Desert Land

Day in and day out, it's a grind. How do people do this for forty years? Not even four years in and I'm already burning out. I suppose the difference-maker is relationships. Boldly introverted and running with a solid support structure, I was doing pretty good for awhile. Now in this desert of a season, five o'clock hits and busy busy just switches to null and void.

People say you should love what you do. Scripture says the land was cursed after the fall of man (Gen 3:17-19). All things were created by God and for God (Col 1:16); man was made to love and man was made to work. I get that. The crux of the matter is making it count.

Easily ("easily"), I feel, can I go minimalist and serve people in a third-world country in exchange for daily necessity-driven closeness to God. (I know the times in my life that I was most joyful were with people in places that had less stuff.) But where I stand now (already having paid off debts A and B and living well below my means), I still have a massive financial abyss to climb out of. Oh how I wish I could just declare bankruptcy, forsaking my credit score (and my ability to take on new debts) and just live off the grid. But never do I fail to hear my Conscious say, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mark 12:17).

A line from Relevant resounded with me the other week:

We’re getting theologically fat and spiritually bored with our safer versions of sunshine-pumping Christianity.*

My body has all that it needs in this area of affluence, but my soul... I'm dying out here.

Maybe this rich place is my desert land, my third-world country. Certainly, the needs look different, yet my spirit cries out to God all the same (and dangerously for my soul, it often does it unbeknownst to me). I've realized that, sometimes, it's harder to stay behind and send than to go. The world is not for me to save; I can only do my best to be faithful where God has placed me. He doesn't need me to accomplish His will, but obedience transforms me and serves others, perhaps with the former sometimes being His greater purpose. Nevertheless, obedience (even in the mundane) honors Him.

Despite my pre-mission-minded collegiate recklessness, I know that God can be glorified through my debt. And despite working corporate to pay off that debt, rarely seeing the difference I make and often feeling neutralized in my cubicle, I trust that whatever plan He has for me is good; all the days ordained for me were written in His book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:16). Wait no longer to make it count, I pray, for where I am now is my battleground.

LORD, make today Count as defined by You. Amen.

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*How Much Should We Risk? by Mike Barrett,
Relevant Magazine (06/23/2010)