High calling- Low response:

This morning- the family scrambling to grab breakfast and make it out of the house by 8 am. Suitcases strewn everywhere, as we arrived home from St. Louis last night. Squabbling children, worried parents, stress you could cut with a knife. It seems to be the story of my life these days. To top it all off, I entered the kitchen this morning to discover (unfortunately not before I'd stepped in it) that someone had thrown up all over the floor (which Lex JUST scrubbed) during the night. Ah, how I love Lysol... :-D All of the children swear they have no idea who got sick or how this unfortunate occurrence occurred. The dogs and cats are not releasing any statements at this time, but we have a detective on the case... ;-)
Yeah. Life is messy. And boy, is it EVER messy!
Andy Kauffmann, a missionary, and aquaintance of mine once said though: 'When you live in the mess, you learn to cry out to the King!"
I haven't been learning this 'crying out to the King' business very quickly. Crying- yes. Crying out- no! Self-pity is so insiduous, and creates the ultimate 'Slough of Despond. Lately I've been uptight, emotionally volatile and brittle, frustrated with everything. And it's not because circumstances are truly intolerable, it's because I, in my determined self-will, have been intolerant of circumstances.

The Christian walk is such a beautiful thing on paper. 'We rejoice in our light and momentary troubles', 'What is seen is temporary, what is unseen is eternal', 'Just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also, through Christ, our comfort overflows.' 'Take up your cross and follow me.'
Such a high calling is ours! To walk and love and suffer with an all-sufficient Savior! But the minute this doctrine leaves the realm of theory, I am tempted to enter the realm of 'rage and pout and sulk'. Oh, I know better, but I do it anyway! It seems that everything in human nature wells up in resentment when desires are balked, troubles are piled on, and things cease to go 'according to plan'. MY plan, of course! :-P
Such a high calling we are given. Such a low response seems to be within our grasp. God says 'Surrender these things to Me', and all too often we whine 'But I CAN'T!' (Which is usually code for 'But I don't WANT to!' ).
Fortunately, He can, and will, where we are incapable.
God, give me the humility not to whine, or snap irritably my protestations of 'I can't do this!', but instead, to come humbly, say brokenly 'I can't do this.'- longing and hungering to see YOU do it IN me. Believing that it WILL be done, regardless of the tumult clamouring all around.

A couple of paragraphs in 'Still Higher for His Highest', by Oswald Chambers, convicted me deeply this week:

The Snare of the Sentimentalist, Worldly Sorrow, and The Deepest Longing:

"Lord I will follow Thee, but..." The wish ought to be followed by immediate obedience. I must take the wish and translate it into resolution, and then into action. If I do not, the wish will translate itelf into a corrupting instead of a redeeming power in my life. This principle holds good in the matter of emotions. A sentimentalist is one who delights to have high and devout emotions while reading in an arm-chair or when in a prayer meeting, but he never translates his emotions into action. Consequently a sentimentalist is usually callous, self-centered and selfish, because the emotions he likes to have stirred do not cost him anything; and when he comes across the same things in the domain where things are real and not sentimental, the revenge comes along the line of selfishness and meanness, which is aways the aftermath of an unfulfilled emotion."

"It is a terrible thing to say, and yet true, that there is a sorrow so selfish, so sentimental and sarcastic that it adds to 'the sin of the city'. All sorrow that arises from being baffled in some selfish aim of our own is of the world and works death. Those who sorrow over their own weaknesses and sins, and stop short at that, have a sorrow that only makes them worse, it is not a godly sorrow that works repentance. Oh that all men knew that every sentiment has its appropriate reaction, and if the nature does not embrace that reaction it degenerates into a sullen sentimentalism that kills all good action."

"You are getting tired of life as it is, tired of yourself as you are, getting sour with regard to the setting of your life; lift your eyes for one moment to Jesus Christ. Do you want, more than you want your food, more than you want your sleep, more than you want anything under heaven, or in heaven, that Jesus Christ might so identify you with Himself that you are His, first, last, and forever? God grant that the greatest longing desire of your heart may begin to awaken as it has never done, not only the desire for the forgiveness of sin, but for identification with Jesus Himself until you say, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."

Oswald Chambers pulls no punches, but he's truthful. And I recognized far too much of myself in the 'Sentimentalist' he describes. Do I also identify in that all- consuming, overwhelming, overcoming hunger for Christ? Not always.
So, Lord, where I fail to desire You, 'desire in me'.