O the Deep, Deep Love

It’s amazing how easy it is to become muddled. To lose focus. It happens so quickly. In the rush of midterms and piles of papers to grade and weekend trips and choir practice – all good and worthy things – these past few weeks, I have not had chances to sit down and simply talk with students. I don’t like feeling a tension between all these different activities. I want to be able to view and sense that everything that I’m doing here in Klaipeda is part of God’s work. But it isn’t. The same pressures on my time, on my heart, on my physical body, are present in Lithuania, just as much as they are in the States.

This morning I should be going to church, as I have the past two months. Instead, I am staying home to try to pray my way through these tensions. I hear God asking me to remember my priorities, and to order my days and my time in accordance with His plans for me. This sounds very grandiose, and probably self-important. But if, as a bookmark I keep in my Bible says, “Each small task of everyday life is part of the total harmony of the universe,” then small tasks are worth paying attention to.

My soul is thirsty to be close to God and to have His presence and love shake my world and its duties upside down. I can’t serve and mentor and teach and encourage if I am not receiving my strength from the love of God. I was talking with a girl I have breakfast with on Tuesdays who is also struggling with how to serve – she is heavily involved in some of the campus ministries. She doesn’t feel like she is doing a good job, even though she has been brought up with all the tools and knowledge to be an effective servant. Instead, she is exhausted, and isn’t able to pray, and doesn’t find any joy in what she is trying to do.

This is what happens when we try to serve out of our own strength, rather than out of God’s love. When I try to serve out of my own strength, I spend my time on the things I think I’m good at, when perhaps God wants to enable me to do the things that are difficult and uncomfortable. I want to sink down deeply into the unfathomable depth of God’s love – as one of my favorite hymns says, “O the deep deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free.” Then the fullness of this love will overflow me and naturally, joyfully, completely flow out into the lives of those around me. (“Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all”). I won’t have to “plan” and “prioritize” how to serve others; it will be unstoppable, as a river is unstoppable.

I have wanted to approach this business of prioritizing my activities here as a checklist – where I can easily choose between what is number two on the list and what is number seventeen. But following Christ is not a business plan. Discipleship is not a checklist that can be laminated and kept in a coat pocket. If it were, we would not need the Holy Spirit – we could simply rely on our handy-dandy list to tell us what to do, what not to do. Instead, we must submit every moment, every decision, every thought, to the guidance of the Spirit and the light of the Word. This is so much harder, but it is the way that we grow – that I grow – closer to our Father, as we seek to hear His voice in the world.

Writing out my “priorities” list today, I wrote out the question: “Why am I at LCC?” I had thought to make a list. Instead, this is the best I can figure:

“to love people in any way I can – in all things, at all times, to ascribe the unsurpassable worth of Christ to those around me. To serve them and to love them as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. I am to be like Christ, and to lay down my self daily, to pick up the cross and to follow Him. To die to the old self and its ways of living, its constant searching for worth and wealth; and instead to find my security, my rest, my home, my hope, my husband, my father, my friend, in the fellowship of the Trinity, and the community of the saints.”