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Spiritual Inertia: Being stuck, and getting moving

by James Barringer  
3/29/2010 / Christian Living

A few hundred years ago, a fellow named Isaac Newton wrote what came to be called "The Laws of Thermodynamics." The first is that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, meaning that all the matter in the universe had to be created by something that does not obey the laws of nature, which is to say something supernatural. The second is that an object at rest will tend to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. There's a third but it's not important right now.

The second one is the one I want to focus on, because I find that my spiritual life has been characterized by two alternating experiences. First there is the experience of inertia. Picture if you will a soccer ball laying on a flat surface. The law of inertia says that it will most likely stay there. It won't go flying across the room unless an outside force, such as my foot, acts on it. I've gone through long periods in my life where I felt like I was that soccer ball, stuck in place. No matter how hard I tried to move closer to God, I just couldn't.

There are times, though, when I suddenly find myself flung into a tremendous state of spiritual growth, without meaning or trying to, as if God has come running up to me and booted me across a field. A few months ago I started reading the Bible and now I'm about to finish it in less than four months. I can't count the times I've tried to read the Bible and never made it past Genesis, and all of a sudden, for no good reason at all, I'm doing it.

It's not limited to spiritual things, either. I've always been self-conscious about my body size, because I'm pretty thin. For no good reason, I started exercising a few weeks ago, and have since put on several pounds of muscle. The change is noticeable and I like it. But as much as I like it, I'm left utterly baffled by the fact that I have tried similar things in the past and they have never worked. I have no idea at all why I'm sticking with it this time. God's boot to my rear is all I can come up with. I know I'm not alone in this, either, because exercising and eating right are the two most frequently-made New Years resolutions, half or more of which are broken by the time baseball season starts, according to the people who report these things.

Now we come to the difficult part, which is applying this to everyday Christian spirituality. I do a lot of reading, and most of the books and articles I read about spiritual growth basically say to try harder. They'll hide it behind pretty words, encouraging advice, and Scripture verses, but that's what it comes down to: stop doing what you're doing, and try harder to be better. There's a great "Mad TV" skit where Bob Newhart plays a counselor who charges five dollars a session because he's not good at what he does. When he hears his clients' problems, all he can muster is a flabbergasted, "Stop it!" I hear his voice a lot of the time when I read Christian self-help writing.

Don't get me wrong; there are a lot of good Christian authors out there, but I'm led to wonder more and more these days if God doesn't have some of us in a holding pattern for a reason. We're led to believe that constant spiritual growth is mandatory for anyone who believes, but in my life (and I would wager yours as well), growth is never constant. I flatline for a while and then I shoot upward when I encounter a problem that I need to grow through.

You have to admit that if God's goal were to grow us constantly, he would be beating us up constantly, confronting us with difficult people and difficult situations that demand we rise to the occasion. Yet he doesn't; he allows us to get into ruts, and he allows us to stay there for what seems like a disturbingly long time. Now, some people who are in ruts are there because they're comfortable and don't want to leave. Others of us are trying frantically to escape the ruts and we just can't seem to ever get it together.

How could it possibly be God's plan for us to stagnate? Well, he had the Israelites wander for 40 years in the desert, didn't he? He refused to remove Paul's thorn in the flesh, talked about in 2 Corinthians 9, didn't he? His reasons don't always make sense to us, but he has his reasons. Sometimes, I think, he wants to see how faithfully we handle what we have now before he tries giving us more - "You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things," Jesus says in Matthew 25. Oftentimes, it's not our fault at all. God may be preparing the situations that we're about to step into, the people that we're about to encounter. We perceive that we're stuck; God perceives that he's moving all the other pieces on the board into position, because it's not just about us, and shame on us for thinking it is.

Paul says to test yourself, to see whether you are really in the faith, so it's worth asking (if you're in a rut, anyway) if you're there because of complacency or if you're there in spite of your best efforts to lift yourself out. If it's the second of those, maybe you're just experiencing spiritual inertia. When that's the case, you can - indeed, must - lean on what you know, namely that God knows what he is doing, and that when you think he's forgotten about you, left your ball alone in the field, he's really just lining himself up for the perfect kick.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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