I am currently reading John Piper’s book, “Desiring God.” This book is arguing that true Christianity is hedonistic, meaning that it involves a personal joy and satisfaction from one’s relationship with God and the act of serving God. The chapter I read today is about Scripture and how it should be used as kindling for Christian Hedonism. Much of this chapter discussed the trials that come along with Christianity and how, with the presence of Satan, it is impossible to make every day a joyful day in the Lord. The first few paragraphs read as follows:

“Christian Hedonism is much aware that every day with Jesus is not ‘sweeter than the day before,’ Some days with Jesus our disposition is sour. Some days with Jesus, we are so sad we feel our heart will break open. Some days with Jesus, we are so depressed and discouraged that between the garage and the house we just want to sit down on the grass and cry.

Every day with Jesus is not sweeter than the day before. We know it from experience and we know it from Scripture. For David says in Psalm 19:7, ‘The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.’ If every day with Jesus were sweeter than the day before, if life were a steady ascent with no dips in our affection for God, we wouldn’t need to be re-vived.

In another place, David extols the Lord with similar words: ‘He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul’ (Psalm 23:2-3).  This means David must have had bad days.

There were days when his soul needed to be restored. It’s the same phrase he used in Psalm 19:7: ‘The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.’ Normal Christian life is a repeated process of restoration and renewal. Our joy is not static. It fluctuates with real life. It is vulnerable to Satan’s attacks.

When Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:24, ‘Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy,’ we should emphasize it this way: ‘We work with you for your joy.’ The preservation of our joy in God takes work. It is a fight. Our adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion (I Peter 5:8), and he has an insatiable appetite to destroy one thing: the joy of faith (Ephesians 6:17) for the defense of our joy.

Or, to change the image, when Satan huffs and puffs and tries to blow out the flame of our joy, we have an endless supply of kindling in the Word of God. Even on days when every cinder in our soul feels cold, if we crawl to the Word of God and cry out for ears to hear, the cold ashes will be lifted and the tiny spark of life will be fanned. For ‘the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.’ The Bible is the kindling of Christian Hedonism.”

The reason this spoke to me so strongly is because I am very aware in my life that not every day is a  joyful day in the Lord. Many days I am overcome by incomprehensible sadness and it’s days like that where my faith in God is at it’s weakest. There have been so many periods in my life where I thought I was trying so hard to pursue the Lord, yet I was getting nowhere. I have now come to the realization that this is the way Satan attacks me. He robs me of my joy and fills me with hatred and self-loathing. These are the days when my joy in the Lord is non-existent, and every time it happens I am pulled further away from my Creator. However, I have now learned that the only way to overcome this is by seeking him relentlessly through prayer and through the Word, even in the times that it feels like he is not there. I want to encourage everyone who has felt this way not to give up, because once you give up it’s a lot harder to get back. I have learned and am still learning that through my own experience. Don’t wait for God to pursue you; pursue Him by fighting every temptation along the way and by remembering that you are not alone.

 

Jesus Was a Social Worker

My decision to leave my comfort zone at Samford University to come study social work at the University of Alabama was based off my desire to follow my calling in life. And that is coming from someone who doesn’t even really believe that every person has one specific calling or destiny. But I believe with everything in me that I was brought into this world to make a difference in the life of others. Care, compassion, and outreach are the things I am actually good at and I am determined to put those skills to use in my career. When I left a school comprised of mainly dedicated Christians to come to one of the biggest party schools in the nation, I was under the impression that I was one of the only ones who chose social because of their desire to accomplish the task that God has placed in their life. I have never been more happy to be so wrong.

At the beginning of every semester we have to do those awkward go around the class and tell your name and why you chose your major kind of things. Every semester, about half of the class credits their faith in God for their decision to choose social work and I think that is just amazing. In fact, I feel the presence of God more in the School of Social Work than I did at the private Baptist university I once attended. Here, people are putting their faith into action by becoming the hands and the feet of Christ. This is not to say that every social worker I have met is a Christian. However, whether you put your trust in God or not, it is evident that the duty of a social worker requires one of have a Christ-like view of the world. And by this I mean non-judgmental, compassionate, patient, loving, caring, forgiving, and a strong desire to put others before yourself.

A few weeks ago we had a guest speaker in my policy class. He was a middle-aged man who grew up in the foster care system and is now a social worker. He had a terrible experience in the foster system, and decided in his adult life that he wanted to become a social worker so that that his clients would not have to experience the same things that he did. He told us his inspiring story. When he was a baby his mother took him to her neighbor’s house and asked them to watch him while she went to the store. Hours passed, and eventually days. She never returned. As an infant, he was taken into the foster care system by DHR, where he would spend the rest of his childhood and adolescent years. He was never a bad kid really, but he did have some behavioral problems. Because of this, no family wanted to keep him so he bounced from home to home and was eventually put in a group facility for children with mental illness, even though he had no mental illness himself. He was a burden to the system, and he was placed here because nobody wanted to deal with him anymore. At this point, he was reaching his adolescent years and began struggling emotionally. He contemplated suicide. After saying this, he stopped his story to say, “I’m going to be very blunt with you and say that I am an extremely religious man. The day I was considering suicide, God spoke to me and told me that he had a plan for my life. That was the day I surrendered myself to Him.” It was so encouraging to me to have this man come into a public university and tell my class about his faith in God. He continued his story by saying that when he finally aged out of the foster system, he was given the opportunity to attend college. “I started out studying ministry, I wanted to be a preacher,” he said, “but then we got to the part where we had to learn Hebrew and I decided that I didn’t want to be a preacher anymore. I didn’t want to be a preacher, but I wanted to be like Christ. So I became a social worker.”

I think that last bit pretty much sums it up. During his time on earth, Jesus spent time with criminals. He fed the hungry. He did this physically, spiritually, and emotionally. He associated with the outcasts. He was friends with those who were a burden to the system. And guess what. He didn’t judge any of them. In fact, he loved them. He showed care and compassion and he reached out to them.

When it gets down to it, I can’t think of a better way to spend my life than by using my career to bring life to the lifeless and to become a voice for the voiceless. Nobody tells us it’s going to be easy. In fact, they tell us it is going to be pretty dang hard. But they don’t focus on that; but rather, they focus on the joy and sense of reward that comes from changing someone’s life for the better. So what do I want to do with my life? I want to be like Christ. Therefore, I will be a social worker.