The Death of an Insidious Dream...

After my decision to follow Jesus in 2002 I knew God was calling me to do something important.

Call it the perennial idealism of my youth or a genuine calling from God, but I had a deep sense that God was calling me for great things.

As the years passed by however, this sense of calling slowly turned into a dream, and from a dream it evolved into an ambition, and then slowly into a sense of entitlement.

I am entitled to do great things for God I thought.

To add to this process of entitlement there were a couple of words of knowledge given to me from a couple of people: God is calling you to do great things for the youth.

Thing is, from my own perspective, I am still waiting for these great things to happen.

A conversation with my fiance prompted me to do some serious thinking about this dream.

"People won't probably write books about us, and that is fine" she told me.

But it wasn't fine with me. I felt disturbed when she said this. And then I knew something was wrong. Why would I not be OK with books not being written about me? How did this pretentious attitude about my life's calling got inside of me?

I felt grieved. I felt that by shining light into the arrogant entitlement of this dream it emphatically and irreversibly died. That's what light does to darkness after all.

In my prayer, I shared with Jesus this grief. Lord, how about all your promises?

Then I heard Him say, "take care of the little things, and let me take care of the great things".

I realize now that my focus, or my purpose, is not to do great things for God, but to take care faithfully and with great love the small things He has put me in charge and leave the rest to Him.

Mathew 20: 26-27 has a lot of things to say about greatness. The greatness spoken of here is so radically different to our westernized idea of greatness, that I wonder if these are two completely different ideas.

We see greatness when mighty and powerful people accomplish many good things for themselves and others. Books are written about these heroes, their praises sung in every corner. Usually, these are people with power and authority.

And then Jesus drops this big one on His disciples: "It shalt no be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant". Awesome.

The word translated from the Greek here as servant is Diakonos, where we get the word for Deacon.

A diakonos was a servant, an attendant, one who served food and was ordered by those in authority to do so. Hardly our idea of greatness.

As if that wasn't enough, Jesus drops off an atomic bomb in the next verse: "...and whoever would be first among you must be your slave". Seriously Jesus?

The Greek word translated as slave here is doulos, which can also be translated as bond servant, one who was so devoted to another that his or her own interest was disregarded.

Jesus moves from being a diakonos as a recipe to be great, to doulos if you want to be the greatest. That's nuts, if you think about it.

And then if you think about it a little longer, you may find it beautiful. The one with less privilege, the one marginalized and mistreated, the one who is disregarded as less than human, this is the one who are great in Jesus' eyes.

And if you want to be great in Jesus' eyes, you must be so utterly in love, so radically and completely lost in God's way, that you have not much time or desire to look at your own self-interest, and your own privileges, whatever they are, are offered to the needs of others.

What Jesus is asking of us is indeed frightening. What He seeks is intimidating and foreign to our own ambitions.

Jesus is not simply something you add on to your life in order to make everything better, or to simply "Christianize" areas of your life.

Following Jesus will inevitably mean dying to ourselves. It ultimately means nothing short of the cross.

I don't want to seek to be famous anymore. I don't want to make the point of my life to do great things.

I want to, instead, do small things with great love, for that's all that is asked of me.