I'm afraid that in our day, we often live with a glaring contradiction. We want to know God. We want God to be real and we want life to have deep meaning. And yet we want all this without any serious cost or effort.
~ Stuart McAllister
Tonight at our fellowship potluck, we will sing "In the Secret" per Josiah's request, since he is the birthday boy and got to choose all the songs. I love that song and haven't gotten tired of it; but I've come to realize that it's a lot easier to sing, "I want to know you, I want to hear your voice, I want to touch you, I want to see your face," than it is to actually know, hear, touch, and see God.
Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). That is no easy call. So why do I keep trying to make my life easy?
I wrestle with this even in relation to my daily times with God and specifically this manna blog. Most of the time, I prepare these posts the night before and then auto-post them at 7:00 AM the next morning. The reason is simple: by nature, I am decidedly a night person. The house is quiet at night after the boys are in bed, I can think, I can take my time reading and writing and meditating, I don't have the deadlines that come in the morning ("four boys will be rolling out of bed in 15 minutes, and I need to grab some spiritual food before then! come on, manna!!"). It very naturally falls into my daily schedule and my body rhythms to spend this time at night with God, and then, during the day, to reflect on what I've written or what I'm planning to write. But it's easy (relatively). It is SO MUCH harder for me to force myself to go to bed early and to wake up early, and I'm left wondering: is that what I need to do? Or is this habit of daily time with God at night just as beneficial?
Before we resume our normal homeschooling schedule this fall, I do want to train myself to have an earlier-to-bed, earlier-to-rise schedule so that I can have at least a little time to myself in the morning before the boys get up. I don't want my baby's cries to be my alarm clock; I'd rather be up and dressed and past the first stage of morning grogginess before I need to attend to my boys. But should I realistically aim for 6:45, or for 6:00? Is 6:45 sacrificial enough? Does the cross I need to carry daily look like an alarm clock set for 6:00--with no snooze button to offer reprieve? :)
I don't know the answers yet; but I do know that I don't want to fall into that "glaring contradiction" that Stuart McAllister pointed out. When I say I want to know God, I want to be willing to go to any lengths to develop that intimacy, even if it demands "serious cost or effort."
