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!
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