*confessions*

Here's a confession: I miss the experience of knowing God, of hearing His voice, of resting sure and confident in His love. I miss the passion, the purpose, the diligence, the clarity, the peace, and the joy. Reflecting on "the days of my youth" (cue Led Zeppelin), I'm forced to ask where that passion, purpose, and clarity went. I like to blame academia: it's a well-known fact that the more years you spend in a religious institution, the less apt you are to be religious. Perhaps that's simply what happens when you mix business with pleasure? But if I'm honest, while the effects of 4-5 years in a religious institution have had an effect on the way I approach scripture, worship, and even prayer, the true grit of the matter is that much of my faith's degredation stems not from academics but from my own selfishness. Somewhere along the line I put my own wants, desires, and dreams ahead of my faith so that I sought to shape God into a beast that would cater to my every whim and flight-of-fancy. Contemplating the disconnect between The Faith That Was and the Faith That Is breeds a lot of emotion: there's regret, guilt, and a sense of lost-ness. There's need for a lot of repentance in a lot of different areas, and there's an even bigger need to appropriate for myself the grace God so lavishly gives to us time and time again. As the song goes, "You've been forgiven more times than there are drops in the ocean." 

There are false ways to go about reclaiming the experience of a vibrant, Spirit-filled* life: upping church attendance, listening to hosts of sermons (and taking diligent notes!), reading spiritual books, even studying the Bible. These aren't bad things, not at all; but these are the sorts of things that flourish when they're practiced in the right manner. These aren't stepping stones to the life I miss, the life I crave; they're tools and not the life itself, and by using tools I'm seeking to manufacture the life I want to have anew. I'm excellent at the utilization of these tools but a failure when it comes to utilizing them well. I've been approaching my walk with God in the same way that I approach dieting: it's all about discipline, doing the right things and saying No to the wrong things. It's flawless for dieting, but it's fruitless when it comes to relationships; and the life I crave isn't about the externalities. It's about risky abandonment to God, about a viable and flourishing trust, about an unswerving commitment to a heartfelt vocation. The life I miss is a life marked by being loved and growing in that love so that I radiate that love outwards. It's a life based on relationship with God. 

Reclaiming that life isn't about upping church attendance, listening to more sermons than most, or studying the scriptures diligently day-in and day-out. It's about cultivating the relationship I already possess. Prayer, scripture-reading, church attendance: these aren't tools by which we manufacture a religious experience but windows through which we come to know God better. Jesus says that knowing God is life itself, and my experience, though feeling antique and rusted at this time in my life, speaks to the reality of that conviction: to surrender oneself to Christ is to be free to be oneself, and to be overwhelmed by Christ so that "it is no longer I who live but Christ in me" is to find our God-given place in the cosmos and flourish in that God-ordained role. We are created with God as our life-source; outside of Him, we are consigned to leading futile, dreadful lives that are marked by suffering and intermittent bursts of genuine happiness and contentment. The lives we live outside of the hope and power and freedom of the gospel--lives of "quiet desperation," according to Thoreau--find their antidote only by plugging into the power source of life itself. All this to say that the life I miss and crave isn't about the things I did but about the relationship that was cultivated. The way back home (if I can say it like that) entails learning to see myself as I am in Christ and losing myself once again in the very source of peace, joy, and quiet strength. It isn't about doing this or doing that, but simply sitting down in the quiet, opening my mouth, and talking--and being transformed by the conversation.

*Because "Spirit-filled" conjures up images of Pentecostals handling snakes while sputtering gibberish, I believe it pertinent to establish what I mean by a "Spirit-filled" life. It's simply, really: a life animated, guided, and enthralled by the Spirit; a life where the Spirit does such a "Spring Cleaning" year after year that we become different people altogether. Spirit-filled people aren't marked by esoteric chants or outbursts of charisma; Spirit-filled people are marked by love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. There's a reason, after all, that such things are called "the fruit of the Spirit."