Complaining, Complacency, and Compassion (Part 2)

Whoops, here's part 2.  Sorry about the delay, life has been at warp speed lately!  And that's kind of a good thing...busyness is normalcy for the Prudhomme family.  In case you missed it, my post about complaining was the first part of my three-part blog series.

I love coffee, in case you had forgotten.  If you want to be friends with me, offering me coffee is a surefire way to move along our friendship.

In the morning on my way to work, there is nothing that I love more than to enjoy a cup of piping hot coffee with vanilla, hazelnut, or amaretto creamer.  If I forget to make it at home (which is more often than not), then a quick McDonald’s or Starbucks stop is often in order.  Oftentimes, I find myself the coffee ninja at work, stealthily grabbing a mug of coffee from the office just before first hour starts (Amanda, I know I at least owe the office coffeepot at least one coffee can…I promise I’ll do that sometime soon!).

If I make coffee at home, I like to hold onto the cup the whole way to school.  My son watches me drink it on the way to Montague, where I drop him off.  Is it any surprise that “coffee” is already in his limited vocabulary?  He says “coffee” and then he usually immediately follows up with “yuck”.  I’m not sure if he’s genetically related to his father and I…that’s never something that we would say.

Anyway, so why am I rambling about coffee? I’m getting there. Once I get to first hour, I usually set my mug down and start teaching.  I’ll have a couple of sips here and there, but sometimes the mug is abandoned for a lengthy time period as I go about my daily business of shaping lives and imparting knowledge.  Inevitably, I will come back to the mug as second hour nears and I will take a sip.  Sadly, travel mugs still have a long ways to go in preventing coffee from ever getting cold.

Yuck!  Lukewarm coffee!  Often I spit it right back into the mug.

Guess what?  That feeling of disgust that I get over lukewarm coffee is exactly how God feels about complacent Christians.

Revelations 3:14-18
14 “To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
   These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. 15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17 You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. 18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see."

I have statements to make that might rock your world.

Just because you darken the doorstep of a church on a regular basis, does not mean that you are a passionate Christian.

Just because you read your Bible on a fairly regular basis, does not mean that you are a passionate Christian.

Just because you pray, does not mean that you are a passionate Christian.

I’m not condemning Christians that go to church, read their Bibles, and pray.  I feel quite the opposite: all of those things are totally essential components of our Christian walk and should be done.

But is there a passion in your heart to see God’s kingdom be furthered and to serve Him recklessly?

Is there a yearning in your heart to know His character more intimately, to feel His presence in your life more strongly?

Is there an aching in your heart for the same people that break God’s heart: the orphan, the widow, and the lost?

Being obedient to God is more than just following rules and having good behavior - it's an all-encompassing, totally motivating, deep and insatiable desire to see God's work be done.  It's what drives one to wake up in the morning and do what they're called to do, and to reach out to the hurting.  It's what drove men to literally drop everything and follow after their Savior.  It's what drove Paul to endure unthinkable hardships to see God's work be done.  It's what calls people to dig deep into their pockets and give well over the standard 10% of their income to the Lord.

Note that the passage from Revelations says, "I know your deeds."  If you love the Lord with an all-encompassing passion, the way you live your life reflects that.  How you spend your time, your talents, and your treasure is going to be a reflection on the depth of that passion.  If you are insular and selfish, you'll probably spending the overwhelming majority of your time, talents, and treasure on yourself, your house, and your own family.

Comfort is the biggest killer of this passion.  Comfort breeds complacency.  If you are content with your cute little life, your comfortable microcosm of Christian culture, and your like-minded group of friends, then I would seriously challenge you to find a way to step outside your comfort zone and see what God may have in store for you.  Following God is not just about going to church , but about being recklessly and passionately devoted to the things that He cares for.  What have you done lately that has stretched you?  What are you committed to doing for the Lord that makes your life even remotely similar to Paul's life?  If you can't find anything, then you might be a complacent Christian, as unpalatable as lukewarm coffee.

