Change in the new year {PART TWO}

{READ PART ONE HERE.}

I had a real “being-before-doing” experience fairly early in my Christian ministry life.

More than 30 years ago, I came on staff to a church with strong, life-giving, God-glorifying worship. It was in Nashville, with many from the early contemporary Christian music industry in the body there. Worship could really feel like a premier concert if you let it, but the church attended carefully to encouraging real personal engagement, not a performer-audience mentality.

In my own Christian walk, I was really desiring greater intimacy with the Lord. Church life included many great encouragements in that walk, but I found myself doing good stuff that just didn’t ‘stick’. I didn’t see it making a different me.

With the many gifts which the Lord had brought to that church body, a number of the worship songs were original verbatim scriptures put to music. In my desire for a closer walk, I pursued – without calling it that – a being before doing strategy with those worship songs.

I marked those passages in my Bible – in the Psalms certainly, but also Jude, the Timothy doxology, Philippians 2, Revelation 4 and 5, and many others. In my personal reading and study, I would often move into quiet worship with those words. It connected me and my study to the Word, to experiences I had had within the church body, and to the Lord Himself.

That’s “doing” of a sort, but it’s also importantly a different thing to “be”. I wasn’t a “doer” so much as a worshipper, an experiencer, a pursuer of the Lord, a glorifier, a “be-er” of a certain sort. It offered perspective and motivation which I didn’t have in the doing alone.  

That was new for me in a lot of ways. My walk with the Lord grew closer, more vibrant, more real. The “habit” of worshipping through the Word as I read and studied helped unify and empower my walk.

There remained many ups and downs but, as a whole, those came in closer fellowship with God. I was in a great place to be doing good things for intimacy with the Lord,  but I experienced it when I started “being” something new.

Last week’s blog post considered being before doing when pursuing change in the new year. I applied it to common New Year’s Resolution examples of weight loss and procrastination.

Obviously, today’s example of intimacy with God is a very different kind of change to pursue in your life. That one came from several years back for me, certainly not once and for all but definitely a transforming experience for me. I’d also like to have one that is very much “today” and “tomorrow” for me – unfinished; in many ways, just started.

The last change area is a current interest, desire and commitment for me. I want my relationships with others to be about real connection and include more investment of myself.

I relate to others. I know many. I serve a lot. But my connection is too often more shallow than God’s best for relationships. I give time and energy and sweat and service. I don’t give as much of me in the daily give and take as I could to have the richness of connection which God can work.

I know it, but I rarely do it differently. I’m convinced being has to come into play. But being what?

Much in relating is about personality. Different people wired different ways do it differently. Some emote a lot. Some talk a lot. Some don’t. Some play together. Some work together. Some learn together. Some explore together. You can’t connect if you don’t do some of it, but no one can do all of it.

That’s not what it takes to relate deeply, fulfillingly, connectedly. It takes sharing. Both selves. Many selves. Sharing themselves with others.

Without that, you can be of service to others. You can have affirmation of others. Building up of others. Protection of others. Teaching of others.

But without mutual sharing, shared sharing, you don’t get true connected relationship. I don’t get it.

So, how do I grow in it? Just beginning to grow in it some more at this season in my life, I won’t be presumptuously claiming to know all about it, or even to know confidently about it.

I do know what I’m trying though, and it seems to begin to be working.

My place to grow in being is to be one in the habit of resting or refraining from the task long enough to share things not on the ‘to do’ list. Some of you can hardly imagine how not to relate that way,

But even if it’s natural for you, there still come times when you have to make a choice to share in the difficult times and with the difficult subjects.

For you, without sharing beyond the task, it hardly seems worth doing, or fun, or personal, or caring or even polite.

I can imagine it. I can do it all the time. That is, relating without sharing. Serving and caring at a distance. Giving out but not giving of myself.

I want to be more one who sees that distance getting in the way of the relating that I honestly want to do. It’s not protection; it’s not polite reticence; it’s not humility; it is less than God’s best in connection with His fellow image-bearer.

That’s where I want to grow in being. That habit takes practical investment of time and self and even a degree of uncomfortable disclosure. But that person I want to be recognizes the value of what is won in relationship for those commitments of time, self, and even comfort zones.

I’m trying it. I’m trying. We’ll see how it goes. If it’s a journey you want to be on, I pray it goes well for you, too. I think it’s worth doing. I think, even, that it’s something I can be confident God is doing even when I’m not. He is about that work of connecting me to others and them to me. He is there, about His work of building His body. I would so like to join Him more often in that masterpiece work!