time

I’ve been chewing on the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s song ‘Time’ from The Dark Side of the Moon record. It reads a lot like the book of Ecclesiastes. Essentially time is an unstoppable constant that consumes us completely in the/our end. Its easy to just live, spinning our wheels, keeping the merry-go-round greased, but many years will quickly come upon us and our present will come back to haunt us with all kinds of questions–namely, “why not?”. We’re currently kicking around on a piece of ground in my home town, waiting for someone or something to show us the way. The last 2.5 years have felt like a hamster wheel and we feel like something has got to give. It’s not just frustration. We really feel like something huge is on the horizon. I can’t waste another year, month, even day. I am ready to truly be alive. I’m ready to live this life with my beautiful wife and 3 incredible children (who constantly remind us that time is moving faster than we think). Something needs to happen, I’m starting to feel older.

Time

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation…

It is never fun to die

I love the juxtaposition of contradicting words and ideas. Ideas that have no business being paired together. Some of my favorite examples from the Bible: the way that the poor in spirit are actually rich (Matthew 5); how Jesus gives us a “light burden” (Matthew 11); and most poignantly how we are called to lose our life if we really want to find it (Matthew 10).

I love it that God is life and created all life, and as humans we’re all dying in sin and so the answer is that Jesus died for us so that we could have eternal life. And the way that plays out in our lives is that we are called to die. Die to our own sinful nature that makes us selfish, self-seeking creatures who instinctively try to preserve what makes for a spiritually shallow life, and in so doing usually miss out on real life in God and the answer is that we need to lose our life in order to find it. So for us to live Christ had to die and in order to have full, real life, we must die.

¹⁰But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. ¹¹And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.  ¹²Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation—but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. ¹³For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live…

-Romans 8 (Bible)

And so I am challenged to die:

“We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgement. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Savior passed when he suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

-A.W. Tozer

If we put some clothes on this spiritual idea, what might it look like in my life, in yours…?

Pride, arrogance, selfishness, greed, desire for safety and comfort at the exclusion of obedience to God, discontent, laziness… these are parts of me that need to die. The type of death you don’t come back from. Not like the death of a character on “24″ or “Lost”… but like real, dead, death. I need to grow and change and see these things left behind as I emerge as a truly new creation in Christ. It’s  a good thing I have my whole life to be “perfected” by God and even then… that “perfecting work” has a lot more to do with forgiveness than perfection. And grace. And mercy. Thank God that he delights in working on us… I have always loved this quote:

Jesus accepts us the way we are but loves us too much to let us stay the same.

God makes my life so full of joy and hope as I follow Him, and yet as I am ever knowing God,  may I  be completely conscious of His voice as he whispers “Come, and die so you may live.”

everything must change…beginning with me

I [Allison] am going to start blogging here mostly about what I’m reading, thinking, praying, et. on my journey in relationship with Christ. Perhaps because I am a Christian, the idea that my life is a journey with God goes without saying, but I need to say it. I need to talk about how my heart is longing to be closer to God. I don’t know if anyone will read these encouragements but if you do, may you also be inspired to draw quietly close to your Creator, Savior, and wonderful Father.

Today I am reading The Pursuit of God by  A.W. Tozer and so the quotations are his.

This is such a central and vital thought for me about knowing God:

“The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.” -Tozer

In Christianity today [in America], the biggest deal is made about us initially “accepting” Jesus into our lives (a term which is not even in the Bible) and Tozer says, “we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.” We have been deceived by this idea that “once we have found Him, we need no more seek Him.” Even the word “crave” convicts me! Do I crave to know God more closely? Honestly, not lately. But today is a new day.

I can think of many characters in the Bible who continue to search for and long after God for the duration of their lives, and these are the people from which we can learn the most about actually walking with God. Moses, Abraham, David (author of many God-seeking psalms), Paul and John are a few who come to mind. It seems we love espousing the idea that we have a relationship with God and that sets us apart from other “dead” religions. But what is a relationship if it is not an on-going, growing, deepening, and changing experience between us and God?  I am strongly sensing that God wants this one thing from each of us that would dare know him: that our top desire would actually be to know God and find ourselves, our hopes, our fulfillment, our happiness, our whole life in HIm. And today I am challenged by Tozer that Christ “waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very  long, in vain.”

I will no longer be satisfied with simply being challenged. Or with simply having “found God”… today everything must change, beginning with me. I am going to seek to listen, love, and lose myself in knowing God. I am quoting Tozer a lot, but when I read this prayer he penned over 60 years ago, I couldn’t believe how much it was my own prayer, too:

“O God, I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God… I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. … Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”