One of the most pervasive characteristics of our culture is the way we elevate our busyness. It is not uncommon in conversations with those from other companies or churches or ministries to throw in a few "humble brags" about how busy we are...I find myself falling to not that trap... oh, I'm "trying to keep up." Our culture puts an unusual premium on busyness and we elevate in our esteem, those who we perceive to be the busier ones among us.
This happens at many levels, but I speak especially of what happens in good Christian ministry. Our busyness becomes a machine, and we find ourselves continually maintaining the "machine" of our ministry, or our ideology, and we can no longer understand how God could do something other than the way WE are doing it. If something comes along that "may" truly be of God, we may listen for a while, but we are soon drawn back to maintaining the machine. It is unthinkable to us to turn off the machine and contemplate some other direction, some other "methodology," some other concept other than what we have clung to in order to keep our machine running.
I believe that is why we see so little of what I would call true "Presence Based Transformation" in the West, and in our country especially. For over a decade, God has been giving us example after example of what He is doing when people forsake all to pursue Him, but we don't see how it can fit into our machine, so it remains a nice, maybe even challenging example, but our mindset is, it can't work here, because it does not fit into our "machinery."
It is so hard to break free of the ways that we have always done things. It is hard for us to STOP and take time to listen until we really hear. I look around, and there are places of hope... but the vast majority of us are too busy and too occupied to hear when He whispers, or when He quietly slips in the door, waits for us to respond, and then moves on because we are just too busy.
Transformation will not come until we let go of those things, and learn to listen for His instructions, His voice, His presence.
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