Distractions

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
~Jean Arp

Our hearts ache, but we always have joy. We are poor, but we give spiritual riches to others. We own nothing, and yet we have everything. ~2 Corinthians 1:10


As I stood by the door of the church in the 200 person village of Shato, Perú, I watched as families, guided only by voices and the faint light of an old flashlight, navigated their dugout canoes up the Amazon towards the riverbank. It was no later than 7:00 but it could have been midnight and we would not have known the difference. With no electricity to use light bulbs and no clocks hung on the walls or placed strategically around us, time began to take on a whole new meaning to us.

We lit candles and brought in kerosene lanterns made from old tin cans and set them around the room, giving off just enough light that we could see Lucy, our Peruvian friend, and missionary on the Amazon, as she led the people who had literally traveled miles to be in the service that night. There was no sound system, just the natural volume of her passionate voice. There were no instruments, jut the chorus of a people that desperately wanted to meet with their God that night. There was no PowerPoint or hymnals, people had learned the songs young, memorized them, the words of praise and adoration ingrained in their memories, engraved on their hearts. This was church. it was not a production. No one talked about programs or bulletins. There were no talks of building projects or insufficient parking. It was not focused on the seeker, the believer, the post-modern, the modern, the youth, the children, the sinner or the saint. It was focused on the one who had created the jungle around them. People did not come to find out how to be more ethical, make better business decisions or find the Five Steps to Familial Friendliness. The came to meet with God. They came with one mind. They came with one need, they came with one song.

And now I sit here. Sipping a coffee at Starbucks. In a city of 8 million people. Cars running past outside, honking, yelling, spewing exhaust. My laptop in front of me. My cellphone beside me. My house with four walls and a roof a mere taxi drive away. I got here an hour ago to begin reflecting on my trip but was distracted by other things for 45 minutes. I needed to check my emails, order my coffee, check out who did what on facebook, check out cnn.com, etc. How quickly I am forgetting what it was to live without the distractions I have invited into my life?

And that is what a lot of what we live with is. Distractions. We have become so addicted to the things that we think make our lives easier that we miss out on all the incredible things God has for us. We miss out on the way we were intended to live, in communion with God through his creation. When you strip away all these things that make life so "liveable", the cars, the big houses, the fast food, the grocery stores, the technology, what are we left with. Nature, creation, the dirt and grass and trees. And we feel called to it. As Rob Bell (Mars Hill Community) pointed out in a recent message: We turn on the TV and we see commercials for that great car that, if we buy it, will take us from our concrete jungle, into the open country. We'll throw the skis we never use and the kayak we don't own, into our gas guzzling SUV and drive where? Into nature. It's what we yearn for. It's how God created us. To be in a place whithout distractions. A place where, like those in the service at Shato, we won't care about such trivial things as the toys we have, the money we have, the size of the church we go to or even what time of day it is. A place where we are free to see God for who he really is, not distracted by the things he can get us.

We talked a lot this trip about how, in many ways, there is great benefit to living as they do in Shato. They don't worry about credit card debt. They aren't concerned about mortgage payments, or home owners comities telling them to clean up their yards. Is it possible for us to live without those distractions? Is it possible to get to a point where those things, which now distract us, simply become things that are there? Is it possible for us to reorganize our priorities to a point where instead of these things distracting us from God, we will have to pry our thoughts away from God in order to focus on these things for just enough time that it takes to deal with them and then have our hearts and minds race back to God, where it's almost as if God is our distraction from these things?

My prayer is this:

Lord, I'm so distracted. Even as I write this I am thinking about what needs to be done next. Help me to focus more on you. Take away the distractions that keep me from becoming everything that you want me to be. Amen.