Last night was prayer meeting. Main focus: the pastor’s bad
attitude. Yes, I’m talking about me. I got busted for an attitude problem that
has been like a thorn-in-my-paw experience. My focus had been on the thorn in
my paw, and how it was hurting me. Everyone else saw how poorly I was handling
my situation, and lovingly called me on it.
What became clear to me during this humbling experience,
and seemed to dawn on me even brighter this brand new morning, is that I had
fallen prey to a whole series of faulty dominoes.
It went like this: first, I had unrealistic goals of what I
had to try to accomplish. Second, I was trying too hard, in myself, to meet
these goals. Third, there were too many interruptions involving people (my real
assignments), but my sark was too fixated on my bad goals that I couldn’t see
these for what they were. Fourth, my faulty goals being consistently blocked by
my real assignments (not the way it looked in my sark), caused excessive frustration.
Fifth, the excessive frustration made me irritable, unfair, and not very easy
to get along with.
(Okay, I would love to erase that last part, but I trust
that sharing about it might help someone with whatever thorn-in-the-paw
experience you might be going through.)
What
happened last night was that my church family spoke truth to me in love,
addressed how I was doing, told me I needed a vacation (because my wife needed
a vacation from me), and encouraged me to slow down. They also shared the
Scriptures God was speaking to them about, showing all of us how God was
working. I was humbled, and grateful.
This
morning, I realized that God had graciously chosen to return
me to joy. This is in part by showing me a church family who will lovingly
correct me without losing respect for me as their pastor. It is also in the way
the Holy Spirit reminds me that I am off track from things he has taught me in
the past.
There is a way in which God leads us deeper into ourselves,
so that the experience of life is very much like the Higher-and-Deeper I often
talk about. In one way, God keeps revealing Higher things about himself,
something like teaching a child more and more about life as he or she grows up
and matures. At the same time, he takes us Deeper into ourselves, as though invading
a heart that needs to experience God, and so making progress in a divine
take-over that seems to defy the human imagination to know how much we actually
need to be changed.
In some ways, this experience of seeing the ugly depths of
our souls would be utterly hopeless if we did not understand what God is doing.
However, when we realize that his word describes this Higher-and-Deeper experience
as transformation into the likeness of Jesus Christ “from one degree of glory to another”,[1] we can accept the necessity of both the Highers,
and the Deepers.
The transformation of a sinner into a saint who is holy and
blameless in God’s sight means that we are constantly discovering new things
about what is still un-Christ-like about us, and just as consistently enjoying
new experiences of growing up in Jesus Christ as we get to know God better than
we have ever known him before.
Whether we think of the Samaritan woman who first had to
face her five broken marriages and present adultery before hearing Jesus say
that he was the Messiah she was looking for;[2] or Peter discovering he could deny his Savior
three times before experiencing the work of the Holy Spirit turning him into a
fearless preacher of the gospel,[3] there are very encouraging testimonies of how God
makes us see Deeper things about ourselves in order to experience Higher things
about him.
So, this all comes back to the fact that I had to see
another way in which I had fallen into frustration because of bad goals, and
self-reliance, and the “sinking” feeling of the waters suddenly no longer
holding me up.[4] My heart was set on the wrong things, hence the
bad attitude dominoes falling down all over the place.
Which is where falling down becomes so hopeful. Scripture
tells us to, “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”[5] I’m not sure how much I humbled myself, or just joined God in the
humbling he was doing through others, but humbled I was. This morning I felt
lifted up in the grace of God. And returned to joy. I didn’t like all the
dominoes that fell, but I am very thankful for the grace that lifted me to joy,
and the peace that guards my heart and mind through the course of this day. I
am thankful.
© 2014 Monte Vigh ~
Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise
noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible,
English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway
Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)
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