Our Spirtual Journey

It’s amazing how much one can learn, spiritually, when you are living outside of your comfort zone. Steve and I feel like we entered a spiritual wilderness a few months ago, not a wilderness without God, but a place where God is challenging our beliefs in what church and our Christian lives should be. While we know that living here has been instrumental in bringing us to this place, we have also been pro-active in pursuing God and asking the hard questions, What does God really require of us? What are we here for? Do we have value if we can’t be useful and do things? We feel like God has been bringing us to a place of greater understanding of our relationship with Him, that He loves us just because we are us, not because of what we bring to Him, or what we can do for Him, or how many gifts we have, or even how many people we witness to. When we reflect on our life back in the States, we marvel at how busy we were, and how even though we went to church, small group, and a variety of other activities, we didn’t feel the near presence and voice of God like we do here. And we are less involved in church! Was it because we were SO busy that we couldn’t hear His voice? When we remember our busy lives, mixed with a tinge of stress and tiredness from the constant flow, we ask ourselves, is this what life as a Christian is meant to be? A constant to-do list of activities, that do… what? Did all these things, while good, bring us to any deeper relationship with God? Or with our families, or friends? While we don’t think activities in and of themselves are bad, when they take away from what is most important, we wonder, who is controlling who? We are eerily reminded of Jesus’s words to Martha in her busyness, “Martha, Martha, why are you worried about so many things? Mary has chosen what is most important and it will not be taken from her.” We realize now how shallow our relationship with God really was, and even with most of our friends. God was somebody we had relegated to Sunday mornings, and small group meetings. Now, we are learning to see God in everything we do and think, and how our lives should reflect His constant presence. While at first we struggled with feeling valuable here since we weren’t doing so many things, it has given us time to think about God and our life as Christians. We have come to realize that all our busyness and activities were merely substitutes for having a deep relationship with God. We would fill ourselves up with feeling important, useful, loved and valuable by surrounding ourselves with friends and things, but at the end of the day, the feelings would all slip away. Jesus said, Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. We had replaced the love of God with the love of everything else. But we wonder, Is it possible to have this kind of life in America? The whole culture seems swallowed up in a “I have a million things to do, and don’t have time to chat now, but I’ll schedule you in” or “You don’t really matter unless you are involved” ideology, where activities have replaced real relationships and value is obtained from the number of things you are involved in. The more things you do, the more important you are. But when we were busy running here and there, there wasn’t time to talk about the deeper things of life, our struggles, concerns and even loving correction. We don’t have the answers, but after stepping away from the American culture, it has become painfully obvious that although Christians are supposed to be different, how different are we really? Church was not a time of spiritual growth for us, but a chance to “hang out” and chat with friends. God was on the margin. This is simply our reflections of how much we have missed in our own Christian walk, how we had not been living in the “fullness” of it all, and are now just getting a taste of a deep relationship with Christ, and how we are struggling with being able to bridge our two worlds. We wonder if we could survive again in the States, if our relationship with God would slowly be replaced with to-do lists and activities. We are praying for wisdom and guidance as we continue this new path…only God knows the way!