Move Toward the Mess: Curing Boredom in the Christian Lifeنموونە

Guilt

We’ll begin with a working assumption. Guilt is analogous to physical pain. Pain is that brilliant sensation produced by a nervous system that God has hard-wired into the human body. When the system is working properly, it minimizes all sorts of physically destructive behavior. For example, if you’re camping and accidently put your hand in the campfire, pain will motivate you to remove your hand from the flames rather quickly. Had there been no pain, you might have inadvertently left your hand in the fire long enough to render it permanently useless. In other words, pain is the body’s alarm system. When a physically destructive behavior occurs, it sounds the alarm and says, “Stop that!” And we do – pretty darn quick.

But sometimes the system becomes dysfunctional. Something that’s intended to be a brief alarm refuses to turn off. Then we’re in trouble. Chronic pain means that something in our body has broken. When this happens, pain ceases to alert us to a problem. It becomes the problem. We can say the same thing about guilt. But often we don’t.

The original idea, if I’ve read the owner’s manual correctly, ascribes the same function to guilt that is attributed to pain. The difference is that guilt is a bit more preemptive in nature. It’s the spiritual alarm system that says, “Don’t do that!” And if everything is working correctly, we don’t do whatever we were thinking of doing. A negative outcome is avoided.Here’s the problem: A disturbing percentage of us deal with chronic guilt. We would never accept chronic physical pain as normal. But for some reason we think chronic guilt is not only normal but is somehow the way religion is supposed to work. It ends up being the motivation for all sorts of supposedly spiritual activity. We end up thinking it is a godly motivation. And when moving toward the mess becomes motivated by guilt, things don’t end up well. For example, you may be a solid middle-class person looking at third-world poverty. Or you may be an upper-class person looking at domestic poverty. Either way, you are one of the “haves” looking at the “have nots.” It’s a ripe situation for producing guilt. So off we go . . . moving toward the mess because we feel guilty.

You probably think I’m going to say something about trying to drum up some feelings of compassion. I’m not. Don’t get me wrong. I hope that at some point all of our hearts will break for all who break God’s heart. But I don’t think that’s where most of us start. My suggestion is that we move toward the mess because we are commanded to do so. It’s about obedience. Read Matthew 25:37-40 again.

It might be tempting to equate obedience with “should” or “ought,” but they are miles apart. “Should” places you in the driver’s seat and makes your sense of obligation the ultimate source of authority. Once you’ve met the requirement of what you feel you should do, you are released from any further commitment. “Ought” turns your attention inward to what you feel about things. Once you’ve satisfied your sense of what you ought to do, you’re done. Obedience, on the other hand, places the ultimate authority with God. We move toward the mess because he told us to do so, not because we felt we ought to. It’s a simple matter of where the authority resides--in your own soul or in the imperatives of the kingdom.