I
was having a really difficult time figuring out what I wanted to do for my
vacation. I really wanted to go on one but I couldn’t seem to settle on
anything. It shouldn’t have been so hard, but somehow it was. I had such an
idealized picture of what a vacation should be that I had a hard time letting
go and letting God open a door for what would be best for me. It turned into a
major problem.
My
ideal vacation was from the past—an image, a phantom from my youth—having a
great time camping, fishing, and floating down the rapids. But every time I
tried to duplicate
it, it just didn’t measure up. The image was pulling at me so much that I was
getting really aggravated, and everything I planned fell through. I needed a
vacation so desperately that I was exhausted just thinking about it. It started
as a desire but turned into lust and idolatry. Lust, because I became obsessed
with it; idolatry because I’d put it on such a pedestal.
The
Holy Spirit interrupted me in the middle of my dilemma and let me know what I
was doing, so I stopped seeking the vacation and sought God instead. I looked
up the word “idol”: “a phantom, an image in the mind.” I told myself that I had
to just let the old phantom image go, that past vacations with the family are
now memories, and really great memories, but still memories. I couldn’t
continue chasing ghosts. I had to trust that God open doors for new kinds of
vacations. I knew He would want me to have a great vacation so I quit trying to
figure it out myself.
Chasing
a mirage doesn’t deliver true results. The Bible calls this “vanity.” “Walk not
as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind” (Eph 4:17). The book of Job puts it this way: “Let
him not trust in emptiness, deceiving himself; For emptiness will be his reward”
(Job 15:31). The vanities
(illusions) are all around us, promising things, looking good, baiting us, but they
don’t deliver. Living in Las Vegas I see this all the time.
There’s
one casino we’ve nicknamed “the sex hotel.” The young guys come in and you can
see the hunger and expectation on their faces. I watched one guy in a
restaurant start flirting with a waitress in a way that he fully expected her
to take him in the back room for sex right there on the spot. It was kind of
hilarious, but sad too. The billboards advertise sex, so the guys come in
expecting to get it, but it’s a phantom. They can look all around the main
floor of the casino and restaurants and be sorely disappointed. They’re trapped
by visions of their imaginations.
I
had been caught up in chasing the illusion—a mental and emotional image I had
of the perfect vacation. But my picture was something that really wasn’t
available in the same way as I saw it in my mind. I wanted to understand how
this delusion was working on me, so if I got tempted in this way again, I would
be able to recognize it and stop it more immediately. I thought about how being
obsessed by this phantom idea made me feel and act; I had become totally crabby
and irrationally irritable. I felt like I was being squashed in a vise grip.
The
dictionary says a vise is a “screw, that which winds, consisting of two jaws
opened and closed to hold or squeeze with.” That’s exactly how I felt. The
idol, the image, the vacation mirage had me in its jaws and was squeezing. I
felt pressurized and unsatisfied. When I looked up the word “vise,” the
dictionary said that it could also be spelled “vice.” I realized that a v-i-c-e (defined as a fault
or harmful habit) works much the same way as a v-i-s-e with people’s minds. The
vice gets a grip on the mind and it won’t let go. We usually don’t even know
the real reason we got trapped by it in the first place.
God
tells us that His desire for us is to be free. Paul wrote to the Galatians:
“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be
not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Gal 5:1). The “yoke of bondage”
is the oppression, the vise grips of the unprofitable bondages the world puts
on people, rather than the freedom that comes with Christ and walking by the
Spirit.
The
world is a big billboard of phantoms, and we’ve been bombarded with them since
we were young—things we were led to believe were right for us to seek and
seize. They were presented to us through all kinds of media including books,
magazines, TV, the internet, religion, our parents, teachers, peers, our
cultural and ethnic backgrounds, to name a few of the sources of these
phantoms. We have even combined what these sources put out, and developed our
own versions of certain ideas, or pictures of how we think we’d really like
things to be.
My
recent picture was of a specific vacation I was idolizing and obsessing over.
Another example comes from when I was twenty-one. I had the idea of having
twelve kids. I figured since I really liked teaching Sunday school classes with
lots of kids, I would love having twelve of my own. But that was my imagined scenario, and I didn’t check
it out with the Lord. I also dreamed of being married by the age of twenty-five
and I felt devastated when that didn’t happen.
One
of my friends used to envision herself having one perfect job—one that she
would absolutely love, and she would do it all her life. It didn’t happen. Women
often fantasize about what they want in the perfect husband and take the chance
of missing the best husband for them—the one God sends. People get an idea of
what they see as their perfect family, but then they end up as a single parent,
step-mom or a step-dad, and they may feel that their dreams have been forever
shattered, and they have a hard time coping with the reality of the new family
they’ve been given.
We’ve
all had dreams we thought were our own, but sometimes those visions of what we
think we want, don’t come from God, but rather from the enticements of the
world. When we insist on pursuing these things without really checking them out
with the Lord, our thoughts and actions can turn very un-Christ-like and we get
further and further away from the good path God has for us. It gets harder and
harder to see the truth. Paul says: “I warn you beforehand, just as I did
previously, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God”
(Gal 5:21 AMP). That’s because when we’re chasing phantoms we’re off track and
can’t be at the same time enjoying God’s great inheritance. Paul isn’t saying
that if we get trapped by a delusion we’re not going to heaven. It’s just that
our lives aren’t going to be as free and satisfying in this life.
Unfortunately
many of us only find out that something is wrong for us after we’ve sought it
out over and over and it still isn’t doing what we wanted. These illusions disappoint
and fail us so many times we finally just can’t ignore them anymore. That’s
when we need to take some bold action.
It’s no
time to be apathetic. Romans 13:11 says, “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake
out of sleep: for now is our salvation [wholeness] nearer than when we
believed.”
It’s time to examine those things we think we want and make some brave changes
if necessary. Philippians 4:13 says, “I can do all things through Christ which
strengtheneth me.” Why wait, when we can turn some things around right now?
If we
truly seek the Lord Jesus Christ, He will not fail us.
He
will help us to recognize what ideas and visions are dangerous illusions, and what
images are solidly from Him. If we let Christ be with us when we take a closer
look, we’ll see where the visions come from: tradition, family, culture, peers,
the media, the Lord, or some other source. Once we know where they come from
it’s a lot easier to deal with them. If they’re not from God, He’ll provide us
with something better. He did that with my vacation.
I
didn’t go camping at all, but instead I got to go to Maui and had the best
vacation ever.
Love,
Carolyn
