renationalising spiritual growth

I have a child.

Matter of fact, I have two.

These children bring along responsibility. I now have to be a decent and respectable person (at least most of the time). I have to do something to earn a living because our children seem to need these things that are only designed to catch the aftermath of their digestive systems. I also have to watch what I say around them. I have to be very careful around my two and 9/10 old. He seems to have magic ears which only pick up what he is NOT supposed to hear.

I can tell him to do something a million times and he doesn’t bat an eye. But say something about his mum under my breath, and he is off to report.

I also have a resposibility to keep myself healthy. I have to eat well, not just to show him how to eat but so that I will be healthy and be able to do the things that I need to do with him.

Responsibility isn’t all it is cracked up to be.

But I wouldn’t change it for the world.

I have to admit that I feel this way about my faith quite often. I feel this responsibility to maintain a good varied diet of worship and the Word, of service and silence. A well rounded diet of all the spiritual disciplines.

I feel a responsibility to maintain my own spiritual health. Sometimes this weighs heavy on me. I feel like it is something that someone else says I should do. This is something I have never been good with. If someone tells me I have to do something I have a STRONG urge not to do it, simply to spite the person who told me to do it. I almost always have to wrestle down this urge and bite my tongue as I do whatever it is (even if it is something that I kinda want to do).

But I have found that my relationship with God is so much better now than when I outsourced my spiritual growth.

You know how this goes, the only time I opened the Bible was in church (even then I would rarely crack the spine, and listen with only one ear). The only time I thought about God was when I wanted his help to impress a girl, or one of my friends, or get me out of something I had got myself in.

I thought my faith was the responsibility of the pastor, the elders, my parents, my grandparents, my church, …

…everyone but me.

I have come to see, however, that those who accept that their spiritual life, their spiritual health, is their own responsibility are the only ones who seem to enjoy their faith.

The rest of us seem to go through the motions.

I think it is time to renationalise my spiritual development.

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