For the last eight years of my life, I have primarily surrounded myself with people who would call themselves Christians. If they didn't identify themselves as a Christian, they at least knew in some form about the person of Jesus and the religion of Christianity and the rules that they were supposed to follow (because they were on a Christian campus).
In the past few months, I've found myself in the middle of two jobs that I love and hate.
Job number one: A young adults pastor at Evangel Church. I am the young adults pastor at a healthy and growing church. The staff here at this place are great. They support me and are patient with my unorganized, scatterbrained self. They are helping me get my feet wet in the church and I appreciate this opportunity. The young adults are great here. They are a random and sometimes odd mix of people, but they love God and seem eager to grow in that love. The part I hate about this job is that for a people that seem genuinely eager to grow, I don't know the best way to lead them. I do not know how to lead them into a lifestyle that is exciting, and purposeful, and fulfilling of all that God can accomplish through them. I don't know how to best help them unleash that.
Job number two: A "seafood expert" (server) at Red Lobster. This job pays better than the church, which is good because Sallie Mae and MOHELA are knocking at my door, waving documents with thousands of borrowed dollars that I'm supposed to repay them. This job is different everyday. Every day I encounter new people. Some days the money is good; other days it's non-existent. Some days my customers are super nice; other days a bunch of devils. It's different everyday...and for me, that's a positive. I also have great co-workers. They are a bunch of hazards, but I enjoy working with them and learning more about them. It has been an interesting dynamic as they learn that I am a "pastor" and how they interact with me. The one thing I hate about this job is that I don't know how to impact these people in a substantial way--in a way that changes their lives forever and introduces them to what Jesus has to offer. They are content in the lives they live; the sex, the money, the fun, thrills and getting wasted is all they want. It seems like they'll never want what I have, and I will never really want what they have. A classic standoff.
So for the past eight years I've been around Christian people for the most part. Now I've come to a place in my life where I have a challenge to take a large group of Christians and lead them in their following of Christ and to help develop what it means to love God, love others, and serve the world. I have the challenge to try to get these people to realize that being a Christian is so much more than feeling eternally safe and having a sense of entitlement from God. It's more than coming to church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights with other church friends and talking about God for awhile and then shutting down the spiritual thinking for the rest of the week. Being a Christian is what you are...and because of what you are, you then do.
To be quite honest, it's hard for me to motivate MYSELF to grow in my relationship with God at times. Sometimes, I'm the one that needs to be led. I'm the one who needs to be taught and shown what a real Christ-following life looks like day in and day out. I'm the one who needs to be convinced that living for God is more important than being content or comfortable or easy.
And that's why my other challenge is dually difficult. Because it is not comfortable or easy to try to live a Christian life with my co-workers at Red Lobster. It's hard to try to convince them to follow a God that I sometimes struggle in following myself. It's not comfortable to have to follow in the footsteps of Christians who have treated these people wrongly in the past and now that's why they have a bad personification of the Christian faith. It's not easy to bring up conversation that people will write off from the first word. But it's the situation that I'm in. And hopefully, because of what I am, then what I do will capture the attention of people and intrigue them just enough...
It's a struggle for me to find my purpose in it all.
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