Is always good to take stock of our journey and notice where we have come from, we are, and perhaps reflect on where we are being taken. One area I have been pondering lately has been the slow but nevertheless fading need to attach myself to someone who is visible and the flavor of the month or better yet the season.
You see for years, like many of us do, I too chased after personalities. You know superstars in the Christian world. These ranged from those that were really popular already or on the way to becoming seen and important. Time after time I spent truck loads of time and energy listening and promoting the work these people did. I liked everything they put out on Facebook and Instagram as well as shared what I could with others.
This merry go around continued until suddenly I either found someone that in my estimation was better or perhaps more complete than the one I was currently chasing. This shift normally happened when I suddenly found that my super star was somehow not “doing” it for me any more. They were either not entertaining me the way I thought they should, a weakness had shown up in their lives or message, or perhaps their work had not spread as fast or as wide as I thought it should in order to merit my continuous allegiance. You know their sell by date had come up so as far as I was concerned it was time to up sticks and move along to the next seasonal flavor.
As you can imagine after many of these cycles taking place I began to notice that perhaps the problem was not with them or their message but instead it was with me. As I listened to my confessions about this faith journey of ours I realized that I spoke a lot about brokenness and the importance of it in a mans life yet when I saw my super stars brokenness I swiftly moved along to another one that seem to be whole and strong. I saw how I passionately shared about God being strong when we were weak yet when I saw weakness on my super star’s life or message I moved on to the next one that I felt seemed strong and popular all of the time.
If this too is your experience I would like to invite you to consider that if you find that you are constantly changing the person you listen to or follow then the problem is more likely to be with you than the ones you have left behind? Consider today, as I have, that experiencing this merry go around in our life could be a strong evidence that we are looking for a father or perhaps for someone to give us what ours didn’t but was supposed to. Clearly there is nothing wrong with listening and learning from a variety of people and passing that on if it is helpful, however discounting people altogether because a new Captain America has been found is not healthy nor Kingdom inspired. Clearly one may suddenly find more familiarity with someone else’s message however this is not the same as removing your embassy altogether, if we can use this term, from their country. Over time inevitably people are going to show you their blind spots so it is very important for us to understand that thinking that there is someone out there without one only helps to show how big ours is.
No man alive or dead will be be able to fulfill the role a father didn’t. Only God can heal and play this role when our father is absent from it. Going from one man to another is evidence that we are looking for someone to follow and that the reason we are doing this could be because the one we are supposed to, if we can be honest enough, is perhaps not as real to us yet as we would like him to be.
Remember – In the Kingdom there is only one middle man and his name is Yeshua.
-pablo-
Photo by Dreamsurfer
