The Rest of God by Mark Buchanan

Author:Mark Buchanan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

SABBATH LITURGY:

Finding Your Joy

If I live to decrepit old age, tottering in body and wandering in the head, I still think I won’t have deciphered an everyday mystery: how it is we seldom choose what’s best. How, given an entire orchard, we’ll choose the one fruit forbidden. How, invited into intimacy, we’ll settle for suspicion, and encouraged to speak truth in love, we’ll instead resort to gossip. How, told not to be anxious about anything but to pray about everything, we’ll be anxious anyhow, and more or less prayerless.

Some of the most gifted people I’ve met are also some of the most broken. Their giftedness has not led them to a place of serenity and thankfulness. It’s not led them to what’s best. In some cases, it’s led to barrenness: fretting, blaming, self-pity, envy, accusation. I know. I fight this in myself daily. My giftedness—modest as it is—has fed my insecurity more times than it has helped me vanquish it. I rarely rejoice in the times I think I have spoken or written well. It produces in me something more akin to panic: Can I do it again? Did I really do it then? If I’m doing well, why don’t more people say so? What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with me?

In quietness and rest is your salvation, God says. But we want to flee and amass horses, chariots, accolades, pats on the back—just about anything to bolster our sense of security and worthiness. But none of those things can. All they do is send us scurrying in the opposite direction. They just widen the hole we want them to fill. Like gluttony, insecurity’s appetite increases with every bite.

What a surprising cure God provides: to choose our own joy. God invites that, but with a caution: don’t mistake your joy for your druthers. This is not about getting your own way. This is not about indulging your own appetites or satisfying your own sense of justice. This is not about getting what you think is owed you.

This is about finding what is best.

In Luke’s story of Mary and Martha, Martha is all in a flap over what she sees as Mary’s laziness. Mary sits attentive at Jesus’s feet, while Martha wrestles the crockery, thickens the sauce, bastes the lamb chops, sets the table. Mary is oblivious, dreamy and serene, even though Martha is sending up smoke signals thick and menacing. She places the tableware with an emphatic clunk. She raps the ladle on the pot’s edge hard as a blacksmith nailing horseshoes. She sighs with a hiss like fire brazing water.

Still Mary doesn’t notice.

So the lid finally boils over. Martha vents her frustration on both Jesus and Mary: “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” (Luke 10:40).

Jesus gently chides Martha, gently commends Mary. But it’s his praise of Mary that should give us pause: “Mary has chosen what is better” (v. 42).

Mary’s choice is only better.

What would be best?

My guess: Martha’s industry joined to Mary’s attentiveness.

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