The good news of faithfulness

We spent the weekend with our local church family hashing out God's call to magnify his glory by introducing people to life in his kingdom. We are 100% on board with the church vision that people in our city have repeated opportunities to experience the life-changing reality of Jesus Christ. We really struggle with understanding how our family is to participate in this.

In our year of "do less", we're hearing from the pulpit "do more". As we grow older and are more comfortable with how God made us, the "success" stories presented to us don't look like our lives. Whether it's true or not, what we seem to be hearing is that who we are isn't valuable. We need to be X. X meaning more extroverted, more exhausted, more what we weren't made to be.

As I step back and look at who N and I are, we're the un-glamour family. Professionally, we're actually reasonably accomplished; N has worked on some high profile video game titles, I've published a couple books. But when I think about our lives in among our neighbors and friends, there's not a lot of flash and bang. We're not going to win community service awards for hours at the soup kitchen. But our neighbors will drop by to borrow an egg or ask for computer advice. People from 5, 10, 15 years ago will call when they need a friend. In a dozen months, we've had about that many out of town visitors.

Doing less goes hand in hand with marginal living and allows us to steward what we have. Because we're not out running around every weekend, N has time to learn how to keep up our yard. This is important first, because it is simply part of being a good neighbor and second, because it helps us connect with our neighbors who happen to care about their yards and are way more knowledgeable than we are. Because there are "margins" in my life, white spaces, when crises arise as they seem to with some regularity, instead of being bowled over I can pray and contribute.

Our pastor reminded us this weekend that becoming a child of God cost us nothing (because Jesus paid it all), but that becoming a disciple costs us everything. I don't disagree. Following Jesus is about recognizing that we are dead, dying to ourselves, so that Christ lives in us. But these words coming from a go-go-go church planter easily sound like we have to burn ourselves out to become disciples. I know the Apostle Paul uses a lot of race and training imagery, but he also exhorts the believers in Thessolonica to make it their ambition to lead a quiet life...so that their daily lives would win the respect of outsiders.

Maybe if I could summarize our struggle it's that we are Appalachian trail through hikers who feel exhorted to sprint marathons. What we have to offer is the faithfulness of putting one foot ahead of the other, mile after mile. No flash, no oos and ahhs. I think this is a deep grace in our lives, and I think there is an element of gospel-living in this that I'm unwilling to give up in order to squeeze ourselves into a check box that makes sense to who knows who? I live with the deep trust that as we are drawn deeper into God's grace, our lives will be more and more aligned with God's view of and work in this world. How could it not be?