Complacency and Purpose

I've been reading an excellent book by John Piper called "Don't Waste Your Life." Last night, I finally got to the meat of his message: forget entertainment, appearance, and all this other hoopla -- make your life count by screwing the world, screwing what other people think, and following Jesus! How else will you be able to stand before God and look back on your life without regret? How else will anyone who doesn't know about Jesus distinguish the difference between Christians and non-Christians. In our society, the two groups look the same! Except for the small fact that Christians aren't supposed to do some "immoral" things and spend 2 hours Sunday morning in a building with a cross on it.

"Therefore the man who stands before God with his well-kept avoidance ethic and his protest that he did not spend too much time at the office but came home and watched TV with his family will probably not escape the indictment that he wasted his life. Jesus rebuked his disciples with words that easily apply to this man: Even sinners work hard, avoid gross sin, watch TV at night, and do fun stuff on the weekend. What more are you doing than the others? (Luke 6:32-34; Matthew 5:47)"

I’m starting to think Satan’s strategy here is not to frighten us with the supernatural, but to deaden us into complacency and distract us with entertainment. In medicine, the temptation is to seek a life of comfort, because you’re so wiped out from your training and tired of being overworked and underpaid. You watch all your other friends in their late twenties and early thirties make more than you and live normal lives. When you’re actually presented with a choice, you just want to find some cushy job. It’s a strange mixture of entitlement and necessity, to pay back massive loans.

But even now there’s that feeling of deadened routine and pointless leisure. This past week was really long, one of those weeks where you wait for each work day to be over, come home to go through the routine of chores, wind down doing something mindless before waking up to start it all over again.

I was reading through some of D’s old blog entries, which was sort of an inspiring thing to do. He wrote so honestly, with so much of the heart and substance that he still has, but I don’t always uncover in the daily grind. What he wrote above really resonated. I think we all want that: for our lives to be about a greater, truer purpose than ourselves; to be about more than entertainment, appearance, status, or superficial comfort.

Of course, it starts now. It doesn’t start when I’ve caught up on my sleep, or after the baby goes to bed, or when we finish residency and get to wherever we’re going. It starts with the moment I take to be with God, to reflect and listen and relate. The type of boldness and faith it takes to be living a life like that takes a foundation built upon all those moments. For some reason this can be really hard to do. But no one ever said it would be easy.