Stop Frontin

The website UrbanDictionary.com defines the word "front" as "to put on a fake or false personality; not keeping it real." A few weeks ago my wife and I were getting ready for bed when I told her that I felt like I was playing around with Christianity. I felt like my commitment to Christ was something determined by my mood-at-the-moment or when it was convenient. My wife responded, "Sometimes I wonder if I am only a Christian because you are one." I am a pastor, but it's hard not putting up a Christian front when you have everything you could ever need and your vocation is to be "religious." I live a life of comfort, ease, and often excess that millions around the globe can scarcely imagine. Just last week our church hosted its annual week long revival/pot-luck fest, and every evening I left physically bloated and spiritually conflicted. In his mercy, God was present throughout our daily worship services, but my mind and my heart repeatedly wondered if I would be so readily "spiritual" or "religious" were the revival held in a refugee camp in Darfur with men, women, and children starving to death all around me. I want to claim that I long to come to the end of "American" or "Western" religiosity and that I long to know and to be know by Christ with stark, unpretentious authenticity. But there is one problem; I'm not sure I'm ready to meet, follow, and serve God on his terms. What if God is not how the American Church has defined him? What if he really is calling me to lose my life in order to save it?