I shared at the living room this past Sunday that one of my struggles is in living a dichotomous lifestyle. It’s scary how my entire life, all I’ve been doing is become more and more adept at becoming a smoother switcher between modes, a lifestyle router, if you will.

One mode is the mode of Christian thought. It is highly aspirational, and within this lifestyle, I seek to love, to encourage, to fight, to preach, to advocate, to worship, and to pray. I see the paradigm of Christian holiness and continue to add to it through further theological exploration.

But another mode is unwittingly and utterly secular, so secular in fact that it would qualify to what Craig Gay (and perhaps others before him) has called “practical atheism”. It is a lifestyle devoid of God, an immersion into a personal culture in which we behave as if there IS no God. Literally, hours go by without an active acknowledgment from me that God is God and I am a finite creation of His whim: loved, sustained, counseled, and disciplined by His hand.

What is the solution? Short of total monastic devotion, I don’t really know what a life wholly dedicated to Christ really looks like. The appealing but sloppy solutions are as follows:

1. Admit that loving God with all of our heart, souls, minds and strengths is actually impossible, that it’s just an aspirational goal that cannot be realized on earth. In a sense, Jesus was just talking overboard; He didn’t really mean it. And even if He did, it was largely within a cultural context of rabbinic hyperbole, a phrase not to be overly literalist with. God is happy when we do our best to love Him.

I reject this for a simple reason: if God is God, an empowering game-changing life-altering force of supernatural weight through whom all things are possible, then giving His people a command that asks for everything is not hyperbolic. It is simply the high calling of humankind from its one true deity.

2. The other reconciling theory is that loving God can happen without the conscious acknowledgment of God. This is the abstraction of God’s personhood into His qualities. Whenever I love anyone, I’m participating in blessing God, because God is love. Whenever I feel restful and at peace, I am somehow magnifying concepts that remind people of God, so I’m really loving Him.

Yes, loving Him may bear fruit in subconscious effects, such that the desires of His heart become our own. Good. But to actively LOVE God, like loving any person… it is an act of will. It is not something that can be rationalized after the fact. A man would never tell his wife, “Gosh do I love feasting my eyes on Eva Longoria, or what. She’s so crazy hot. Um, because she’s a brunette. Just like you. I’m really loving you, here. Dang, I must really love you, honey.” (If that works for you, wow. I don’t know if you’re lucky or cursed.)

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The solution? I don’t really know. But all I know is that I must find a way to infiltrate my days and nights with the identity of God. I don’t think this means piety or religiousness as we’ve known it, but I do think that it means an active, courageous foray into moments of sanctity, of reverence. I think it means discipline to pause and consider, at any given instant, if the hour that has just passed is one that was spent with the person of God, wearing the mantle of His royal, chosen priest.

My new roommate, jadanzzy, and I will be moving into our place over the next month. As I consider where the furniture will go, I consider the space that I’m designing for my daily activities. Where will I cook, sleep, watch tv? How should I arrange my furniture accordingly?

But as I make plans and arrangements for the mundane, do I make plans for holiness to inhabit my space? Have I considered where and how God will reside in the mornings and afternoons of my everyday life? Is it so absurd for the old Jesuit order to require a crucifix in every room, or for the early Eastern Christian traditions to build shrines of icons?

I welcome any thoughts or concepts about how to sanctify the time and space that constitute my life.