Okay, back to Gary Thomas' book Authentic Faith. It's been awhile, so let me refresh your memory regarding my post on the first spiritual discipline - which Thomas called "selflessness". In that chapter, Thomas gives four examples of selfless living throughout history. The first was Paul the apostle, the second Augustine, the third C.S. Lewis, and the fourth Orel Hershiser. I would say that living a selfless life could possibly be the hardest thing a person could ever do. I mean, our world revolves around living for ourselves - the advertisements, the marketing, even the way church is structured.
The second discipline could be just as hard.
I've been thinking a lot about 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul talks about how when he was a child, he thought like a child and acted like a child - but when he became a man, he put childish ways behind him. I've been thinking about that verse, and then also thinking about the ways that we as adults still act like we're children. The first way I thought of was the fact that when we are kids we aren't very good at sharing. We try to horde all of our toys and protect them from any other child who comes to our house - and we also try to take other kids toys and make them our own too. As adults, a lot of us never grew out of that stage. We continue to want more and more "toys", and we certainly don't want to share our stuff with anyone else. Another way we continue to act like children is the "Lifeboat" game that some of us had to endure in class with teachers who I guess aspired to be Adolf Hitler or something. In this game, we supposedly learned values clarification (to repeat the phrase from Steve Taylor's excellent song "Lifeboat") and we decided if certain people were on a lifeboat and one had to be thrown overboard, who would be the one that would be thrown over. I guess the final decision was usually made on who had the littlest value to society. I think usually it was the person who had the lowest IQ (represented usually as mentally challenged) that ended up being thrown overboard. Stupid game, yes, but yet some of us adults still live our lives that way. We don't value other people equally - we base their value on what they can offer us, usually.
The main way that we adults still act like children, however, is this in a nutshell (if a nutshell means two words): instant gratification. When we were kids, we always wanted everything now. Unfortunately, this is one childlike trait that most of us don't grow out of. My grandmother and I were talking about my parents divorcing when I was little, and I asked her what she thought was the main reason for them getting the divorce (since I was around four at the time, I don't remember anything about it). She thought about it for a moment and then said, "I think it's the fact that your mom and dad wanted to have everything right away - a house, new cars, new furniture, etc. And then they had money problems because they bit off more than they could chew." In other words, it all stemmed back to the fact that they wanted everything now. Instant gratification.
It's a serious problem in today's society. Why is the credit card debt so outrageous in our country these days? Because people want what they want now, and rather than saving up to get what they want (taking time to do so), they figure that they'll just put it on a credit card and pay it off soon enough. A lot of time that doesn't happen, unfortunately.
Gary Thomas' second discipline in his book "Authentic Faith" offers a solution to this sickness of instant gratification. It's a rather simple answer, but I think it takes a lifetime to truly understand and hold onto: the discipline of waiting. Waiting is hard. For some, waiting is impossible. Yet waiting is exactly what we need to do sometimes - no, most of the time. When we look at the different characters in the Bible, we see that they were ordinary people who were used by God because they were available to God, but at the same time God had developed character in their life over several years. Moses was eighty before he tackled the huge responsibility of taking on Pharoah and the nation of Egypt. Joseph was in slavery and in prison for several years for things he did not do and was not worthy of suffering punishment for, but Joseph came out of prison ready to lead a nation to stock up supplies for a seven year famine. Jesus didn't start his ministry until he was around thirty years old. As these characters waited, God developed them in time to be teachable and useable.
He brings up two areas that God calls us to wait in: spiritual growth and prayer. I can attest to struggling with waiting in my own spiritual growth. There are areas in my life that frustrate me because I continue to struggle in them, attitudes that I have developed over several years. Thomas makes a great point: "If we have spent ten, twenty, or even thirty years pounding a sinful habit into our lifestyle, we shouldn't be surprised if the residual elements take a long time to be rooted out." I need to be patient with myself and allow God to slowly work in those areas of my life that need to change, celebrating the small steps of growth over the years until He is finished with me - which in our case, is never. Prayer is another area where I struggle in waiting. I'm one of those people who get frustrated if my prayer for something isn't answered. Plus I'm a rather forgetful person, so there are times when I forget to continue to pray for a person or a situation, and then when I am reminded of the situation, I can't believe that the prayer hasn't been answered. I am reminded of when the iron curtain fell in Europe, and communism and oppression in many countries were defeated. Some of the Christians in these countries had been praying for fifty years that God would work in their lives to bring about change in their country; fifty years later, their prayers were answered. Can you imagine the feelings these people had when they stood on the Berlin Wall, or saw their dictator fall from power?
Instant gratification is hard to overcome, no doubt. But God is asking me to be patient with myself and with others around me and to allow Him to change what needs to be changed over time.
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