Nine Foot Tall Midget

Lately at church, Rob has been doing a series on David, and showing how he was a "heart" champion and Saul and Goliath were "height" champions, skilled in the things that the world says are important and admire. This last week he even used a 9 foot tall wooden cut out of Goliath to illustrate the point of David's relative size. He spoke of how we are meant to be "heart" champions and instead have been put out to pasture or told that this isn't good enough. He encouraged us to pursue these things that are true and pure- through good works and a right heart- in a sense, we are called to be short. In our church, and indeed, in many churches, I don't think that this is the problem. I think that the issue is that in our American congregations we have our own unique type of height- and it is that which often appears to be "heart." We applaud those who come from places of pain or who are far from Christ and are eager to show accpetance of them, but once they come under the heading of "members" they are subject to a change in expectation of their behavior and appearance. What our "world" honors is if people are so busy and so overcommitted that they are stressed bordering on burning out. We admire those who are giving themseves ulcers with all of the "good deeds" they are doing, and we feel inferior if we do not measure up. The longing is still there for the accpetance and the admiration of others. Only the means by which we get this admiration has changed. We are standing up in a crowd and jumping up and down, screaming, "Look at me! Look at how tiny I am! See- I'm so short! I'm freaking microscopic!"
It is wise to show that we shouldn't be focused on the things of this world to gain our status. Things like cars, money, sex, and power are not the true measure of who we are, but we must also emphasize that us do-gooders can have just as much of a impure purpose and unhealthy attitude by deriving our value from the opinions of others through working in the nursery every service as some might have from orchestrating a hostile take-over of a corporation.