Written by Jon Singleton
Mid-semester, do you feel frayed? I often do. My peace and focus get blasted apart like racked-up billiard balls struck hard and scattered by the cue ball of each week’s demands.
A recent week of isolation gave me space to read Gordon MacDonald’s “Ordering Your Private World.” Racking up scattered billiard balls is MacDonald’s metaphor for the inward order we need.
Without inner order, says MacDonald, under life’s pressures “we may sense something within us about to give way. We feel we are just a moment from a collapse that will threaten to sweep our entire world into a bottomless pit.” We are driven by our “outer world,” which is “measurable, visible and expendable” —- our “work, play, possessions and a host of acquaintances that make up a social network.” But our private world, “as infinite in size as we perceive our public worlds to be . . . like the depths of the ocean, remains unexplored, full of surprises, ambushes, emotions and dreams.”
At first, I struggled to understand MacDonald’s use of “driven” — not as “excellent,” “achieving” or “successful,” but as something more like lashed onward.
“Among the more painful self-revelations of my life,” he writes, “was that I am basically a driven person. . . . That drivenness has created moments of crisis for me down through the years. And each time I had to come to grips with fresh new revelations of an insidious energy within me that wanted to achieve and accomplish things for reasons that were far from obedience to Jesus or the glory of God.”
Drivenness is a “habit pattern,” he says, “similar to an addiction.” Driven people ride on “unearned characteristics at the beginning” of their young adult lives. We run fast and far before having to develop the inner fiber that we need to really endure.
What follows is a compact little book of dazzling spiritual clarity and wisdom. It’s the boiled-down wisdom of a dedicated Christ-follower, late in life, saying, “Here, take the best I’ve gathered.”
He probes the sources of drivenness: shame, bitterness, anger; attempts to earn the approval of people who may never give it. MacDonald’s self-revelations are raw but healing for this reader. Each of our stories is different, yet we are not alone.
I also love how MacDonald champions intellectual excellence as a spiritual discipline. The “life of the mind” is deeply inter-rooted with that of the spirit. He says, “Christians ought to be the strongest, broadest, most creative thinkers in the world.”
Even after reading lots about spiritual life — Foster, Willard, Lewis, etc. — MacDonald’s insights feel continually fresh and new: how to take control of time; how to deepen, rather than just stiffen, as we age; how to make the kind of capital-F Friendships we need as we move beyond our college to life and work settings where friends become scarce.
One line of this book rings in a dark, wide space in my memory, haunting me: MacDonald asks, “[what is] the meaning of ambition in the life of a Christ-follower?”
That’s a difficult question. It cuts to the root of the tree for a university predicated on both “pursuit of excellence” and “commitment to Christ.” But we must ask it, each of ourselves and of each other.
MacDonald points us inward, where the answers gleam.
