The other day, at a bible study, a friend posed an interesting question. "If we are called to love, how do we know how much is too much? Because of our finite amount of resources, how do we know if we should be doing action A or B?" It was interesting to me because I had never thought of it that way before. How does one know if there should be something else that one needs to be doing, instead of whatever they are doing there?

I think that it is dangerous to dwell on these things. It is dangerous because we try to rationalize why God would want us to do something. Like, "why would God want me to go to a city full of evil people? I might get killed there. Hmmm... Let me go in the opposite direction... Oh no! I'm swallowed by a whale! Dang it! Okay, okay, let's just do this God's way.... Oh look! The evil people are turning back to God! Who knew!"

Pascal (remember him? They named the units of pressure after him, I think) wrote it best for me:

"Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we ever think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future . . . So we never live, but we hope we live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so."
- Blaise Pascal, Pensees

We use crazy words in our lives like "ministry" and "calling" and "annointment", when I think that really, being in constant worship of God cuts through all of that, and brings us to the place where we have nothing else to do but let God do his thing. Our constant iterative struggle with him draws us closer to him, and gives us more assurance that it is not mad to be actually worshipping God through peeling potatoes. Romans 12 tells us that offering our lives as a living sacrifice is "our spiritual act of worship."

But you know, the problem with a living sacrifice is that it always wants to crawl off the altar.

Instead, we are called to be. Human "beings", not human "doings" (somehow that just makes me think of droppings. I don't know why. Anyone else feel that way?), not human "knowings", just human beings. That in itself is one of the most truly liberating things in our worship to God. Being who He called us to be. I am not advocating that we use it as a shield to allow ourselves to continue doing things that are wrong, because I think that our spirit could never agree with it. And the last I checked, truth and spirit were still part of worship.

Rather, we should not be stifling ourselves with the "model Christian" as a sceptre that binds us. It is foolish and we suddenly find ourselves unwittingly making an idol of of that image. There's probably a reason why God used weird people like a shepard (David), foreign talent (Joseph) and a slew of other folks like fishermen and tax collectors to dispel our fixed notions on a model believer.

How then shall we worship? What are the steps to worship God? Is it with the guitar? The piano? The voice? The clapping? Who know. But with confidence, we can approach life and know that at the end of the day, we are just called to be.

And that, I think, is the essence of worship.