If a good friend sat down with you on the couch to watch a videotape of your previous week, took the remote controls of your life, rewound your internal and external conversations of the past week, you would discover what’s most important to you. What we say is most important and what actually has become most important can be different. The truth of what’s most important can be found as we listen carefully to the conversations and the stories that we’ve been telling.
To be honest with you, my spirit is drawn to a home-based encounter that Jesus had while visiting with His friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Martha was running around the kitchen getting all of the food ready while Mary was sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening to every word that He spoke. She was captivated by His love and His presence. Martha was worn out from her anxious striving and doing all of the work in the kitchen. When her stress and frustration got the best of her, she interrupted their holy moment and asked Jesus to send her lazy sister out to the kitchen to be more responsible and to help her out.
Jesus doesn’t typically respond the way that we expect. In fact, Jesus told Martha that her sister Mary had found what was most important and that He wasn’t going to make Mary leave Him to go and make food. We can be consumed or distracted by a variety of things that aren’t most important—but they wear us out.
Furthermore, we can set our own agenda while serving Jesus and feel completely justified. We can even get mad at our family members or friends who are encountering Jesus in a different way or serve Him in a different way. We can even be duped into believing that our way of being a Christian is the best and only way. But how can we tell when we’re off? By sitting at Jesus’ feet.
When I sit with Jesus, He reveals everything. What’s most important is Jesus. When I become full of His love, truth, and grace, I can’t help but share it with everyone around me. When I’m full of something else, I’m full of it. When I’m full of it, then you’re getting it. It doesn’t satisfy or bring peace. Only Jesus satisfies my deepest longings to be known and loved simply for being who He made me to be. Jesus made me to be with Him.
Today, as I’ve chosen Mary’s way of sitting at Jesus’ feet, I can get up and invest my day in people, but it’s different. I don’t work and play and serve people because I have to or to get something from it. I do it because the love of Christ compels me. I know that I’m on my game when I’m holding nothing back from loving God and loving His people. I know I’m off my game when I’m holding onto something else. My past. My anxiety. My frustration or anger. Focusing on what’s wrong. Injustices. My expectations, agenda, or plans. If I’m sitting on my bench out back while others are in the game, I can find plenty of reasons to feel sorry for myself or avoid making a difference for Christ and His people. I can even critique what’s wrong with your game—but that’s futile. How I thank God for all of the times and ways that He’s gotten me out of my funks, preoccupations, obsessions, and distractions. Sitting quietly with Jesus, I soon discover that sitting with Jesus is what’s most important. How can I know what I’m supposed to do today if I don’t ask Him? How can I know what to do until He tells me?
As I journey with people, I find out what’s most important to them. Getting what I want. Entertaining people to cover up hurts. Working more in order to have more. Doing more in order to experience more. Making and spending more in order to feel better. Drinking or eating more in order to feel good or to stop feeling bad. Talking more in hopes that people will hear more. Performing better to feel more accomplished. Looking better in hopes of feeling better. Using technology more in hopes of connecting more. Hurrying more and distancing more so no one really knows me and how I’m doing. But doing more of what the world offers gets us further and further away from abiding with Jesus in His love.
Why not do less of what the world offers in order to be able to say “yes” to what Jesus offers? Jesus offers Himself and everything He has. That’s all that we need. And when we have the Holy Spirit living in and through us, we won’t have to search for or consume something that doesn’t satisfy. You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free. If you get rid of what you don’t need, you’ll have more time and room in your life to spend with Jesus and with the people that He’s put in and around your life.
What’s most important to you?