Two Masters (11-15-2006)

I started a blog at Blogger because I changed email addresses and forgot my password at Wordpress. Most of the stuff I've written over the years is kind of dumb, but some of it might be worth preserving. I'm copying it over here so that when I forget my login info again, I can just copy it from this one place.

 

I have been quite anxious lately. My faith is faulty and shaky, and I tend to get worried about things that are temporal and — often — beyond my control. I often worry about money, and I typically fail to entrust my life and well-being into God’s hands. I believe that this is a sin, and I catch glimpses of its effects in my sleepless nights, irritable disposition, and hopeless frustrations.

I’m reminded of a lyric from a Derek Webb song: I’ve got faith in the bank, and money in my heart.
I don’t know exactly what Mr. Webb had in mind when we coined the phrase, but this one catches me on several interpretive levels.

 For one thing, I feel like my faith truly is in the bank. This could be taken to  mean that I am keeping my faith tucked away for a rainy day, so to speak, and not relying on it for the day-to-day use. My attitude seems to be one which places a very distinct line between the areas of life that require faith and those that don’t; I tend to see the areas that I can control (or so I think) as those that are in my hands, and I reserve my faith for those areas that are beyond my control. Becuase I am quite proud, and I have been fairly successful to this point, the pieces that fall on my side of the faith line are piling up much more quickly than the pieces I let fall in God’s corner. My faith is stashed away in the bank, and it is starting to gather dust.

Another interpretation is that the object of my faith is the bank. My faith is not in God and His sovereign providence, but rather in the institutions that do not have my best interest at heart.
Either way, I am guilty. The object of my faith is often wrong, and I tend to lean not on faith, but rather in my own limited understanding.

The second idea in the lyric hits me pretty hard as well. I am guilty of serving two masters, and I end up loving one and resenting the other. Too much of my time is spent thinking about money — planning ways to make more, dreaming of the stuff I want to buy and all the extra stuff I could buy if I had more money, and worrying about the money I have (or don’t have, as the case may be). All of this gets in the way, and all of this takes my eyes off of God and His glory.

Actually, scratch that; I am shifting blame again. These are not the cause of my averted gaze, but rather they are symptoms of a condition I have long pursued. It is because I have looked to the idol of wealth and trusted in it to provide peace and solace that I am now struggling to appease it once more. The demands it makes are great, and the rewards are fleeting, at best, and can be seen in the musty cardboard boxes lining my basement walls. I often trip over them, and curse my cluttered life, but when it comes right down to it, I continue to stay awake at night dreaming of ways to increase my clutter. I am a foolish person who is easily trapped by the same snares that I vow to avoid.