my audience

In my last post (“dancing in the dark”) I considered the idea that “we need a witness to our lives,” and I suggested that this longing may be related to the fact that we were created to live under the gaze of a God who sees us. What really interests me is the potential impact that this truth might have on our day to day living IF we really believed it. And that IF obviously suggests that we really don’t believe it. I think it is healthy for me to ask myself often: Who is my audience? Who am I putting this show on for? Whose opinion of my performance really matters? And if I were to consider my actions and words throughout the course of the day, and take a moment to examine the underlying motivations for these, I imagine it would not be very hard to identify who my audience really is.

Church is a great testing ground for this. I shudder as I think of the number of times that I have sat through an entire church service, singing the songs, listening to the message, taking the communion, perhaps even engaging in prayer without REALLY pondering the profound idea that God is there and that He sees me. If this is the case in church, how much more so throughout the rest of my week?

The up-side to this, of course, is that He really does see me. And that reality has the potential to be extremely liberating if I can grab hold of it. What a relief it would be to narrow the members of my audience down to One. I’m not suggesting that I intend to embrace a monastic lifestyle or live in isolation. Other people will see me; there is no way around it. And in fact, what they observe in my life may serve to advance God’s purposes in theirs. The issue here is not who is in the audience. The issue is who I am performing for.

How freeing it would be to ignore the voices of the critics and the flatterers, to live uninfluenced by what they will think and what they will say. To the extent that my attention may be fixed upon the face of the One who sees me, the One who knows me inside and out, the One who designed me and who understands how I function and why I function that way, to that extent will I find satisfaction and fulfillment in the life that I live on the world’s stage.

And this, I believe, proves to be true even when I am far removed from the world’s spotlight, when I do not occupy center stage. Perhaps, as I suggested near the end of my previous post, performing in the shadows on the world’s stage makes for a far more pleasing performance in the eyes of my Audience.

Hebrews 4:13
And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.