Just a warning, this one rambles a bit…
Yesterday at Crosspointe church, Pastor Dave related his own story of being “the most religious” and then experiencing religious recovery. The reason I bring this up is that, as I look at the various people who seem to really make a change in their lives, I notice that the first step is most often not to make complete reversals, but rather dropping the unnecessary baggage. Let me try to explain,
I think that most of us get trained in one direction. We take that direction to be the be-all and end-all for life. When the vast majority of us are confronted with changing our lives, we often throw out the baby with the bathwater and make a complete reversal. Take, for example, a marriage that is not working. What do the statistics show that most people are doing?
Humans by their DOS nature are prone to extremes. We go one way, and if it does not work, we think we have to go the complete opposite way. More often than not, I think we need to find a more middle ground between the two points. More often than not, this is much harder work.
Pastor Dave talked about how from the time he was young, he was raised to do all the “right religious things.” He excelled at being at every church service, and doing all the right actions. however, something was missing. He was miserable. Rather than dropping church altogether (as some people do) He moved from doing the right things to having the right heart. He left behind the baggage of doing things to please himself or others and went forward only looking to please God. There is more to his current process that I will talk about later.
I know I have experienced this. As I was growing up, I was raised very conservative. I felt that even touching on any “liberal” ideas was awfully bad. However, since that time, I have found my way to integrating the good in both points of view.
Sometimes I wonder if that is where we get tripped up on Jesus’ words to repent. We feel as though that means to make a total reversal of our lives. None of us wants to feel that we are so depraved that every element of our lives is wrong. In some cases, maybe they’re not. Maybe we need more minor course changes rather than complete turn-arounds. Dunno, just thoughts…..feedback?