Starbucks, Jacob, and Rachel

This afternoon around 3:15 p.m., I stopped at the Grand Haven Starbucks for the second time today and ordered another grande Blonde roast with one creamer and two Splendas.  Now, lest you think that I'm a freewheeling spender, I was gifted a Starbucks mug for Christmas (from one of my students!) that allows me to go to Starbucks the entire month of January and fill it up with brewed coffee for NOTHING.  I didn't even know that such a thing existed.  Now, since I am a quarter Dutch and it's January 30th, you'd bet your sweet bippy that I'm going to get every last drop out of that mug.  I've got quite a reputation around the GH Starbucks for being the blonde that likes Blonde roast and Splenda.  I totally get their marketing strategy though.  They sell those mugs so that people can give them as Christmas gifts, and people like me who normally brew their own coffee at home to save money get totally HOOKED on expensive coffee and become regular customers.  Yeah, I'm onto you Starbucks...and guess what, your evil scheme totally worked.

So what does this have to do with Jacob and Rachel?  Absolutely nothing, except that I'm awake at 11 p.m., no thanks to my Starbucks addiction... and I likely will be awake for quite some time...so why not blog about a topic that's in my head?

So, God taught me an important truth about attitude through the story of Jacob and Rachel as I read it recently.  While I can't relate to bigamous relationships, manual labor, or really anything about their culture, I can relate to certain parts of their story and namely, their attitudes.

Here is a link to Genesis 29, which tells their story.  As you read it, notice a couple of things.  First of all, Uncle Laban was in the sheep business.  I don't know how much you have been able to experience sheep, but my best friend growing up had sheep for a couple of years.  Sometimes I'd be at her house, and she would have to do something regarding the care of these animals and I would tag along to their pen with her.  I remember very little about sheep except that they are stupid, that they excreted really foul-smelling stuff, that they were messy and difficult, and and that hers were named Salt and Pepper.  Helping my best friend occasionally feed her sheep (or chase one if it got out of its pen) is really all I ever want to do with them.  So I find it very remarkable and frankly - depressing - that Jacob agreed to work for seven years in a disgusting job to marry the woman that he loved.  However, he put his nose the grindstone and kept a positive attitude during those seven long years (v. 20).  I like that about him.

Contrast that with the woman he married, Rachel.  As lovely as Rachel was on the outside, if you look closely at her character, she has a lot of problems.  Rachel suffered from a condition that I can relate with, the "I want what I can't have" syndrome.  The biggest object of her desire was to have a child.  It wasn't enough to be Jacob's beloved and preferred wife, but she possessed an all-consuming desire to have a child and went to great lengths to procure one.

However, even when she finally had a natural son, she wanted more.  And her greed didn't stop there. If you keep reading in Genesis, she took her father's terephim so that her husband would be the principal among Laban's male heirs.  She was continually discontent in her circumstances, always looking for the greenest grass.  Contrast that attitude with the humility that her husband showed to his deceitful uncle and to his tricky wife, and I'd say that you have a pretty huge divide in their character at this point in their lives.

Sometimes lately I have felt like Rachel.  I have to check my attitude to make sure that I'm not allowing discontent to breed itself within me, and I will tell you that it is hard.  Keeping an attitude of thankfulness is not an easy thing when I feel like my life and my dreams have been ripped away from me.  It's so easy for me to become jealous of others like Rachel was jealous of her sister Leah, and to forget the blessings that God has given me in abundance.

I think that Jacob is the one that I'd rather emulate.  He treated his difficult wife very well, which is an admirable thing in and of itself.  His attitude was good in the midst of his hard labor. Yes, he chose to endure his hard labor for Rachel's sake, and I didn't choose my situation.  But rather than complain about the sheep droppings in my life, I too could focus more on my Beloved (and I'm talking about my Heavenly father here, not just Ryan!) and minimize my self-centeredness.  My attitude in the midst of this journey is positively correlational to the amount of time I spend praying for God's will to be done in my life.  Being like Rachel and continually looking to what's around the corner or how I can squeeze out of a situation that I don't like only leads to discontent, anger, and a loathsome attitude.

So today, after I have had a really long, hard day of feeling sorry for myself, I choose to act more like Jacob and put my nose back to the grindstone.  I'm not sure how long we'll be on this journey, but no matter how long it is, my complaints and pity parties would be better left by the wayside.  After all, positive attitudes sound much more melodious than negative ones.


P.S. Shout out to my grandpa-in-law for the bippy comment!