Life is Shallow

There are some blogs that I write in a spontaneous burst and then later I regret that I wrote it for no other reason than I think it is shallow. Being shallow isn’t a crime. People make millions off being shallow every day. I even subscribe to shallowly written things. Seriously. I know that you are all now booing me but I have to admit that I actually have a subscription to Glamour. I actually kind of hope that you all didn’t think that of me. It isn’t a secret but I most definitely don’t advertise the fact. Why? Because it is shallow. So why do I dislike shallowness? Well I happen to be one of those kinds of people who like “deep” things. Deep conversations, thoughtfully written pieces, music that moves me, etc. I would in no ways call myself an intellect but I do enjoy “deep” thought. Sometimes I get caught up in that. So much so that many times I forget to have fun. I judge myself quite harshly and how I use my time. The problem with that is often that overflows in to all areas of my life and overflows on to others. Unfortunately you can’t treat yourself one way and others another. This easily leads right in to several other posts that I have written before concerning learning how to relax, learning how to have fun. Maybe learning isn’t the right word. Allowing is actually the word I am looking for. I know how to do these things I just don’t let myself. I find ways to guilt myself out of them. Things I should be doing. Harder things. “Deeper” things. This piece I am about to post is a personal creed of mine from one of my favorite dead guys Oswald Chambers. He demolishes my sense of being deep and stomps on the thought that there is a deep and shallow and higher and lower level and leaving me free to live shallowly deep.

“Beware of allowing yourself to think that the shallow concerns of life are not ordained of God; they are as much of God as the profound. It is not your devotion to God that makes you refuse to be shallow, but your wish to impress other people with the fact that you are not shallow, which is a sure sign that you are a spiritual prig. Be careful of the production of contempt in yourself, it always comes along this line, and causes you to go about as a walking rebuke to other people because they are more shallow than you are. Beware of posing as a profound person; God became a Baby.

To be shallow is not a sign of being wicked, nor is shallowness a sign that there are no deeps: the ocean has a shore. The shallow amenities of life, eating and drinking, walking and talking, are all ordained by God. These are the things in which Our Lord lived. He lived in them as the Son of God, and He said that “the disciple is not above his Master.”

Our safeguard is in the shallow things. We have to live the surface common-sense life in a common-sense way; when the deeper things come, God gives them to us apart from the shallow concerns. Never show the deeps to anyone but God. We are so abominably serious, so desperately interested in our own characters, that we refuse to behave like Christians in the shallow concerns of life.

Determinedly take no one seriously but God, and the first person you find you have to leave severely alone as being the greatest fraud you have ever known, is yourself.” Oswald Chambers