Holy desperation
One night last week, a few friends gathered for dinner to celebrate Lady Snoflek's birthday. Over the food, one of them started telling us about growth, and the search for that spiritual "something more": "It's like I move a step up, and then plateau out, then move up, and plateau out again... well, now I'm at a plateau and I want to move on to the next thing God has in store for me," she said.
I sighed inwardly as I thought about my own spiritual journey. Charted on a graph, it would look more like an ECG reading -- so many sharp ups and sharp downs. As a teenager I'd always been frustrated and worried about my lack of constancy. I'd make commitments at Christian youth camps and then come back to my 'real life', struggle, and eventually renege. It always felt like I wasn't really sincere about my relationship with God, when I actually was.
How to explain -- it's like Mom constantly asking me if I'd been doing my "Quiet Time" regularly (daily Bible reading & prayer) and me feeling gutted by guilt and failure because I hadn't. "Surely, if you were truly serious about your relationship with God, you'd work at it and maintain that daily discipline," I told myself contemptously, echoing the words of thousands of preachers.
Sometimes I really identify with King David, who wrote, "My sin is ever before me". Except mine would be sins, in the plural.
Another psalmist said his soul panted for God as the deer pants for streams of water. As my friend talked about the times of "holy desperation" in her own life, I tried to recall my own times of desperating longing & searching for God and came out with an almost zero. With a sense of disquiet I recalled my own on-again, off-again commitments to banish one particular sin from my life, and knew that I have not stuck to this commitment because I've not been desperate for God -- or not desperate enough.
Surprisingly, it's not a guilt trip thing, although it could so easily be. It was more like a light bulb coming on. I realised that if I were truly desperate to know God in a deeper way and to be in a close relationship with Him, I'd be seeking after Him with my whole heart, beating down the doors of heaven, praying, maybe fasting; I'd be reading the Bible, soaking up knowledge of Him, immersing myself in it; pursuing Him no matter what. Desperate people are very single-minded.
It's because I'm not desperate that I have such a hard time saying "no" to temptation and keep on tarrying, looking back, flirting with danger. I SO feel like Lot's wife sometimes.
But how do you manufacture desperation? You can't. In my experience, desperation is usually driven by fear -- ever prayed desperately when you've found yourself in a tight corner? But desperation for God shouldn't be fear-induced. It's supposed to be a good kind of desperation -- like when you find the perfect, most gorgeous pearl and are so desperate to own it that you sell all you have because you absolutely HAVE to have it. (Sound familiar?)
When am I going to realise that God is my "perfect, most gorgeous pearl", and start acting like it?