c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)
UNDATED _ Computer stories, like baseball stories, assume a certain patience among listeners. So, please, be patient.
My task the other day was to convert a pile of data into a new format and populate tables in a new database. I got the data sorted out, but then an unexpected glitch occurred.
The C: partition on my computer was full! The other three partitions of the hard drive had plenty of room, but for this data-conversion to proceed, I had to make room on C:.
Rearranging files didn’t free up enough room. Time to delete applications. Out went the fax-and-phone software that came with the computer. Out went the desktop publishing application that I might use some day.
In the end, I did prevail. But as with so much in computers, I was left asking, Why does it have to be so complicated?
The answer is that computers, like people, need cleansing from time to time, as well as sorting, rearranging, prioritizing, and the making of room. Nowhere is this truer of people than in the arena of faith.
We tend to fill our lives. Jobs, families and community keep us hopping. If we have a spare moment, we fill it. Unscheduled time makes many of us nervous. When my seven-year-old son and I went to the mall recently to buy books, I felt surrounded by people who had no particular mission there except to fill empty pockets of time.
A full life, like a full hard drive, can proceed smoothly as long as one more thing doesn’t try to enter in. If someone came to us and said, as a disciple of John the Baptist named Andrew said to his brother Simon,”We have found Messiah!”it would provoke a crisis.
If Messiah actually impinged on our time _ if Messiah were more than an idea, if Messiah expected some response beyond the vague interest that we give, say, the impeachment trial _ the”hard drive”of our life would crash.
It isn’t that we don’t want to respond. Our hunger for God is palpable. But many of us respond to God’s nearness by tweaking our schedules. We free up a weeknight for choir or committee. We take our turn chaperoning a youth event. We make a well-intentioned vow to worship on Sunday whenever we’re in town. We hope that harder choices aren’t required.
For the most part, harder choices aren’t required. The modern church has learned not to demand too much. Church schedules are geared toward full lives. In North Carolina, for example, church planning revolves around Atlantic Coast Conference basketball. In ecclesiastical realpolitik, church yields to Super Bowls, auto races, tax season, soccer schedules, summer vacations and the need for brevity on busy Sundays.
One of the engines driving church growth is getting sufficient critical mass so that the congregation can pay its bills and do significant ministry without expecting too much of any one person, except, of course, for those church workers who use church work to keep their schedules full.
Faith, however, is always a crisis. Andrew brought chaos into the life of his brother. Simon had a job, obligations, probably a life-script. Something had to go. To make room for Messiah, Simon gave up his father, his job, his home and even his name. That’s taking response way beyond freeing Thursday for choir.
Even that wasn’t enough. Once Simon had rearranged his schedule, he had to do more. He had to give up his certainties, his prejudices, his false pride, his traditional answers to deep questions. Soon, he was a weeping coward _ then, by the grace of God, a bold stalwart _ then, by the further grace of God, a martyr.
Faith isn’t a pleasant add-on to life _ a”peripheral,”as it were, like a CD-ROM capable of providing entertainment, or a modem capable of bridging long distances.
We might have tamed church, but faith provokes a crisis: an error message that says,”Disk is full,”or a frozen processor that requires one or more tasks to be terminated, or what techies call the”blue screen of death,”when the system simply shuts down and must be rebooted.
DEA END RNS
