A BAG OF WIND

A bag of wind.  Just a bunch of hot air.  Hypocrite.  Where does she get off thinking she has the right to…when we all know that she doesn’t have her stuff all that together? Do you hear these voices too?  Are you stymied from moving forward into what your heart longs to launch into because of these accusations which might be inaudible to the rest of the world but are certainly not to you?

It took me awhile to identify my reasons for shying away from writing lately.  It looked to me like a classic case of laziness.  I am all too familiar with the laziness that assaults me when it’s time to clean house or get at those weeds that, in spite of the triple-digit temperatures, continue to thrive.  But writing is something I generally enjoy doing; I have memory upon memory piled up of writing for hours, even days, on end.  Why would I suddenly find all kinds of excuses not to do the thing I most love doing? 

And then I finally got alone and still enough to recognize the voices in my head.  They had been doing their sinister job on me by whispering these accusations one at a time. So stealthy they were that I had failed to add them all up and realize their power and the number they were doing on me.

Driving my car, sitting in church, falling asleep late at night, the inspiration would hit; the excitement would build to write about all these things I’d been learning. The vision was so strong that I had no doubt that at my first opportunity— as soon as I drove into my driveway and could get into the house; as soon as I got home from church; as soon as I woke up in the morning—I would get to writing. It would be thrilling to get it all down in black and white.  It would be nothing less than exhilarating.

But then the faintest little accusation rubbed up against— ever-so gently— the most remote boundary of my consciousness. “You have no right! Who do you think you are?” 

It took a twelve-hour car trip and a nine-disc audiobook to wake me up to the reality of what was happening to me.  It might have happened, be happening, to you, too.  “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).  We are gifted by God, some to do this thing, others to do that one.  Most of us, if we are honest, know what at least some of those gifts are.  They are the directions we naturally lean, the things we do more instinctively than most, the music that, when we cannot be directly focused upon,  is always playing in the background of the rest of our lives, the colors that, when we aren’t totally swimming in them, most thoroughly saturate our peripheral vision.  God gave them to us to use lavishly,  not to horde and not to bury. 

That’s the cheery half of the story.  The other half of the story is much more sinister.  This is the dark part of the story that threatens tragedy and will have its way if we don’t pay attention and get a grip on reality.  Revelation 12 tells us about it.  When the dragon didn’t get to destroy the woman’s Son, he came— and still comes— after the rest of her offspring—“those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”  Our Enemy wants to deter us in any way he can from magnifying his Enemy, God.  Of course, he would attack our productivity.

And one way he attacks is to convince us that we are not worthy of spending our talents.  We are not well-behaved enough; we are not obedient enough; we are not consistent enough.  In fact, since we are still struggling with looking like Christians should, we are probably even confused about this thing being a gift from God at all. What does God have to do with this thing you do?  You are a fool deluded fool living in la-la land.

He is trying to rob us, and God, blind. Stealing is one of the things he does best, right up there with killing and destroying. 

Don’t let another day go by believing the lies.  Get on with the thing God has given you to do.  Yes, less-than-perfect you. Yes, inconsistent me.

“Then the man who had received the one talent came. ‘Master, I knew that you are a hard man…So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground’” (Matthew 25:24-25). (The end of the parable gets pretty rough, so I’ll just leave it up to you to read the rest of it in privacy.)