God the extrovert

One of my stranger operating assumptions is that merely thinking a beautiful thought makes the universe a better place.

This isn’t a “visualize world peace” notion – I don’t believe thoughts actually shape reality. It’s more the belief that God gave me a mind, and I should use it to glorify Him. Disgusting thoughts don’t please Him, but beautiful thoughts do – and if God peeks into the realm of my small skull and finds something that especially pleases Him, then the universe is all the better for it.

In that sense, a beautiful thought doesn’t need to be appreciated by others, does it? Can beauty not exist in and of itself? After all, natural wonders like Mammoth Cave in Kentucky went unnoticed for thousands of years. How many more caverns, larger and more glorious, sprawl just beyond our notice? Some of these caverns we will never find before God scraps the earth at the end of time – and He has created an entire universe of planets, meteors, stars and galaxies with exponentially greater splendors that we will never know. Is the universe not the better for it?

Such hidden creations provide great hope for an introvert like me, a person who finds far more gratification in the world of invisible ideas than in external reality. Perhaps it truly is the thought that counts.

For example: the other day I overheard a group of students talking about using badminton rackets to smack cicadas into smithereens. I cringed, rendering the universe free of one more callous person. Who cares whether my cringing actually turned into action, whether or not I walked across the cafeteria to scold those students? Perhaps that would have been effective, perhaps useless – but at the very least, when confronted by their cruelty, I cringed. My reaction was good, and God was pleased.

At least that’s how I hope it works.

But I also have this lurking suspicion that God is not pleased so much by thoughts as He is by relationships.

I don’t get this from the fact that “faith without works is dead” – I do works, so I don’t worry there. Instead my concern is that my non-works, my beautiful thoughts, may have no value in themselves. I suspect this because the Gospel itself, God’s very mode of operation, is not a philosophy – it is a relationship. God is not expressed through truth or action so much as He is through a person, Jesus Christ. Likewise, His primary concern is not theology or obedience so much as it is the redemption of His people.

It all comes down to people – not ideas.

In that light, it could be argued that any thought (or action) outside of a relationship is irrelevant. God has redeemed and is redeeming a people to Himself. That and that alone has significance – everything else in the entire created order is destined to burn. And there’s the rub.

Do my private thoughts have any significance in the light of eternity?

When I put my ideas into words in a unique, insightful way, a way no one else has ever done before, I feel that I’ve Accomplished Something. Who cares whether or not those words are ever read? I have used my mind to produce something beautiful in God’s eyes. To me, that has seemed enough.

But if those words are never read by another person – if they never inspire, never edify, never challenge or encourage or enliven anyone – can they have any possible significance? They may be only random driveling scribbles destined for the wind …

It gets worse. The time I spend writing – is it not a waste, a pouring out of the precious hours and days and years God has given me to interact with people, who do have eternal significance? I’m not just talking about theoretical people – I’m talking about a beloved wife, a brother, parents and in-laws, friends and colleagues and neighbors and students. What if my writing only steals time from them in the most selfish, prideful, senseless way?

Am I really all that much better than those cicada-torturing students, swatting at the people in my life with the racket of my inattention?  It’s the introvert’s ultimate nightmare: to discover that God is an extrovert, and cares not a whit for the machinations of the mind.

Of course it’s not like that, the pat answer goes. God cares about art, about expression that honors Him.

But the suspicion lurks, and I wonder …