A Long-Term View

A devotional message from Elisabeth Elliot at Back to the Bible:

Title: Spiritual Equilibrium

Sometimes a hope or desire lays hold on one with such power that it becomes almost burdensome, even though the thing is a delight to contemplate. The ordinary business of life must be attended to, but this thing carries a lot of weight in soul, mind, and heart. It has a strong pull. And when you are carrying a heavy weight, you have to compensate in order to keep your balance. The best means to spiritual equilibrium, I find, is to look repeatedly at the things which are not seen, that is, at things which are eternal. What Evelyn Underhill calls "the pressure of the Divine Charity" forever urges me forward, counteracting the pressure of my emotions and human desires, reminding me with great patience and great persistence that this thing--this love, this longing, this huge desire--is the very thing God Himself gave, in order that I might have "somewhat to offer." He will see to it that it does not come to nothing, provided we lay it before Him, put it at his disposal.

Lord, all that I long for is known to you,
my sighing is no secret from you...
I put my trust in you, Yahweh,
and leave you to answer for me, Lord my God.
--(Ps 38:9, 15 JB)

For me, "this thing" which both delights and distresses is actually a combination of things, of hopes and desires that are quite entwined yet at times seem at odds with each other. As Ms. Elliot writes, the delight is in knowing that God is more than aware of these desires; the distress slinks in when I try to fathom exactly how and when He might work them out and consequently what I should be doing to get there. I am learning the balance.

An older, wiser person than I asked me where I see myself in ten years. "Have a long-term view. Where do you want to be 10 years from now? It will go by faster than you would ever think. Are you willing to plan, chart the course, and take the daily/weekly/monthly steps to reach your objective? If so, you will get farther in 10 years than you ever dreamed of. Of course you will have to give up good things along the way to get the great things (for God)."

What's my ten-year vision? To be educated, yet DEBT-FREE. That will probably mean that I work more and go to school less. But it's important to me that I have an education. I have too many unanswered questions. I'll take as many courses as I can afford to without loans and take full advantage of the libraries and well-educated brains in my life to learn unofficially whatever I can't at school.

Goals: to have thoroughly studied all the areas I wrote about earlier and be able to teach what I've learned to other seekers; to be actively serving in my church and community; to be fluent in Spanish and French; to have travelled abroad and lived in another culture. And to go skydiving. :) But for the cost of jumping out of a plane I could take two credits of course work. priorities...?

Desires:
Family
To be the godly wife of a godly husband and have children that we're both joyfully passionate about raising in the Lord; to be homeschooling and have our home open to travelers, studiers, small groups: LOTS of fellowship; to be a family immersed and serving in the body of Christ and the community and learning; to travel as a family and learn first hand about cultures, the outdoors, adventure, history, music, art, sports, science... The most important thing we can teach our children about is who God is, what He has done, how He loves them, and how they can be in relationship with Him; how to live as Christ did and love others.
Missions
To get my feet wet in short term missions, working with children, possibly long term.

John Piper writes in his 1980 end of the year sermon I Have Kept the Faith:

Numbering your days simply means remembering that your life is short and your dying will be soon. Great wisdom, great life-revolutionizing wisdom comes from periodically pondering these things.

Part of that life-changing wisdom that comes from numbering our days is humility and yieldedness to the sovereignty of God. James wrote to an arrogant group of people among the churches and said,

Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain'; whereas you do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that. As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

If we run away from the truth that we are a mist that appears a moment and then vanishes, if we try to keep this from our minds, then we will become arrogant and presumptuous. We will feel that we are the masters of our days and forget that every moment of life is owing to the free and sovereign will of God: "If the Lord wills we shall live…"

But, if we do not run away from this truth and instead, at least once a year (for myself it must be much more often), imagine that our death is near, then we will be humbled and moved to yield ourselves to God more fully and filled with a practical wisdom for how to live.

And in A Godward Life:

What matters is not that we do all we might have done or all we dreamed of doing, but that, while we live, we live by faith in future grace and walk in the path of love. The times are in God’s hands, not ours.

With this common conviction we will, God willing, embrace [life] with all the might that God inspires in us... May the Lord establish the plans of our hearts.

Amen.