Produce: a new paradigm

I was praying this afternoon, because I knew I really needed to (obviously.  unceasingly, right?), and the only thing I could think to pray was, "God, I'm so cranky and so grumpy right now, and I'm annoyed at my friend, and I'm hungry.  I know you know, but I thought you should know.  Anyway, here I am."  And it was odd, having proved to myself immediately prior--and unequivocally--just how foolish it was to have tried to assuage my crankiness and grumpiness and annoyance and hunger by reading about Ph.D student debt and wallowing in other similarly vapid internet practices, to get this response: "Produce fruit in keeping with repentance."

Simple: "Produce fruit in keeping with repentance."  I recognized that, from John the Baptist, Luke 3:8.

And that's it.  Not it, the end of this musing (clearly)... that's it, the Word I needed for this season.

See, it was last week that I was again acting the fool and veritably calling for locusts to come and feast on my time--which meant I was being an especially poor steward of my waking hours--that I came across this: an article entitled "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500."  I read it, and I was enthralled, and I came as close as one like me, who is not at all given to emotional decision-making and who is fairly conscientious in weighing wisdom and discerning a way forward before deciding such things, to deciding then and there to move to Detroit in June and buy my own $500 extreme fixer upper.  I knew the thought was a bit silly, and maybe somewhat impractical, but I was unsurprised by the inclination in myself.  Restoration like that, which perhaps I've romanticized but which I also know would be backbreaking and dangerous and frigid in the winter and dirty, is redemptive.  Making newly good the bad things, or the unfinished things, or the rejected things, is itself good.  I loved wood shop in middle school, I took a machining class a few years ago, I'm not experienced but I like cooking; there's a sort of reverence I hold for such physical makings; something in me likes to create things.  To produce things.

And thus my mind was recalled to an article I read a few months ago, that I had sampled but not digested, and to which I had to return to give it the proper time to metabolize.  READ IT, please.

So our fundamental orientation in the economy of the Kingdom to which we are called is alien to that of capitalism: We are not consumers, but producers.  We are to be fruitful--to produce fruit!  (This makes me think Marx was perhaps onto something more Kingdom-minded than he knew--not with the "opiate of the masses" thing, but more with the "alienation of the laborer from his labor" thing--but I can't be sure.)   And the fruit we produce is nourished, and therefore produced, only when we are connected to the True Vine.

Reading The Atlantic and Buzzfeed and The New York Times and Boundless?  (I'd include the clear analog, shopping, but since I do so little of that it would be almost irrelevant to a personal post like this one.)  All, for the most part, consuming.  Not altogether bad, but certainly unfit to occupy much of the time of one who should be producing.  Building and budgeting wealth so I can share, restoring a house with no owner to a home, investing in the growth of younger brothers and foster children and siblings in Christ, bringing a musical to life from some ink and paper, keeping a blog?  Producing.  And by the grace of a good and loving Father who grafted us onto His own Vine.

Moreover?  Spending time in prayer instead of spending it on my own selfish pleasures?  Producing fruit in keeping with repentance.  That's the key to my desire to be satisfied in the Lord: to allow myself to choose to produce fruit--that is, plug into the Vine and be nourished--rather than to consume everything I'm told should fill me up and turns out only to give me cavities and a stomach ache.

I may not be packing up and heading to Detroit, and I probably will continue to read the news online; but somehow, I know this is big, and I daresay--or foolsay, though I hope not that one--it's a shift in my paradigm.

Produce fruit in keeping with repentance!

A Life That Matters

The other day my friend prayed for me that one of the things that would mark my last semester would be good, renewing relationships--which is something I have in no way been asking for myself or even thought of asking for myself, but which I was so thankful for her to have prayed for me.  Because I really need that.  Because it's really hard sometimes, the past few years in particular. 

I had dinner with a different friend a few nights ago, and it was one of the most affirming things that I have experienced in a good, long time.  Do you know what he said to me?  He told me that he's noticed that I'm always the one listening, and so he figured that it would be nice for me to have someone to listen to me sometime, and asked me to share with him my life story.  The whole thing.  And when I tried to give him the politely abridged version, he stopped me and told me that he wanted to hear the whole thing, not just the highlights.  Wow.

We continued our conversation a couple of days later, since our dinner was cut short (we didn't make it past middle school...), and one of the things we were discussing was our vision of the successful life: when we started thinking about it, what we thought about thinking about it, what it is... Anyway, I watched this today, and all that little anecdote was meant to set up was that, though I've thought some about success (particularly around the time when I jumped off the pre-MD ship and swam as fast as I could to the pre-PA flotilla), when I saw this, there was no question: 

These surrendered people, this great and extravagant and mundane love?  This is the successful life.

(link)

P.S.  Shout out to my life-story friend, who has no idea that I have a blog and will probably never read this... but if he ever does, a most genuine thank you.  But by then I think it will be redundant, as it would be silly not to say "thank you" in person.

This.

"Love God and do as you please. If you love Him, then you love holiness. What you please shouldn't present a problem."

-- N.D. Wilson, in his Notes from a Tilt-a-Whirl, describing St. Augustine's philosophy; I haven't read the book, but feel like I should now


Two brief additions:
1 - My prayer for this year, my senior year, has been that God would make me faithful in the small things.  It was such a blessing yesterday to hear from a friend that she sees that in me; it's one of those things that can be hard to see in oneself, so I'm grateful (anew) that God "seriously hears prayers in accordance to his will," as she said, and that she encouraged me in that way.  That's actually amazing.
2 - My prayer for this year, 2014, is to be fully satisfied in the Lord--that is, not looking for "outs" in other things, like rest in Yahoo! News or relaxation in watching the Food Network.  Nothing against those things, but... come on.  Jesus satisfies.  Full stop.