Spiritual Hiccups - Anxious Striving

My wife and I just returned from an 8 day trip to New Mexico where we took in some of the sights near Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and the very small hamlet of Thoreau, where our daughter works with Teach for America.  It was a wonderful visit that we both enjoyed very much.  And to my mind, one of the best parts of it was that we did very little planning, instead doing whatever appealed to us that day.  We went with the flow, ate when we were hungry, hiked until we were tired, slept late when we felt like it, and enjoyed the magnificent splendor of northwest New Mexico.

Such rhythms are quite different from the ones most of us know and practice on a regular basis.  We tend to be an over scheduled people.  Not only are our work lives busy with long to-do lists and calendar reminders popping up on our computers and PDAs, but our children's lives are heavily scheduled as well.  Many parents shuttle children from one "enrichment" activity to another.  And many of us maintain a hectic pace even on vacation.  I often hear people say, "I need a vacation to recover from my vacation," which makes me think that they didn't do a lot of relaxing on their vacation, but scurried about from venue to venue, theme park to theme park, activity to activity. 

Where did we get this idea that if we don't hurry, we'll miss something?  How did we become so anxious?  Why do we so willingly join the "rat race," furiously spinning the little wheel that is supposed to bring us fulfillment and accomplishment and stature, only to become exhausted without actually going anywhere?

Many of us are familiar with Jesus' words about the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin where he calls us to stop worrying and striving for things.  Jesus says to strive only for the Kingdom that is coming, and let God take care of the rest, but we can't quite bring ourselves to believe him, to trust that what he says is true.  And so we strive very rarely for the Kingdom, for that promised day when God's will is done on earth.  But we strive and worry all the time about other things.

Jesus invites us to get off our little wheels that go nowhere, to opt out of the rat race, and to find real meaning and worth in striving for the Kingdom, in trying to make the world more like God's vision for it.  This is no call to a dull life of drudgery, but a gracious invitation to life that is as it should be, life whose rhythms are in sync with our deepest, truest nature.  It is an invitation to freedom from endless, anxious striving.  If only we can trust that Jesus knows what he's talking about.

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