participation

Completely unrelated to the topic for which I came to blog, I have to start by pointing out the "Schmaps Portland" box on the left. The person responsible for annually updating the content saw some of my Portland pictures on flickr and asked me if they could use the one here on the right of Pioneer Square for their latest update. Of course I said yes! It's pretty cool to know that I'm not the only one that likes my pictures.

Now that I've gotten my shameless self-promotion out of the way I can get on to my real topic: Participation. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It started in October when I was at a conference (so not normally my thing!). I was sitting there, minding my own business and out of the blue God challenged me, over the following forty days, to let Him address with me all the ways I comfort myself, and some of that involved fasting. You need some background to understand what a big deal this is to me. I have never ever successfully fasted from all but water for more than about a day and a half in my whole life. The very idea of a food fast was shrouded in shame for me. Having been a chubby girl most of my life, you can imagine the heightened sense of failure the inability to fast would produce in someone like me, who already feels judged by the world and popular culture when it comes to eating and food. As I was taking that in I suddenly had a complete and blatant awareness that I was right then at a pivot point in my life, and in that moment my choice would dictate my availability to participate in the dreams God has put in my heart. Without any emotion or "overwhelming sense of the Holy Spirit" I needed to decide whether or not I would just obey and do it or talk myself out of it. So I took a deep breath and said yes.

Comfort is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it can all to quickly become something exalted in our lives. I slowly became more and more aware that as I lived with habits of self-comfort it meant I kept myself in a place of constantly needing to be comforted. I can't begin to describe how dull and desensitized I realized I had become. It was a really hard forty days, but I was finally able to get into a place that God could start to show me how He really is all that I need. Through this process I found that I was constantly asking Him about things in my every day life. Things like what I should eat, how I should spend money or how I should spend my time. When it was all said and done the thing He was really bringing home to me was the role obedience plays in the life of faith. That sounds condescendingly simple, but it's really, really important and all too often overlooked.

There are so many ways we excuse disobedience in our Christian walk, and we don't see the significance or the consequences of those little daily choices. This was really brought home to me as I was reading through Deuteronomy and got to the end of Moses' life. He lost his temper at one point in the whole exodus adventure and completely disobeyed God in front of everyone. The consequences God gave for this was that Moses would be allowed to see the promise land with his own eyes, but never be able to go into it. As I was reading the verses that described the very end of Moses' life this thought came to me: "Obedience is the deciding factor between seeing the fulfillment of God's promises and participating in the fulfillment of God's promises."

As I ruminated on all this I had to look at what obedience entails, and I came up with two things - humility and repentance. Both of those words I think generally evoke a sense of shame, and both I think are misunderstood. The act of repentance is an act of obedience, but to truly repent requires humility. We think of repentance as a denial, and in some ways it is. But more it's the act of letting go of the things that come between us and God. It requires that we chose to do what God wants rather than what we want, and to trust that His plans for us are good and not evil, and they are full of hope. That choice is humility. The resulting action is repentance.

At the end of it all, whatever my life held, I don't want to have just watched. I want to have participated in the fulfillment of God's promise and fully embraced every adventure He had for me along the way. God will absolutely fulfill His promises, but it's really up to me if (to use basketball terms) I sit on the bench the whole game, or if I make myself available to get in on the action. It's not easy - not by any stretch of the imagination - but He really has and is all that we need to chose obedience.