Holy Indifference

I have a confession to make: I’ve built a hierarchy in my mind, and hard workers sit at the top. A long time ago I even ended a relationship over my partner’s inability to work hard or ‘lock in’. This ability to dig deep is not only a personal preference, it is also reinforced and valued by our culture in the way it rewards hard work. This is not even unique to our current culture. In historic times, if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. If you didn’t work, you weren’t protected by the community as you brought little to no value to it.

So this isn’t just something I admire, it’s something I’ve built part of my life around.

Alongside this, I love when I come across a person who has a dream, who has vision. Even if I’m not part of their particular dream, their energy is infectious and causes me to rethink my own dreams and visions. To me, these are the inspirational people, the kind of people who say one thing and suddenly you’re rethinking your next five years.

But as much as I love these things, I think the true challenge for most of us is when we are asked to give them up. Not because we failed, but because the alternative is part of a wider pattern of redemption that God is inviting us into, often beyond what we can see.

This usually brings up questions of why God would give us skills and abilities and then ask us to leave them behind for something that feels less aligned with those very skills. I wonder if our forefather Moses felt this way when he was asked by God to lead the Israelites after spending decades shepherding. He questions God directly, why him? Why this role, one that required him to speak for a nation when he didn’t feel equipped to do so?

I think God still asks the same of us, and in hindsight, it is often the better way forward.

That means the vision may not eventuate how we thought it would. What if we create a beautiful space for our family to reside in, and then feel the nudge of the Holy Spirit leading us to sell and move somewhere new? Or maybe we had a vision of the future that felt truly God-inspired, but now we sit within numerous changes wondering, “Did God really say…?”

I’ve definitely felt this before when we pivoted from a calling to spend the next few years in Budapest to instead spending them in New Zealand and Spain.

“It’s important to see that holy indifference is not apathy. ”

Mary, the mother of God, shows a beautiful posture toward these changes through her response to the angel: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be unto me according to your word.” She gives permission for her life to pivot away from anything she may have foreseen and into the unknown. I can’t tell you what Mary’s dreams were, but I can’t imagine it was a common desire to become impregnated with the Son of God, especially in a culture that didn’t protect unmarried, pregnant women.

Jesus also shows this same posture of holy indifference in the garden of Gethsemane, right before his death: “Not my will, but yours be done.”

It feels holy and obvious in hindsight, but he was fully human, a man facing a horrific and agonising death at the peak of his life.

It’s important to see that this holy indifference is not apathy. Jesus and Mary weren’t detaching from life or caring less. In fact, through their actions, they showed that they cared deeply. There simply came a moment where obedience led them in a direction that was far from easy, far from comfortable, far from ‘working in their strengths’.

Things are only good insofar as they help us love God and love people. Jesus keeping himself out of harm’s way was good until it was time to surrender that. Mary having a good reputation and standing in her community was good until it was time to surrender that.

If they had held onto those things longer than they should have, we would have missed the beauty of their sacrifice. Their willingness to let go became the very thing that made room for something greater. That is freedom, the kind of freedom that allows us to fully love God and love people.

So can we hold our dreams with intention, while giving God the freedom to take them somewhere entirely different?

That is what I mean by holy indifference.

Take what God has given you, the strengths, the talents, and the freedoms, and hold them with open hands. Value them, but don’t cling to them as if they were the ultimate goal. They are gifts, not gods. Tools for the journey, not the destination.

And if God asks something different of you, be willing to lay them down, for what may very well be the greater good.