Spiritual Hiccups - Prophets and Spiritual Ruts

For a number of days now I've been reading from the book of Jeremiah.  And while there are some very uplifting passages in the book, so far its mostly been gloom and doom from the prophet.  "You folks have gone your own way and abandoned God's ways; now you're gonna get it."

I wonder if anyone was ever glad to see a prophet like Jeremiah.  Such folks become revered only after the fact, once it become obvious that people should have listened.  No one listened to the few folks who suggested that the world economy was headed toward disaster because of all the fancy investment vehicles that banks and Wall Street had devised, not until it was too late.  But bankers and investors aren't really all that different from anyone else.  None of us like to be told, "The way you are doing things is wrong.  Change or pay the consequences."

And therein lies a real spiritual/religious quandary.  The vast majority of humans seem to have some sort of spiritual impulse, a deep seated sense that there is much more to life that what comes to us via culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.  We want more meaningful lives and better answers to our questions, but, and this is a very big but, we would like all this without challenging the way we already think and act.  We want our lives to have meaning, to really matter, but we're not sure we want to change very much.

I wonder what assumptions that I hold dear get in the way of me hearing what God wants me to do, what will bring my life meaning and balance and wholeness.  How often am I like the person Paul describes in today's reading from Romans, doing the very things that lead to the opposite of what I desire? 

But the solution to this problem is not to try harder, to strain against my own resistance to change, or to expend more effort separating myself from treasured assumptions.  What very small steps toward spiritual maturity that I have taken convince me that first I must go deeper into God.  What I need most of all is heart change, a transformation deep inside that happens as I fall deeper and deeper into God's love.  For it is this inward journey of transformation that can free me from the fears and anxieties and  certainties that so often bind me in ways of thinking and living that do not lead where I really want to go.

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