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Joy and Really Being an End.

by Colby Joyner
9/24/2007 / Worship

This is my response to a recent weekend retreat:

I got back today from Fall Getaway and promptly crashed onto my bed for four or five hours. I never take naps, so it has made my level of "tired" pretty out of whack, as it is 11 pm and I feel like it's three in the afternoon. Either way, it was such a great experience.

I learned quite a few things at our retreat. For one, there is something worse than downing three gallons of diuretics with no bathroom in sight. What's worse is not being able to down any water for fear incited by the wretched smell of the stuff with plenty of bathrooms in sight. Camp McNeil is a nice place, for the most part, though. There's a miniature pirate ship and a big lake and plenty of ground on which to hide and scare people (I'm not saying that any of this happened).

One thing surpassed by this weekend was the thing that I thought hindered nearly all weekend experiences: pacing in restraint of time. You had to feel burnt out to accomplish anything or feel all right and barely got the ball moving. Hardly was the case with this year, for the timing of the climax still left me with satisfaction. We had ample time on that "high" at which we lingered without feeling too exhausted. With many other weekend events, I had felt more like a Flinstones Push-pop, knowing that everything was pretty sweet, but as soon as you hit anything solid, you're at the end. Quality increased in the same way here, but instead hovered over the "solid" layer, if you will, of spiritual swallowing to the point of being effective. Yeah, that's called the Spirit.

Anytime when you have something like this, human effort is going in to try and bring praise. But, we can't worry about our faults when having "planned" experiences with God. It's much like how you don't really have to worry about backwashing into mouthwash. I mean, it's self-clensing, right? Suck straight from the bottle! It's more than a mistake to believe that "forced" readings from the Word and such is like treating it like an equation. There will be an effect, and I believe anyone that happened to be at Fall Getaway can attest to that.

As with any one of these planned or forced or whatever experiences, the goal is not merely experience. The goal is the creation of longevity: the spectrum focusing on the eternal while practically working on the experience of tomorrow and the day after and the day after. The establishment of universal truths, such as those brought to attention factually by speaker Ed, allow for the continual sucking in of God's presence like a humid capsizing of all things sinful, as made possible by Christs interceding that is certainly not intermittent, rather perpetual and constant. The humidity of this is at its maximum when at any location or function like our getaway. The bubble is now popped, with us flying outwards fast, hitting the air and the friction known as outside world.

So, as we are abrased by ideas of global acceptance, compromise, and the instant yet fleeting gratification of the lost, have faith that you can allow for your own personal bubble to expand to that which is bigger than the world, entirely encompassing it, feeding on truth until each passing moment from top to bottom is lived with the constant seeking of the joy found in God for it is not fleeting, it is not limited, and it is not prone to corruption by our own imperfect backwashes of impure action and thought to the point of being able to completely assimilate Himself into mankind through Jesus and become sin to leave unscathed in order for us to do the same by faith alone. Your personal bubble is reinforced in size and relevance through these planned spiritual encounters. The trick is to make the plan the present. The present is intangible in a sort of way, though we rely on everything in it. It's an instant, and we can't even read "instant" without experiencing countless instants. We are just here to struggle to make those instants alive due to the passive qualities we can possess in Jesus. By passive I mean automatic, and by automatic I mean as constant as how you are loved.

One key of the last paragraph was "struggle to make." It's a struggle to achieve joy, because it is not you who achieves it. It's rather the loss of you, the dissolving of you under the tongue of something much greater, the speck of a dandelion caught in the breeze except that astronaut in space can see that speck, knows all about that speck, and loves that speck unconditionally. It's one of the most abstract things to put in one's mind, but when you can finally reach a peace at how you can experience joy from God by putting a lot of effort and trying, but not trying to fix the problem, you will be at such great rest I cannot encapsulate in one million pages. You cannot fix the problem, the effort of trying to fix it proves there is one. It is beyond you. This is so hard because in every other situation in life we are used to fixing things by putting effort towards the problem. We look for solution in terms of how the problem is set up, we read the question, we hear the stress of the situation and lock down based on past experience. Here we cannot simply function a solution out of the problem. The solution is infinitely greater and beyond the problem, so the effort cannot be put into the problem leading to a solution, rather the proven solution resolving all problems below it, including the greatest of all according to you.

This is why the jump to practicality does not work as a Christian. We're in a movement now that adores it, but any stepped-out method of how to reach God is empty without the understanding, accepting, and centering of oneself around the truths laying before you. Without those truths, it is as dead as faith without works. So, as the speaker said, Jesus is exclusive. Jesus is the way, and don't let your tendency to compromise make you think that through this way you are really respecting others' opinions. You know Truth. It would be the most disrespectful to act as if everyone is right while devaluing Truth to simply a value, simply an opinion.

So, if you want to know how to really break the bubble as to make one big enough for an entire life, center yourself around the Truths. Don't compromise. Treating others as valuable in themselves, as an end, is only really achieved by knowing what part of them is eternally valuable and is an end: their soul. Whoever considered the shallower idea of thinking of people as ends really meant letting them keep their false ideas never considered anything past dying. Those are the kinds who simply think we live to continue our existence, only with different people. Don't look past a soul, it's much more important than a smile.

Colby Joyner is a full-time student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington; he is currently studying Spanish.

He thoroughly enjoys getting feedback or comments on his works and can be reached at [email protected]

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