Rachel has asked me to blog on here but most of the time I’m more of a tweet & facebook kind of guy. Spare time seems pretty rare for me, so I usually don’t want to use it to sit in front of a keyboard. But I had a revelation the other day so I thought I’d use my inaugural guest blog to confess & share…I’m gross.
Spiritually gross, that is. This is no big surprise to those of you that know me well. I could tell you lots of ways my heart is black and sinful but for today I want to just share a little bit about ugly pride. You may (or may not) have noticed, I’ve been a little leaner on the tweets & facebook posts the last few weeks. That has been intentional and here is why – Pride. A few weeks ago I’m reading through Leviticus and I found myself thinking “there is nothing good in here to tweet”. I know, yuck. The sad thing is, it wasn’t until later in the day that it hit me how disgusting the thought was. I’m sitting at my desk and it hits me. “Did I actually say that?” “Did I actually take the Holy, Perfect Scripture; the Living, Breathing Word of God, perfect in all ways, and have a negative thought about it because I couldn’t find a neat little verse that is 140 characters or less?!” I had made Scripture more about me wanting to tweet something than about me learning something that could make me more like Jesus. I had made it all about me.
There have been times I’ve thought facebook is “of the debul” (that’s “of the devil” to anyone who is not a Adam Sandler/Waterboy fan) so I just had to ask myself why I started doing the whole tweet/facebook thing anyway? It started as a way to let folks know about what was going on with Harvest Field & our family and hopefully to provide some encouragement & truth in people’s day. And none of those are bad reasons; but I think I have to be careful or it can become very PRIDEFUL.
Rachel calls Pride the ‘gateway sin’ like marijuana is a gateway drug. Sure, smoke a little of the devil’s lettuce and it’s no big deal; but then a year later you find yourself downtown in an abandoned building sitting on a dirty floor sharing needles to shoot heroin. You get a little pride, sure it’s no big deal; but then it leads to gossip, envy, vanity, lust, arrogance, anger, etc. Okay, maybe the analogy is a little bit of a stretch, but hopefully you get the picture. We can all get a little prideful about who we think we are or what we think we’ve accomplished; then we find ourselves being envious because we think we should get the same deal our neighbor got; or we find ourselves gossiping and using our words to tear people down; or we grow a short fuse and easily become angry with others. It’s a really gross cycle that pride can get kickstarted.
So my commitment is this – I plan to keep doing the twitter and facebook thing, and maybe an occasional blog (if Rachel allows me after this one) but I need to often do what I call the “spiritual arm pit self sniff”. You know how when you’ve been in haiti for a while and you catch a whiff of someone with bad body odor and the thought enters your head “Oh no, I wonder if that is me that smells like a 6th grade boys locker room?” So you wait until (you think) no one is looking and discreetly lift your arm and crane your neck over towards your own arm pit to sniff and see if it is you that is so rank. Well I need to this same thing, but in a Spiritual way. It looks different though…it is more a picture of getting on my knees and saying “Lord, please shine a spotlight on the darkest area of my heart. Show me where the sin is, that I’m not even recognizing as sin. Make me aware of my grossness, then burden me with a desire to confess and repent that sin and have true heart change.”
We all have a lot of sin in our life. I am just very grateful that no matter how gross I am, my God will always provide more GRACE than I have sin.
