Fast-Fruit Culture

Why is it so hard to just serve God where you are?

For the last while, I've occasionally had this urge to go start some "thing." Like a band, or a coffee-house ministry, or a Christian writer's network. (I could call it CWN: doesn't that sound heavy?) But then, I wonder if it's just because I'm living in an age of many started somethings and I don't want to be left out.

You don't have to drive through the countryside or surf the internet very long to realize that our world is full of half-completed towers. It seems our society may place an unhealthy emphasis on beginnings. Ground-breaking ceremonies are nice, but they're also a bit of a fanfaronade. As King Ahab said, in a rare quotable moment, "Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off."

It is less an axiom and more a spiritual principle to say that it is better to do one thing completely than ten things partially. Jesus taught us that great lesson in his last four syllables on the cross. You can't ever grow if you're continually transplanting yourself from one thing to the next, and you can't go to a drive-thru to pick up some Christian fruit. In dry times we must remember, as Lindvall has astutely pointed out, that abiding is continual while bearing fruit is seasonal. Psalm 1 says the righteous man is like a tree; I usually feel more like a weed. "Ye have need of patience," indeed.