone, gave powerful sermons, always is available to be called, enjoys meetings, puts his family first, etc, etc.
And I have an idea of what a superteacher/Christian/wife/daughter/neighbor/relative/church member should be.
The last part of the section says, “I meet so many people who have superwhatever rattling around in their head. They have this person they are convinced they are supposed to be, and their superwhatever is killing them. They have this image they picked up over the years of how they are supposed to look and act and work and play and talk and it’s like a voice that never stops shouting in their ear.
And the only way to not be killed by it is to shoot first. Yes, that is what I meant to write. You have to kill your superwhatever. And you have to do it right now.
Because your superwhatever will rob you of today and tomorrow and the next day until you take it out back and end its life. Go do it. The book will be here when you get back.”
I haven’t read any more in the book since I finished that section. Because I haven’t done it. I haven’t killed the “superwhatever” because I don’t know how.
And because it isn’t that easy. Some expectations will always be there. Some “have” to be there. I can’t just get up in front of whoever and say, “I can’t do _____ anymore because it’s killing who God intended for me to be.” And that’s another thing, how do I know what God intended for me to be? What if this is the fire and I’m being refined? What if I just need an attitude adjustment? I am tentative to mess up, no petrified, because I’ve already reaped some of those consequences and they were crushing. I feel trapped in this mental cycle where I know that I need to break out but I don’t know how to without destroying what I’ve worked so hard to build.
But, I don’t want to run the wrong race.
I don’t want to be burning out and trapped inside a shell.
And so I cry out to God, for freedom--to live as He intended me to. And vision to see it.
