Virtually Paul

Paul to the Max(ima)

December 7, 2006 on 10:26 pm | In Faith, The Life of Paul |

Well, I finally took the plunge and got rid of my 626.  I’m now quite pleased with myself, now that I own a used Nissan Maxima to get around in.  I reckon I got a reasonable deal too.

So I’m back on the road again.  No more trains to work.  No more scabbing lifts.  I can successfully spend this entire weekend bouncing between the eastern and north western suburbs of Melbourne.

What I found most interesting about the new car experience, was how much I actually tried to spiritualise it.  You might get the wrong end of the stick with this comment if you’re not all that familiar first-hand with Christian teaching… so leave a comment if you have any questions.  Here’s the story…

After a reasonable degree of whinging and indecisiveness about my old car, I stopped and realised… ‘I haven’t prayed about this one’.  Now that’s not a legalistic faith requirement.  I don’t have to pray about anything.  But if you want something and you believe in a supernatural, all-powerful creator of the universe… it seems logical to ask for stuff that you need.  So I did.  And two weeks later I have a car, not because a magic pixie appeared on my doorstep… because I went to a caryard and bought one.  Nonetheless, I did the same thing a month ago and found no suitable cars in about 10 different yards.  Divine intervention?  You tell me.  I’m open to suggestions.

Now, I’m really thankful for the car.  It will make my life a lot easier.  I’m thankful for the provision of a job that I love and for the finances that seem to have accrued themselves without that much careful accounting on my part.  And yes, I said ‘thankyou’ to God for the car.

At the same time, part of me felt like an idiot.  See, if I’m really tuned in to this whole God thing, even though God is definitely going to be interested in the mundane details of my life, I felt like a bit of a hypocrite for making such a faith ‘thing’ out of this car.  I don’t want to appear self-righteous, like the americans in one of those Amazing Race teams that go out of their way to call themselves Christians and keep asking God out aloud for divine intervention to help them win the million dollar prize (at the expense of all the other teams).

There’s nothing wrong with me being thankful to my God for the small stuff.  There’s nothing wrong with the idea that God cares about the small stuff.
But there is something wrong when our big investments in spiritual connection with God come at a time when it suits us… when we have a material gain in focus… or when a relative is in hospital or something.  From a biblical perspective, God is going to accept you no matter when you decide to turn to Him.  So I’m not saying that we have to try and make ourselves adequate before God.  What I am talking about, is avoiding a personal hypocrisy, which comes closer to being religious than having faith.

From my personal perspective, if I’m only interested in God as an extension of being interested in myself, I may as well cut down on active expressions of faith altogether and embrace an illusion. I could just be toddling along to a random church for Easter and Christmas, comfortably calling myself a Christian and completely missing the point at the same time.

This, I think, is one of the big reasons why people don’t want to pay attention to God.  It’s because they know it will cost them something.  Usually they think that the cost will be church attendance - but it doesn’t have to be about an institutional church if you don’t want it to be.  That’s between you and God.  Church participation is not the cost.

The cost is that you can’t have your spiritual cake and eat it too.