Get off the Assembly Line and into the Wilderness

To desire the intangible over the physical is one of Christian spirituality’s biggest challenges. It’s hard to wrap our minds around longing for an invisible Christ, especially when we compare it to more “practical” concerns. It’s even more difficult in a post-enlightenment culture that’s suspect of anything that isn’t measurable and concrete.

Rather than learning to embrace the mysteries of spirituality, we resort to a faith that’s either mimicked or prescribed. At least copying someone else’s behavior or submitting to their direction, for Christ’s sake, has some sense of observable reality to it.

So instead of being molded into the ideal versions of ourselves, we’re programmed into little christbots. We attempt to manifest the fruits of the spirit in the same ways, we emphasize the same dogmatisms, we share the same opinions about complex political and religious ideas, we speak the same language full of strange symbols and colloquialisms, and spirituality is reduced to assembly-line reproduction and called discipleship.

“Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself.”―Søren Kierkegaard

As we try and gauge our progress by looking at others, there’s a frustration that we’re cramming ourselves into a mold that doesn’t fit. It’s exhausting and demoralizing. And there’s also a constant feeling that, as my life begins to mirror yours, the real me is disappearing.

We’re running full speed on a treadmill and aspiring toward:

• The strengths of others
• The virtues of others
• The behavior of others
• The practices of others
• The beliefs of others

I don’t think we do it intentionally. In our sincere desire to manifest maturity in our lives, we look for a standard.

“Let us be what God likes, so long as we are His, and let us not be what we want to be, if it is against his intention.”—Francis de Sales

We eventually churn out people with the appearance of godliness and no spiritual spark and power — and, quite honestly, we shun people who might truly be closer to Christ because they don’t fit the archetype.

Christ wants you, not your version of someone else’s spiritual life—you. This truth is both freeing and frightening. There’s freedom in not being in not constantly measuring ourselves by standards that don’t fit, but it’s scary because this casts us into the unknown wilderness of working out our own salvation.

Plunge yourself into that mystery. There’s nothing else that will truly release you to be who you are. Don’t chase virtues for virtue’s sake, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, or disciplines for the sake of practicing disciplines. Pursue only Christ. Pursue him in the Scriptures and in your prayer. Pursue him in community life. Invite him into your daily activities and conversations.

When he is your only goal, he’ll lay upon you virtues that fit perfectly.

So stop wishing. Stop comparing. Stop straining. Be you. . . just be the best damn version of you that you can be. Let him worry about the rest.