Soul Keeping

by John Ortberg

  The stream is your soul. For it to flow freely, the keeper of the stream must clear it of anything that becomes more important than God.

  Instead of a humble village being fed by a life-giving stream, that farmer’s life had become an upscale village filled with expensive homes. That cries out for my attention. I will be happy if I have more money. I will be happy if I have this moment of sexual gratification. I will be happy if I can upgrade to a cooler car. I will be happy if I can win more applause. I will be happy if the stock market is kind to my IRA. I am drawn to whatever is shiny and bright and new in the village.

  We will always take the most care of that which we value most deeply.

  DENTED CARS, DENTED SOULS

  I drive an old Honda; it’s been dinged up enough times that I don’t often notice a new ding. One day I pulled out of a parking space in a very crowded parking lot, and I heard this sound of metal scraping metal. It was not a loud sound, so I hoped that meant there was no damage to the other car. I got out of the car and saw a tiny scratch on the car I had just barely touched. It wasn’t a dent. It wasn’t a crumple. Just a little scratch — something I would ignore if it were my car. But this was not my car. It belonged to someone else. And unlike my car, it was not a beater. It was an Italian car.

  Rhymes with Terrari.

  Everything but my soul told me to take a quick glance around the parking lot to see if anyone saw what had happened and then quickly get into my little Honda and put some distance between me and the car with an imperceptible scratch.

  My soul told me I had to leave a note.

  Later that day, the owner called me back. He appreciated my leaving a note but was committed to having his car restored to its original condition. A car of such worth should not be driven in such a degraded condition. Do you know how much it costs to restore perfection to a Ferrari?

  We exchanged several phone calls back and forth, all quite gracious, but each one meaning more bad news for me. Then I got one last call from the owner of perfection: “I’ve decided to get a new car, so you don’t owe me anything.”

  I wanted to call him back and ask him if I could have his ruined car, but I decided not to push my luck.

  Even a Ferrari is only a ding waiting to happen.

  We live in a world that teaches us to be more concerned with the condition of our cars, or our careers, or our portfolios than the condition of our souls. Maybe because a dent in a soul is more easily concealed than a dented car. Maybe because a dented soul is harder to fix. After a while, the dents pile up, and they stop bothering us. We hardly notice. One dent more isn’t going to make much difference.

  The keeper of your soul is responsible for its dents. You are the keeper of your soul.

  One scholar put it like this: “Both for his own sake and for the sake of the community every Israelite must take good care of his own soul.” If he fails to do this at crucial points, the soul is to be cut off. Repeatedly in the book of Leviticus, Israel is told that if people do not properly observe the Sabbath, or Passover, or if they profane what is holy, or despise the commandments, “. . . such persons must be cut off from their people.” That may seem harsh, but an unhealthy soul is like a cancer in the community. I care for my soul because if it becomes unhealthy, it will infect others. You have seen it happen. Someone comes to the office in a foul mood and it casts its spell on everyone.

  I have done slightly better caring for my soul than I have caring for the many animals that have come into my life. We have had a long history of pets in our family that did not go well. One of the first times I drove up to the church in Menlo Park where I now serve, it was from southern California. We had just gotten our first goldfish, and fish don’t travel well. Goldfish especially don’t travel well. That goldfish gave its life for this church. A little later we got a little bird for our daughter Mallory, and she called it Jo-Jo.

  We were on vacation one time. Nancy and I came back early. Our kids were still with the grandparents, and neighbors had watched Jo-Jo for us. They gave the bird back to us, and we had it for a day or so, when finally Nancy said to me, “I don’t think that’s Jo-Jo.” I said to Nancy, “You think our neighbors killed our bird, got a replacement, gave us the fake, and then lied to cover it up? You really think that is what happened?”

  That’s actually what happened.

  It gets better (or worse). We had to tell Mallory that Jo-Jo was dead, and, naturally, she was devastated. She insisted on a burial, but this happened when we lived in Chicago and the ground was frozen. We had to wait until the ground thawed, which would not occur for another six months. So for six months poor little Jo-Jo rested in the freezer, and every time we opened the freezer, we were reminded of the consequences of deceit.

  I keep my soul carefully because I want to bring life and not death to those around me.

  YOUR SOUL IS FOREVER

  Jesus said, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body . . . rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” A lot of people would be shocked to know Jesus said something like this because we think of him as always saying comforting words, especially “Fear not.” I have not counted them, but I have been told that there are more than 365 “fear nots” in the Bible. So why all of a sudden is he telling us to be afraid? Because the stakes are so high — the body eventually ages and wears out, but the soul lives forever. And how you live determines the destination of your soul. We don’t like to think about this, but the Bible teaches that we will one day stand before God who is the judge of our eternal destiny. If you live your life in deliberate violation of his will and his ways, your soul will eventually be destroyed by being completely separated from God. That was the essence of Jesus’ warning: Protect your soul. Guard it. Make room in your life to care for it.

