I said goodbye to my cousin this evening. It was strange. This has been a strange couple of weeks anyway. I have been doing a lot of growing up spiritually. God has really confronted me with being serious about following Him. I suppose some of this comes from the fact that in less than three months I will be graduating and moving out into the world to…do something…. Life begins to take on a more serious perspective when you look at it that way. I've been doing some soul-searching and surrendering as indicated by the previous post.
See, I want God to move in my life. Or…actually, I want my life to disappear and take on the form of Christ's life. I want to lose my identity in Christ. It's hard to explain the thoughts and emotions of the past couple of weeks. Some of the things I have been thinking about are hard. There are a couple of specific things that I have been thinking about and praying about. Both of them are areas that I want to be surrendered to God.
One of them is especially hard for me, and I'm not even completely sure why. Probably a lot of it has to do with pride or jealousy, and that's part of why I really want to get that particular area completely surrendered. I don't want those things to have any place in my life. If I were to give advice to someone about surrendering an area, I might just tell them that they need to "just give it up" or "just give it to God." It doesn't have to be complicated; I know that. But…if you've ever tried to surrender something you want, especially something close to your heart and/or something you have to face on a daily basis, you know that it's not always as simple as just saying, "Ok, Lord, this is Yours" and walking away. If you can do that, I give you kudos, but for some of us, death comes slowly as a daily process, rather than instantly by gunshot.
The other area is not so much something that I feel like I am clinging to, but has to do with my future—what I'm going to do after I graduate. There are a couple of ideas I'm tossing around in my head and praying about. Ok, "tossing it around in my head" makes it sound like it's a light-hearted thing. Really these are serious thoughts, and things that I seriously want God's guidance in. The surrender in this aspect comes in not putting what I want in front of what God wants. Although this particular issue may not be such a big deal (meaning that I'm totally willing to do whatever God wants me to), I still may be influenced by personal feelings about it, and I don't want to talk myself into or out of a particular decision based on my own personal feelings. I really want God to guide me.
All that to say that tonight was somewhat strange as well. My other cousin and her husband left for South Korea just a few days ago and will be there for at least a year, and now this cousin is going to South Africa probably semi-permanently. It's a strange feeling of peaceful morbidity to think about it. So much separation….
Yet as I thought about it after I left him this evening, really this is what we are for. We really weren't made to all gather in one spot and make ourselves happy. I was just talking with another friend earlier this evening about not wanting to live the American dream. I'm scared of the American Dream—making money, having a wife, kids, nice car, nice house, 9-5 job, etc. I hate the idea. Oh…it's not that I don't think about it sometimes and think that it might be nice to live comfortable with the pleasures of technology and modern convenience at my fingertipes. But when I really think about my life and the things that I would like to do…when I think about the fact that I would like to have something at the end of my life that would actually count for something…I reject the idea of living the American Dream.
I would far rather live the Heavenly Dream. And I think that's what my cousins are doing. It's what I hope to do someday. It's hard to leave family. I've experienced it in a small scale so far in life in going to college 1800 miles from home. But my cousin is going around the world to live in a whole different place far from family and the familiarity of American culture. And I don't know what God is going to do with me, but I could very easily do something along the same line. Missionaries of the past have a set a similar example, especially in the days before travel was so readily available. Some would leave and never see their families again.
But tonight it crossed my mind that it's really not so strange if you think about it. I mean…we say that this world is not our home right? Heaven is our home. And if we're all headed there, if we really believe that as much as we say we do, we're going to meet up there someday anyway. So it's really not that weird for us to be apart here if that's what God wants. The thing to keep in mind is this: God has promised to be with us as believers. If God is with each of us, then we must all be with Him as well. Which means that thousands of miles really aren't that far after all.
Perhaps we must remove our minds from the physical, tangible things of earth and begin to think in terms of the spiritual, eternal things of Heaven. Physically we may be far apart, but spiritually we are together because we are all in Christ. It's all part of the Heavenly Dream….
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