Failure Day IV

Today is Failure Day. For those who may not have been here before, it commemorates the day in 2005 in which The Firm was dissolved and I laid myself off. The great experiment was over. Much like Anzac Day in Australia, I use this day both as a reminder of something tried as well as a day of self assessment.

So what is the assessment this year?

I'm not sure how to answer that question.

The past year (from last Failure Day) has been quite a series of changes. I moved from one employer to another, then to unemployment for four months, then to a new employer in a different state. An easier way for me to think of it is that I was only employed 8 out of the last 12 months.

Financially, things are a mess (given this economy, I'm sure this is a surprise to precisely no-one). The reality is if you remove the paper money increase from our house, we are at approximately the same level as we were 9 years ago. Yikes. That was not a figure I enjoyed looking at when I saw it.

But in looking at it, the idea suddenly burst into my head "But is that the right goal?"

I looked at the presentation I was working on (for myself, mostly - I find that I think very well using a PowerPoint setup). It was about money. Mostly about money anyway, with some "goal" setting put in as well.

The remarkable thing was, it was all about the here and now, and very little about eternity.

The Pastor of the Church here in New Home said an interesting thought this morning, one that I have been chewing on all day: "The church in America stopped growing when it started going to church and stopped being the church" - in other words, when church, when Christianity, became something that we do rather than something we are, it becomes lifeless.

As I looked at my goals, my finances, my "things I'd like to do", it suddenly struck me how absent God was from most of them.

Oh sure, there were the usual tips of the hat: Pray 15 minutes a day, continue in personal Bible study, try a family Bible study, be involved in church. But the more focused ones, the more developed ones, were all things in which God possibly could be present, but not as the singular focus of the activity.

Damning indeed. Has church become something I've done, and not something I am? Certainly, this is one of the calls of Francis Schaeffer, who I've been reading over the last 2 months. He constantly stressed the need for purity/holiness and love, the Christian being the example (flawed, to be sure) of these two realities of the nature of God, as the witness both to the world and to Christians.

This is not the day of reflection I was expecting.