Richard Rohr, one of my patron saints, notes that people’s lives are divided into two halves. The 1st half is self-centered, ego-driven. The second half is self-emptying, selfless. Rohr states that the vast majority of people never reach the second half of life.
St. Paul understood this. In Corinthians he writes “When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, reason like a child, think like a child. But now that I have become a man, I have put an end to childish things.”
As believers and leaders one of the most important questions we can address is: “Am I growing in my love for and knowledge of God?” “Is my understanding of God the same today as it was yesterday, a year ago, ten years ago?” The danger of not growing is that God is remade in the image of humanity which means that God is constantly being deformed to fit human needs, or what we perceivwe to be our needs.
It matters who we think God is. The first-half-of lifers see God as a flannel-graph, one-dimensional God. Tame, a non-risk taker, playing-it-safe kind of absentee landlord. No surprises here. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever but not in a good way.
The God of the second half of life is the God that Annie Dillard writes of: “On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”
What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something that assaults our imagination and rocks our world. What we need is someone bigger than ourselves and what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God.
See you in church.
In Jesus,
Wayne
