More Than Discontent

August 6, 2007, 2:45 pm; posted by
Filed under Articles, Djere  | 4 Comments

I just spent a week counseling seven boys, ranging from 16 to 18 years of age at Camp Shiloh.

It’s not boot camp by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a fairly regimented life. We have a schedule; we stick to the schedule. Counselors have devotions every morning together, we eat three square meals a day (though this year’s food was less than desirable), we have chapel twice a day, and for one entire week, our focus becomes entering the presence of God. Until you see a couple hundred teenagers passionately pursuing God day after day and night after night, you haven’t lived.

To leave that lifestyle is, at the very least, a rough transition.

I returned home to settle back into routine, only to find that I hate my life. Not in an emo way, but in the sad realization way. I thought I liked my job, but I’d trade it for camp in a heartbeat. I’d trade my car for intimacy with God. I’d trade my… just about anything for opportunity to, and intimacy in, worship.

Here I am, having just left work, with this overwhelming feeling that I missed the boat… that I settled for less than there is.

A couple years ago, just before summer break at Oswego, my friends were discussing summer plans and jobs. I said I was working at Lowe’s and they all just stared at me.

“You work?,” they all asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean!?”

My then-unsaved friend Ryan put it best. “I can’t picture you with a real job,” he said, “I just sort of picture you with a stick in one hand and a bible in the other, just walking from town to town preaching the Gospel… you know… like a prophet or something.”

It’s not that I’m unhappy, it’s more than discontent. It’s unfulfilling.

Then again, you try being in the presence of God for a week, then see how well your first day back to work goes. I know where my Bible is. Maybe I should find a stick…


Comments

4 Comments to “More Than Discontent”

  1. Karen on August 6th, 2007 3:07 pm

    It’s funny, because that is almost exactly how I felt about going back home after camp. Everything that I was okay with is all of a sudden so empty and dissappointing. I hear you, buddy.

  2. Tom on August 6th, 2007 5:00 pm

    You can use Betty, if you promise to give her a once-over with a piece of sandpaper every so often…

  3. David on August 6th, 2007 5:50 pm

    “The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance, I owe only to the giver of all good things…”

    If I stand, Rich Mullins from Winds of Heaven/Stuff of Earth

  4. Katherine on August 6th, 2007 6:28 pm

    I am all too familiar with this restlessness myself. Giving your all to people who don’t seem to care, jobs that don’t seem to matter. Then again all of us are placed where we are for a reason, aren’t we? For such a time as this. God Loves our neighbors here as much as those kids at camp. His will is for our co-workers too. Sometimes all we need to do is listen. Sometimes all we can do is hope for heaven. Sometimes we just have to step down to our knees and give it back to him.

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