Choose Life

Have you ever found yourself in one of those slumps of life? just bogged down with everything or totally not apathetic with your faith?

The other day i sat down with a friend and had a really good honest conversation about this very topic. We dived right in to the feelings of "spiritual apatheticism" that we knew we frequently had and it seems to me that we aren't the only ones experiencing this. And even more today we aren't the only ones experiencing this.

the hardest thing, though, about our whole conversation is the solution. How do you make someone joyful who isn't, how do you make some one care who doean't, who do you make someone love who doesn't? Its so much easier to not care than to care, because it is so much easier to not do something than to do it.

But isn't that just our problem? we don't do something and thus we eventually just don't care anymore. Its true of alot of things examples are all around, in school why do more when you only will be rewarded the same and why work through a problem when putting it on someone else makes an easier solution.

In the end though this solution eludes me until i finally think on scripture- How does Jesus solve this, what is His solution because it obviously has to be better than what i have tried so far.
What i find when i look for this is that Jesus says to take the narrow road, the one less traveled and to go against your prenotions and dispostions of what feels good.
Thats interesting to me because it seems like the answer isn't some easy fix like pray and be healed or just say the magic words and you will care again. Infact it is quite the opposite, Jesus doesn't ask you to do anything different, do what you were but choose to go a different route.
Basically Jesus says to choose the short straw, to take the hard way out, to do what you normally wouldn't want to do. Thats an odd cure but thats not the oddest part because never does he say there is a way to fix that.

The best example i think of when i say that is in the garden right before Jesus is taken. HOw much more apathetic can one be to go to a garden with JESUS and be asked by JESUS to pray for him. That to me is powerful because this guy JESUS had some serious power and a definately serious message-one worth listening to. You would think that might have been the stance the disciples would take: "What JESUS says you do". And yet they still fall asleep.
funny how that works out too because they say the same defensive things we say when we are apathetic- "i was tired i couldn't help it" or my personal favorite "I am getting nothing out of this, it was hard to listen to"- Now that is apathy but did you notice what Jesus does? he just wakes them up and a little rebuke, He knows they are apathetic and all he does is continually and painfully encourages them to "stay awake" time after time.

So whats that mean to me?
thats your first problem "me".
You see we say it alot but truly Christianity has nothing to do with you and never will. You comming to the Lord didn't change God's view of it.
I think what is crucial to see is that Spiritual apathy is a huge problem and we can't use some small fix to solve it. The only way to deal with it is at the root. If we can truly start looking at Christianity and "our faith" as "His truth" then i think we might start renewing our hearts. Sometimes we have to get out of the way, choose the hard path that you know is right even though you don't want to. But don't do it for you remember who it is for and that you truly have no time to waste on yourself even with this. Choose to "wake up" its simple, nobody wants to but thats what you have been called to do. "wake up"
And as for those around us in Spiritual apathy, be Jesus to us. Encourage us to continually "get up". Keep being that thorn in our side to "wake up" or take the way we won't choose.
In closing: If we are supposed to make our body our slaves we can't do that unless we choose contrary to the body. Why would you want to be with the old self if you have become the new. Choose to wake up, Choose to be a thorn, Choose to know your faith is not your own but a manifestation of the new life you have. Choose life.