Filling the Void

Just so you guys know, there are 47 days until Christmas.  I have always loved Christmas very much.  Another thing I have always loved is the city of Vancouver at night.  The lights of the city reflecting on the water bring a new light into the core of my very being.  Perhaps it is because I was born and raised there.  It always feels like home to me, no matter where I happen to hang my hat.  Everyone wants to go home for Christmas, right?  I think the saying “Home is where you hang your hat” is not nearly so true as “Home is where the heart is.”  

On that note, there is another “place” which I consider to be home and that is wherever I am that happens to be in the presence of God’s people.  This community is what brings me true life and every time I am away from it, I feel homesick.  My church is in the midst of a three week fast and I feel like God is moving swiftly among us in response to our fasting and prayer.  He is moving.  Things are happening.

According to the five year old daughter of my pastor, the reason we fast is “to remove the things that we love more than God.”  Out of the mouths of babes, right?  Goodness, I love it when young children just GET it!  What I have been thinking of this week, though, tells me that the idea of fasting goes beyond just removing things from our lives.  We don’t stop eating food or checking facebook just because.  We do it so that we can focus on God more.  The question is, if we do not add any discipline to our lives, how then do we expect that this new found free time will suddenly be filled up with us focusing on God?  The answer is: it doesn’t.   We need to be purposeful about how we spend our time, whether we are fasting or not.  We need to fill the void.

I know this sounds entirely cliché, but every moment that we are given and every breath we take is a gift.  I believe that we were put on this Earth with one supreme purpose – to serve and praise our supreme God!  He gave us life and we owe every second of it back to Him.  Unfortunately, we do need to also be productive members of society, so we have obligations to such things as family and work etc.  But we tend to take out obligations too seriously, to the point where God is put on the back burner, or he is taken off the stove entirely, if you want to put it that way.  According to the Bible, we are very finite creatures.  It is only in our own minds that the span of our lives is so very long.  In comparison with eternity, we are hardly even a blip on the proverbial radar.  Take this scripture for example:

“Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”” -  James 4:13-15

To think about our own mortality is slightly morbid, I know, but that is not the entire point of this verse.  It is meant to snap our heads into focus so that we don’t waste what time we do have left.  We could die tomorrow, or in 50 years.  Even still, we should not waste our time.  We are to be good stewards of our time as much as of our possessions. 

So what are the disciplines that we should put in place of these things which waste our time?  Again, with the clichés, but we should pray and read scripture.  This is something I have been wanting to address for a few days now, but I have not been sure how to incorporate it.  Here it is: For those of us who have been raised in a Christian atmosphere, we run the risk of thinking of certain portions of scripture, and even certain practices as being cliché.  The truth of the matter is, these things which are the foundation of our faith are not cliché.  They stand the tests of time, and they do so because they are of lasting value.  Two verses come to mind in this regard: 

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;
⁶ in all your ways acknowledge him,
    and he will make your paths straight”

Proverbs 3:5-6

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”  - Matthew 6:33

In everything that we do, we are told we need to lean on God rather than ourselves (as hard as that may be,) we are to TRUST in Him and we are to acknowledge Him and beyond that, we are to seek His kingdom and His righteousness.  

When I think of leaning on God, I think of Him being sufficient enough for my emotions, to the point where I do not need to run to substances, people or things (any sort of vice or crutch) in order to either fulfill my emotional needs or to quell my emotions altogether.  God WANTS us to have emotions, and He wants us to come to Him with them.  I am reminded of a vivid memory of myself a few days after I had lost two people very close to me within 24 hours of each other.  I was at work on my break and as I sat outside the work van on the pavement, I started crying, and I literally felt God wrap His arms around me and hold me close.  I had never felt so loved by God in my life, and in the moment, I leaned entirely on Him.  There are other areas of my life in which I have recently been challenged to lean on God rather than on myself or on other people.  The main one is in my romantic life, or rather, my lack of a romantic life.  I have always, since I was a little girl, wanted to get married and have children.  This desire has never left me, and I don’t suspect it ever will.  In this area I must often check myself to ensure that the desires of my heart are not for things of Earthly value more so than they are for God Himself.  The words of two different songs come to mind when I think of the role that plays in my life in this area: “Jesus, lover of my soul.  Jesus, I will never let you go.  You’ve taken me from the miry clay.  You set me feet upon a rock and now I know, that I love you.  I need you.  Though my world my fall, I’ll never let you go.” AND “All of you is more than enough for all of me, for every thirst and every need.  You satisfy me, and all I have in you is more than enough!”  Jesus is the lover of our souls, at least He wants to be.  He wants to be enough in our eyes, and when we let Him, He always come through and proves His worth.

Trusting God is a whole other matter, now isn’t it?  It is easy enough to lean on God as our all sufficient source when we are drained and have nothing left to give.  But what about when we are at our best and we think that our own knowledge is ultimately what is going to get us through?  It says here that we are not supposed to rely on our own ways of understand things.  That means that no matter how many degrees we have under our belts, no matter what experience we can boast, or what lofty language we spew out, we are still nothing in comparison to the omniscience, or "all-knowing-ness" of God.  He is in all and He is above all.  That being said, He knows when even our most well laid out plans are going to fail, and when out of the blue things will seemingly miraculously line up for us with little to no effort.  (Hint – it IS a miracle, and God was behind it!  Sometimes miracles happen when we don’t even ask for them.  In fact, most of the miracles of our lives go unnoticed as they are done behind the scenes, by angels who are preventing bad things, or putting certain good things in our paths.)

When it all comes down to it, as mentioned before, every moment of this life if a gift from God, so we ought to acknowledge Him in every moment that we are given, no matter what we are doing.  Whether we are in class, at work, at home with our families, out running errands or enjoying some leisure time.  It really makes one evaluate the statement “in all your ways acknowledge Him.”  It begs the question, “What exactly are my ways?”  Are my ways pleasing to God? If I am doing things that are selfish, can I really acknowledge God in that, or do I need to put such things aside in order to be able to acknowledge Him?

Lastly, we are to seek God’s kingdom and His righteousness.  It is often debated what is meant by “the Kingdom of God.”  Some say that the Kingdom of God (or the Kingdom of Heaven) is what all believers will experience in the afterlife.  Some believe that it is God at work in our lives here and now.  I am more inclined to lean toward the second viewpoint, but I do believe that it means both.  See, in God’s eyes, times is of no relevance, so to Him, “eternity” in Heaven is already started and so it is essentially the same time as what we are experiencing here on Earth right now.  Time means nothing to God.  The relevance of this is that when Jesus left His spirit to stay here with us, His Kingdom here on Earth was initiated.  His Holy Spirit is at work in the hearts and lives of people all around the world, bringing people back into relationship with God the Father.  Since we, as Christians, have the Holy Spirit living in us, we too have the opportunity to take part in God’s Kingdom here on Earth.  We can join in with the Holy Spirit in attempt to bring restoration to humanity.  I do not mean that salvation can come to anyone through a mere human being.  I do mean that we are God’s instruments, and if we allow Him to, He can use us to do His work.  The work of His Kingdom and of His righteousness.  I believe that to seek these things means to seek to know them and then to make them a part of our own lives.  That, of course, is another story for another day, but perhaps you can start to look into it for yourselves.  Open up your Bible and start reading in the first four books of the New Testament.  Jesus talks often in parables about what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.  If we study these things, and know them, we will be far better at helping further God’s Kingdom here on Earth.

I know this has been a long one, but it has been a few days since I posted and all of this has just been percolating inside my head!

Thanks for “listening.”