"And I'd end up saying have no fear, These are nowhere near the best years of your life"
- Brad Paisley
“If you understand what holiness is, you come to see that real happiness is on the far side of holiness, not the near side.”
- Tim Keller
I’m sitting in an empty conference room at seminary. Nothing
special really, some old guy has his picture on the wall, with a glowing
sentiment about all the great things he has done. He’s been a missionary for a
bajillion years and a professor for about as long. Everything else in the room
is pretty normal. The chairs do not match, there are a couple of holes in the
walls, and it smells kinda like dirty cloth and fake leather. And I have
to admit. I kind of hate it a little bit. I hate because it threatens something
quite dear to me “ My Boring Idol”……. Allow me to flesh that out….. and when I
do it will probably look boring and normal also.
When I was 20 years old I was
barely a Christian, and lived a life my dad described “ as hell on wheels” on
several occasions. I'm not one of those dudes that hated high school, it was
quite the opposite. I loved it. But really I loved it for all of the wrong reasons,
I loved it because I drank a little, I was popular, funny, moderately
attractive, I played sports and that was awesome, friends and I partied far
more than we should have, few of us
cared about classes, basically it was college, except we had to call our
parents if we wanted to go somewhere. We were like Zach Morris making fake ID’s
to get into The Attic. But I find myself
hearkening back to those times. I remember telling my mentor and dear friend
Dennis that my biggest fear was “ becoming an ordinary dude, and that adulthood
looks boring”. He laughed in his typical manner and we went on our way. Lately what I have found however, with the
help of Paul Tripp and other Christians far wiser than I, is that in the mundane we encounter something you will
never hear at a conference or read in a bestseller, or made into a movie
starring Jennifer Lawrence and Ryan Gosling, you encounter a God who cares
deeply about the ordinary, and that maybe our Christian subculture has enough
room for radicals and “ordinary”.
I run in circles where Downton
Abbey is pretty popular and most folks eat things with organic in the
title. What I’ve learned is that’s ok.
Its ok to drive a minivan and have a few kids and live in a neighborhood that
has a brick sign out front. I am not talking about the “American Dream” keep
all your money, don’t meet your neighbors, surgically enhanced trophy wife
stereotype. I am talking about the Christians I encounter from working in a
suburban church. They love Jesus, and they love him well. Sure it’s annoying
hearing them talk about working too much, but they talk about it because they would
much rather be home serving their kids dinner, and it breaks their hearts that
they cannot. Still they persevere, they press on leading the life that the Lord
has laid out for them, and honestly their life looks pretty incredible, (even
if it is littered with keurig machines and ½ marathon applications). The bigger tragedy is the guilt laid on by
folks who aren’t in that season of life. The “Young and Restless” crowd sees
the suburbs as sinful living and flock to the cities to plant churches and
start soup kitchens. Those are great and
necessary things. What is neither great nor necessary ,is when I talk to folks
a couple of years out of college who feel burned out and shamed that their life
isn’t what they thought it would look like at 17. There is an episode of “How I
Met Your Mother” in which the main character Marshall feels guilt because at
age 30 he is a “corporate sellout and he can’t even dunk anymore” because at
age 17 he had written a letter to himself saying he “ will marry a tall blonde,
wear stonewashed overalls, and have a rat tail down to his knees”. His wife
Lily is short and has red hair, and he cut his rattail and threw out his
overalls. But in a moment of clarity as he is writing to his 60 year old self,
he looks across at Lilly and says “ 60 year old Marshall, if in 30 years you
are still married to Lilly, then you are alright”. Now while this is not anywhere
near a theological statement, it has the stench of common grace all over it.
For the extraordinary life we are to desire is that of Jesus, and if not for
his great mercy we would never make it.
We long for the next world, and it is our mandate to pray for his will
to be done “on earth as it is in heaven”. When that last hiss of oxygen leaves our lungs
we won’t be hearing God ask us if our lives were spent being “radical” ……instead,
if our lives are hidden in him, we will hear our Savior say “Well done, My Good
and Faithful Servant”. There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, that
includes the country boy in a beat up truck, and the suburban mom jogging with
a stroller, for Christ’s blood covers all sins, even the sin of watching
Downton Abbey.
for further reading see
