Lenten Attention

I grew up as the oldest child in an evangelical home where I absorbed the idea that being good and doing things right was what life was about, what faith is about. I got the idea that I could “get it right,” should “get it right,” and that others—if they had half a brain and willingness to try—could “get it right” too.

It’s a long walk out of darkness.

One of my favorite “tutors” is Eugene Peterson and his earthy grasp of life, God, and faith. A favorite quote of his is “The assumption of spirituality is that God is always doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is already doing so that I can respond to it and participate in it and take delight in it.” (Interview with editor of Christianity Today)

Here’s the key: God is doing something—not me, not something I have to generate or work up. I can become aware and then respond, participate, and delight in it. That’s a reversal of my natural approach. Generally I’ve got to figure out what to do and then do it. Hopefully God will come along . . . and if I’m lucky he may even be pleased.

Listen to how Peterson renders the very familiar Romans 12 passage in The Message:

1 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. 2 Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. 3 I'm speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it's important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.

It feels different than what I used to see there: you take your life, you give it to him, don’t you be conformed, don’t you think highly of yourself.

No, instead I begin to see: God helping, embracing what God is doing, God brings the best out of you, God does it all, what God is, what He does . . .

There is something of me needed, attention to all of Him . . . yielding, joining . . .

As I become thrilled with Him, and God brings this too in me . . . I discover a by-product . . . I am being released . . .