Simply A Night Owl

When I was young, I used to be a tad forgetful. I would forget my lunch money. I would forget to come home on time, clean my room or I would forget to take out the trash; much to the dismay of my parents. Didn’t everyone forget these things? Now as I get older, I am forgetting other things like appointments or where I left my keys. I even sometimes can’t remember where I put my coffee cup two minutes after I fill it up. There is a forgetfulness present within some that is common place but oh so much more serious than simply forgetting to put the lid down.

How many times have you seen this? Someone you know is a “Christian”. They go to church every Sunday. They know their Bible inside and out. They lead small groups during the week and camps over the weekend. They have all the answers to this journey. You see them wearing their best clothes and their best face in church on Sunday morning. They praise the pastor to no end about what a great service he gave and how it really spoke to them; how it touched them on a very personal level as if God himself was speaking to them. You think to yourself, these are truly God’s people. Then you see them on Monday and they are the same bitter, lazy, manipulative, backstabbing people that you knew on Friday. Being around these folks does not conjure up any images that even vaguely resemble Christ. Here’s the kicker though. These will be the same people who are going to preach to you about your sinful ways and how you need to find Jesus. Are they just a little bit forgetful? Yeah, I thought so too.

Here are some more of my thoughts as I sit in my reserved seat in the back pew again. Part of our walk here involves a spiritual evolution within us; the result being that we continually grow closer and closer not only to Jesus but into becoming like Jesus. That is part of our purpose here. Part of the purpose of church on Sunday is so that we can look in the mirror again and be reminded of that. Let me put it this way. When we go to church services on Sunday, hopefully the result is that by the time we leave, we have looked into the mirror and have seen Jesus in our own reflection. The rest of the week, it’s our responsibility to ensure that what we saw on Sunday is what everyone else sees every other day. It’s very sad that we sometimes leave the Sunday service and almost immediately forget what Christ looks like.

One of the definitions of evolution is “the gradual development of something into a more complex or better form”. When I used the word evolution to describe this walk, it was a more realistic portrayal of what I consider to be the growth process in that I know that it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight or next week or maybe even in this lifetime. What I do know is that the more we focus on Jesus and his teachings, the closer we come to that change.