On Creating Crises

Steve Timmis has a good post at the elephant in the room blog. Steve is touching on one of my old complaints about church people. Everybody wants to be your comforter. The whole idea of church life, they seem to think, is to find out what's hurting and pray for that. Nothing makes them light up more than to hear that you're feeling down, or you have some back pain, or your job is boring. It gives them something to "intercede" about!

I hope I'm not sounding too awfully cynical here. I certainly do appreciate prayer, but I think we're training ourselves to be perpetual spiritual invalids, rather than forgetting ourselves and getting involved in the mission of God in the world around us.

Anyway, as I say, Timmis is touching on that same matter. He writes:

So whereas once Christians were commended because of the way they faced persecution and death, now we face a day at the office with the same degree of trepidation — and sue God for copious grace with the same degree of urgency!

I love what Timmis goes on to say. In my opinion, it's a lesson many of us need reminding of:

Why do our lives have a tendency towards ‘heaviness’, worthiness and intensity? We could rephrase that: why do we create crises?
Part of the answer has to be that, by and large, we don’t really have any!
That sounds like it could be a good thing, but crises are one of the ways we justify our existence. They are the way we give our lives meaning and significance. They somehow make us important, or are a means of soliciting sympathy.
But part of God’s glory is that he is the God of the insignificant, the mundane, the trivial and the incidental.
In Christ we thrive in the normality of our lives, and by creating constant crises, we rob God of the glory of his superabundant grace for the common man.

Read the whole post and let me know what you think!