RESTLESS

     Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) prayed, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."
       I think our (U.S.) culture and WORLD has seen enough of this restlessness: of all the things we try after rejecting or losing sight of the truth that ONLY JESUS offers REST for our burdens, STRENGTH for our weakness, HEALING for our brokenness. We think we know better in our culture of Political Correctness and Death, but what has it gotten us? Higher rates of death as a result of high blood pressure, obesity, drug addiction, sexually-transmitted diseases. We have become a culture that says ANYTHING goes, and it HAS: our MORALITY, our sense of RIGHT and WRONG, our ability to DISCERN TRUTH over FALSEHOOD!

        In our rush to not wanting to "offend" anyone, we have brushed aside every  kind of personal and spiritual/emotional boundary that God gave to protect ourselves and our nation from spiritual and emotional suicide.  We are  indeed restless, but have forgotten what we are restless for.
We have become a nation lost in "recovery" but think that that consists of talking about our addictions, hurts and lostness endlessly, rather than of seriously searching for a - the -  ultimate cure to our restlessness and (inner as well as outer) strife - the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of the Bible - whom we have casually - if not malevalently tossed aside, but who is yet constantly calling us back to Himself - back to true love (as opposed to lust and superficial feelings, which is what we major in as a society). C.S. Lewis once said that we don't want more love but less. By this he defined "more love" as the sculptor working his creation until it is what s/he sees it to ultimately become, not a thumbnail sketch, but the statue of DAVID! If that creation were to speak, it would often cry out, "OUCH!" as it was being molded carefully into the masterpiece it was intended to be.

        We want to be - or say we are - those "masterpieces" - but with the painless work that creates a thumbnail sketch! More love is the masterpiece that requires a LOT of painful & uncomfortable work, which we reject and disdain. But that is the kind of love that God gives: not the superficial, five minute, "how to be happy in 3 steps" approach of our culture, but the painful stretching, the uncomfortable molding of our character that produces true rest and recovery! I'm speaking to myself as well - believe me! As Paul said, "Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me... I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." (Phil. 3: 12 - 14).

       Until we have this character in ever-increasing degrees, how will we be able to offer hope to others in this lost and dying world? That doesn't mean we have to be perfect before we influence!  No!  Just that we are increasingly willing to cooperate with His Spirit so that there would be "less of us and more of Jesus" for the world around us to see our difference in order to ask how to find that peace they see in us, so that we may share how they too can be relieved of their restlessness.