“Your religion is what you do with your solitude.” In other words, the true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention.
Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods
As I was driving from Minnesota to Virginia I had eighteen hours to think.
I love thinking time. If there was some way to drive standing up, I’d roadtrip just to have the chance to be alone, pray and think.
But what do my thoughts say about my priorities? What do my dreams say about my worship? What do my nagging questions say about what I love?
“Your religion is what you do with your solitude”.
A piece of my heart is firmly in love with doing my work well and growing these companies.
But, I’ve made the biggest bet of my life on a much bigger end. If I say I’m a Christian, and that I believe Jesus is God who became man, does that square with how I live my life?
A man can be wrong but well-intentioned, but he can’t be hypocritical and well-intentioned.
These passages make me ask, am I putting my ultimate happiness in what I believe is true, or has my gaze steadily slipped?
Highlights from Counterfeit Gods by Timothy Keller
[I]dolatry is not simply a form of ritual worship, but a whole sensibility and pattern of life based on finite values and making created things into godlike absolutes.
Idols generate false beliefs such as “if I cannot achieve X, then my life won’t be valid” or “since I have lost or failed Y, now I can never be happy or forgiven again.”
There’s a dangerous idea in me, that if I don’t grow my companies into multi-billion dollar enterprises, I’ve wasted my life.
But that’s just not true.
Sure, I want to do a good job with my time. It takes just as much time to build a big company as a small one. Both CEOs go to work for eight hours a day. But at the same time, that idea isn’t the arbiter of my happiness or worth. I want to be on God’s plan A.
[I]n the biblical view of things, the main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace.
[W]e can locate idols by looking at our most unyielding emotions. What makes us uncontrollably angry, anxious, or despondent? What racks us with a guilt we can’t shake? Idols control us, since we feel we must have them or life is meaningless.
Americans believed that prosperity could quench their yearning for happiness, but such a hope was illusory, because, de Tocqueville added, “the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy [the human] heart.”