Keep Yourselves from Idols

Ah, what a super fun title, huh? Keep yourselves from idols. I just finished Kelly Minter’s study on 1, 2, and 3 John, What Love is, which is excellent, by the way, and 1 John and the entire study ends on this verse,

Dear children, keep yourselves from idols. 1 John 5:21.

An idol is anything that you worship apart from the One True God. I want Jesus to have my entire heart, but I tell you straight, I am pretty darn sure I have many idols in my life. I have met some wonderful people online and have been changed dramatically by knowing them.

I don’t know if it was accidental, but one such friend included me on a voxer thread about creativity. (Voxer is an app that lets you use your phone like a walkie-talkie – essentially you can listen live to others talk to you or you can save the message in the queue and listen later like a voicemail. It is awesome.) Now I’ve been a mom twice as long as I was a worker bee, and I’ve stayed at home the entire time, but most of my life, I’ve put myself in the uncreative engineer box. Being included at the creative table, even though it was one voxer conversation, has rocked my socks off. 😉

One thing that was shared a few times was the importance of showing up with your whole self, with your whole heart. Living life fully present – without checking out. I am a highly sensitive person, so sometimes life is overly emotionally stimulating for me, and sometimes, when things get hard, I have to say, I check out.

Over the course of time, I’ve had the privilege to learn about grace and be given grace. With grace came the freedom not to be legalistic, but to live freely. With grace came rest, the ability not to be doing all the things all the time. Grace comes with boundaries, and so one becomes a fattened cow if one (namely – me) rests all the time. Things begin to go wrong. Too much rest can lead to laziness, and yet, rest is a gift God wants us to have. With grace, I think rest can be a mentality – a state of mind, more than just an action, but like I said, it could become an action of your own undoing.

• I am too busy “resting” on my phone that I cannot get you a drink of water.
• You are yelling at me, so I think I will hide out in my room for a little while, until a little while becomes never dealing with the problem.

Sadly those examples have been my real life. I check out – via social media, television, books, even at times, the busyness of doing things for others. Every day a million little ways, I don’t fully embrace my God-given life.

A checked out life is a sleepy life. A sleepy life is a life full of idolatry. A life without idols is an awakened life fully lived, enjoyed, and appreciated – a life where God is worshipped and adored, a life where all the good gifts God wants to give can be appreciated without distraction.

Stay at home mothering is at times unsatisfying to a person who was in her former life filled by affirmation through what she did (me), yet if ever my kids read these words, they would misunderstand. I feel like I wasn’t trained for this life. I constantly feel lost and affirmation is nonexistent. At 9, 7, and 5, they don’t yet affirm (I need to call my mother and affirm her 🙂 ), and their lives do not blatantly testify if I am doing a good job or not. Many days I feel I am not doing a good job. I fall short (sin) in so many ways despite all my best efforts. Every day I am aware that I need a Savior, but I still check out and zone into my idols – of entertainment, pleasure, affirmation, comfort, security, and the list is long.

We don’t train our smart girls to be moms any more, and I think this is a travesty. We need to teach our girls how to do this mom and wife thing so that when the days are rough, they will know what to do when they feel like checking out or quitting. Give them markers of affirmation so to speak.

I want more than what I have. I want to be a missionary or a writer or change the world. I wonder why my husband doesn’t want the same good things as me, or better yet, why God does not give them to me.

But I know why deep down. God loves me too much. To many or maybe even most, this is an unsatisfactory answer. But I know that my God will not be manipulated by my whims and whines. He is too good to do that. Too Holy. And He is longing for me to come with my whole entire self, not my checked out self. He wants me to appreciate the life He’s given me – cleaning the house acknowledging him as the giver of all I get to care for as I do. He’s given my children – each one I am to approach as if they are Jesus and serve them wholly, fully present – ready to get the water when it is needed, ready to play cards when I’d rather play on the phone or watch TV, or whatever I don’t want to get up from, ready to correct and teach, and yes, ready to say, at times, I need a break. But my breaks, at times, feel more than my works. Oh, the balance between all the good things. I need my Jesus and Father – God.

As Kelly Minter said in her last video of What Love Is, what does Mary of Bethany know about Jesus that I don’t know? Why is she able to offer everything she owns to Him so freely when she breaks open her alabaster jar?

Maybe she’s simply learned to come to the end of herself. All her idols have not made her life any better. Checking out has not led to any good thing. Maybe she wanted to live – fully alive, not half dead. Maybe she got tired of thinking she needed a way out of the life she was given, and realized that it was the sweetest thing having a servant-King to turn to for all of life’s most difficult questions. A servant-King who was fully alive, fully present and could not be manipulated by her whims or desires. A God who loved her so much more than she knew. Maybe she finally concluded that dying for a King was worth so much more than living for dead things that barely resembled God, and with that, she showed up for the life He’d given her once and for all.

I am still answering the question for me, but I want to be like Mary of Bethany. Alabaster jar spilled. Creative juices out. Love for others willingly. Life led by the Spirit.

Fill me, Lord, with your presence, and make me fully present in this life, so that You and only You are the breath I breathe, the manna I need, and the blood I sweat. Rearrange my heart until only You are my everything.