Crazy Holly's Going-out-of-Legalism Sale: Everything Must Go! (Part 2)

Let's see, we were talking about the conflict between the desire to do something and the desire to enjoy what I do... one option was no fun, the other just seemed stupid... OK, here we go:

There I was, stuck. I had been doing OK keeping the guilt at bay over Christmas vacation, till the day I came back to Boston. Maybe it's because I hadn't done much while I was home (although being lazy had been my plan from the beginning), or having to get back to my regular life, or having to leave family again, but I was bummed and felt guilty. Then, the next morning was church and the sermon was about Jesus' parable of the three servants who were entrusted with varying amounts of money by their master -- were they good stewards, or did they do nothing with what they were given? I didn't want to be a lazy and wicked servant. Crap! So I went back for prayer, as I often do. I gave just a skeleton of the situation -- not happy with current circumstances, feel a need to get moving, but have this legalism problem so not sure what to do. I phrased it in a way that would lead a person to advise action. But the girl wasn't there to advise, she was there to pray, and there's a big fat difference. Prayer requires listening to God. Everything she said had to do with patience, with waiting on God and trusting Him, with focusing on Him and letting Him deal with everything else, with letting Him lead the way and following Him instead of running ahead. It was what I had wanted to hear for a long time, but I had to hear it from someone else; I wasn't going to simply tell myself what I wanted to hear, because that felt... I don't know, like cheating somehow. (I don't yet trust myself when I have a strong preference but am not sure if it's the right thing.) This prayer convinced me that sitting tight for a while was OK. Now my plan, for the time being, is Inaction.

Here are a few things I believe:
It's possible to hear from God, both directly and through other people.
God is more concerned with the condition of our hearts and our relationship with Him than He is with what we do; motives outweigh results.
Unless the Lord builds the house, the workers labor in vain.
Prayer makes a difference.
There is always a godly way to handle a situation, but it's not always the way that appears righteous on the surface.
Sometimes God asks us to do things that seem dumb.

I don't believe in utter passivity. I have a couple metaphors that might help people understand what I'm up to. If Legalism is West and License is East, then I'm heading East. That doesn't mean I'm doing to drop off into the Atlantic; it just means I'm heading that direction in an effort to find the middle. Or maybe it's like straightening a trombone slide (something I know a little about). If it's bent, you can't just push it till it's straight; you have to bend it in the wrong direction until it finds straightness (is that a word?) on its own. So maybe I'll go a little too far in the opposite direction. Right now, I'm nowhere near being in danger of going way too far, and if I spend my time worrying about it, I'll play it much too safe.

I've gotten confirmation that I'm doing the right thing from a couple friends I trust. I don't believe they would be blindly supportive if they thought I was making a bad call. The biggest confirmation for me, though, is my own state of mind: When I think of all I would have to do to construct a more satisfying life for myself, and all the obstacles and rejection and self-discipline and mistakes, it makes me not want to try at all. A few years of failure was enough to cause me to lose all faith in my own ability to make myself happy. But when I think of letting God figure things out and bring goodies my way as He sees fit, then I have hope. I get excited about the future, and am able to enjoy the present. That in itself is a form of happiness.

I don't expect it to be easy to explain to people why I'm not taking the good advice they offer. That's OK. If I'm right and this is all God's idea, He'll come through eventually. Then it will be obvious that He was the one who made it all happen, not me. Most importantly, I'll know I can trust Him, and can rest the weight of my hopes on Him. In the meantime, I'm trusting Him by waiting.