Jitterbugging for Jesus

“But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”

— James 1: 22

“I’m having a bad day.”

“I’ll be glad when this day is over.”

“This day can’t end soon enough.”

We all have “one of those days” sometimes. But at the end of the day, what might a good day look like in the mind’s eye of a Christian?

A professor who was my mentor in seminary told me that in his prayers and reflections at bedtime, he thinks back on all the events of the day and the people he encountered or communicated with. Being the good Wesleyan Methodist that he is, he sees this sort of “rerun” of his day in light of John Wesley’s famous commandment to Methodists about do-gooding:

“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”

“The great thing about a rerun of my day,” the professor said, “is that is makes all the bad or ugly stuff I did that day stand out. Some days I give myself all A’s for goodness and some days my grades are mixed, and sometimes I have to pray to God for forgiveness.

“Sometimes I have to swallow my pride and ask somebody else to forgive me for the bad or ugly thing I did.”

I was impressed enough by his memorable words that I took up his nightly spiritual practice for myself. Naturally, I’m not always as faithful about it, or any other spiritual discipline, as I can or should be. But I’ve tried to stick faithfully enough that I don’t miss many nights of it at that. In fact, I would dare say that the regular practice of a “rerun of my day” in my mind’s eye is one of my few “good habits” among all the many other kind.

Of course, I’m still working on that part about swallowing my pride and asking others for forgiveness, and we all have our “blind spots.” We have a bottomless capacity for kidding ourselves into believing that someone doesn’t deserve our forgiveness (and surely that must somehow be fine with God that we won’t ever forgive them that; how easy it is to be a hearer of God’s word and not the doer to which the epistle of James refers).

It’s also easy to deceive ourselves into thinking we’re good enough to others when an honest-go-God grading of our day at the end of the day might not look so good on a report card.

This Christian life feels like an endless, spiritual marathon sometimes–and in a very real sense it is. But if you take it a mile and a day at a time, and for all the good or bad you do you try to be better on the next mile ahead, sure enough, maybe you’ll get your second wind (you will get it in fact) and maybe you’ll finish the race somehow, someday, in a way that the ultimate do-gooder might just say,

“Well done, good and faithful servant.”