Day 2
September 12th, 2007God is there — always. The question is, “Where are we?” If God is available 24/7, how much of our time are we making ourselves available for his work? If you’re not satisfied with your answer to that question, how might you go about making a change?
Believe me, I asked that question a lot the past year and I’m not sure I ever got the answer (or certainly not the one I wanted). But I kept asking — which I think is the whole point — and I think I’ve decided it’s not necessarily where am I but what am I doing while I’m wherever there. Or, perhaps, the simple answer is that I’m on a journey and sometimes the trip is easy and other times it isn’t; sometimes I feel like I’m traveling alone, other times I feel like I’m not (metaphorically speaking).
Having only read the first 4 chapters, I’ve not been terribly impressed. This seems like another one of those works where the simplicity of the answer rarely touches on the difficulty surrounding the question. Perhaps that reveals a weakness of my faith, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only MVT class member who has grown impatient with God or not particularly pleased with her answer. Maybe they — the book and my faith — will get better. I can certainly work on one of them.
And always remember what it says in the Gospel of the Righteous Brothers: “If you believe in forever, then life is just a one-night stand.”
I think you’re right — we’re all on a journey. We get to wherever we’re going “by small degrees”.
I do like the book so far. To me the message is simple, but I don’t think it’s offering an easy answer (in that way I think it differs from “The Purpose Driven Life”.
In “What About Bill”, Richard Dreyfus tells Bill Murray’s character that the key is to take “Baby Steps”. Nothing really new there. We can (and do) get frustrated by simplistic answers and solutions (. . . “day by day”, “one day at a time”, etc.). What we sometimes forget is that these aren’t really “answers”, but a suggested method: a “way” of living.
That’s why reading the book one chapter each day is important. You wouldn’t try to do a month’s worth of exercises in one day in the hope of achieving your goals. To me, this book is like a training manual that is meant to build good habits of reflection, prayer and meditation.
Hopefully, the end result surprises us — just like someone learning to play an instrument wakes up one day to realize that the practice is paying off.
I don’t mean to suggest that this book is “no good,” because I do think it has some good points. So far, though, I’ve not read a single thing that we haven’t discussed in class. Maybe that’s the point I’m missing: As you stated, it’s all about baby steps and we all too often lose track of that. And I agree this is much better than Warren’s book.
Speaking of Faith — we were, weren’t we?: Consider the words of Pres. Kennedy 45 years ago today at Rice University on the U.S. sending a manned space mission to the moon:
I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun–almost as hot as it is here today–and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out –then we must be bold.