In the blanks below, write the two most significant statements in today’s reading assignment. Be prepared to discuss why the statements you chose were significant to you.
“Similarly, how he chooses to spend his resources of time, money, and energy reveals his priorities. Are they spent primarily – if not an amount, at least in preoccupation – on his leisure and recreational activities, his work, or his family? While not one of these has to be evil in and of itself, none is worthy of first place in any believer’s life. – This is the paragraph I should write over and over on the blackboard until memorized.
“No one is ever apathetic! Every man is passionate about something – be it his autonomy, his pleasures, his sports, his wardrobe, his solitude, his control, or one of countless number of idols – the next two sentences are good, too.”
To help you determine what your real passions and loves are, answer the following questions:
What do you worry about the most?
“Probably lack of time, being behind, running late, fitting everything in, and getting everything done. Especially not missing out on any of my time sensitive goals and quests on my apps and other games, but then all the real life repercussions of my poor leisure-time management.”
What are your biggest preoccupations in life – the things your mind goes back to when it isn’t forced to think about something else?
“1. my games and apps
“2. my favorite TV show shows – characters and ongoing plot lines.
“3. Middle Bass Island on warm days when I haven’t been there yet that year.”
What are things you get angry about most regularly?
“I don’t think I get angry much at all, but I do get frustrated or annoyed with myself when my previous procrastinations complicate my day and when I can’t stay awake to finish the last few things I want to finish (mostly Facebook games).”
Has God ever asked you to give Him something very important to you (e.g. a person or a possession)?
“Not that I know of, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that He had, but that I blocked the message (Figurative fingers in ears ‘La-La-La-Not listening-La-La-La’)”
Dearest Rachel –
I’ve had difficulty, while going through this study workbook in particular, with ascertaining when this took place. For one thing, Facebook wasn’t a thing as of the turn of the millennium – it wasn’t until halfway into the decade when it came into general use (and we weren’t exactly early adopters; I still don’t have an account there other than occasionally tapping into yours) – so you can’t have been working on this when it was originally copyrighted.
At the same time, the fact that you admit that you hadn’t had to give anything important up at God’s behest suggest that it’s clear that this was done well before any discussions about your parents’ aging and care came up. To be sure, even those days are so far removed from me at this point that even they seem like they were long ago, but they only occupied the last four or five years of your life – and even then, only about three of them. And indeed, you could easily have argued that you gave them up way back when you said “I do” and moved up here to live with me, as life calls on life partners to do – although the finality of death is a vast remove from simply moving away from home.
I could point out that, during that same decade you were working on this, we as a church had to give up on more than a few things that made the place “our” church, as opposed to a place that welcomed and brought in those who needed to hear the gospel. Hymns and dress clothes are nice, but sometimes, certain traditions need to be dispensed with in order to not be intimidating to outsiders… and ultimately, convert them from outsiders to family members themselves. That was something we might have been undergoing at the time, but if you, it doesn’t look like you recognized it as such at the time; or maybe you already could see that the tradeoff was well worth it, and didn’t see it as having “given up” anything worth complaining about. The fact is, a lot of places are dying for refusing to make the change we did.
Of course, you were probably thinking about things on a more personal, rather than corporate, level. At this point, you hadn’t had to concern yourself with giving up anything or anyone. I do wonder what you would have thought of this question had it been asked in, say, 2019, after both your parents had passed – and as a consequence, you began hauling carloads of stuff back up here from your childhood home. Were you clinging onto the stuff as a way to make up for the loss of your people? If you ever said anything to that effect, I’ve lost that memory to time, I’m afraid. Of course, it’s possible that the thought never crossed your mind.
Then again, when asked by this and other studies, you were painfully aware of what you tended to focus on from day to day, and that it wasn’t particularly important stuff. Although, when compared to the arc of time – both that of one’s lifetime and history itself, let alone the eons of eternity – there seems to be nothing we do for ourselves that is truly important, after all. The best thing we can do is to point others to God, and that’s not easy to do in the real world – especially when we all have our narrow little preoccupations we’d rather dwell on.
But with that in mind, I’d ask for your eye to be on me, honey, with the usual well wishes for the day. I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 