It is important to realize that the struggles we face in our midlife years are a window to the deeper, more fundamental struggles of our lives. If this is true, and in my last my blog I made the case for this, that we tend to replace spiritual realities with physical/material realities, then it easily follows just how physical aging can become such a huge emotional and spiritual struggle for us. The fact remains that we were never meant to get our identities from our physical bodies, but clearly we do. We were never meant to get our sense of security and safety from our physical bodies, but nevertheless we do. Our physical strength and health were never meant to be the source of our hope, but they oftentimes are. The take home message really is this: our struggle with the changes that occur to our bodies during midlife and beyond reveal the idols that have been with us for a very long time. Aging just forces them up to surface. Many of us [myself sadly included] need to confess that we have not been functionally trusting in God at all. And when the thing that we have been trusting in [our physical body, our mind, our craftiness, our income, our relationships, etc.] fails us, we become sad, angry, envious, discouraged, obsessed and even depressed.
Yet physical things still have a great power to seduce us. Because our hearts are deceitful, they easily migrate from worship of and service to the Creator, to worship of and service to the creation without us even perceiving it. There are at least five great dangers inherent in this.
First, and most obvious, is that physical things are impermanent. Everything that is physical decays, grows old, grows stale, wears out, or falls apart [this is the second law of thermodynamics after all and these are laws that are never broken]. Nothing that we look at today will be exactly the same tomorrow. Despite their appearance of permanence, physical things are really transient and unpredictable and thus are a really poor place to place our hopes. They will always fail us in the end.
Secondly, physical things are deceptive. They may appear to deliver what they cannot, in fact, deliver. This why there are so many Scriptures that refer to idols as having "eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hear, and mouths that cannot speak." Jeremiah even says that we have to nail them to a platform or they fall over, and that we have to carry them around because they cannot walk. Every promise of every idol is a lie. For all their perceived attractiveness, they cannot give us what it is that we are looking for. It can never happen. So to seek life in idols are acts of personal and spiritual insanity. It will never be found. Still, sadly, even that head knowledge too seldom stops my wayward heart.
Physical things are impersonal. Worship in its purest form is a relationship. Each of us were created for relationship with God. These are meant to be personal relationships of communion, love, allegiance, worship, dependency; and obedience is meant to be the axis on which our individual worlds revolve. Our worship of God is meant to be intensely personal. Our spirits are to connect with the Spirit in a communion so profound that there are not even words to describe it. We as people were made for this foundational connection of spirit to Spirit. Trying to replace this with things that we can see, touch, taste, feel or use, but never have relationships with, robs us of our essential humanity.
It probably should be noted here that we have some degree of control over the physical things in our lives, even our own bodies [I will grant that as we age there does seem to be a progressive loss of this control]. But we can alter the shapes and conditions of our bodies with diet, exercise and even plastic surgery. We can invest in makeup or a new wardrobe. To a degree there are things we can control. But we cannot control God or our relationship to Him. Thus, proper worship involves not only putting God where He belongs but also surrendering control of our lives to Him. This is where the seduction of impersonal things come in ... they put us where we are in control, the place where all sinners want to be. And this is probably the greatest allure of idolatry and also its greatest danger. We were never meant to be in control, and when we are, we just about always make a big mess of things.
Physical things are enslaving over time. This is probably the cruelest trick of idolatry. What we think we have under control is, at that very moment, in the process of enslaving us. Our desires for physical things morph into "needs," and when they do, we become completely convinced that we cannot live without them. We see this dynamic play out as people relate to their own bodies ... what was once a desire to be fit morphs into an all-consuming time and money-draining life focus. A desire to be slim morphs into anorexia or into an unending pursuit of the next miracle diet. A decision to have a cosmetic surgical procedure morphs into a sad obsession with altering the very looks and shapes of our bodies. A desire to look nice morphs into a constant anxiety about our appearance and an unrelenting envy of those who look like we wish we did. This enslaving, addicting quality of idolatry is ignored at our peril.
Lastly, replacing spiritual things with physical things is deadly. What is the danger of worshiping physical things. Consider the metaphor of the caged canary taken deep into the earth with a group of coal-miners. They keep a careful watch over that canary, knowing full well that if the canary starts gasping for breath or dies, they have precious little time left. These miners of old knew that breathing any gas other than oxygen wasn't an option; to try to do so would lead only to death. In the same way, it is critically important that we remember that life is only found in the Creator. And any physical thing that appears to be life-giving is only an illusion. Jonah said it this way, "Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs."
In summary, the struggles of physical aging, which so often comes to the forefront during midlife, are the reflection of a much deeper struggle. It is essentially the struggle of struggles for our hearts. There will be a day when this struggle is finally over, and God will own our hearts unchallenged for eternity. But today that struggle continues. So God, in the grandeur of His redemptive love, will do what is necessary to reclaim our wandering hearts. These painful moments are neither the result of His unfaithfulness nor His inattention; they are rather the products of His lovely grace. He loves us with an eternal and jealous love. He did not shed the blood of His Son for us only to lose us to some physical thing in the creation.
God fights for us with the full might of His redemptive hand. He is willing to make us uncomfortable and sad. He is willing to bring us through suffering and grief. He is willing to shake us and unsettle us. He is willing to squash our dreams and deflate our hopes. He is willing to let what ever we have craved for [that is not from Him] slip like sand through our fingers. And He does all of these things because we are precious to Him. He will not allow us to live in the delusion that what we have found elsewhere what can only be found in Him.
So, in the end, our struggles with physical aging are really the struggles between idolatry and grace. The Lover of our souls is using the occasion of midlife and the realities of aging to expose and deliver us from the idols that resided in secret and ruled us unseen. We must reject the self-pity, envy and discouragement that occur so commonly at this time. We should look to heaven and be thankful. We are, in fact, being rescued. We should celebrate the One who again and again delivers us from what we, by ourselves, are powerless to escape. And we can join Paul in saying, "Yes, outwardly I am wasting away, but I have real hope and real joy, because inwardly I am being renewed day by day." For what life is really about can never be weakened by age or destroyed by years!
No comments:
Post a Comment