During one of the hardest seasons of my life, God gave me a word for the thing that had quietly been running my life. The word was Meology.
Not theology, the study of God. Meology, the study of me. My desires, my plans, my agenda, my will, with God somewhere out in the margin of my life.
For most of my life, I was a practicing Meologist and didn’t know it. I prayed. I went to church on Sundays. I would have told you God was first. But underneath all of it ran a steady current of self, and most of my praying amounted to asking God to bless an agenda I had already set.
Here’s what makes Meology so dangerous: it’s the idol that doesn’t look like one. It survives church attendance. It survives a sincere faith. It can even hide inside your prayer life. It doesn’t ask you to deny God, only to keep yourself at the center while He stays helpfully nearby.
My financial collapse in 1991 exposed it. For years, I had been building on my own plans, my own competence, my own carefully laid groundwork. When that collapsed, I discovered something I couldn’t have heard any other way: real transformation couldn’t even begin until my self-focused life died.
The Apostle Paul knew this. Before Christ, his identity, purpose, and confidence were all built on pedigree and performance; Meology at its finest. Then he met Jesus and counted all of it as loss.
God doesn’t want to improve your Meology. He wants to replace it, entirely, with a life centered on Him. And when Meology dies, you don’t lose yourself. You finally find the self God designed before sin distorted the picture.
So, it’s worth asking honestly: where is Meology still running quietly in your life?
“Meology” is a central idea in Divine Gratitude: Joy Beyond This World — explored fully in Chapter 6.
Divine Gratitude: Joy Beyond This World is available now on Amazon.
