Longing for the Sea

If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.  

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery  

The pursuit of Christianity is often to make disciples of “our church.” Too often though, this focus modifies our focus and our message away from God and onto us. Or at least our group of disciples and the way we do things. 

  

Our message takes on the shadow of something like “you will really like our programs” or “our preacher with his golden tongue.” We sometimes offer the warning of God’s imminent return and his wrath toward all those who “didn’t believe.” Or, in our more magnanimous moments, we might offer that God loves those we seek and how they might return that love by believing in Jesus.  

Those are acceptable but not fully imbued with the call of our God. In short, we all too often short change the desires of God, turning Christianity into a contest for the greater number of bodies between God and the Accuser. We want larger churches, more baptisms, and well, the psychological satisfaction of being a member of that church.   

Sometimes our feelings of being “in” aren't so much of our church but of being “in” God’s group. We still feel good that we in some process have found ourselves securely placed in God’s world. I don’t know which type of “being in” is better but I suspect neither is overly Christian.  

If we are disciples of Jesus, our message is too small if it raises the possibility of being saved but stops short of enticing others into the world, the life, the work of God. That work of God? Nothing less than inviting and even enticing others into the best life, the best living, the best existence that is possible.   

Here’s the problem: if we have been “converted” to the earlier descriptions of our too-often expressions of the gospel, we can only convert others to what we have—membership in either the best church or the safe group of God. The good news is that it isn’t too late to grasp the real call—the call of our best life with God and sharing his work in the world.   

First though, we need to believe its possibility and then come to actually live it. Live it so that we can come to know its reality. Then, with knowledge that comes with and is grounded firmly in actual experience, we can if we will entice others not to conversion to a system of belief or even a safe place, but to their calling and to real Life as disciples of God. As disciples, our very lives push back against the kingdom of this world, extending the kingdom of God farther and farther into the world. The result is that the whole world becomes one People of God’s Lovers, welcoming all who will into the very same Life.

Do you have that vision? Can you look out over the world and actually feel the drive and goodness of God for the creation? Does it excite you; does it make you want to tell others about it? Could you, standing on the beach with the ocean lapping at your toes, entice others to the journey and to the distant shore the journey would lead? Are you one of those who hunger and thirst after righteousness not for your own accomplishment but because you know, down deep in your bones, that their pursuit is energizing and life-giving?

Only those who know the desire of God and his Life as a sailor knows the desire of the sea, can ever hope to draw others into that desire, that need to pursue the Life-giving God and his ways in this life, right now.

Photo by Cassia Tofano on Unsplash