Don’t Be Chad.

Spiritual disciplines can show us God, but it’s easy to miss Him for them.

So recently, I’ve been getting those, “You have a memory on Facebook” updates just about every day now to remind me that a year ago I was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. I look back on all these pictures of me smiling and having a great time, but if I’m being frank, it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. It honestly kind of hurts to look back at it for a lot of reasons.

However, especially towards the end, I tried to lean into God to combat the hard times. I was already reading the Bible on a daily basis, but I wanted to come up with a full set of spiritual disciplines, or daily practices to connect with God. I was considering a range from prayer to meditation to worship to journaling. Eventually, I came up with a system where I would make a to-do list every morning, and then every day, I would read a chapter out of the Bible as well as a chapter from another book I was reading, which at the time was Scary Close. I felt really good about all this, but as time went on, I wanted to build more on this system, and yet I had a nagging voice in the back of my mind: Don’t be Chad.

However I kept developing this system, and this summer, I got crazy with it. Every day I would wake up at 7:40am, and spend 20 minutes reading a Bible app devotional, journaling, and making a daily to-do list. Then I’d get ready for the day, and bike to work while listening to a podcast on Christian leadership development. During the day at work, I would read a chapter each out of the Old and New Testaments, as well as a chapter each out of whatever two books I was reading at the time. Finally, I would bike home listening to the same podcast, and at home, I would watch a sermon while taking notes on it, altogether spending close to four hours a day on these disciplines. And all the time I was doing it, I kept thinking: Don’t be Chad.

I guess I should tell y’all who Chad is now. In high school, my youth pastor told me about his best friend, Chad. Apparently, he epitomized the spirit of “guys from San Diego named Chad.” I think he went to University of Colorado at Boulder, and during his time there, he got very involved with a few on-campus ministries, and very invested in his faith. That led to him to develop these crazy rigid practices of faith, like praying for two hours a day, and they helped him a lot for a while. He made what he saw as leaps and bounds in life, but eventually these disciplines got tiring, and finally, they left him exhausted and empty. One day, he collapsed to his knees in his bedroom out of desperation, and prayed, “God, why can’t I do this?”

Today, I got some homework back in my logic class, and realized I made an idiotic mistake. As such, I said out loud, “Wow, I’m an idiot.” My professor caught me off guard, and said, “No you’re not. You might have made a stupid mistake, but that doesn’t make you an idiot.”

The instant spiritual disciplines entered into my life, I knew they could get real unhealthy real fast. Frankly, I saw myself as a very flawed human being at this time last year. I took the littlest of mistakes to be indicative of massive character flaws at the heart of my being, and as shown by the story above, I kind of still do. I had it in mind to slowly but surely use these spiritual disciplines as the hammer and chisel to carve myself into the perfect human being. I saw those problems as the direct result of a lack of discipline in most cases, and I thought I could solve them by adding it in through sheer strength of will.

To finish that story about Chad, when he knelt down in his dorm room and cried out, “God, why can’t I do this?”, he heard God speak back to him, “Because I never meant for you to.”

2 Corinthians 3:18 says;

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

Now do yourself a favor and read that again, cuz Paul didn’t write at a kindergarten level, and it’s so easy to miss the point the first time. It’s not that spiritual disciplines (whether that’s prayer or reading the Bible or worship) are bad. Frankly, if you don’t currently practice any of them, you probably should. However, if you do start them, or if you’re already doing them, please take my advice, and don’t be Chad. Rather than a chisel and hammer for you to shape yourself up with, spiritual disciplines should be something that makes space in your life for God’s light and glory to shine through into your heart. He is the one who will change you to be more like Him, and all you have to do is turn yourself to look at His face.

I’m not going to pretend by any means that I’m very good at this; I wouldn’t be writing this if I was. I’ve become so habitually critical of myself in the past year. My mind constantly identifies what I do wrong, and then comes up with a new habit or discipline to fix it. If I keep that up, I will end up where Chad did; kneeling on the ground saying, “Why can’t I do this?” Frankly though, me picking up on this is another example of me critiquing myself. As such, I’m resolving right here and right now to not make any new spiritual disciplines to fix the problem.

Instead, I’m resolving to change the way I look at life. For one, I’m going to look to God first and foremost, and seek seeing His face above all else. For two, I’m going to look at myself not as a problem I need to fix, but as a prince of the Kingdom of Heaven, being raised up in the image of his Father. Finally, I’m going to look at journaling and reading the Bible and prayer not as tools, but rather, as opportunities to see the very face of God through the grace of the Spirit. And hopefully, “Don’t be Chad” will become more than a thought in the back of my mind, but rather, an attitude that I live with daily.

Like this:

Like Loading…

Originally published at theforlornemoose.wordpress.com on September 22, 2016.