More on idolatry

The "I" word sparked a furore in the comments section of this blog. I think Adam misunderstood my highly personal and idiosyncratic telling of the story. After all, I was in my "personal space" writing, using a lot of mental shortcuts that make sense to me but may mean something different to others. So... to clarify:

By idolatry, I don't mean that I was making blood sacrifices to a stone image of Beelzebub. I simply mean that the project we were all working on was becoming more important than God.

To couch it in pluralistic terms, I was out of balance. And in hindsight I could see that Adam was even further out of balance - in his own words he said the project was his life.

And while that's not unusual in art, particularly in the movie business (Kurosawa, Scorcese, etc.), I found myself at a crossroads.

Do you want to go down the path of those legendary artists? Or do you want to forsake that for the transcendent (God)?

Reminds me of a book I read in 2001, called "Work: Prison or Place of Destiny". The author, David Oliver, said there's only one thing that comes close to knowing God, and that's work.

Working with purpose can be so astoundingly fulfilling that it blinds us to our need for relationship with the Creator himself.

Or, as Michael Card puts it in his book "Emmanuel", imagine if his wife gives him a beautiful gift for Christmas and he hugs the book, gives it a big kiss and ignores his wife. How does God feel?

And in the end, that's what it comes down to.