I wasn’t going to do anything special for Valentine’s Day, like a post or anything. But here it is, Valentine’s Day, and I’m posting a post. Though it’s not really related to Valentine’s Day, it’s just a coincidence.

A guy at work asked if I had any plans for Valentine’s Day. I told him I wanted to just chill. I work with a bunch of fun, high-energy extroverts. Which is great. But I value my introvert time.

Most of the time these days my internal world is jumbled, as are my priorities, and so I end up living on auto-pilot because I forget why I’m here, so I do whatever happens to come before me.

Which is scary, because, as someone who works in marketing, I know that the opportunities most often placed before me are things that really aren’t going to satisfy. They may or may not cost me money. But I guarantee most of them are just plain distracting from something bigger, better, more extravagant, that I’m missing out on.

Namely, the construction of a transcendental society, or something like that.
Namely, experiencing, cherishing, being utterly grateful for the vastness that is the universe.
Namely, the crown of all creation, the whole, human heart.

We’re not often “whole,” are we?

Always something missing.
A significant other.
An unfinished task.
A personal flaw.
A broken relationship.

Disillusionment.

Or numbness.

We don’t want to face what’s wrong, and quite frankly, I’ve found a way to distract myself enough to be quite “content” most of the time.

And in this country, suffering is the greatest of all sins, among other deep experiences.

You can live in the kiddie pool, but my point is,
you’re missing out.

Solitude doesn’t sell quite like Noise.

The mountains don’t exactly make money.

You can pull gold out of them,
kill indigenous peoples on them,
build towns in them,
paint pictures of them,
and stick resorts on them.

But you can’t sell the experience of absorbing the beauty of something.

Time is a commodity. We capitalize on that, too. But to what extent is capitalism stealing our joy?

My friend Greg just came back from India. He got to talk to polytheists and monotheists and others about the real elephant minus the blindfolds, about the God who’s alive: the Father who designed it all, the Son as the medium through which it all happened, the Spirit that breathed life into it all.

They wouldn’t let him speak less than an hour. Their gatherings of prayer would start around sundown and not end until morning.

Where is our time going?

We are busy people.

Why?

Our intelligence is wasted on social conformity.
Our emotional expression is wasted on social media.
Our souls are wasted on cheap, quick, low-quality experiences.

Why?

I hear that we’re all afraid of missing out. But that fear itself is causing us to miss out!

“Be still.”

You don’t know quite what that means until you are actually in it.

God is one of those things you can’t try before you buy.

Like bungee jumping.
The only way to really experience Him is to put all your cookies in His eternal cookie safe.
You can get excited about bungee jumping.
You can watch people do it,
and even get yourself to believe you know what it’s like,
even believe that you’ve done it before.

But you won’t know until you get out of the kiddie pool and jump off the deep end.

If God isn’t real, we’re all just deceiving ourselves into thinking we’ve had some kind of spiritual experience.

If He is real, there’s someone more to it than that.

So how do you know whether or not He’s real?

Well, the first thing to do is to stop deceiving yourself.

If you’re banking on something that you know isn’t going to work, like pretending you’re God, and running your own life, you’re deceived. You can’t control the world. You can’t control the direction of your life. You’re not entitled to anything. You may have worked to get where you got, but you didn’t form your DNA molecules, or create a house for yourself to develop before you were born, or tell your body how to form your brain and your muscles, or decide which country you’d be born in. You didn’t do this by yourself.

When you ask, you better be humble enough to hear the answer. You might not like it.
But your opinions about the facts don’t make them false.

The second thing to do is seek. Seek until you find.

We’re a pluralist nation.
Which means we all are familiar with the word “Jesus,”
but I’m doubtful even half of us have ever answered the question,
“Who was He, really?”

Either He’s God,
or a benevolently crazy lunatic who claimed to be God
(there aren’t many of those though, they’re either psychopaths
or have very inconsistent, illogical sayings; not profound, well-thought-out teachings and followings),
or he was evil and has, to this day, deceived about 1/6 of the world into thinking he’s gonna save them from their problems
(Hitler did something like that, too).

We’re a pluralist nation, so we don’t often answer these questions for ourselves. Who was Jesus?
I don’t know. If I answer that question, I’ll offend someone.

Since when does the answer to a question depend on who approves or disapproves?
Try that one in your math class next time no one wants to solve a problem because it’s too complicated.

For most of the questions we leave up in the air, there is an answer we can come by through logical thinking, and, of course, not deceiving ourselves.

As for me… I’m not numb. I’m disillusioned. If I could describe my nation in one word, easy. It would be

Distracted.

Isn’t that embarrassing?

We’re among the most privileged nations.
And what have we done with it?
We’re distracted.

Well, I want to change that. It’s on my mind more than you’d think.
When it’s not on my mind, I’m… distracted.
And I hate it, because it affects me, too.

But I want to change it.

I spent the evening being still. I thought of some of the things I just wrote about. And I also thought of some things I want to do to change it.

I feel like most of my life’s struggle is just to get past the distractions, just long enough to actually overcome them.
I think Someone has really overcome, already, and also in the future,
but what of the endless in between?

In this time you and I have a divine duty to be a part of the victory over sin, death, confusion, distraction, deception.

So my main question is,
How can I help you?

My friends in Kansas answered this question better than any idea I can possibly even imagine. Of course, they got their ideas from Jesus, through whom everything is made in the first place, and He also used it while He was here on earth. But their business model and the details of their relational transactions are spectacular. I want to imitate them.

I want to combine the challenge of this ministry with the community of coffee. Coffee is the single most prevailing institution in our community where people sit down and spend time with each other.

I also know I can write. I don’t want that to go to waste. I think I can use that.

And my vision in life is to help the Church reach its full potential on earth, not only for God’s sake, but for the sake of the State (thanks, Ivan Fyodorovich), the world, and the individual alike, and everything beyond and in between. (I put a high standard on the church. Because God does).

So here I am:

• Coffee shop
• Training class
• Book, copy, booklets, something.
• Helping the church reach its potential.

How can I combine this? I’ve gotten glimpses of this vision. But this is what I want to do with my life.

How will these work together?
What am I to do?
What needs to happen?

Knocking.

I’m only one person. But zero plus infinity equals infinity.
And that’s the mathematically correct answer.

God, make my dreams come true!
You say ask, seek, knock.
So right now, I ask.
Perpetually, I will seek.
And in the event of a change of room, I will knock.

My friend Stephanie asked her friend and coworkers today how they feel loved.

I feel loved
when I am challenged to love someone sacrificially,
and I proceed to do so,
and the love I get to take part in giving them
interrupts their life as they once knew it
and utterly transforms them.

May you be transformed by such a love.
May you be neither numb nor disillusioned.
May you ask, seek, and knock.
And by the grace of God, may I become less of an amateur at this whole thing as time goes by.

Because it’s an individualist culture,
and I can’t change it alone