If we open our Bibles with humble hands, we will find ourselves on every page. We would have grumbled about the fairly tasteless manna in the wilderness. We would have questioned Moses' leadership when pinned against the Red Sea. We would have been attracted to the culture and idolatry of the nations of Palestine. We most likely would have failed to recognize that Jesus really was the Messiah. We share identity with the people of Scripture, and because of this, there is really no struggle in our lives that the Bible fails to address in some way.
And the truth of the matter is that, like the children of Israel, we are all constantly worshiping something. This is the radical epicenter of the anthropology of Scripture. When we finally grasp this fact, we will no longer live in a bifurcated world of the spiritual and the secular. Scripture tells us that we are all worshipers. We are always in the pursuit of something and in the service of something to provide us with meaning, purpose and joy. If God isn't the central reason for doing all that we do, then something in the creation will be. It is an insight that is inescapable and profound. Every moment in life is spiritual. Every thing we do is theological. There is never a moment -- never a word, action or reaction -- that is not somehow shaped by whatever has claimed the allegiance of our hearts. There is never a split second that our hearts are not claimed by something. There is always some desire that rules us.
If we watch closely, we will see that all the stories in the Bible are ultimately about worship. The Fall is a drama of worship, and it is followed by a long string of worship dramas; that is, people allowing their hearts to be kidnapped by the creation and making disastrous choices as a result. Underneath the struggles of mid-life are dramas of worship as well. The crises of mid-life are not just about the surface issues of aging, regret, and lost dreams. These things alone would be fairly easy to deal with, but in reality, the real drama of mid-life takes place in our hearts. What we worship will make a huge difference in how we deal with the issues that almost everyone faces during the mid-life years. To the degree that our hearts have been captured by something in creation, even if we have yet to realize it, mid-life will be extremely difficult for us ... because it is these very things in creation that tend to slip through our fingers in the mid-life years. If we have looked to these things for life, they will start to fail us as we navigate the rocky shores known as mid-life.
Another critical tendency we have as people is to substitute the physical for the spiritual. As we see so powerfully illustrated in Exodus 32, it is very difficult to follow a god that we cannot see, hear or touch. Notice that when Moses, who functioned as the visible representative of God, was gone longer than the people of Israel thought he should be, they immediately turned to making a visible god that they could worship. Perhaps this migration takes place more often and in many more ways than we think. In subtle ways, mid-life reveals that we have replaced spiritual hope with physical hope. We too often have staked our well-being on things that we can see, hear, touch and quantify. When these things fail us or fade away, it often feels like life is leaving us as well.
If we pay attention, we will see this spiritual-to-physical shift all around us. Commitment to spiritual health gives way to a focus on physical health. Desire for physical riches replaces a gratitude for spiritual riches. Thankfulness for acceptance by God gives way to an anxious pursuit of approval from people. Physical food gets our attention more than spiritual sustenance. Spiritual character has trouble competing with physical appearance. Daily spiritual gifts from God's hands go unnoticed as we count our physical possessions. God's presence gets taken for granted while we gush over human love. Our identity in Christ tends to get less attention than our physical location and position does. The shift is everywhere around us, and it becomes a huge issue in mid-life. In mid-life we tend to assess the return on the investments that we have made. It is then that we get hit with the fact that we have invested our well-being in things that decay, can be stolen or fade with age. I seem to recall that Jesus had something rather profound to say about this in his Sermon on the Mount:
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal." Matthew 6:19-20
To be continued ...
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