So how do you identify idols? I have ten questions to ask yourself:
1. What consumes most of your thoughts and feelings?
2. What motivates the things that you do?
3. What are you most afraid of?
4. What brings the highest amount of frustration or anger into your life?
5. What is one thing that can change your mood in a second?
6. What would your friends say is your favorite topic of conversation?
7. What are some things that you feel you can’t live without?
8. What brings you solace?
9. What do you yearn for?
10. What is one thing that you wish God would do for you?
If you begin to answer those questions, you’ll be able to find your idols. Because what you think about, what you yearn for, what you talk about, what you want God to do for you, what drives you, what makes you angry, what satisfies you and what brings you comfort is what you worship.
I figure the best way to answer those questions is to just whip out answers as fast as possible without thinking. Here are mine.
1. Everything. There’s no real singular subject, but it’s everything. My dad refers to it as my anxiety, but it’s not usually anxiety so much as trying to figure things out. Assessment, I guess.
2. Love. More specifically, to be loved.
3. Everything. Life itself.
4. Lack of control.
5. Hard to put into words, but there are these moments where I’m the bad guy and I’m going to lose somebody and I have zero control over what they will do with me next. In those moments, I am ruined for the day. It doesn’t help that they’re usually brought on by things I’ve said or done that I really shouldn’t have.
6. Dogs. Probably. But I talk a lot, so I’m not sure that’s the only subject they might pick up on.
7. A car. Cars are freedom. And my dogs. Dogs are joy and family. Comfort and protection, I guess, is what I get from both.
8. Nothing. God, I guess, because nothing of this world brings me solace. It’s a major complaint lately. I have no escape. I have no tv, I have no substance that I can take to take me away and people would say the internet is my solace, but really, it’s more work than it is fun most of the time. It’s not relaxing. Writing does give me some relief, but I haven’t gone without it in over four years so I don’t know how big of a part it plays. You can always write- wherever you are. There’s always a pen and a receipt or business card or whatever. And if you know yourself well enough, you can write tiny and in code to fit it all in.
9. Happiness, I guess. Just knowing what that feels like. Maybe I already have it but I just don’t realize that this is what happiness feels like.
10. Love me. I wish I could know it’s there. I wish I could feel it even if I don’t feel it directly. You know? I wish I could be sure of it. Same goes for earthly loves too. I’m not even sure my own dogs love me.
Sometimes, I wish my idols were the easy ones, like money or lust or stuff. Or maybe they are easy ones and I just don’t see it. The most obvious one is my dogs but even then, I don’t think they’re idols so much as a part of my life I know a lot about and that just makes me laugh every day. They’re a source of a lot of stories. But I guess that’s it, right? If God is everything, shouldn’t He be a source of stories? I never do talk about God. Well, not never, but rarely. Of all the things I talk about, His pepperings are probably among the rarest. Shyness, I guess. How do you talk about greatness without ruining it? It’s like trying to describe how the Rockies make you feel to somebody who has never been. (Except that there's a 98% chance that they're somehow adamantly opinionated and confrontational about whether or not mountains exist.)
The other most obvious one is control. There are two instances of control with which I have the most trouble. One is the one I talked about in #5 and the other is with my dogs in public. I got yelled at by neighbors in the city so often that I am actually still quite scared of walking them in the daytime. I'm on high alert the entire time, waiting for somebody to come out and scream at me. As a result, if I'm out with my dogs in the daytime, I stress an enormous amount over the control I have over them. If they do something out of line, I panic. I become so easily frustrated because of the tenseness of the situation that the whole ordeal becomes so unpleasant that I just won't do it. I'll either walk them in the middle of the night or not at all.
I guess if I branch that out further, the overall theme is that I can't make mistakes. Whether I make a mistake in a relationship or I make what some stranger perceives as a mistake, I lose the control. I lose my confidence and my equality. All of a sudden, I'm the underdog and there's nothing I can do about it. In those moments, to be honest, I loathe myself.
Because if I was good enough, if I was a quality individual, I could make mistakes and people would forgive me. But since I'm not, people don't forgive me and instead, choose to walk out of my life completely or berate my person without any regard for me as a soul. Evidently, my quality of person makes it such that either one of those becomes easy.
And there is the other point Matt Chandler made in the same sermon:
The Bible is filled with shady characters. And this goes back to the point that the book is about the mercy and beauty of God in Christ and not you and me. Because almost all the men and women in Scripture are these abject failures who God uses mightily. Why? Because the point is Him, not you. So for those of you who like the other end of the spectrum where you loathe yourself, that’s just as much idolatry as loving yourself. Both are saying, “I have no need of the cross of Christ.” Both are wrong.
Right there, the point being I should be allowed to make mistakes, I should be allowed to fail and I should be allowed to just be me because that's enough. I may not be the best and I may not be perfect, but God made me lovable.
Jesus, the most loving character ever written, was sacrificed to make me perfect and take away my profound failings and to make me enough just as I am.
One day, I'll figure it out. Maybe.
And until then, it (this particular bit of idolatry), among many other things, will stand between me and God, from my end, not His.
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