Failure.To.Act.

If there is one thing I am guilty of through and through, it is procrastination. I often pawn it off as the “journalistic technique” within me: wait until the last minute and then work like crazy under pressure to make the deadline. But, when I’m honest with myself, there is something deeper that is creating this pattern of delay. I find myself putting off things only to never complete them. Then upon realization that I failed to act on something that I knew clearly I probably should have, I attempt to take on more in order to neutralize the negative effects of not doing the previous thing. However, at that point, I am overwhelmed and begin procrastinating the new tasks and the vicious cycle continues! Consequently, the things that I know I want to do often never get done and the guilt levels rise to astronomic levels.

I am reminded of the Apostle Paul’s timeless lament:

“For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice!”

Essentially, Paul was describing the quandary that is my life and, unless you’re Jesus, probably yours too to an extent.

In our apple pie American culture, we are busy bodies. Every where we look – including our churches today – we are accosted by flashy … stuff! It seems like everything and everybody is trying to get our attention to transfer to their particular agenda. Buy this. Sell that. Say this. Don’t say that. Sign here. Try this. Eat that. Tap the Rockies, etc. Consequently, we take on the same mentality within ourselves in order to counteract what is going on in front of us. We create our own agendas and attempt to accomplish them often in our own strength. We may not even realize it, but we are constantly moving, constantly achieving, constantly looking for the next apple to bite. (Is that an expression? Whatever, it is now and probably worthy of an urbandictionary.com entry.) However, in the midst of all this fast-paced goal-attaining behavior, we often become desensitized to our Jesus-prescribed goal: Being the salt and light of the earth.

In a sermon I heard today at church, Michael (our pastor) reminded us that we do not have to somehow strive to become the “salt” and “light” of the world, we merely are. It is a state of being. A state of being the divine manifestation of God’s glory and splendor to the rest of the world. However, we can become useless (or unseasoned) salt by becoming tainted or defiled. For me, the primary mode in which I have been rendered “unseasoned” is this procrastination disorder I alluded to. I busy myself with activities that are in hindsight entirely inconsequential and neglect things and people that God has placed in my midst. I have been strongly confronted with the fact that while I can talk a great game of Christianity and faith, the implementation of said game has been weak at best in recent months.

In a more articulate fashion, Brennan Manning puts it this way:

“What we do about the lordship of Jesus is a better indication of our faith than what we think. This is what the world wants from our rhetoric, what the man of God longs for in a shepherd – someone daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, wild enough to be burned in the fire of love, real enough to make others see how phony we are.”

God’s glory and character is meant to be manifested to the world in a large part through His followers. So many of us – including myself – miss this because we are procrastinating doing what He has asked of us and instead remain preoccupied with our own manufactured so-called necessities of life. However, when it comes time to talk about our faith we can definitely project what we know is the right thing to articulate. But as we all know, we can all be well-rehearsed in the semantics of our faith and still fail to act.