Hey, look at me.

It's the end of a very long day, and tomorrow promises to be another long one as well. We're waking up early and heading out to the rice fields to finish off what's left of the autumn rice harvest at p'Eve's family farm. It's awful timing to be blogging, but I wanted to throw out this idea while it's still fresh in my brain:

I know I've made a few biting and sarcastic remarks about the nature of blogging. and I stand by them, not that I shouldn't be blogging, but what I'm trying to say is that I choose very carefully what I blog about and what I post on the internet. Not because the internet is a bad thing, but with it comes an inherent risk. It's not that this risk is specific to the internet, but I think the basic nature of the internet makes us more vulnerable to them, as we're prone to them anyway. Because the internet is basically like a stage, to stand on and to proclaim things in the hopes that people will hear. The facts of this are made bare especially by social networking and blogs and other social media that exist so people can express themselves. Sometimes someone has something really meaningful to say, but we as a culture and as humanity seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking that it's so important to be heard that it doesn't matter so much what we say. So we loudly and boldly proclaim to any passing IP address that might take gander, "Hey! Look at me!".

Lately it feels like my life is a story, with all the elements needed to be a great one. I'm being purposely vague here, but even just the events of this past weekend were so wonderful and so deep and so personally meaningful to me that I want to sit on a couch for a while and get it all down. I need to write everything at some point, even for my own sake. But I'm not going to do it here. Why not? because we're missing the whole point. The story of this past weekend is a dangerous one to tell in such a venue, and even though I'm cringing to type it, I'm going to so hopefully it'll make sense: The stories make me look awesome. All these things about discipleship that I'm reading about in my bible, I'm doing them. Feeding the unloved, praying over nations, hearing from God, being obedient to him, "loving someone and that being enough to show the gospel". That stuff is happening. but I cringe at the thought of telling it here because our world is filled with the kind of people who say things just in the hopes of having everyone look at them and marvel to themselves about how great that person is. and I'm done with that. That is how I used to be, and I grew tired of it.

There are so many elements of this journey that are so very much out of my control. My finances, my living arrangements, the temperature of the shower, what I'll do tomorrow. And soon the little experiment of "discipleship" that is DTS will be over and I'll feel an almost overpowering social pressure to go home and be normal again, occasionally dropping a line to my nephew that hints at the adventures I had when I was younger but otherwise living like people are supposed to. but here's the thing: I won't.

I won't, because something has changed. Around YWAM there's a phrase that gets thrown around, "Broken for the ordinary." It refers to the fact that when you find yourself being obedient to God, you no longer want to stop, to sell out, to go back to the ordinary christian life of going to church on sunday, earning a salary the other six days of the week, and finding your contentment in your ever-growing pile of stuff. To be an actual disciple of Jesus means to say "screw it, I'm all in." and I mean, "all in", not as a gambling metaphor, but as a gambling term. As a disciple, I'm betting it all on God, and I'm no longer going to protect myself with quotation marks and backup plans. There's an important dichotomy that arises: You're either being obedient, on you're not. And this gets back to my thesis: If I find myself doing good christian things as acts of obedience to God, great. But I could be doing these same things, and if my heart in doing them is "I want other people to hear about it and think highly of me", this is all a lie. If this is our heart, we Christians are just like everyone else, except that our collective taste in music isn't as good. I could be doing all these wonderful things and if I'm doing them as something to tell stories about, I lose. I share some of the stories, but I only really do so because I love to. I'm a story person. But if that's my heart in it, then then things themselves were fake and I've had no adventure; I was merely a tourist doing token good deeds in order to validate himself to people. But that isn't what we're here for.

It's all just words, anyway. You'll read them, and then you'll forget. I'm writing this as a reminder to myself: Your life is for loving God and for loving people, not for impressing someone. It's far more beautiful this way.


At some point when I see your face you'll need to ask me about the story from this weekend. Just tell me that you want to know the symbolism of the golden cross. It's a fine tale, about obedience and kindness and hearing God speak and how normally cross necklaces are stupid and self-promoting, but not always. and I'm not telling it here. That would completely miss the point.