Undisciplined

Two things:
1) December's up on my journal.
2) I've changed my email address. psalm13@hotmail.com got a buttload of junk mail, so I've switched to gmail. (Note that it's 13thpsalm this time, not psalm13, because some other punk has psalm13@gmail.)
And now for the main event:

"If you're not reading your Bible daily, you're not giving yourself much of a chance as a Christian"

That's an approximate quote from the speaker at the camp I attended last weekend. Statements like this always bother me. I don't read my Bible daily. I used to - I dutifully read 2 chapters a day, every day upon awaking, for maybe a year and a half once. Never really got anything out of it. Well, I'm sure I gained knowledge about what the Bible says, but I never enjoyed it and I never noticed any effect it had on my life. It was just something I made myself do because I was supposed to. It was pure religion.

These days I read my Bible in little spurts. I haul it out when I want to do a study of some doctrine or understand some difficult passage, but there are weeks when it never leaves my bedroom floor. When I do read it's far more often with an intellectual focus than out of some desire to "grow closer to God", whatever that means.

I have trouble thinking of good reasons to pray. Quick story: I once spent a day talking with a homeless guy in Vancouver. At the end of our talk I asked him if I could pray for him, and he said yes. I asked him what I should pray, and he said that it would rain money. ("Small denominations are ok - tens and twenties.") That wasn't what I was hoping for, but I told him I would pray that for him, and I have. Infrequently. Awkwardly. Briefly. But whenever I think of that guy I pray that God would make it rain money for him. If you ask me to pray for you I will, sporadically yet dutifully, but I have a suspicion that the encouragement brought by saying "I'll pray for you" does more practical good for a person than any amount of prayer.

I used to think that it was bad for me to stand in Church and sing worship songs if I wasn't thinking about the words. These days I often try not to think about the words I sing because I disagree with so many of them. I look at worship (meaning singing) as something I do for God to show my devotion to him. It's far more about the act of acknowledging God's existence and presence (or my belief therein) then about affirming any kind of doctrine in the songs. And it certainly has nothing to do with any emotions I might feel.

I've tried fasting maybe two or three times, and never for more than a couple days. The result of depriving myself from food is that I become really miserable and grouchy and all I can think about is food. Some people say fasting removes distractions and allows us to focus on prayer. Maybe for some of you, but not for me. For me there are few things more distracting than fasting. How am I supposed to focus on praying about stuff when all I can think about is food? Other people say depriving ourselves of food shows the ugliness of our true natures. Well ya, because my body needs food to survive. Try depriving me of oxygen and I'll become pretty miserable too. Would suffocation reveal my "true nature"? I honestly think that banging my head against the wall at regular intervals, cutting myself with knives like the prophets of Baal or any other method of self torture would accomplish just as much spiritual good as the "spiritual discipline" of fasting.

I have no idea what "listening to God" means. To me this is on par with Hindu ideas about reaching higher states of reality through meditation. I'm not going to go around telling other people they can't listen to God or transcend the physical world or whatever, but I have no idea how or even if I could achieve something like this myself.

My intuition and experience tells me that I'm naturally different from other people and I can't expect what works for others to work for me. I've found some things that do work for me and I should be happy with doing those things. Maybe it's just jealousy that makes me wish prayer worked for me the way it worked for Brother Lawrence or Jim Cymbala or that reading my Bible could become something that I'd cherish and that would bring me closer to God. But on the other hand maybe these things will work for me, and I just gave up too soon. Maybe if I could somehow force myself to pray more or if I just kept fasting long enough, then maybe there would be some kind of payoff. Ok, I don't actually believe that, but I do feel uneasy just shrugging off the tried-and-true methods of godly old preachers. I'm cautious of saying, "Ya, I'm not like you. I've got my own stuff that I do; yours doesn't work for me." I don't want to miss out on the obvious answers because I'm so busy being special, and I don't want to tell some guy three times my age that he doesn't know what he's talking about. What do I know anyway? Bah, I'm silly. A reed swayed by the wind.