  I went to Box Canyon to seek ways to improve my church. I left with a greater understanding of the needs of my soul — that I had little to offer the people of my church if I was not tending to those needs, not just for fifteen minutes every morning, but all day. Every day. I wrote Dallas’s words on a piece of paper, and they hang above my office door: “Arrange your days so that you experience total contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.” They are the first words I see every morning when I come to work.

  The stream is your soul. And you are the Keeper.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE SOUL NEEDS A CENTER

  On an overcast day in Florida in the late winter of 2013, a man whose family had lived in the same home for generations suddenly lost his life when a sinkhole opened up beneath the home’s foundation, causing the floor to collapse and simply swallow up the house. Experts say that in parts of Florida, the limestone that lies beneath the earth’s surface is slowly being dissolved by acidic rain-water. When enough rock is eaten away, the void simply collapses under the weight of what an inadequate foundation can no longer support.

  Gordon MacDonald once wrote about how what he called the “sinkhole syndrome” happens in a human life. It may be triggered by a failure at work, a severed relationship, harsh criticism from a parent, or for no apparent reason at all. But it feels like the earth has given way.

  It turns out, MacDonald wrote, that in a sense we have two worlds to manage: an outer world of career and possessions and social networks; and an inner world that is more spiritual in nature, where values are selected and character is formed — a place where worship and confession and humility can be practiced.

  Because our outer worlds are visible and measurable and expandable, they are easier to deal with. They demand our attention. “The result is that our private world is often cheated, neglected because it does not shout quite so loudly. It can be effectively ignored for large periods of time before it gives way to a sinkhole-like cave-in.” He quotes the haunting words of Oscar Wilde: “I was no longer captain of my own soul.” The sinkhole, says MacDonald, is the picture of spiritual vulnerability in our day.

  WHEN THE SOUL LACKS A CENTER


  As I mentioned earlier, the New Testament book of James uses a fascinating word to describe this condition. It’s often translated “double-minded,” but the Greek word is dipsuchos — we might think of it as double-souled, or split-souled, or the un-centered soul. Here are a few of the indicators when a soul lacks a center.

  A soul without a center has difficulty making a decision. One of the pictures James uses of this condition is that the double-souled person is like a wave on the sea, driven forward one moment and backward the next. People whose souls are rooted in a center find it brings clarity to their decisions. Steve Jobs, who was surely single-minded in his purpose, was said to always wear the same outfit every day (blue jeans, black turtleneck) because that way he did not have to waste energy making an unimportant decision. John the Baptist had a different wardrobe but the same one-option approach to fashion.

  A classic counter to this in Scripture is the character of Pontius Pilate. He struggles with the decision of what to do with Jesus. He tries to talk Jesus into saying what will allow Pilate to free him. He pesters the religious leaders without making the decision that his authority would have allowed. He asks the crowd to let him off the hook, but they opt for Barabbas. When the soul is not centered, one is never sure what temptations are worth resisting or what sacrifices are worth making.

  A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances. When David is running from Absalom, he becomes completely exhausted and stops to rest. The literal translation of the text is to “re-soul” himself. It is Elijah’s soul that grows terrified under the threat of Jezebel. He runs and hides. Meanwhile, God treats all his “parts.” God gives his body a rest and some food; he allows Elijah’s mind to hear his still small voice; he appeals to Elijah’s will to return to the battle. Eventually Elijah’s soul is restored, but only because he found his center.

  The disconnected soul lives in vulnerability. When one of our daughters was three years old, she loved to play a little game we called “kitty in the nest.” After bath time, when it was time to dry her off, she would pretend she was the kitty. She would sit in front of me on the floor and make sure my legs made a kind of rectangle around her (that was the nest). It was very important that my feet touch each other, because that meant there was no open space where anything could sneak in to hurt the kitty. If I let my feet separate, she would physically move them together while shaking her head and saying, “Kitty in the nest, Daddy, kitty in the nest!” I thought about explaining to her that if there ever was a kitty in the nest it would not be a safe place for the birds, but I thought that might spoil the game.

  A soul without a center lacks patience. In the book of Numbers, when the people grew impatient with God’s long journey through the wilderness, the text says that “their souls grew short.” The same usage occurs in the book of Judges; Samson’s soul has no center because he simply rambles from the pursuit of power to pleasure to women to revenge; the nagging of one single woman is enough to make this powerful man “grow short in soul.” On the other hand, the character of the proverbially patient Job is said to be “long-souled.”

  King Saul was a big man with a short soul. When he was to lead Israel against their enemies the Philistines, he grew impatient waiting for the prophet Samuel to show up at Gilgal to offer sacrifices. His solution was to take matters into his own hands and offer the sacrifice himself. The result was a shattered covenant with God and a giant step in the disintegration of his soul.

  When I am with my children in a line at the grocery store, or in the car on a crowded freeway, my soul does not have to be tapping its toes and drumming its fingernails. If I am always in a hurry to be somewhere else, it’s an indicator that my soul has not yet found its home. “Nothing in man seems so intent upon God as the soul. . . . The soul seeks the Mighty One as though he is the soul’s own home, as though it can only be at home with him. . . . The soul is hidden in God’s creating hand: ‘In his hand is the soul of every living thing’ ” (Job 12:10).

