No Basketball Today

There is no basketball game to play this weekend. The school gym has been taken over by kids who play in a league. The teachers will be denied their space to sweat with likeminded professionals. The snow has mostly melted on our little acreage. Although it still clings to the places it most heavily drifted over the last month. Just over our bramble of wild plum trees the snow is several feet deep from the drifts and the plow. The ground is muddy elsewhere. I would love to go out and begin some projects, to work outside and build a little sweat. I would love to get a jump on spring, but that is just my impatience. It is still the last day of January. Spring will come. I will have more than my share of sweat to mix with our dirt forming another kind of mud, a mud that holds deep satisfaction. I feel antsy.

Adding to this antsy feeling is the questions that Bobby McGhee posted last night. He questioned his friends about perfection. Is it spiritually attainable? It reminds me of the contradictions I encountered in church when I was a religious and devoted youth. Back then, I didn’t question, I merely accepted it all. The questions I did have were simple; they had concrete answers. They were not the types of questions or answers that I would discover as an adult. You see back then I had this image of myself as spiritually strong and progressive. I was growing in my religion. It felt good. I felt confident in my spiritual walk. There were many who could lead me and many people I could help guide. Then I began to move in the non-Adventist social and professional circles.

It was in the non-Adventist communities that I began to see people of other faiths and people with no faith who seemed to better morals, better senses of self than I. Furthermore, they led lives that weren’t motivated the way I had lived my life. As a kid, I spent hours in the pew. When the preacher said that there would be a day of reckoning, when the goats would be separated from the sheep. I would look at the only obvious division in the church: the aisle. The aisle became the line that divided the righteous and wicked. My cousins sat across the aisle from us, usually a couple of rows forward of our pew. The preacher would add that the righteous would sit on the right and the wicked on the left. We always sat on the left hand side of the preacher, but I wasn’t sure if that was what God meant, maybe the right was where we sat, the right side as you entered from the back of the sanctuary. I would ponder whenever the preacher hit this theme, was I on God’s right side?

In Sabbath school, we would hear all of the stories. There were prophets to whom no one would listen; there were leaders who would lead the masses astray. Life was harsh. Daily decisions would lead to death and worse a spiritual death. God chose people on some pretty strange behaviors. Some appeared to be picked for some unfathomable reason. Those poor people found on the wrong side of God would suffer everlasting damnation, burning and torture. It was a scary picture. I didn’t want to go to that bar-b-que. I was afraid. My little mind would search for ways that I would assure my salvation. It almost became straight up superstition. Would I sit on the right side of the chapel or the left? Would I kneel on one knee or two? How closely could I guard the edges of the Sabbath? How could I control my thoughts from sin? My desire for heaven was based solely on fear. My heart would race, and I would mistake adrenaline for a spiritual awakening. I would drink from the river as if I were one of Joshua’s 300. I would be ever alert and spiritually vigilant. I would be saved. I was too afraid not to be.

At a certain point, I realized that fear was not a great motivator. After all, God looked upon the heart and not at the actions. God would be able to see through my fear. It just wouldn’t be right for God to accept fear as the way to salvation. God, I realized wanted people to choose him. One text spoke to me: where your treasure lay, there your heart will be, also. It made sense. I had to desire heaven; I had to desire a relationship with God. I had earthly treasures, a lot of them. They became roadblocks for my desire for heaven. At the time, I owned my first car, a yellow bug. I loved it. I knew I had to get rid of it for the good of my soul. I sold it to my stepbrother and within a few short months the engine blew. Within a year I owned and sold it again. The Devil was tricky. Twice he brought me the apple; twice I had to pass it on. All I had to do is want heaven bad enough, to build up my spiritual treasure in heaven and deny my earthly ties. Desire though became another idol and another road that would never lead to heaven.

It was about this time that I began to move into the non-Adventist communities. I began to see that there were good people, some of whom had never known God or even denied the existence of a supernatural being. I saw people using God or the tokens of God as trinkets made by a superstitious mind. Competing football teams prayed to the same God for victory; basketball players would sign the cross before shooting a free throw. God was used in our political battles with those Godless communists. I began to feel uncomfortable in my fear or desire based quest for salvation. I ceased going to church. I felt like I was just there to quiet my fear or to build a heavenly treasure for my desire to seek. I felt further from God when I was at church.

Although I haven’t been to a church service in nearly fifteen years, I never have forgotten the stories that I heard as a kid all of those Sabbaths I spent in the pew, all the Sabbath schools where the teacher would place felts on the board giving form and shape to those who had lived the righteous and wicked lives in the past. It was easy not to go to church, we had moved to a new community. We just never got into the habit of going to the new church in our newly adopted community. The church didn’t forget about us though, for years there was a saintly elderly woman, she must have been near 90, who would bring us a quarterly and a newsletter every thirteenth Sabbath. I would always feel a little guilty when she arrived. Whoever drove her to our house would allow her to deliver the literature alone up the stairs to our front door. When I would see her, I would meet her on the sidewalk or on the stoop. I didn’t want her to climb the stairs or see that our TV was on. It would be during those Sabbaths, that I wasn’t at church, I would watch college football. Frequently, I would attend some of those games on Saturday with my new fellowship of friends. It was during those games that I began to make sense of some of those Bible stories.

This great fight between good and evil takes place and we are not apart of it. We simply watch. There is nothing we can do. The spiritual battle is like watching a football game that was played last week. The outcome has been decided and our role in it has been proscribed. All we have to do is love and take care of those less fortunate than ourselves. Our outlook should not be inward toward the spiritual world; it should be outward toward the temporal world outside of ourselves. The work we have is simply humanitarian. We provide for those who are too weak or poor to provide for themselves. The more we seek spiritual growth the further we take ourselves from the direction God has always wanted us to go. Spiritual growth, the quest for perfection focuses on our own spiritual world. It is selfish. God doesn’t want us to be selfish. He wants us to be giving.

I see the question: is perfection possible, as totally the wrong question. Doesn’t that question force you to look away from God and to your own soul? Look around, isn’t there something better we can do with our time? Wouldn’t it be better to spend sometime with someone who needs a friend; to play basketball with some friends, to go to a football game on some a build a relationship with someone who will need you in the future; or better yet, to go out on the Sabbath and actually work for those who are in need, to truly carry out God’s ministry. The question should be: why do you want to attain perfection?

I know there are people at all different points of their spiritual development. It has become something that I cannot dwell upon, though. I spent to many unsettled Sabbaths in the pew pondering if it was my side or my cousins who actually sat on the right side of God. Perfection and my salvation has always been God’s job. There is nothing I, nor anyone can do.