crucifying the mind

I am constantly reminded at how much I need to reorient my thinking around the gospel. Last night while at work I found myself in the drive thru watching car after car come through. These were nice cars, the expensive kind of cars that only those with bookus of money (or bookus of debt) are able to buy. These were people with nice and well-paying jobs with regular hours. They were handsome men with beautiful wives. I found myself envying them--the successful careers, the immaculate cars, the good-looking physique and the beautiful broads. I kept looking at my own situation--working full-time at Starbucks making minimum wage and having difficulty paying my bills, driving a wretched-looking car that threatens to break apart every time I hit a bump, an awkward body with a massive chest--and I honestly became a little depressed. It gets worse when those handsome men in the nice cars are people I graduated high school with; usually no words are said, but more than once they've laughed seeing me in my green apron handing out drinks and running a cash register. All of this envy and jealousy of their money and social success is symptomatic of a heart that has not yet come in tune with the rhythms of the gospel; it is symptomatic of a mind that is in dire need of renewal. The pride of life runs deep through my veins, and I must crucify it again and again. The renewing of the mind, I think, is no passive thing; it is a hard and at times excruciating endeavor, killing off all those thoughts that lose sight of the way things are and instead seek self-glorification and ease in life. I know the gospel and I know the Christian message--the two are actually not the same thing--and I know the Christian hope; and I know that as a member of God's covenant people reworked around Jesus, my hope is not to be "in the pride of life and lust of the eyes and lusts of the flesh" but in the eschatological victory over sin and death, of a new and recreated universe. A day is coming when, dare I even say it, all my dreams will come true, when I will experience the existentialist's wet dream, being fully and finally who I was created to be and living-out fully and finally that God-given vocation. But right now there is tension, a tension held taught between two historical poles: Easter and Consummation. Evil, albeit defeated, still looms large and heavy and even prospers in its own crippled manner. The world is still characterized by sin and death even though both of them have been defeated in Jesus' death and resurrection. Right now my vocation is not to "live the dream" but to "bear the cross"--and bearing the cross isn't fun.