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.)
