Complacency or Futility

Yesterday in our VWS leadership team meeting, we were praying a bit together. I LOVE praying with that team! I often get powerful images and words and I'm trying to learn what to do with them.

We were reflecting, before we went into prayer, about the amount of "bad stuff" going on across our body. We're in a teaching series on 'fighting' that is all about recognizing when we're being led astray by temptations, bad habits, influences, thoughts, etc that can be attributed to this concept of "spiritual warfare" that I've blogged about before. And, it seems as we raise our voices about these things, they come at us even harder and stronger.

While we were praying, though, I kept hearing this phrase "a spirit of futility." As I leaned into that and prayed for some more understanding, even as I knew that a spirit of futility in our team and across our body is something that I needed to push back and pray against, I think God helped me to understand something.

Last fall, a group of us went to the Catalyst conference in Atlanta. It rocked us in so many ways! Primarily, it shook us out of a spirit of complacency. Complacency is when we really don't care to challenge the status quo...we just live day to day and "settle" with where things are/how things are. At the conference, we realized that we had been lulled into complacency because things had been going fairly well, and so we settled in. Honestly, we had worked really, really hard, and we needed a rest...but, we rested too long and too deeply. Anyway, we "woke up" at that conference and got back in the game -- working to join God in the stuff he's doing here on the Westside of Cincinnati.

Recently, the amount of "bad stuff" going on has been increasing...maybe we're just more aware of it, or maybe there really is a lot more of it going on -- maybe both. But, there's a lot of it. Marriages at stake. Dreams at stake. Futures at stake. Lives at stake and being ravaged by temptations, addictions, bad thought patterns that lead people down paths that they know they shouldn't go down, but they do anyway...It's easy to get frustrated. The work we're doing is hard work. A spirit of futility could take us over, if we're not vigilant against it.

Futility is when we just give up. We decide it's just not worth it to keep fighting for change and abundance and life. And, it's just as bad, if not worse, than complacency.

Both futility and complacency are big threats to the work that God is doing. When things are going well, complacency seems to be more likely to drag us down, and when things are tough, futility could be the happy recipient of our tattered spirits...

So, I'm praying against both complacency and futility and instead for steadfast strength for the body and leadership of VWS and every other group of people working to shine God's light in dark places.

If you're feeling the weight of complacency or futility, take a few minutes to let this word sink into your heart...plug in your earphones, close your eyes, and let it soak in...