There's hope yet!
I've been reading Mike Yaconelli's Messy Spirituality, which is probably THE most encouraging book to read when you feel your life is hopelessly messy and might never get straightened out. I don't think my life is ever going to go like clockwork and what's more, I'm not sure I want it to... but anyway...
When someone starts a book by saying, "My life is a mess," you know you're probably gonna identify with whatever he says.
He goes on to talk about how we, messy people with messy lives, don't have anything to be ashamed of as Christ-followers; how we've always equated "spiritual" people with those who are disciplined, balanced, have it all together, pray for 2 hours a day, etc., and we the messy ones have always felt hopelessly inept, inadequate, as if we couldn't match up to them. But the truth is that God is in the messiness.
And spiritual growth, he says, is more than a regimen of prayer, Bible study, service and community:
It's a wild search for God in the midst of the tangled jungle of our souls, a search which involves a volatile mix of messy reality, wild freedom, frustrating stuckness, increasing slowness and a healthy dose of gratitude.
Now, THAT sounds like my life journey, all right!
My walk with God has never ever looked like a straight line. Backwards, forwards, up and down, stops and starts, yes, but never straightforward exponential progress. It's something I used to worry about, especially when preachers say things like, "If you're not moving forward, you're backsliding already! There's no such thing as being stagnant when it comes to the Christian life!" Eek!
So, if you were to draw a graph of my life, you'd see lots of ups and downs kinda like an ECG readout. And, Yaconelli says:
Usually when we analyse [graphs like these], we make value judgements. The high spots represent the good or positive moments in our relationship with God while the low spots represent the bad or negative moments. But what would happen if we removed those kinds of value judgements from our thinking? What would happen if, in place of 'good' and 'bad', 'positive' and 'negative', 'high' and 'low', we used words like 'resting', 'listening', 'waiting', 'starting', 'returning', 'savouring', 'celebrating', 'dancing', 'learning', 'growing'? How would our understanding of the spiritual life be altered if we used these other words to describe our growing?
Good question. Maybe I can start to see God and growth in my "stuckness" (Yaconelli's word) and messiness instead of just seeing something that needs to be fixed, or something to be despised.