Two Worlds...or One?

I re-met a choice young man yesterday.  Brian played football for the ISU Cyclones a few years back in the days when I hung out with Coach McCarney's kids.  These days, Brian shepherds a young family in central Iowa, teaches physical education, and helps coach on the grid iron.   His broad smile lit up the Jacobsen Building, there for a coaching clinic to enhance his skills in mentoring a high school team.  We had a brief opportunity to catch up and mutually encourage.

His follow up email posed a question every young man should be asking -- "How do I balance time with the Lord and time living in this world?"

The two worlds we traffic do seem so very much different.

"Time with the Lord" - for a Christian, this usually means quiet moments either in worship with others or alone, reading, letting the Holy Spirit speak to our insides, praying, confessing sin (1 John 1:9), re-setting priorities, "putting off the old man and putting on the new man" (Ephesians 4:20-23)...heart shaping stuff like that.  For most any Christian in love with Christ, we long for more of this kind of time, but often it is in short supply.

"Living in this world" - for the Christian, this can mean disorientation.  Running in a pack with others, many of whom couldn't care less about Christ, or any of the things that are important to a Jesus-follower.  It can often feel like a world where God is not invited and where Jesus doesn't belong.  But WE have to be there!  There is where we earn a living.  There is where our home is located, our jobs are engaged in, and many of our friends can be found.  5,6,7 days a week, we spend most of our time THERE.

Do we live in two worlds...or one?

If I read my Bible correctly, it's all one world to God   And He wants into all of it.  "The earth is the Lord and all it contains" writes the Psalmist.  And even when those who wrote Psalms vividly understood that much of that world was not in sync with its Creator and Lord, the world still belonged to God.

If I understand Jesus correctly, my following Him is to bring him into all of the world.  And, all of my world.  It is to refuse to see my world, my living, divided.  It is to prayerfully insist that I will invite Jesus into every part of it through quiet, intentional, constant, conversational prayer.

A great resource to help bring our two worlds together is Paul Miller's A PRAYING LIFE: Connecting with God in a Distracting World.   Don't just read it...with your Bible in hand, use it!   It will bring your "worlds" together into one, under God and with God, the way things were intended from the beginning.