So I hopped on over to Ann Voskamp’s website where I always receive a blessing and I read one of her post and I shook my head in agreeance as I read through her words… because they were the same words that have gone through my mind a thousand times…
My calling.
Not my calling as in my vocation… but my calling as a follower of Christ… my calling as a Believer… as a Christian.
This calling… I don’t wanna miss it…
I can’t count the times that I have asked God if I am doing enough… not so that I might earn His salvations, but that I don’t miss an opportunity to be obedient to what He has created me for and saved me for and purposed for this life that He has given me.
Ann I understand your frustration in middle class Kansas… It can be frustrating here in the safety of middle class Alabama too. I was glas to hear that it was not just me… that I was not crazy for thinking these thoughts, for having this internal struggle.
And even in that statement… guilt… ugh… this is the worst I have to be frustrated with? Really?
I hear of my brothers and sisters in Christ going through torture for their claim to Christ and guilt rises up my spine as I know that I have never experienced that… and I waver between thankfulness and jealousy… yes… jealous that they have the joy of suffering for His sake.
Is being a wife and a mother and doing the laundry and keeping the house and ministering in my church and giving of my time and my money enough… is my sad attempt to teach what I know of the Word to anyone who will listen enough… it just doesn’t seem like it to me… Am I smiling enough? Loving enough? Encouraging enough? Building up enough? Pouring out enough?
It’s a weird place here in American christendom to me… so many unwilling to even sacrifice a Sunday morning to sing praises to Him while others in another time zone sing praises to Him even in silence because they lost their tongues for doing it out loud.
So please forgive me if I am not sympathetic to your apathetic excuse for forsaking the assembly.
The hardest thing God asks of us here in America is to sacrifice a few hours one day a week… the church has even made it so easy for those of you here in the “biblebelt”… there is one on every corner… they meet morning, noon, and night… you can find a service somewhere… a Bible study… a small group any day of the week.
So when was the last time you whined about God not answering your prayers?
I sit and I whine that I feel like I am in prison here in middle class America… bound by the chains of affluence… suffocating under these temporary moth ridden treasures… and the apathetic response to a gospel rejected so many times that people neither love nor hate it.
I struggle here.
I am weird I suppose. I struggle as I sit all curled up in my nice cozy home with my beautiful family while I know that outside my door there are children being abused and neglected and abandoned and unloved, while I know that my brothers and sisters in Christ are truly suffering for His name, and I have to admit for the first time ever I am not even stressing over Christmas shopping… there are souls facing the eternal fires of hell and saints being set afire for the glory of His Gospel… there are people who will breathe their last breath tonight… and where will they spend eternity… and what part will I play in their eternal destination?
This is where I scream for freedom from this falsehood and scream out for what is real and true…
Jesus.
Black Friday is coming up… it’s this week I believe…
People will go without sleep, people will bite, slap, claw, stampede, stand in lines for hours to get more stuff… and well why not… people have Sunday to sleep in.