Lacking

This past weekend, CCM hosted the first-ever women's discernment retreat. I will post more on that later; for now, know that it was an awesome weekend and one of the highlights thus far of my job as YACM. I fell into bed Sunday night exhausted... and woke up 11 hours later, at 10 am. I never sleep that late, or that much. And I was still tired. As a result, I had very little awake time on Monday.

Most of that awake time I spent in the kitchen, cooking and baking. Since it was a birthday, I made a cake (with my mother's buttercream frosting!) and a meal of mashed potatoes and chicken. The cake did not come from a box, the frosting did not come from a can, and the potatoes did not come from flakes. As a result, I spent a good deal of quality time with my electric mixer.

I am the proud heir of my grandmother's electric mixer, which I am fairly certain is at least as old as I am. Much as I would rather have a KitchenAid, I am content with that quirky little hand-held electric mixer. And by quirky, I mean on its last legs. Unless you hold the cord at a particular angle away from and then back toward the mixer (most easily achieved when holding the mixer in your left hand) it won't turn on. So my quality time with my grandmother's mixer was lengthened as I moved the cord oddly and had to reposition it to turn on the mixer, approximately 3 times every minute.

My entire kitchen, currently, is an amalgamation of bits I inherited from my grandmother, extras/duplicates from my mother's kitchen, purchases I made (mostly from thrift stores), and birthday/Christmas gifts from the past four years. It's cute and quirky and a little bit romantic to have no money and pull a life together in such a patchworked and jury-rigged kind of way. To buy the car I drove in high school from my parents. To use a computer that is missing an "l" key and has to stay on a heating pad. To have a kitchen table and chairs that don't match because they were what I could find for (nearly) free in my two weeks before I moved.

But as I was rearranging the cord to the mixer while trying to decide how many seconds of my 90 seconds of beating I had lost in the interim, I realized that eventually I will outgrow that. Eventually, I won't be 20-something and just starting out in the world and on my own with so few cares and concerns. And that raises the question : Is this a temporary state of being, because I am 20-something and just starting out in the world and on my own with few cares and concerns... or is this a choice, that I want to live my life unattached to the material culture that permeates today's world?

For a few years now, the story of the rich young man has haunted me. To refresh your mind, it comes from several of the Gospels, including Mark 10:17-22. We take seriously so many of Jesus' commands in the Gospels. And then there's this one. We tend to brush it aside or explain it away. So two main points of the story are lost. One : Jesus asks us to sell our possessions and give them to the poor. We are not supposed to acquire material wealth. Two : Jesus says, "You are lacking one thing." Our possession of material things is a lacking in our lives. We will be more full, more complete (especially more complete in Christ) without things.

This message is the same sort of radical message that challenged me in Irresistible Revolution. It suggests that Christianity and Gospel love are a lot more revolutionary than most Christians, even devout Christians are comfortable with. God calls us to let go of everything material and let Him be our backup plan for all the contingencies for which we gather and store. It has huge implications about how we live our lives in very fundamental ways. I'm not sure what this call means for me and for my life, but it comes up in my prayers again and again. Right now, I'm mostly praying for the wisdom to discern the call and the courage to follow through.