  The soul without a center is easily thrown. We were with friends recently at kind of an open-air street fair, and at one spot there was a mechanical bull that tries to buck people off. We stopped to watch, but nobody would climb on the thing and give it a try. The man operating the bull said, “Watching isn’t nearly as fun as riding. Who’s going to be the one to get on the bull?” So somebody in my little group said to me, “Why don’t you go?” I never took the rodeo class when I was in seminary, but nobody else would go, and I wanted to see something.

  So I told the remote-control-bull operator that I wanted to ride. He took one look at my middle-aged body and asked, “Are you sure?” That pretty much guaranteed that I would not back down.

  “There are twelve levels of difficulty on this bull,” he explained. “It might not be all that easy, but the key is you have to stay centered, and the only way to do that is to sit loose. People try to clamp on too tight. Don’t do that. You have to be flexible. If you think you can be in control of the ride you’ll never make it. You have to follow the bull. You have to keep moving. Shift your center of gravity as the bull moves.”

  I got on the bull and it started slow, and then it started moving faster and jostling around, and I was holding on real tight. Then I remembered his advice, so I loosened up, and it kept moving faster and jolting and bucking and jumping. I was hanging on sideways. My arms were flailing around all over the place. I just hung on and finally the bull slowed down and it stopped, and I was still on the bull. It wasn’t pretty but I made it. I imagined how surprised the operator of the bull would be that I had triumphed. I looked over at the man who was operating the bull, and he looked over at me. Shaking his head, he smiled and said, “That was level one.”

  Level two lasted maybe a second. The bull won.

  Sometimes life comes at us at level one. Level one is kind of like Mayberry in the 1960s sitcom. It just shuffles along without major complications. Level one is the week after your honeymoon when nothing is more exciting or complicated than finding a place to store the three blenders you got as wedding gifts.

  Life never stays at level one.

  It gets complicated. Stuff happens. Opie turns out to have a major anxiety disorder. An addiction that has hibernated for two decades suddenly wakes up. My job is threatened. My faith is riddled with doubts. My friend betrays me. I can’t sleep. My health becomes uncertain. If your soul lacks a center when life comes at you fast, you will be thrown off the bull. No matter how hard you try to hold on, eventually you’ll get thrown.

  The soul without a center finds its identity in externals. My temptation when my soul is not centered in God is to try to control my life. In the Bible this is spoken of in terms of the lifting up of one’s soul. The prophet Habakkuk said that the opposite of living in faithful dependence on God is to lift your soul up in pride. The psalmist says that the person who can live in God’s presence is the one who has not lifted their soul up to an idol.

  When my soul is not centered in God, I define myself by my accomplishments, or my physical appearance, or my title, or my important friends. When I lose these, I lose my identity.

  HOLD ME, DADDY

  A soul without a center is like a house built over a sinkhole. “How collapsed you are my soul, and how you sigh over me.” On the other hand, the soul comes alive when it is centered on God. “Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love . . . for to you I lift up my soul.” A friend once told me how his three-year-old son, who is now a grown man in his thirties, used to approach him when he was tired or frightened or just needed to be held. The little guy would reach out with his arms and say, “Hodja, Daddy. Hodja,” his three-year-old version of “Hold me, Daddy.” Years later, my friend recalled, his son came home from work and discovered his wife had left him for another man. He was devastated and called his dad and asked if he could come over. Of course he could, so he drove the five hours to his parents’ home, walked in the door, and collapsed into his father’s arms. My friend told
me, “I could almost hear him crying, ‘Hodja, Daddy. Hodja.’ ”

  When we reach out to God, we are lifting our souls up to be nurtured and healed. A soul centered in God always knows it has a heavenly Father who will hold its pain, its fear, its anxiety. This is spiritual life: to place the soul each moment in the presence and care of God. “My soul cleaves to you, your right hand upholds me.”

  It is much harder than it sounds to keep our souls centered on God. We hold on tightly, but often to the wrong things. But staying centered on God — his word, his ways — is the essence of life for the soul.

  Thomas Kelly wrote,

  We feel honestly the pull of many obligations and try to fulfill them all. And we are unhappy, uneasy, strained, oppressed, and fearful we shall be shallow. . . . We have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! . . . We have seen and known some people who have found this deep Center of living, where the fretful calls of life are integrated, where No as well as Yes can be said with confidence.

  “My soul clings to You; your right hand upholds me.” When God seems distant, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?” Brother Lawrence called this “practicing the presence” of God, and the most important part of that practice lay in “renouncing, once and for all, whatever does not lead to God.”

  A very simple way to guard your soul is to ask yourself, “Will this situation block my soul’s connection to God?” As I begin living this question I find how little power the world has over my soul. What if I don’t get a promotion, or my boss doesn’t like me, or I have financial problems, or I have a bad hair day? Yes, these may cause disappointment, but do they have any power over my soul? Can they nudge my soul from its center, which is the very heart of God? When you think about it that way, you realize that external circumstances cannot keep you from being with God. If anything, they draw you closer to him.