Patricia Johns

Like everyone else, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. The world is turning upside town. People are scared. The systems we trusted are proving less stable than we thought. There’s a lot of fear.

Every year, our church asks us to choose a vision verse. It’s a verse we ask God to lead us to, to help us to stay focused for a year. I chose Psalm 90:12.

Teach us to number our days,
    that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
Psalm 90:12 NIV

The thing is, we never know how much time we have. Life happens. So does death. And lately, I’ve been thinking about what matters on the other side. Do things I fixate on and obsess over even matter over there?

I’ll give you an example: bestsellers lists. We authors long for that recognition. When we get it–and it’s not due to hard work, people! It’s mostly luck–it’s a a lifetime ambition achieved. But when I die and face God, will a NYT bestsellers list matter at all? No. Will it even come up? Probably not, unless it’s in relation to how I dealt with it.

In the Bible, Jesus warns us “religious people” about our cockiness. He says that there will be people who say, “Lord, Lord, didn’t I do all these things in your name?” and he’ll say, “I never knew you.” (Matt. 7:22-23) What if that isn’t reserved for TV preachers and two-faced politicians? What if that’s a warning for us regular people who are so confident in our rightness?

We Christians are a market. Did you know that? They sell to us. They manipulate us. They angle for our vote. They whip us up with social media garbage, drive wedges between us and people we should be loving, and anticipate what we’ll do next so they can gain power and make money. We’re a commodity when we should be a movement.

You know what? The Christian vote should be a whole lot harder to get! We should be a whole lot harder to manipulate, too. We should be able to see it when they give us a scrap and then steamroll a whole bunch of garbage right over us and tell us that’s what we want. (That happens on both sides of the aisle!) Christians shouldn’t be divided by political parties–we should be a worldwide family so tight that they can’t wedge us apart. This world isn’t our home–Heaven is. That’s where we’re headed, right? That’s our focus!

They say that astronauts, once they spend time on the space station, never see the world the same way again. They see this fragile planet with a whisper of atmosphere, floating in the vastness of space. They see a globe, not lines and divisions. Well, we Christians should have that perspective, too. We should see the world differently.

I’m not perfect with this. A few years ago, our small town suddenly had a lot of drug addicted homeless people wandering our streets. They were taking busses out here from the city, and we had drug addicts lounging on our property. It was scary. But then… it stopped. I don’t even know what happened, but I guess the police cracked down and they stopped coming. I was so relieved! I didn’t have to SEE that anymore. Was that right of me? Not at all. I’m ashamed of my own reaction. As a Christian, I should have seen broken people. But in my own weakness I just saw scary people that I wanted to go away.

This world is full of people. Full stop. They are not garbage. They are not worthless. They are human beings with so much value that the spiritual realm is all out battling for their souls, and God will judge me on how I treat them. God won’t ask how many books I sold, or if I won an award. God can give that and take it away. And I don’t want to be a person who everyone THOUGHT was such a good woman, but when I face God I find out otherwise.

We are Christians on a green and blue marble with a whisper of atmosphere. There are lives and souls, and human beings and a spiritual war being waged that we can’t even see. There is a broken mess that needs fixing and we are the ones tasked with seeing this world differently. Christianity has always been counter cultural from the beginning. Jesus was killed for it. If I find my Christianity comfortably nestled in a surrounding culture, reinforced by my own natural likes and dislikes, I’m probably doing something wrong. That’s a very broad highway. The world WILL be broken. And as a Christian, if I’m not going against the current, I think I run a very real risk of being told, “I never knew you.”

So this year, I’m asking God to help me number my days–to recognize that I won’t be here forever, and that eternity is a very, very long time. These are the things I’m thinking about. Maybe you are, too. For what it’s worth, these are my thoughts.