Dwellers In the "Land of Inconsequence"

Parts of this story are mine too.

Saw this sad, but very familiar, story by Dan Edelen entitled In the Land of Inconsequence at Cerulean Sanctum. If you have ever had youthful dreams of serving God, giving your all for the Kingdom and doing great things for the Lord - dreams that later seemed to dissolve in the mists of time or lie broken in the dust- then you too may be familiar with the Land of Inconsequence. I've lived there, like Dan, for a long time.

After describing his life journey, Dan says:

"That’s my story. I believe it’s one that many other Christians share, though the details are different. I think that church pews around America are filled with middle-aged people wondering what happened to the mission they embraced years ago. Life became cubicles and rush hour gridlock and the smirk on the face that accompanies hearing the dream stories of youth who are poised to change the world. Those were our stories—once.

It feels like hell living a life of no consequence, counting time until we go to heaven and receive whatever meager reward we earned, based mostly on what we accomplished for the Kingdom when we were barely out of childhood. The Land of Inconsequence is a terrible place to dwell, yet the population grows daily.

God knows most of us who dwell in that land would prefer to be elsewhere. We’d like nothing more than to cast off the burden of a life buried in bureaucracy and striving. We don’t want to look at the mission of the Kingdom of God and think, Hey, nice fairy tale. We want to be more concerned with the fact that Christians in India and elsewhere  face persecution, but we’re stuck on the phone arguing with the electric company, trying to figure out why our electrical bill is twice as high this month.

All the while, what we once were eats at us. The old mission claws at our heart, but we don’t know how to get back to it. We don’t know if we could even perform that mission should it one day open up again. And the days keep falling from the calendar."

I don't have any answers to this condition (if I did I wouldn't be living in it too), but agree with Dan that we should not pretend this dismal land doesn't exist, and that so many people in the pews of our churches visit it or dwell there.

How about you?