Where is God in the blurry mix?

Details--and more details.  Things to do.  Worries dangling over some threatening precipice.  We cannot identify their source, yet their weight threatens to undue us.


Sometimes it feels as if our days are shattered into a million tiny fragments. There are, after all, so many things to keep in mind—so many plates to spin in the process of our life-- and of making a living.  Far from having focus, our splayed vision shatters concentration like a prism scatters light, except that there is no beauty in the dispersion.

What is the product?  Confusion, lack of focus, anxiety and frustration are a few symptoms.  Stress, sadness, depression, hopelessness are a few more.  

Where is God in the blurry mix?

I find great encouragement in Philippians 3:4-14.  Paul completes his thoughts with a bombastic statement.  "This one thing I do..."  How can that be true?  Paul travels, faces immense persecution and suffering, starts churches, trains leaders, manages them at great distances, writes letters, faces-down Roman governors--and all the while he is composing Christian Theology and church polity on the fly??  One thing?? 

Right.  Where was he hiding his "to do" list?

Once, when Jesus had impressed the multitudes with his miracles, a group of religious followers asked him, "What must we do to do the works God requires?"  

Jesus answered them: "The work God requires is to believe in the one he has sent."  (John 6:28-29)

We ask the great questions of life in the plural.  

                                  Jesus answers in the singular.  

One thing is required.  Jesus.  And Paul understood.

And I'm trying.

Jack of all trades, and a master of none?

I love the idea of learning new languages. When living abroad in the early 90's, I had the opportunity to get a decent grip on Russian. I also took the time at one point to learn some very basic German vocabulary, and the numbers served me well a few times in a pinch. I studied French in school, but know very little, and about six years ago I took a Spanish class. When in Israel I learned to say some please and thank you kinds of words in Arabic and Modern Hebrew, but remember very few,--shukran you very much. In college I had to learn to read New Testament Greek, and for my master's paper I toiled/toyed with Old Testament Hebrew very little.

This fall Shelly and I are going to have the opportunity to spend some time in Italy. And so now we are both studying a bit of "get you around" Italian. Molto bene!

It's funny how all of these languages kind of take up residence in different places of your brain. Sure, sometimes I'll get my languages mixed, like coming up with a Russian word in an attempted Spanish sentence. But for the most part, if you are thinking in a language--and around it for a few days--your brain engages that particular gear for the time of need.

Just in case you are wondering, if my survival depended on my ability to speak any of the above languages, I'd get skinny pretty quickly. I can still--after 16 years--speak a bit of Russian. And I can come up with the right words here and there in a few others. But really, for all the passion I've placed upon learning to communicate with the people I visit, I have little to show. I am a jack of many languages, but a master of one--and that is if you count my native English! (Some readers may wonder about that now and then.)

What is your one thing? What are you passionate about? When the last words are spoken at your memorial, what will be their theme? I want to try and keep my stubborn self focused on the ways of Jesus. I want to speak him to my world fluently. And I want that place in my brain to be engaged when someone needs him.

In Philippians Paul said: "This one thing I do..." I want that to be true of me too.