Written by Jon Singleton<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A recent week of isolation gave me space to read Gordon MacDonald\u2019s \u201cOrdering Your Private World.\u201d Racking up scattered billiard balls is MacDonald\u2019s metaphor for the inward order we need. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without inner order, says MacDonald, under life\u2019s pressures \u201cwe 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.\u201d We are driven by our \u201couter world,\u201d which is \u201cmeasurable, visible and expendable\u201d \u2014- our \u201cwork, play, possessions and a host of acquaintances that make up a social network.\u201d But our private world, \u201cas 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At first, I struggled to understand MacDonald\u2019s use of \u201cdriven\u201d \u2014 not as \u201cexcellent,\u201d \u201cachieving\u201d or \u201csuccessful,\u201d but as something more like lashed onward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAmong the more painful self-revelations of my life,\u201d he writes, \u201cwas 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Drivenness is a \u201chabit pattern,\u201d he says, \u201csimilar to an addiction.\u201d Driven people ride on \u201cunearned characteristics at the beginning\u201d of their young adult lives. We run fast and far before having to develop the inner fiber that we need to really endure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What follows is a compact little book of dazzling spiritual clarity and wisdom. It\u2019s the boiled-down wisdom of a dedicated Christ-follower, late in life, saying, \u201cHere, take the best I\u2019ve gathered.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He probes the sources of drivenness: shame, bitterness, anger; attempts to earn the approval of people who may never give it. MacDonald\u2019s self-revelations are raw but healing for this reader. Each of our stories is different, yet we are not alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also love how MacDonald champions intellectual excellence <\/em>as a spiritual discipline. The \u201clife of the mind\u201d is deeply inter-rooted with that of the spirit. He says, \u201cChristians ought to be the strongest, broadest, most creative thinkers in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even after reading lots about spiritual life \u2014 Foster, Willard, Lewis, etc. \u2014 MacDonald\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One line of this book rings in a dark, wide space in my memory, haunting me: MacDonald asks, \u201c[what is] the meaning of ambition in the life of a Christ-follower?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s a difficult question. It cuts to the root of the tree for a university predicated on both \u201cpursuit of excellence\u201d and \u201ccommitment to Christ.\u201d But we must ask it, each of ourselves and of each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n MacDonald points us inward, where the answers gleam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15068,"featured_media":18083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15068"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}