Posts Tagged ‘joy’

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30
Jan

Any Sufficiently Advanced (Spiritual) Technology

It’s common, and very wise, to ask God for strength, patience, peace, joy, etc. So how is it, exactly, that God gives these things to us?

Our magnificent church just finished a Daniel fast together. In the final week of it I made a well-meaning but ill-fated attempt to give up most of my usual sources of comfort and rest and entertainment: snacks, fun books, video games, tea, solitary TV-watching, condiments, etc. Everything must go.

The semi-articulated goal behind this experiment was that I wanted to learn to draw strength, comfort, peace and rest from nothing but God. If he didn’t feed me, I would go hungry; not just food hungry, you understand, but all-the-way-down hungry. It was very hard, and I didn’t manage to carry the experiment through the whole week.

Channels of (in this case) hydration -- (c) Tony Hisgett

But what I started realizing more clearly is that in many cases God provides strength, comfort or rest through all sorts of channels, say a hug from my wife Kristen or a nutritious meal. Certainly some of the available channels are not bringing anything from God. I don’t think playing computer games for hours on end is usually a channel of God’s rest (nor, in the end, all that restful). But other things I do, like eating and sleeping and laughing and watching Modern Family with my household, are the actual way God is giving me strength.

Then there are the times God “directly,” seemingly magically, gives me a sudden sense of peace or bravery, usually in response to prayer. But I suspect that that sort of magical infusion is not more holy than gaining confidence and peace through a hug from Kristen and an encouraging e-mail from my dad.

So it becomes a matter of discerning which channels of grace are God-authorized to meet our needs at any given moment. Sometimes a feast with friends is the way God strengthens us, sometimes it is an escapist avoidance of the hard work that would be the real channel of God’s strength.

And there is still the mystery of the magical infusions of one blessing or another. I am inclined to treat these in line with Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Perhaps it’s not that there are “indirect” channels of God’s grace, like hugs from friends, and “direct” channels, where God “just does” something to us or for us. Perhaps it’s simply that we don’t really understand how spirits work yet, and sometimes we are receiving an invisible hug or snack.

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28
Oct

Two Dilemmas

Unemployment is a fascinating situation. So far I’ve discovered two really interesting dilemmas:

1. Progress through useless activity

Any job-search action I take has a very low probability of success and no guarantee of any usefulness, at maximum. Finding a job listing, sending in a resume or making contact with an interesting local resident may be the thing that gets me a job, but 999 times out of 1000, it’s not. Since each individual step seems so unlikely it registers psychologically as useless, there’s little motivation to take the steps. But if I refuse to take the steps because each one provides (nearly) zero results for non-zero effort, I will never find success. So basically the goal here is to keep doing things that feel useless, constantly. Very intriguing.

2. The genuineness dilemma

I think my biggest asset is that I’m naively, almost startlingly non-mercenary. I am quite specifically here to serve the people of Baltimore, just because Jesus loves them and I consider them valuable. It’s what I care about and currently my deepest measure of personal success.

So I’ll go to fairly significant expense and effort just to find ways I can help people, then help them in those ways. I could be a secretary, mop floors as a janitor, head up of a non-profit or stay unemployed and take people out for coffee, and I’ll be largely content and purposeful in any of those cases.

Content minus the fact that I’m not providing for my family, of course, and that’s an important pressure. Because the pressure to provide means that I want to get a job, and wanting to get a job means I’ll start turning whatever assets I have to influence people to want to hire me, which means that I’ll start being genuine and non-mercenary with an ulterior motive, which, we sadly conclude, is no longer non-mercenary, and is therefore no longer an asset.

So essentially my goal is to stay true, stay joyful, keep my value and purpose centered on Jesus, trust him to provide employment and/or money as the (true) need arises, and in the meantime keep doing important, useless things.