By Mark Azzara
My Dear Friend,
Among my many weaknesses I procrastinate. That’s why I took particular interest in a recent email about procrastination from Kate Shellnutt, editor of her.meneutics.com.
Citing a Wall Street Journal article about procrastination, she wrote that chronic procrastinators do so in order to “do something else, something that makes them feel better.”
Procrastination has been a “friend” of mine for generations. It was my college roommate, the third parent to my children, the co-writer of many of my newspaper articles and the co-pastor of whatever church I was attending. More recently it has been an unwanted guest in the apartment I rent, sometimes making it hard to keep my place clean. But I am using the grace God has given me to shove it out the door so my life can be more focused, active, joyful and, yes, courageous.
For instance, I tend to pile stuff wherever I can find a flat space, in the hope of dealing with it “later.” Well, later is here. That stuff (most of it, anyway) is gone. The job wasn’t that difficult. More than anything it was simply a case of deciding whether to throw out or give away the stuff that I’ve held onto for a long time in the wrongheaded belief that I might some day need it. My pile of Smithsonian magazine back issues is now entertaining folks at the city’s senior center.
After reading Shellnutt’s note, however, my thoughts took an unexpected turn because I’m pretty sure that apartment neatness isn’t Jesus’ primary concern.
Shellnutt’s email got me to think more deeply at “ministry,” “worship,” “charity” and other “Christian” activities (in my case, Christian writing). All of these become forms of procrastination when they distract us from our essential need to surrender fully to God.
I shared this observation with Shellnutt, who answered quickly, saying I was “absolutely” right. Those activities are certainly good but they don’t get us closer to God. They are meaningful only when they are the result of being close to God.
I have seen countless examples of people who engage in all sorts of Christian activities in order to make themselves “feel better” – i.e., to prove to themselves and/or others that they already have a deep personal relationship with Jesus and have already been changed by it. But if you need to prove it you may not really have it.
Shellnutt’s email says to me what I’ve been implying in this space for a few weeks – that we must abandon procrastination and get on with the essential act of surrendering to the God-directed process of being transformed from mere human beings into ever-more-perfect reflections of Jesus.
When it comes to surrender, procrastination may be rooted in the fear of a close, deeply personal relationship with God because, for our good, he must control it. We can control those other activities, but not our one-on-one relationship with God. We not only fear a relationship we can’t control; we also fear the changes that will result from it. We fear the process that God intends for us – the process of becoming, day by day, more like Christ.
We are all terrified of God to some extent. It’s human nature. The only appropriate response is to surrender that fear to God. Fear is the first thing God must conquer. He does so by loving it out of us, and only then can we truly love others as he has loved us.
I can only wonder what the church will look like when we finally stop procrastinating and surrender unequivocally to God – to love. But whatever it looks like, I’m betting it will be the most beautiful sight we’ve ever beheld.
All God’s blessings – Mark
