:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

Some days I feel like Paul is that big brother I never could match. I see him as the kind of guy who was always picked first for sports, topped the honors charts in school, and quickly rose to the top of his company. He worked tirelessly, also knowing what to do next.

When mocking a church obsessed with credentials, Paul rolls out a list of accomplishments that include being shipwrecked, imprisoned, and nearly beaten to death for the sake of the Gospel. What have I got? How about an atheist writing a cross comment on Facebook?

I’m not even close to matching Paul, the super-missionary, apostle extraordinaire who wrote the Bible—well, at least the part of the Bible that folks like me read the most. Wink. Wink. To make things worse, Paul mocked people who called themselves super-apostles.

Paul is so awesome that he can mock people who think they’re more awesome than him…

Paul brings up a very real tension for us in the Christian life. The pace of his ministry was furious. He was a true overachiever. There are plenty of reasons why evangelicals in America love Paul, but one reason may be his indomitable work ethic. If there was ever a “git ‘er done” guy in the Bible, it was Paul.

There are other traditions in Christianity besides “git ‘er done,” fast-paced ministry that globe trots from one ministry to another. There are other paces we read about in the Bible. Jesus spent the first thirty years of his life working as a carpenter or doing whatever people in Nazareth and Galilee were up to back then. Even Paul, that tireless worker, took a bunch of years to get his head on straight in the wilderness.

What did he do?

Those quiet years intrigue me. For all our obsession with being “busy” with ministry, there is a tension at play where solitude and leading a quiet life emerge as viable options for either a season or at least a lifetime.

Paul and his fast-paced ministry have become so normal and ideal in my conception of Christianity, that I forget the rest of the examples in the Bible about staying put, leading a quiet life, and winning people over through a gentle holiness.

There are different callings for different people, at different seasons in their lives. There were times when Paul had to stay put and times when he had to roam from one city to another. Some Christians were called to serve in their cities as elders, while others stayed in lonely places where only the willing sought them out.

We don’t have a blueprint for Christianity. What happens is we gravitate toward the characters and lifestyles in the Bible that make the most sense to us. Along the way, we miss the point that God directed people in a wide variety of directions.

American Christians like me long to be busy—busy just like Paul. I forget that Paul looked at all of his accomplishments and counted them as foolish rubbish, counting only the love of Christ as his treasure. May God give us eyes to see the riches that he has called us to in relationship with him.

May we get over Paul and into the love of Christ.

I grew up among conservative Christians, and between the radio and various things I heard from others, I developed a sense that the world is somehow full of dangerous liberals, both religious and political liberals, who wanted to somehow destroy our nation and my religion. That fear was followed by anger and a kind of hostility where I just wanted “those people” to leave us alone.

Life was simple. I knew who the “dangerous” people were. I feared their agenda, and listened to people who acted as watchmen, protecting me, my country, and my faith.

Yesterday I realized that the tables have turned quite a bit in my mind.

Today I think I fear extreme conservative Christianity and politics a lot more. Why do I fear them? Because I believe they’re dangerous, though for a different reason. I have fallen into the same exact trap as before: developing an irrational fear that a whole segment of America is “out to get me.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about who is actually out to get us and whether everyone around us is really all that dangerous.

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When I pray and set aside quiet time to be with the Lord, I sometimes make a huge mistake. As I seek the Lord and fellowship with him, I become fixated on experiencing him.

I want the Spirit of God to come upon me, and my goal is to somehow validate my relationship with God or to prove that he’s true. It’s a kind of therapeutic, self-help, feel-good experience of God that really has little to do with God and everything to do with me.

God provides us ways to guard ourselves from this outlook, and I’m working on cultivating these as disciplines.

First of all, when we enter God’s presence with praise and adoration (as in the “A” in the ACTS prayer guide), we take our focus off ourselves. As we praise God, we break away from our focus from our concerns about money, insecurity, or disappointments in life.

Secondly, we can remain open to hearing from God in order to do the work that he has called us to. It is striking in scripture that with the Spirit usually comes some kind of commission or action to pursue.

Sometimes it’s as simple as, “Pray for this person.” Other times I need to stop obsessing about something. And then there may come a pretty huge, life-altering mission.

When the Spirit came on Isaiah, he didn’t just bask in the warm, holy goodness of God. In Isaiah 61:1, we read that he was anointed to preach the good news to the poor. This meant that Isaiah had to change his plans dramatically.

Seeking out God’s Spirit can result in a life-changing moment. We may never be the same. The status quo may be redefined. Are we willing to risk that when we seek the Lord and the presence of his Spirit?

As I look at where I’ve come from as an evangelical Christian the vast majority of evangelicals I read and interact with, I’ve been realizing that I generally lack a functional vocabulary of the Holy Spirit.

While I’m very much aware of the Holy Spirit’s presence, and I mention the Spirit at times, I lack the tools to speak of the Spirit’s work with other evangelicals. I’ve seen this among many colleagues online as well.

In a blog post I once critiqued one well-known speaker and author among the missional gang of Christians for his dearth of references to the Holy Spirit. A friend who knew this author shared that he knew from personal interaction with this man that he was fully committed to relying on the Holy Spirit for Christian mission.

However, we would never know this from his writings.

From blogs to sermons to books, in my travels and readings I repeatedly run into Christians who merely assume the Holy Spirit’s work or take his/her/its presence for granted. The teachings generally end with some kind of call to action, Do this. Period

If we challenge such teachers, even if I challenged myself sometimes, the reply would be something like, “Well of course the Holy Spirit is in the mix.” Somewhere. We don’t quite know how to verbally express how the Holy Spirit empowers us to holy living and generally makes the whole salvation, Christianity thing possible.

There are a few reasons for this verbal disconnect. In examining my own struggles with speaking of the Spirit there are reasons that range from the evangelical fear of sounding too “Pentecostal” and a failure to seek out the Spirit’s influence in our daily lives. I’ll touch on these reasons tomorrow.