Let's Get Real.......Do you live in a bubble? A bubble that consists of your world and everything within your sight and your reach? I mean, it's very easy to do. We get caught up in our day to day which consists of work, school, running here and there, going to the grocery, ballgames, homework.....and then, Whew! Who has time for anything else, right? Well, that leads me to my question of the week.
How many of us need to be challenged to step outside the bubble that we live in? The most eye opening experience is to discover that you actually do live in a bubble. You never discover it unless you take that first step out of your own world, and that which encompasses it, land yourself into someone else's world and then take a look back at your own. Then you see it.
I hear quite often that people, especially Christians, are plagued with guilt over not feeling like they do enough to help people. They feel like they should be doing something. That feeling lasts for a while and then it is drowned out once again by the busyness of life and the comfort of our bubbles.
Is it comfortable to step out into a world that is unfamiliar, whether that be across town at a homeless shelter, or across the world in an orphanage? Is it easy to serve others? The answer is NO, it is not comfortable and it is not easy? It takes laying ourselves and our own wants for that moment aside. It requires us to be obedient to what we feel in our spirit that we are called to do. It is SO easy to push that feeling aside.
But is there reward in the end? YES!! A thousand times....YES! We then wipe the sweat from our brow and say "Whew, It was worth it!" We see the great need and then we see how we were placed in a position to help that need. But the only way the need got solved was because we chose to step outside of our own world, our own "bubble", so to speak, and step into a place where we can be used by God.
I lived in a bubble for many years before my eyes were opened. I have a cool story which I will share in the next post about how God busted my bubble. Often times our bubbles consist of worry, depression, problems within, that we would discover really aren't that bad if we ever stepped out long enough to look at the problems of others.
How have you been challenged to step outside of your "bubble"? Please tell the benefits of it and what it was that opened your eyes to it. We all need to be encouraged in this area. And we all need to get real and admit that most of us live in a bubble in the first place. How can we see, unless our eyes are opened?
Psalm 119:18 (New Living Translation)
18 Open my eyes to see
the wonderful truths in your instructions.
Sometimes opening our eyes to need around us could be as simple as looking across the street.
I look forward, as always, to hearing how you can open some of our eyes with your stories and your comments :-)
The first time God "burst" my bubble was when I visited the nursing home for the first time. I remember thinking about how selfish my life had become, and this was God pointing me to a purpose bigger than myself: serving "the least of these". It is still hard for me to go visit the widows at the nursing home, but every time I do, I think of each one of them as Jesus in disguise. When I leave that day, I feel so refreshed, because I have stepped out of the bubble of my lifestyle to serve others. And that is better than ANYTHING ELSE I could have chosen to do that day.
ReplyDeleteThis past six months is when God has burst my bubble. It started with our adoption journey, where God has been changing me and my family. Six months ago, we were gaining a son and he was gaining a family...but now our son will be getting a Radiacally different family than we were six months ago. God has used the book Radical and the sermons of David Platt to obliterate our bubble. He has pushed us to stop being selfish Christians. Oxymoron, right? But that is what we were and are still struggling to overcome.
ReplyDeleteIt started with deciding that if we loved God and we loved people, shouldn't our lives reflect that? So we decided to get rid of luxuries in our life. It hurt to put our flatscreen tv in our benefit auction, but it is not our treasure, Christ is our treasure. And we love our son in Ethiopia more than our tv. We got rid of our smart phones to sponsor an orphan through lifesong. We struggled hard with that because we "needed" them. But they are not our treasure, Christ is our treasure. It is not wrong to have a smartphone, but it is wrong for an orphan to die of starvation because we chose our smartphones over them.
God is continuing to break us and our bubble. We are selling our comfortable home in January and are purposefully moving to a neighborhood and an area that is out of our comfort zone in order to share the love of Christ with them, because Christ is our treasure.
Tonight He continued to work on me as I wept uncontrollably over my selfishness and how much of my life I have already wasted on myself. I pray that I don't get sucked back into the "American Dream" Christian life, but that I can pick up my cross and follow Him. It is a constant battle.
I used to live in a bubble, and am SO glad that God burst it. The hardest thing is that others in my family still do.
ReplyDeleteI've been following your blog, but I don't think I've ever commented before. God has "burst my bubble" pretty recently by opening my eyes even more to the world.. I have wanted to work with orphans overseas for years, but never as much as He has given me a passion for in these last few months. He has opened my eyes to the need to reach the unreached people in the world who have never heard the Gospel and I feel my heart being tugged in that area. I am a college student and I used to be unsure of what I was going to do after graduation. I now know that whatever I do, it will be for God and it will be to reach people for Him. :)
ReplyDeleteI am so glad someone shared this post with me.
ReplyDeleteI've had my bubble burst multiple times. I think it has to be happening constantly. It is so easy to busy ourselves with things which we can later look back and and so easily proclaim as nonsense.
It's difficult to realize that we are poignant if only we decide to be. It's a lot of power to give ourselves. It even feels almost wrong, in a way, to feel so powerful.
To be lovingly powerful is such a wonderful thing.