Good intentions are keeping me from good works.

WARNING: This post may not make a lot of sense, the ideas I'm working on here aren't as of yet fully developed.

That being said...I was thinking the other day about words like "incarnational" and "works" and general ideas about the evidence of salvation displayed through the way in which I live my life. Alot of this thought has been brought on by my new job. Although I am thankful that I have a "really good" job that pays well, I find it hard to cope with the fact that I must spend all this time at the office and much of that time is spend not doing a whole lot. Sure there are bursts of activity and sometimes its really busy with projects and problems and fun stuff like that. However sometimes there's really NOTHING to do, and yet I'm still kind of expected to waste my life away sitting at this desk. I know I know i should get creative and all that and put that time to better use. So we can get into the ethics of corporate life and my responsiblity as a christian and a father and a husband and how my corporate schedule pretty much sucks most of my time away, but that is for another post.

The thing is that I have this desire to 'do something' for Christ and for others, and integrating that desire into the monolithic nature of my work schedule is really a pretty daunting task. I keep coming to the conclusion that I'm serving two masters and one of them has got to go. Now you may ask why I don't do anything about this breach of integrity that has seeped it's way into my life, and I would answer that I do, and that what I do has created yet another little trap.

You see to cope with the fact that I feel somewhat paralyzed by demands of corporate life and the middle class american lifestyle I often resort to good intentions. What I mean is that I'll think good thoughts and have good conversations at church or at bible study. I'll talk about the starving people in china and all that, i'll watch the compassion international videos on TV and send them some money, and I'll even go and meet with a homeless man in my neighborhood and help him out in some small ways with food and money and whatnot. You might say, well hey, that sounds good, sounds like your doing some good things. And I might agree with you, but still something doesn't feel right about it. Something is a little off.

Now obviously all the talking at church and at bible studies is pretty blatantly shallow behaviour. It's just talk, and it's main purpose is to make me feel better about myself, and to help me to think that since i'm spending part of my free time considering the things of God then somehow that makes me a good person. Most of the time the main purpose is to make other people think I'm smart, so you can see that is pretty much just pure sin. But the actual activities, the giving the helping, that's real right? I mean I only have a little bit of time left at the end of the day, and my family would like to see me some, and well, by the time i've met my minimal expectations for the day its 10 or 11 at night and i'm pretty tired, and at that point I still have to get my entertainment fix (which is also a subject for another post). So if I can manage to scrape together and hour or two here or there to help out a homeless guy or maybe dig a little (a very little) deeper into my pocket book to send some money to Ghana or whatever then what else can be expected of me right? My intentions are good, my intentions are to serve Christ with all that I have. And by my very american standards I have about 2 hours a week to give to him.

I think I may be putting a little to much weight on my intentions. In fact I think I'm letting the intentions associated with my actions completely redefine and exaggerate the significance of my acitons. I even think that sometimes at church or bible study when I talk about the suffering in the world and come up with brilliant hypotheses about how to alleviate it, I somehow actually convince myself that I have done something good. It's like I have some kind of guilt-o-meter in me, but it doesn't work very good. You see it's supposed to go off whenever it has detected that I haven't done much good stuff lately, however I can fool it by doing some pretty menial stuff and having really good intentions (like helping out a homeless guy but not really having any kind of plan that would require me to really get involved in this guys life), or even better I can trick it by simply talking about doing good stuff.

All of this obviously is a result of a severe lack of integrity in my life. And by integrity I mean to use the meaning of integrated. Meaning that instead of having a compartmentalized life with the bulk of the time being completely meaningless and then that time is sparsely peppered with a few bits of very over glorified acts of "good works". And even though I'm using the word integrity with the idea of an integrated life, by not having my life in this way I am basically suffering from all the same symptoms that any man who lacks integrity in the more traditional sense.

What I want is a life that has meaning, and not only that but that all of the natural and God ordained parts of my life would build upon each other to enhance that overarching meaning. I mean from what I do for money, to how I spend time with my wife and children, to how I spend time with my friends, my free time, my spending, my reading, my entertainment, my acts of service...why can't it all be driving toward the sigular purpose that I know I was created for and that is the worship and glorification of Christ... I have to find out how to live my life (meaning how to spend my time) better. Maybe the corporate gig has got to go, I definatly have to change how I relate to it. Not to mention I just have to get some kind of vision for some kind of life that is different that anything I've seen. Hopefully I can do more than than to just talk about it and have good intentions...