On the Small Things

Today's a notable day, and I found myself sharing some of the things I'd learned over the past year with somebody tonight. He told me that I should write them down somewhere, because they'd probably be things I'll find myself coming back to later on down the road, perhaps to help another. So I'll post some excerpts from something that does capture some of the biggest things I've learned this year...

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"...I sense that I should find a vehicle for recording and remembering these things, and find that writing it as a testimony to someone else is probably best. I hope this letter finds you well, and that my eagerness to share my thoughts can carry through and make reading them an enjoyable experience.

For the last few years, I've focused on how to make the most of the blessings I've been given, to ensure that the rare combination of talents I've been given find their proper home in the kingdom of God. It's a journey that forced me to ask myself whether what I was doing what God asks of me, or merely hiding in a comfortable place; whether I was delaying my true calling for lack of clarity, or courage, or discipline, or faith.

It hasn't sit well with me. "With great power comes great responsibility," and all that. I had received one of the world's best educations, and an amazing set of resources which afforded me the freedom to do anything I set my heart towards. But what had I to show for it? An interesting, well-paying job devoid of the biting troubles that plague most workers, a comfortable lifestyle that left me without material wants, and a lingering guilt that I was working to preserve my comfort and my future family's comfort rather than building the kingdom of God.

I didn't feel like I was doing enough. I didn't feel like I was giving enough of what I had, or making noble use of what I had learned. And I fell into that all-too-common trap of contrasting how I was living with how other people were living, and wondering if I lacked something that gave them the strength to live as they did, to forego everyday comforts in pursuit of justice or change. From time to time, I could tell myself that it simply wasn't my time to shine yet, that there were things for me to learn, experiences for me to have, that would equip me to do what was needed of me when my calling actually came. But whenever I said that, something in the back of my heart asked me whether--when that calling came--whether I would actually have the courage to follow it.

A good friend of mine likes to pose this question: if, perchance, you were forced to choose between the perfect career and the perfect family, to choose between work that truly does better the lives of many, and a home filled with love and fine memories, which would you pick? I could never really defend my decision, even though it felt intuitively right. There's a part of me that still aches to be the dad that my own dad wasn't.

For the last few years, it's felt like the easier, weaker choice, one that required less faith, less courage, less conviction. I couldn't really articulate why.

So this was me, determined to find my "calling," convinced that it had to be, above all else, noble. If it were grand, I would know that I had made good use of the grand tools I'd been given. If it were humble, I would know that I had had the courage to step out in faith and seek the Lord. But if it were comfortable, if it were ordinary, if it merely let me say I'd served people and not that I'd changed them, I would feel unfaithful, as if I were avoiding my responsibilities and burying my talents in the sand.

In A Grief Observed, CS Lewis speaks of a God who remains silent amidst our cries and laments, that he looks at us with compassion, and a smile that says "my dear child, I wish you could understand." As I remember what you wrote in your original response to me, I'm amused that it's taken me three months, perhaps three years, to grasp the insight you shared as you spoke of your own life.

I was listening to a talk by NT Wright on why the resurrection matters. He said this:

"Living as a Christian looks like this: you look back to what God achieved in Easter, and you are called in the power of God's spirit to implement that in the present. You look on to what God is going to do in the future, and you are called in the power of the spirit to anticipate that in the present. Living in the present, implementing Jesus' resurrection and anticipating new creation. And in my book, literally and metaphorically, this is called building for God's kingdom. What do I mean by that? Some older theologians used to talk about building the kingdom, which always sounded like we could just roll up our sleeves, work hard, and we'd make the kingdom of God come by our own efforts. That technically in theology would be called a sort of social pelagianism, I guess. An attempt to pull yourself up by your social or moral bootstraps. No, we build for the kingdom. What do I mean? Where I work, one of the places I work is one of the most wonderful cathedrals ever constructed: Durham cathedral in the north of England. And I imagine a thousand years ago, the stonemasons in the yard, probably illiterate, and the foreman comes into the yard and says "i want you to carve this chunk of stone with this bit of pattern and with this shape and these dimensions, and the chap probably wouldn't understand it if you explained to him why you ask him to do that. But he gets on and he does it. And then one day the master builder comes with the architect, and the stones are held up by some primitive scaffolding, and there is that little stone. But it's hugely important because it's part of that much larger pattern that he'd never imagined and never seen. He's building for the cathedral. Let me tell you--when you go work with drug addicts and homeless people, when you go and teach sunday school to kids, when you do whatever it is that god's calling you to do, today, tomorrow, with your life, you are not building the kingdom. That would be arrogant, and dangerous, actually. You are building for the kingdom. You may not, you will not understand the larger patterns within which your bit of the work is going to form, but they're there, and they matter."

Eloquently spoken, but his words essentially amount to "your work, whatever it is, no matter how seemingly insignificant, will never be in vain." Often, I'd heard the same thing and dismissed it as naivete, a pat answer given to salve the disappointments of those whose efforts had failed or stagnated. But something about the way they were spoken now hit me.

Another close friend commented, fairly recently, that I was being a Martha. I was dumbfounded when she told me. Five years earlier, I'd been thinking, myself, about how Martha-like the world was, and how it was indeed far better to be a Mary, to say "Jesus is enough", and let all else come second to pursuing him. How was it that I'd become precisely what I'd tried to avoid?

And at that moment, I finally knew why. I remembered the class that I'd run to train up worship leaders. Few came, and those who did only got as far as learning how to play the guitar. I thought about the dorm ministry I'd invested my sophomore year into. It became nothing more than an ordinary dorm room, and worse yet, a gossip hub. I thought about the worship times that I'd cut out a good part of my schedule to run. The largest gathering had maybe three people, and more often than not, there were none. The campus fellowship I'd committed myself to dwindled down to four, then two, then I was the only one left. The fellowship unity gathering that I'd poured my heart into came, was wonderful...and then disappeared, falling far short of its original aim to bring the different christians on campus into one body. Many of the people whom I'd engaged most in my Christian walk had abandoned their faith completely.

I realized that I actually felt like a failure in my personal ministry. I came into college with the confidence that God would grow my efforts, no matter how humble their beginnings; I left with nothing to show for those hours. Less than nothing, actually. In some ways, I feared that I'd made things worse, that I'd been one of those overzealous types that had so overflowed with passion that I'd obscured the depth and truth of who God is.

And I realized that the disappointment from those failures still lingered, telling me that I needed more influence, more control, more power in order to actually make things work, to actually touch someone's heart and speak God's love into somebody's life. I convinced myself that I could no longer devote myself towards the small, that I would have to swing for the fences in order to truly be offering up my best fruits.

I'm still amused by how my language changed over those years. I went from speaking of mustard seeds and testimony to a strategic thinking plan about building movements and mobilizing capital. I remember one person confessing to me, having heard me give my spiel about what I wanted to do, that I seemed to have it all together, and that I'd seemed so confident and determined when I'd made those statements. I look back at that conversation now and all I can do is laugh. All this talk about mobilizing capital and I still had trouble offering up my own surplus harvests in faith.

I'm not sure exactly what happens next, now that I realize this err. Lately I've felt a lot more comfortable where I am, a lot more confident that when I am called, I will not cower. And being back in Hong Kong, revisiting those places where I once sat in peaceful solitude under a cloudless, starlit sky, helped me relearn the joy of being God's child rather than his soldier.

I suppose the next step is to let that joy burn and refine those plans of mine, that I might truly say that I trade all that I have for all that is better. And to remember that comfort is God's way of ensuring we can minister with hearts of joy and love, not of mere sacrifice.

Thank you for speaking to these things for me, and for living them out in your own life.