“All things truly wicked start from innocence.” –Ernest Hemingway
Just yesterday I was looking over my 118 pages of poetry from this past year. Yeah, poetry happens to me… a lot. It’s not always very quality poetry, but it is the equivalent of my diary and I write about everything I’m experiencing and going through. It helps me process. Anyways, I noticed that there was one rather major topic I hadn’t really explored in my poetry: my relationship with God. That shocked me. I’m a Christian and God is important to me. At least, He’s supposed to be. He should be at the center of my life. What it was that had separated me from Him was simple, really. Apathy. I was becoming lukewarm.
I feel as though a lot of Christians calmly accept that they’ll go to church on Sunday, hear a good message, maybe read a devotional every once in a while, and pray the Lord’s Prayer from time to time, but, eventually, all of that fades away. Piece by piece, layer after layer, is peeled away. You take a step, then another and another. And it all adds up. One day you’ll come up gasping for air and realize how far away you are from God. And, sometimes, this gasping doesn’t happen. Sometimes the patient etherized upon the table never awakens.
I think the real truth behind why we get apathetic is that we secretly want to keep on sinning. We don’t want to hear that still small voice nagging. So we ignore it, bury it by turning up the music, running around all day always doing doing doing, using up every second in the day for you, not God. Sorry, God, I haven’t got time to talk today. Maybe tomorrow I’ll read my Bible. Maybe tomorrow I’ll pray. Maybe tomorrow I’ll donate some money to charity or something. Maybe tomorrow. We slowly move ourselves to the center and God just ends up in some tiny corner wherever it’s convenient. When your Christianity becomes a dull routine, then you’ve got a problem.
It is a wicked thing in every sense of the word. Maybe you think I’m being a bit extreme, but we innocently walk into this trap almost every time it is lain out in plain sight for us. Why is this? Another major cause of apathy is that boring seems far safer than God. But God never promised us benign bliss. I think a lot of the time we say that we know this, that we’re ready for any trials and challenges that will come our way, but at the first bump in the road, we want out. We want to stay in our tiny little comfort zones.
But, like the father of the prodigal son, God will come out to meet you once you’re ready. He’s not leaving you stranded. You just have to be ready. You have to be willing to turn away from your sin. You have to be ready to topple the idol of you. That’s the key.
