About 10 days ago my wife and I made a significant purchase: we bought an iPod. We’ve been saving for one for some time and it’s something I’ve really been wanting. Since then I have spent entirely too much time playing with it—loading music, making playlists and learning the ins and outs of the thing.
All that to say, I’ve been distracted and haven’t been posting. But I have been reading and I’d like to share something I read today from Mike Yaconelli’s book, Messy Spirituality:
“For a period of time, we were lucky enough to have a housekeeper. She would come in once a week to dust, vacuum, and clean every little out-of-the-way corner of our house. I dreaded the day she came, because my wife and I would spend all morning cleaning the house for the housekeeper! We didn’t want the house to be dirty, or what would the housekeeper think?!
“We act the same way with God. We talk our way out of the spiritual life by refusing to come to God as we are. Instead, we decide to wait until we are ready to come to God as we aren’t. We decide that the way we lived yesterday, last week, or last year makes us ‘damaged goods’ and that until we start living ‘right,’ we’re not ‘God material.’ Some of us actually believe that until we choose the correct way to live, we aren’t choosable, that until we clean up the mess, Jesus won’t have anything to do with us. The opposite is true. Until we admit we are a mess, Jesus won’t have anything to do with us. Once we admit how unlovely we are, how unattractive we are, how lost we are, Jesus shows up unexpectedly. According to the New Testament, Jesus is attracted to the unattractive. He prefers the lost ones over the found ones, the losers over the winners, the broken instead of the whole, the messy instead of the unmessy, the crippled instead of the noncrippled.”
He’s got a great point. Of course, those who believe they are uncrippled or unmessy simply have their own unique way of being crippled and messy–they’re blind to their own infirmity.
If you haven’t read it yet, you should–Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2 is a good book by an Irish Presbyterian pastor who’s followed U2 since their very early days in Ireland. It’s one man’s opinion of their journey, but he has some interesting insight into some of their music.
One aside–we have a once-a-week housekeeper, too, and I can promise you the house never looks worse than on the morning before she arrives.
left by Trey on 12.07.2006 at 3:02 pm