In small group last night we were having a really great discussion on committment. We talked about the difference in committment and complacency. We determined that committment is being satisfied with where you are at, but yet still wanted to move forward. Complacency is when you don't want to move forward. We, as Christians strive to be fully committed to God and His will, and most of us struggle with becoming complacent. There are times when we feel that God can do no more with us, or that God isn't really telling us to do something, or simply that we don't need to do anymore to grow in our relationship with God. That we are just fine staying right here.
Then, we began to discuss vision and how sometimes in life we fall behind. We commit to reading our bibles everyday and doing our quiet time and for a while we do really well, whether that "while" be a day or a week, but usually with the busy schedules of college students we fall behind. For me personally, once i get behind even for a day it is hard for me to catch back up, especially if you are doing one of those daily bible studies, which if you skip a day requires you to do twice as much reading as normal. Anyway, back to my point, we realized last night that many of us struggle with God's vision for us. We yearn to see His vision and want to follow through with what we feel is His will. But, when we fall behind we were worried that we might have missed the vision He had for us because we didn't have our quiet time and we might have missed that specific verse that was placed where we were supposed to read, to speak to us on that particular day.
Well, i am reading this book call the Irrestisble Revolution. (Hence the title of this blog) by a guy named Shane Claiborne. This dude with dreadlocks is on fire for God. He has done it all, he went to Calcutta and worked with Mother Teresa, he went to Iraq after the war started to minister to the Iraqi people, basically he risks his life all the time to share the word of God. Anywho, I am reading in Hendrix today trying to finish it before i turn 97 and i come across a passage talking about vision. This is what good ole Shane has to say about it:
"It is easy to fall in love with the great things, whether we are
revolutionaries or church growth tacticians. But we must never simply fall in love with our vision or our five-year plan. We must never fall in love with "the revolution" or "the movement." We can easily become so driven by our vision for church growth, community, or social justice that we forget the little things, like caring for those around us...Many congregations are in love with their mission and vision and rip one another apart in committee meetings trying to attain it. And many
social activists I know tear each other up and burn themselves out fighting for a better world while forgetting that the seeds for that world are right next to them."
HELLO!!! exactly what i was looking for. Now, you may have just read that and been like "i am not a revolutionary who is fighting about church growth and social reform", but i bet you have a vision for/of something. Whether it be going to med school is 2 years, getting a job at a big business firm, or going to Kenya to be a missionary- all of these are visions. What we need to know and realize is that we have to commit to God and His vision or us and once we have done that we have to look as the smaller things. Little visions, if you will, that can be life changing if you will let them. Even if it is something as simple as talking to the person that sits next to you in Math or realizing that going out every weekend and getting trashed is not what you need to be doing. We must first look small before we can see the big picture.
Oh and i really hope it wasn't illegal for me to quote stuff out of that book. Sorry, if it is...
