Martha & Mary: Disclaimer

Some follow up thoughts to last night, late night post that may not have come through entirely:

- the exact Martha comment was worded as: "Stop being a Martha" & it came from a good friend calling me to leave the serving & come enjoy fellowship... it wasn't meant (nor taken) in a mean spirited way, it just got me thinking is all. I've wrestled a lot with the tensions inside me of the two (seemingly) opposite sides. As an engineer most people assume I'm a thinker & a do-er/Martha. For years, I wished that people would see the reality that really I'm a feeler & long desperately to be like Mary, a worshiper... and so I used to cringe every time I was called 'Martha'... in more recent years, I've fought the battle between 'doing' & 'being' & tried to shift my life entirely from living out of what I do & trying to move into the reality of who I am... i.e. changing from where my work, my service, the stuff done external to me defined me instead of letting the core stuff of personality & heart & passion define who I am...

Last night, the call to come away from the doing & join in fellowship with friends was met by me with the addict response of "OK, but just let me do this one more thing first"...and that one more thing becomes another & soon you're no where near following what you think you 'want' to follow & are instead chasing the rabbit trail of the tyranny of the urgent.... finding that there's alwasy one more thing to do until you find you've missed the whole point & missed out on what matters most - love, relationship, friends....

.... seeing this again, it makes me wonder why I'm so slow to respond to the call to relationship over the call to do & it makes me ask the questions of where I'm at in moving my life from servanthood to sonship/kingship. A servant lives always in the 'doing'. A servant who loves his/her master lives for that next task, that next assignment. Many times we in the church refer to God as Lord, master. We approach Him as servants & I lived for years wanting to just find God's 'will' so I could know what he wanted me to do in any given moment. In more recent years, I've seen God moving me to sonship - there is a transition point in our faith where we move from being servants to being sons/daughters (see Galatians 3), where we move from being servants to brides (see Hosea 2: 16), where we move from servants to friends (John 15:15), where we move from servants to Kings/Queens.... in this new role, new relationship, we approach God with boldness, we come as His beloved, welcome into his heart & presence. We recognize His headship & that He has given us His authority & we walk in the power & anointing of that... He teaches us to rule, lives through our hearts & shows us that the thoughts, feelings, drives, passions that we have are often birthed from Him & we need to learn to trust our hearts, our voices & we end up living like Him, speaking like Him, walking like Him, all while retaining the unique expression of 'us'...

But yet I am so slow to move from this place of seeing myself as 'servant of all' to being 'king', though in truth, the only true kings are those who make themselves servant of all....

... so yeah... basically just trying to say that a lone comment from a good friend can bring up a lot of stuff. Maybe that's neurotic, but hey, it's my neurosis :)

In the greater light of day, I feel that perhaps each of our lives must embrace both Mary & Martha, both being & doing... The Bible itself shows this 'tension' as Paul speaks of grace alone & James says "if you can't show me your works, I don't believe you have faith"... In the language of love, passion/care/tenderness for someone will always produce actions, and loving actions pretty much always lead your heart to love. How can you truly seperate heart from deeds? A good tree produces good fruit, a bad tree bad fruit.... there is a very fine, if not entirely imagined, line between what we do & where our heart is... (this being said of course knowing that I, like others around me, have a 'fearful' (for lack of a better word - timid perhaps) heart & it takes us a long time of heart stuff before it sometimes translates into action - the action comes, it's just sometimes delayed).

But yeah, anyhow, now I'm rambling.... & yeah, not to say that I didn't have a good time last night. I was just a tad overwhelmed by evening's end & needed to write to process through some of my thoughts....

Thanks to all who came out & enjoyed the food.... it was a pleasure to have you as guests & friends & look forward to the next time (though I'm trying to scheme about how to make it slightly less labour intensive next time :) )