Faithful

I attended a preaching workshop at the seminary yesterday.

While the seminary feels stranger than it used to (I've not been there since I stopped working at the Holistic Child Department), something about it felt like home. The smells, the steep slopes, the sweat climbing up 'em steep slopes, the smiles, and the mesmerising seaview. The snakes too, I suppose.

It has been more than 2 years since I graduated. 

I. Can't. Believe. It. 

Anyway, it was during the workshop that God reminded me through Isaiah 6... that those who have chosen to serve Him should be faithful, even if not successful. 

Isaiah was never successful in the eyes of the world. He was never meant to be. His hearers, well most of them, shunned him. They would hear and not understand, see but not perceive... and continue wallowing in their sins and afflictions.

Have I been faithful? I think, this is a hard question to answer. It is especially tough on me because my self-esteem isn't on an all-time high... and I don't know if I'm being honest or self-critical.

See, I am that apple tree who doesn't seem to bear much fruit - compared to other apple trees. And I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be that way - or if I haven't given faithfully enough. Will I even produce another apple tree? We tend to measure one's faithfulness by his/her achievements and success. But what does God see when He looks into a person's heart?

I wonder what He sees when He looks into my wandering heart. I certainly don't feel very faithful myself. 

It is so easy to be faithful when you're constantly plugged into a people up on a "holy mountain". What happens when you live on the other side of the island - absorbed in nothing your holy mountain prepared you for and far away from your support network - and much of your world is made up of people who can't relate to your calling and its struggles? Temptations abound, a cynical veil blinds, troubles multiply, and foreign ways overtake and choke. After a while, you start to doubt your calling. Did God call me in the first place? What if I was wrong all this while?  

Yup. 

A friend of mine said something today that made me realise that I don't actually understand what faithfulness is. So far, I've always seen it as a human effort - something you beat yourself up to do if you are prone to slacking. However, as my friend talked about how God has been performing painful but liberating "heart surgeries" on her since she decided that she was ready for them, I was rather blown-away by the revelation that perhaps faithfulness is not just about me striving to be loyal to God and His call. For a human being, it is about receiving and hungering to receive more from God with regard to allowing Him to deal with the existing pain and guilt in your life (even while the process might be even more painful) so that you can be free to choose to love and obey Him. My friend said that she can't help but love Jesus now after what she had received from Him. 

It must have been a similar experience for Isaiah. His lips were cleansed with burning hot coal, so hot that the seraphim had to pick it up with tongs from the altar. (Do you smell that burning flesh?) It must have been excruciating - but it did set him free to later volunteer himself: "Here I am! Send me." (BTW, I don't think God was asking a rhetorical question, "Whom shall we send?" expecting Isaiah to say YES.) Perhaps then, we should see Isaiah 6 as Isaiah choosing to devote his life to God's cause having received God's gracious intervention in the knotted, tangled, painful, conflicted depths of his soul. Isaiah 6, I think, has far more to do with Isaiah choosing gratefully (and joyfully) to love a saviour God than him merely wanting to serve God's purposes because it was the right thing to do. Love God and success becomes unimportant - because you live to please God rather than the world who defines that success.

But will I be willing to taste that pain?

End of rambling.