How to reconstruct our Christian lives.
The big word around IBM these days is restructure.
For years IBM dominated its field. Other high-risk ventures might outperform it for a season, but year in, year out, the smart money was on Big Blue.
Not anymore, IBM’s stock value plunged in the early nineties. And for the first time, IBM is no longer the leading maker of personal computers.
When it became clear to management that what they were doing was not getting them where they wanted to go, IBM committed to restructuring. This meant a leaner workforce, changed spending priorities, and an organizational chart that redistributed power.
To restructure means to reconsider your strategy, to redeploy your resources to fulfill your mission. It requires both a clear understanding of the goal and a willingness to rearrange activities in ways that best bring movement to the goal.
Of course, not only corporations restructure. Sports teams, universities, even families do it as they pass through life’s seasons. My mother, for instance, drove a station wagon when she had three children at home; now she drives a foreign convertible.
Most important, people can restructure. This suggests a helpful way of understanding the fundamental response Jesus called for in his teaching. “Repent,” he says, in Matthew’s summary of his message, “for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” In other words, his was a new proclamation of the goal of human life. It was suddenly possible to live in a different way under the reign of God. With this goal in mind, Jesus says, it is time to reconsider your strategy for life. To repent is to restructure, to rearrange your activity around the offer of kingdom living.
Repentance, however, is all too often misunderstood. For many people, to repent means “to feel really really bad” for sin. It is a term of emotion, often thought of in terms of a cathartic experience.
I remember as a teenager attending Christian camps where leaders were masters at producing this kind of experience. Seven days of sleep deprivation, a diet of sugar and fats, relationships of incandescent intensity, radical self-disclosure, a hundred fireside verses of “Kum Ba Yah,” and a speaker who told stories of one of last year’s campers who died in a car crash on the way home, and people were ready to confess to anything. They stood and confessed in tears to total strangers. The feelings were sincere, but they often didn’t produce lasting change.
This understanding of repentance inadequately attends to the nature of human personality. We are creatures of habit. We live our lives according to long-standing patterns of speaking and behaving that, neurologists tell us, actually become physiologically ingrained; they become part of our circuitry. Change does not come easily.
This misunderstanding keeps us from seeing what a life characterized by true repentance would look like. Garrison Keillor reflects this in a passage from Lake Wobegon Days:
Larry the Sad Boy … was saved twelve times in the Lutheran church, an all-time record. Between 1953 and 1961 he threw himself weeping and contrite on God’s throne of grace on twelve separate occasions—and this in a Lutheran church that wasn’t evangelical, had no altar call, no organist playing “Just as I Am Without One Plea” while a choir hummed and a guy with shiny hair took hold of your heartstrings and played you like a cheap guitar—this is the Lutheran church, not a bunch of hillbillies—these are Scandinavians, and they repent in the same way that they sin: discreetly, tastefully, at the proper time, and bring a Jell-O© salad for afterward.… Twelve times. Even we fundamentalists got tired of him.… God didn’t mean us to feel guilt all our lives. There comes a point when you should dry your tears and join the building committee and start grappling with the problems of the church furnace and … make church coffee and be of use, but Larry kept on repenting and repenting.
Like restructuring, true repentance is oriented primarily not to the past but the future. It is not primarily an emotional experience but an invitation to reflect on life in light of God’s great new goal announced in Christ.
For IBM, restructuring means beginning with a clear understanding of its mission. One industry analyst chided IBM for the lack of such clarity: “Job reductions will not be enough. Distracted by endless rounds of cutbacks, the company lost sight of the ball.”
For individuals, this means something far more challenging. The person confronted by Jesus’ proclamation must begin with a clear definition of his or her mission: “Will I adopt as my ultimate goal to live the life that Jesus offers and calls me to?” Once a person has decided to become a follower of Jesus, he or she must ask, “To what extent are my current practices helping me live as Jesus would live if he were in my body?”
Consider an analogy. An alcoholic hears the news that sobriety is a possibility, even for him. He comes to believe this; not perfectly, not with 100 percent certainty, but enough to act on it.
How can he respond? Not just by regretting his drinking; he has done that before, bitterly and sincerely. Not by promising he will quit by supreme effort of will; this has been tried and found wanting also.
Instead, he is invited to a new response—to restructure his life. He cannot be transformed by his will alone, but neither is he a passive victim; he can put himself in a place where a greater Power can enable what he cannot. He restructures his days around relationships (through an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous) and activities (like the 12 Steps) that will enable him to enter a life of sobriety.
Often restructuring will involve changes that do not seem spiritual at all, that have to do with daily, even mundane choices. Understanding repentance as restructuring can break us out of the category of narrowly “religious” activities. For restructuring means ordering all my activities, from how I eat to how I budget my income, in ways that will most help me become the person God intended.
True repentance, as the Hebrew Scriptures make especially clear, also has a corporate side to it. It involves how I relate to members of my church and to society as a whole. I cannot repent without also working for the restructuring of my world. I will want to see God’s justice and mercy more evident. To divorce spirituality from social concern, from Christ’s lordship over economic and political spheres, is to turn it into a form of ascetic narcissism.
What would a truly restructured life look like? It would not be identical in any two people. After all, the ideal structure for IBM would not be ideal for Amway. Each individual is a unique blend of weaknesses to be overcome and possibilities to be realized.
But there are some general guidelines, apparent in the lives of great saints throughout history, and supremely in Jesus himself. Almost certainly, a life restructured around kingdom living will devote significant chunks of time to solitude and prayer, give of material possessions generously, and make room for disciplines such as serving and cultivating silence.
Repentance then will become a daily way of life that asks, “How can I reorder things today to help me move further into the kingdom?” It will become not a burden but liberation.
Indeed, true repentance is not always unpleasant. While a corporation may have to reduce its workforce, causing pain, another time it may need to restructure by expanding, bringing joy. If God is calling you to repent of joylessness, it may mean structuring your life around celebration. If the Jewish feast days are any indication, God’s people need to celebrate on a far more regular basis than is common.
Perhaps you need to spend some more time with banana cream pie, if that’s what has the power to move you to authentic gratitude. Philosopher C. Stephen Evans once said that banana cream pie is the greatest proof for the existence of God he knows.
Restructuring can have a gamelike quality to it. Frank Laubach wrote a book called Games with Minutes. In repenting of his disconnectedness from God, he devoted a year to a kind of holy game, seeing how many minutes he could spend in the awareness of the presence of God.
While restructuring isn’t necessarily unpleasant, it is no superficial business. It is a matter of life and death.
Restructuring is not something they take casually at IBM. They recently hired two “head-hunter” firms and spent millions of dollars scouring the globe for a CEO who could move what some consider the twentieth century’s most important company into the twenty-first. Millions of dollars and thousands of jobs rest on the venture.
But what the world is waiting for—although it doesn’t know it yet—is the restructuring that was called for 1,900 years before the birth of IBM. That restructuring can effect changes beside which the influence of the most important company of the twentieth century pales in significance. That is the restructuring that has the power to change the human soul.
Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
