echoes of redemption

There are over 144,000 apps in the App Store. I’ve had over a gig of them on my phone up until today, the net result being a lot of time gazing into the glow of my phone. Which is why I’m taking a break.

Lent is a journey where we give up things that distract us from God and focus more time to prayer. So as we think through what to leave behind, we find things that distract us the most. Fog our clarity the greatest. Clamor for our focus the loudest. And we eliminate them.  In this spiritual act, we experience God in deeper ways because we’ve transferred our pursuit of freedom from our own hands into the hands of Jesus.

For the past two years of my life the word “sustainable” has been sitting in the front of my brain.

Am I living life in a sustainable way? Can I do this like I’m doing it for the long haul? Because I tend to do things at 125% – and I tend to burn myself out. So to guard against it. In my head, sustainability = survivability… until yesterday.

Leadership.net dropped their Q&A with Rob Bell, and while he was talking to the subject of pastors, I think we all could learn a lot from his thoughts:

Sustainability…
That’s an important word for me. Some pastors think about how to survive the next five years. The better question to ask is, how are we going to thrive? How do we construct a rhythm and pace of life that ensures five years from now we’ll have more passion, more energy, and we will be filled with new and fresh ideas about life in God’s world?

I’ve survived before. And I’ve burned out. And burn out hurts in a few ways.

(Follow the blue line.) First comes the rise to meteoric success which is accompanied by unsurvivable habits and rhythms to life. Which leads to a drastic fall. And once a person has burned out (if they’re fortunate enough to rise again) they’ll find they aren’t capable of quite as much as they were before… AND, to top it all off, they likely have the unhealthy habits and rhythms that lead to burn out accompanying them… which will lead to burn out again.

Designing the rhythms of life for incremental development is a slower process, but it results in a life that grows year over year.

And maybe that’s the difference. If we’re focusing on growth – growing our passion, growing our energy, growing our perspective of God – then we become the kind of people Jesus calls us to be. Because Jesus resisted the massive temptation of myopic focus on success.

It’s a new way of living that subverts the norm – but that’s what the way of Jesus is.

So, how about you? Where are you focused on short term success over long term growth? Where are you burning out? What rhythms of your life are slowly killing you?

Most importantly, how can you set your life up to grow each year?

Getting short-term priorities and long-term goals to line up is a whip.

• We want to get in shape, but we need a caffeine fix… which is accompanied by mass amounts of sugar.
• We want strong relationships with God, but we’re too busy to pray or read Scripture regularly.
• We want to be pure, but it’s a quick look and no one will every know.

Any action items on a topic like this would be redundant. I don’t know about you, but one of my problems as I set priorities in the present is that I want to travel down the road and disregard the detours. But how much farther would I be if I weren’t stopping every 15 feet? Or having to double back?

I know part of it is living with the understanding that everything counts – even the small stuff. But more than that, I’ve learned sometimes it’s forgiving yourself for the past.

What if we learned from every detour we’ve made? What if we became experts at spotting them from miles away? What if laser-like focus comes from future-orientation and past experience?

And if changing the world only comes through changed people, what if we embraced the journey we’ve already traveled as the foundation for the future?