As someone who has spent a great deal of time in church services, listening to pastors and priests give hundreds and hundreds of sermons, let me tell you from experience what I’ve learned: Church sermons can really mess you up sometimes.
Now, that can be a good thing for your soul; challenging what you walked in believing was important, getting under your skin about the way you’re living at a given moment, opening your eyes to a deeper truth, and letting you see something path-altering.
But too many messages from the Sunday pulpits in America are lazy, oversimplified, easy-flowing religious platitudes, that do little more than feed the already frantic pace of life we all exist in, and the overwhelming feeling most of us have that we are not doing enough for God.
These are sort-of Christian culture catch phrases that sound great, require little work from the speaker and are designed for maximum “Amen-ing” from the Jesus peeps.
If you’ve spent any amount of time where Christian leaders do what they do, you’ll recognize the usual suspects right away:
“God has a plan for your life!”
“Jesus wants to change the world through you!”
“You need to share your faith and spread the Gospel to everyone!”
There’s nothing inherently evil going on here; no pastoral conspiracy to overburden or crush God’s people, and it isn’t that these messages are necessarily un-Biblical at all but the impact on the congregation is the same: people are getting worn-out.
If you’re anything like me, or the frazzled masses who stream into our churches every Sunday morning, you’re moving at an unsustainable pace as you arrive at a worship service.
You’ve spent the last six days running and working, doing and planning, picking-up and dropping-off, and today you’ve basically had to pull off some major, Jedi master, Matrix-style, gravity-denying ninja tricks just to get your family out of the house, into the car, and through the parking lot, (all the while, with a “We’re the perfect family” smile plastered on your faces), just in time to violently crash into your chairs (or pews) before the choir, rock band, DJ, or hipster folk duo cranks things up.
And before you can even catch your breath or recover anything resembling a normal resting heart rate, the pastor gets up and tells you that God has a plan for your life; that He wants you to save your school or your family or Africa, and you’re thinking to yourself, “Dude/Lady, I can’t even manage my DVR library, balance my checkbook, or find my kid’s left shoe, I think saving the world may be a bit above my skill set!”
I know exactly how you feel.
Even though I confess that I too often am the giver of this kind of religious megaphone, rah-rah, pulpit pep talk, I spend most of my regular time the way you do; believing that God has a plan for my life while laying awake all night trying to figure out specifically what that is; knowing that I’m supposed to share my faith with friends and strangers but usually feeling too exhausted or irritable to actually do it; agreeing that God wants to do great things in my life and feeling like a failure because all the greatness seems so often submerged in mediocrity.
But maybe all of this striving and guilt and frustration, is actually not what God wants most.
Maybe, what Jesus desires for you more than anything, is that you recover a pace that allows you to breathe and receive.
It’s possible that your most pressing personal mission, is not about you doing anything at all.
What if God’s plan for your life right now was not that you save souls or change lives or fix the planet, but that you take a nap?
Today, I decided to stop reading and studying and writing and thinking and doing God stuff, and I simply laid down in our backyard hammock. I purposefully didn’t wrestle with any great spiritual truths or any nagging questions about the future, or of death or about my personal, God-designed plan. I just rested, half-awake and half-asleep, (and occasionally all-asleep).
And something really great and quite spiritual happened while I was wrapped in that small bit of suspended cotton, and swinging lightly in the breeze that I had no input in creating.
I remembered how small I am.
I thought about the planet revolving in space and spinning on its axis, and the gravity that held me gently in place, though I’m usually oblivious to it all.
I noticed the trees shifting in the wind and the sounds of birds and the shade of blue above me. (Without meaning to, I “considered the lilies”, as Jesus commands).
As I did, I re-realized that God doesn’t just a have a plan for me, God has me.
It could very well be, that God wants you to change the world (or more likely, just the little corner of it you happen to be occupying at a given time), but more than that and well before that, God wants you to recover peace in His presence; to be able to rest in the questions and in the undone, to pause and realize that His greatest plan is not that you save anything.
You are the one being saved.
Nap your way into that truth.
Rest well.
