Spiritual Change

This blog post is about spiritual change. I was getting ready for bed last night, and I just knew I needed to pray. So I did. It wasn’t anything earth shattering. No chance that the prayer would be published as some example of poetic greatness. Instead, it was just an acknowledgment that I could not keep on living the “Randy” life. Don’t get me wrong. I lead a very privileged, very easy life. Very little bad or negative actually happens in my life (most of my problems, I realize, are actually worry about problems that haven’t or aren’t taking place—and most times just don’t happen). I am by no means complaining.

However, I’ve come to realize it’s not the life that I was meant to live. I was meant to live like Christ. So what does this mean? Are things going to change? Absolutely. I need to be conformed to the image of the Son. Oh, I’m still going to live at my same address, have my same family, operate this blog, go to school, and I even still have the same aspirations. But I can’t do it for me. I’ll certainly enjoy the fruits of life, and whatever labor in which I engage. But the “best life” (pardon the terrible theology behind how that phrase is most commonly used) that I can be living has to do with bringing honor and glory to God in everything that I do.

It’s why we need a robust theology of work, theology of calling, theology of life. It’s why we need a philosophy that is thorough, well thought-out and that honors and reflects God’s thoughts, as he is the ground of truth. Make me more like your Son, Jesus Christ. The journey starts anew for us every day. The biggest challenge we face is not external activity to change, but the second-order capacity to want to change.

A few recent books I have been reading, as well as the Holy Spirit, have prompted this. Within this prompting (and reading), I’ve seen that the reason we don’t often change is because we don’t work on (and allow ourselves to be worked on) at the “lower orders” of capacity. For an example, we can’t quit caffeine because we haven’t examined the second-order issue of why it is that we feel we need caffeine, or what is bringing it around. Perhaps it is a lack of sleep (second-order), and perhaps that lack of sleep is due to a schedule that is too full (third-order), and perhaps that is due to a failure to organize time properly (fourth-order), and so on. Maybe small, baby steps, and growing very slowly, are the ways in which most of us will do most of our growing. What will you do? Share your comments below!