Lent 27 Settling

I was talking to a friend the other day about my gradual spiritual decline over the past fifteen years.   I look back to my late twenties early thirties and remember ( possibly through rose tinted spectacles) several years of sucking up Truth, experiencing power, soaking in prayer, riotous and profoundly holy worship.... and I mourn.

What saddens me most is not that I have lost so much of what I used to have, but that it has pretty much stopped bothering me.  I have settled.  Somewhere in the past lot of years I stopped yearning for more, stopped being hungry, stopped being dissatisfied and let the dust start to accumulate in my soul.   I really really hope you are not in that place.  It sucks.    And the worst thing about it is that I know it is entirely and utterly my own doing.   At any point I could re-engage with the power and the teaching and the worship and the Holy Spirit.

So why haven't I?

There are any amount of excuses I could make.   For several years I was sinking slowly in a mire of depression and that sapped me of my energy and distracted me with lies in my head.   I've never managed to make the sort of spiritual friends I had back then - or the pastoral accountability/input.  Practical considerations re kids and husband and geography have made it difficult to plug into the spiritual things which are going on here.   Blah blah blah.  It's all just so much nonsense.   The bottom line is Im not disciplined.  I dont love God enough to put in the effort.  Other things have taken the place He once took.  I've settled.

I can talk the talk.  But I stopped walking ages ago.   God is lovely - He still uses me sometimes.  I know I encourage people and bless people.  Even through these blogs people have been touched.  But that is because He is fabulous, not because I am.

I suspect Im not alone.  I wonder if there is such a thing as a spiritual mid-life crisis.  Perhaps it is part of growing up - that we have to leave behind the former things.  Move on from milk and get down to the nitty gritty of being responsible for our own spiritual development.   At the moment Im just hanging on by my fingernails.  But thankfully God knows where I am.  And He won't let go.