Theology Thursday: Living For Something Bigger
If you cannot tell, the idea of living for something bigger is something that I think about a lot. I understand that when you live for Jesus Christ, you are living for the biggest thing possible, but I also understand that there is a difference between calling ourselves Christians and truly living for Jesus.
The reason I am writing about this today is I started thinking about big events that occur in all of our lives. I had a "Facebook Memory" popup of Elijah's "gotcha day" which, for those who are not adoptive parents, is the day that he officially became a Bush. It brought back memories of other huge events in my life that, for one reason or another, brought my normal life to a halt. Here are the things that I thought about:
Huge events like:
- The day I married Jessica.
- Sophie, Elijah, and Ezekyal's birth.
- When my grandmother was put into hospice and we knew she was about to die.
Smaller events like:
- Just 2 days ago when Ezekyal ran into the wall and had to get stitches in his head.
- The kids' last week of school when we wanted to make sure to be a part of Sophie's graduation and the kids' parties.
- A vacation.
I thought about these events because they change you. Some of them change you forever, others just change your "normal" schedule for a couple of days and it takes you a while to get back.
What I am afraid of, in my own life, is that I live for and desire the "normal days" far more than I do the life-changing ones. I say that with the full understanding that Jesus can and does work through the mundane, I am just not sure why I desire these days so much.
My desire for normal, scheduled, routine days can make its way into every single aspect of my life to the point that I no longer even ask GOD to do something great. My desire for financial security, social standing, and well-rounded ("busy would work here as well) children can sometimes dominate my desire for a life that is fully abandoned to GOD.
I remember when we decided to move to Haiti. I thought it was such a big decision and that it was this huge step of faith for us. I thought it was the beginning of a spiritual breakthrough that would last for the rest of our lives, or at least for a few years. But that's not how it works is it? If I am completely honest our last few years have been some of the most incredible and some of the most difficult, from a spiritual standpoint, I can ever remember.
Let me get to the point. It is so easy to live for small things. Let me give you some examples of things that are really, really, really small things to live for, but please read until the end if you have made it this far. I do not want the following list to offend you, but I do want you to know how pathetically small each thing on this list is:
- Your spouse.
- Your children. (probably the biggest temptation for most of us is to live for them)
- Your job.
- Your church.
- Your comfort.
- Your schedule.
This "Theology Thursday" blog has not been overly theological, but if you are a Christian then you believe in an infinite GOD. One who is so big, so powerful, and so "there" that anything else is tiny. There is a Chris Tomlin song that says, "My heart is a cup...Your love is an ocean." For me, that is an incredible idea of who GOD is compared to us and everyone else.
So I have to ask myself, why can my wife, my children, my family, my job, and my days change my life completely when anything out of the ordinary happens, but I want my GOD to just be there and let me live a normal life without too much interference from Him?
I do not have any solid, tangible call to action here. All I have is this...
I want to live my life for something bigger, something infinite, and something far more worthy than anything else in the world.