Urgency

"I believe that the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time." This line stuck out at me tonight as I read "Blue Like Jazz." I started thinking how true this is. We worry so much about the evil that we, or others, may do that we waste our time in ways that are really meaningless. We spend our time protesting the ills of society, the choices that people make, the things we think need to be changed, and all the time the real thing that needs to change we never look at.

We can't afford to waste a minute, must not squander these precious daylight hours in frivolity and indulgence, in sleeping around and dissipation, in bickering and grabbing everything in sight. Get out of bed and get dressed! Don't loiter and linger, waiting until the very last minute. Dress yourselves in Christ, and be up and about!

Romans 13:11

What should we be up and about doing? We should be up and about changing our hearts. We are sleeping and involved in frivolity and indulgence when we are worried about everyone else's heart but our own. We forget that we are just as capable of sin as any other human being in the world is. We get caught up in being "religious" and we waste time in the habit of selfishness and our heart cannot engage with God.

As the Ruin Falls

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.

I never had a selfless thought since I was born.

I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:

I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,

I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:

I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--

But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.

I see the chasm. And everything you are was making

My heart into a bridge by which I might get back

From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls.

The pains You give me are more precious than all other gains.

C.S. Lewis

We say we love, but do we really? We say that we are involved in the urgency of God's work, but are we really? Noting changes until we become urgent about changing the person we see in the mirror every morning.

Namaste'