The Wilful Sunflower

This is appropriate, after agonising about trying to change.

My life is a mess.

After forty-five years of trying to follow Jesus, I keep losing him in the crowded busyness of my life. I know Jesus is there, somewhere, but it's difficult to make him out in the haze of everyday life.

...I want desperately to know God better. I want to be consistent. Right now the only consistency in my life is my inconsistency. Who I want to be and who I am are not very close together. I am not doing well at the living-a-consistent-life thing.

...I have been trying to follow Christ most of my life, and the best I can do is a stumbling, bumbling, clumsy kind of following. I wake up most days with the humiliating awareness that I have no clue where Jesus is. Even though I am a minister, even though I think about Jesus every day, my following is... uh... meandering.

- The opening lines of Messy Spirituality by Mike Yaconelli, founder of Youth Specialties, an organisation that trains Christian youth workers and provides resources for those who work with youth.

If you think about it - here's a guy who's a pretty well-known international Christian speaker, who heads a Christian organisation - admitting his life is a mess. Hmmm.

Most of the time I look at pastors or famous Christian leaders such as Billy Graham and I think, wow, they're like, you know, there. It's like they have it all together. No way would they be messing up like ordinary ol' me. And I keep wondering how long it's going to take me to "get there".

When I read the opening lines of this book, I realised I will never "get there"!

I'll never be "there" simply because I'll always have something more to learn, something more to become, something more to surrender.

Living the Christian life is a journey of saying "yes" to God every step of the way. Yacconelli might be a little bit ahead of me, but he's still on the road, just like I am.

Fellow travellers. I like that.