no good reason

I was talking with a friend a couple of years ago about God and where each of us where with Him and my friend and I both commented that we felt like we’d drifted, not so much in our behaviors, but more along the lines of the closeness of our relationships with Him. Neither of us had good reason for this, it just seemed that this was reality at the time. We had both gone a while without really praying or reading the Bible or anything like that.

Talking to my friend, knowing that he and I are both fairly good guys and we both love Jesus and all, I asked him why he thought this had happened, and you know what he said? He said that, at least for himself, he thought maybe it was just laziness. Laziness. He said he gets busy and he tells himself that he’s going to spend some time with God and then his schedule gets out of hand and it doesn’t happen. He ends up opting for other time fillers and God gets put on the back burner. He said all of this rather matter-of-factly, like he was telling me that he would have gotten some bananas but the store was out.

I told him I didn’t buy it, not for him or for me.

Here’s why: suppose you go to your doctor and your doctor tells you that you have cancer. Suppose it is a particularly nasty form of cancer and your doctor says that they can save you, but only just barely. The cancer will advance quickly and aggressively and in order to stop this process, you must, absolutely must, attend 5 sessions of chemotherapy a week. He schedules them for Monday thru Friday and asks you to come back after the first week to tell him how it’s going and you’re out the door.

One week later you go back and your doctor asks, “So, how did those sessions of chemotherapy go?”

Can you imagine looking your doctor dead in the face and answering, “Well, Monday was good and Tuesday went alright, but I missed Wednesday. I mean, I meant to go and all, but I got pretty busy with work stuff and then I had a date Thursday night, so I missed Thursday, too. I did, like, a half-session on Friday, which is better than nothing, right? Anyway, I meant to make it every time and I’ll try to do better this week. I really don’t know why I didn’t get around to it more—I guess I’m just lazy…”

In other words, if you knew your life depended on something it would be ridiculous to ignore that thing. Treating your “salvation” with such a bizarre form of casual non-interest would make you certifiably crazy. But that, I told my friend, is what we were both doing.

(My friend disagreed. He said my analogy was too cut and dry and that he didn’t feel he was making that kind of choice.)

I don’t know what time with God is like for you. I don’t think it’s the same for all of us, and for me it is sometimes mystical and intense and sometimes fairly non-eventful. Sometimes it feels like an awful lot of work on my part and sometimes it just flows. It’s different every time, really, and I think maybe it’s supposed to be that way because it is the being together part of a relationship and that isn’t something you can always predict. But whether it’s the kind of experience that leaves me with goose bumps or not, I believe that it is something like chemotherapy for the cancer patient, only considerably more powerful and considerably more necessary.

What I mean is that through my relationship with Jesus and my times of interaction with Him life is imparted to me and death is staved off. When I go for days or weeks without talking to Him, I begin to feel stale and worn thin, like the essence of life within me is leaking slowly out and I’m transforming into some kind of zombie. But when I spend my time with Jesus as I should, as I want to, I feel that life takes on a different quality and it’s not like I hear birds singing all the time or anything, but I do feel a certain meaning and purpose, a kind of power and intent behind things. In short, I end up experiencing the presence of God in my life.

So the big question, then, is this: why do I go thru those periods of ignoring God? Why did my friend and I end up being lazy or careless or whatever? I told my friend that I didn’t believe it was laziness at all, but that I thought maybe it was a problem of belief. If I only understood my need for Jesus, then it would seem I’d never miss any time with Him. That’s partly true, but not totally, because I know I need Jesus, need Him to the core, and I still find that if I’m not purposeful in talking to Him and reading about Him and interacting with Him then I don’t do it, and I think maybe that’s because my relationship with Him is a real, actual relationship, and relationships take work. Every one of them. Relationships have to be maintained and tended to and this has to happen often or friends drift apart. Think about it: surely you have friends you were once quite close to—people you haven’t spoken with in ages. Why? What happened? Likely nothing. It was what didn’t happen that ended up separating you, and it’s the same way with Jesus.

I can’t tell anyone else how often they need to talk to Him. Relating to God is not the scientific endeavor that chemotherapy is. You can’t prescribe a daily intake of 100 mgs of God, but I’ll tell you that I doubt very much there’s a single human being alive who doesn’t need at least one meaningful interaction with Jesus every day in order to be in a real relationship with Him. Jesus Christ, Himself, when here on earth spent an incredible amount of time with the Father in prayer and fasting and that tells me at least three things: one, He loved God and liked being around Him. Two, His time with God was a big part of who He was. And three, His time with God was a priority because He always made time for it to happen. If Jesus is supposed to be any kind of example for us, we ought to learn something from that.

Going back to my friend, I have to honestly tell you that I still struggle to make time every day and I ask God to help me understand this and change it. I think it’s weird that it can be hard to do something so necessary and easy to just not do it. I could talk about the idea that there are spiritual forces at work trying to interrupt my relationship with Jesus and that maybe that’s why it’s hard, but I’d rather not remove the responsibility from myself. I mean, I do think those spiritual forces make it harder, but at the end of the day I’m the one who either walked with God or didn’t on that day, and while there are more days that I do than don’t, I’d be lying if I said I did every day. Again, this is a relationship and it has a sense of ebb and flow to it. My hope and my most sacred goal is that with each passing day, I’ve moved somehow (perhaps by God’s grace) a little closer to being closer to Him, and that with these moves, small though they may be, I’m staving off death and ingesting a source of life. Not life for the sake of living, but life that leads me closer to Him, because being close to Him is really all I have or ever hope to have.

That’s what I pray for—for myself and for my friend, and even for you.