Goals for 2015

Every year for the past six years I have made it my annual tradition to prepare a list of goals and principles to live by in the upcoming year. It’s a little more thoughtful and deliberate than a new year’s resolution (or at least I like to think so.) It started innocently enough, one year in which I was feeling particularly ambitious. My goals run the gamut in terms of scope. One year my goals might be to finish a novel or run a half-marathon and another year they might be to buy a new pair of glasses. As I said, pretty wide spectrum. Every December (or January if I procrastinate) I set aside time to think through what I want to accomplish in the upcoming year. If I’m completely honest I’m not much of a long-term planner. I often have a hard time seeing the “big picture”. I’m also decidedly risk-averse (read: cowardly).

I had already given some thought and jotted down a few notes on what I want 2015’s goals to be when I went for a run a week ago. [Sidenote: running is one of the “principles” that I have been able maintain consistently. Yay me!] I was trying to find a way to articulate why I do this exercise year after year if I were asked. I circled around the answer: it is a way to get me closer toward where I want to be. But then I began to ask myself: where do I want to be? What is my life aiming for? I mean its one thing to say that I want to write 500 a day on the way to finishing a novel, but is that what I really want? It is indeed a very noble goal but is that truly where I really want to be going?

I pondered and pondered and pondered some more and this is what I rested upon:

In 2015 I want to respond immediately when the Lord calls. At the end of the day; at the end of my life, that is what I want to identify me: did I respond to Jesus.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am very good at dismissing the Lord’s calling. I will be leaving church and feel that I should pray for someone, but I get into my truck and drive home. At work, I will know that I should ask a deeper, probing question, but I shrug it off. It’s not that I don’t know what the Lord is asking me to do, it is rather that I have become adept at ignoring it or rationalizing it away. For instance, the other day I was going to see a movie with my parents (The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies if you must know) and as we drove though my parent’s neighborhood, I saw a woman sitting on her porch sobbing. Immediately I felt the desire to pull over and ask if she was okay. But… we were already cutting it close on the movie start time AND we were almost to my parent’s house already AND I wasn’t the one driving. So we drove on.

Who knows what the outcome would have been. She probably would have thought me crazy and shooed me off her property, but that wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t the validity or rationality or probability of the request, it was the one asking, namely the Lord. Will I respond when He asks me to?

I don’t know where you want to go in life. I don’t know what kind of person you want to be. I don’t know what goals you hope to accomplish in 2015, but I encourage you to thoughtfully articulate them. Give them attention. Think about the man or woman you want to be and set yourself down that path. The only way you can control who you’ll be in 10, 15, or 20 years is to become that person today, this day, this moment.

As for me, my aim is to 1) actively listen and 2) respond immediately when the Lord calls.

Too Much Stuff, Too Little Gospel

It’s about ten thirty in the evening. My wife and I stumble into our darkened house setting down our bags with a thud. My daughter, who at this point is far beyond tired, acts as if she has no skeletal structure and collapses into the floor in a heap as we attempt to get off her hat and coat. We are just returning home from a youth group Christmas party. It was a slow-burn affair culminating in a (most unexpected) chaotic game of Red Light, Green Light. It was good seeing the students who turned out for the event but it got me thinking: how much time, energy, and resources I spend putting together game nights, retreats, and overnighters. We have established patterns and systems that keep our ministry going throughout the year. Now don’t get me wrong, these systems are useful and serve the purpose of gathering us together (a Biblical command) but as I contemplate where the greatest percentage of my time goes I, wonder if my resources are being best allocated. If I’m honest, the bulk of my time goes into maintaining systems.

Systems serve the purpose of establishing rituals, streamlining procedures, and maintaining order. In the Christian life we each have our own systems: quiet times keep us reading the Bible, prayer gatherings keep us praying, tithing establishes the discipline of giving, gathering keep us meeting together. All of these things serve organizational and devotional needs, but is Jesus in them? It is a heart question that we all must ask ourselves.

If I’m honest, I’ve grown tired of maintaining systems for the sake of it. As much as I love ritual and routine, I’m afraid that they are keeping me from the Lord rather than leading me to Him. I’ve grown tired of events where we don’t talk about Jesus. As I grow older I’m less tolerant of talking around the edges of faith; of churchy banter. I’m tired of church gatherings that are more focused on small talk than seeing Christ move, on being transformed by the Word, and on praising the glory of the Lord. Mostly, I’m tired of the fickle shallowness of my own heart that elevates ritual over experience and routine over relationship.

As one involved in the planning of a ministry I can tell you (confess, really) how easy it is to create events for the sake of creating events; to gather for the sake of ourselves. The reason, at least for me, that this is so tempting is that it scares me to plan events (and our lives) about Jesus. It’s scary to gather solely for the purpose of knowing Scripture. It is scary to get together and ask questions deeper than what’s trending or about the results of some football game. It’s scary to ask in prayer what the Lord asks of us and be ready to do it. It is scary. I am scared, but I’m also dissatisfied. I’m dissatisfied of seeing how poorly my life lines up with the life of Jesus as demonstrated in the gospels.

This isn’t an indictment of systems or practices unless they get in the way of us responding to Christ; unless they insulate us from the life that the Lord truly wants us to live, a life of radical dependence. A gated community is great until it isolates us from the things Jesus wants us to be concerned with.

So what does this all mean? I’m afraid it means a break from the safety of our rituals and long-established patterns. There is no easy remedy for distrust other than trust. Often the desire to live a life for Christ demands a drastic reordering of priorities and a reimagining of what “normal” life looks like. A Christ-oriented life requires a state of expectancy for God’s movement. We cannot pray without expecting the Lord to answer. We cannot read without anticipating change. We cannot serve and still cling to any notion of pride. If we are for Christ, we can be for nothing else, most importantly, ourselves.

Lord, break us of our complacency.

Give us faith in the face of fear.

Give us the courage to abandon the good for the sake of the great.