Friday, April 9, 2021
One day you might wake up to find that all your heretofore pursuits are devoid of meaning and value. You may discover that old delights simply don’t thrill like they used to. You may even feel dead inside, though you won’t be using the phrase to make a joke, as it so often is these days. You will actually feel the deadness of the world, if you’ve ever walked here.
It’s like stepping into a clearing on the way where the view takes your breath away, and you see a glimpse of how wonderful it is just to be near God. Here great violence is done to the illusion of the temporal world. You see the truth of it a little more. This is the place where God pulls back the veil a little and enlightens human understanding with a clean shot of perspective, and you don’t usually make it here without deliberately following Jesus for a little while. This place is difficult to describe with the sort of language that has been corrupted and confused, that runs in the rut of the legacy of Babel. To say that this revelation is bittersweet, for instance, is a disservice.
Solomon said that the end of a thing is better than its beginning, and while I kind of get it about what he’s saying there, I’m not sure I can agree with all my heart. One reason is because his magnum opus, the book of Ecclesiastes (one of my favorites) keeps a shade over the hope it should hold. I’m not sure Solomon understood about Messiah. I’m not so sure we do either.
So many of us, myself included, have been carrying so very much baggage that it’s a wonder we can walk, let alone walk with Jesus. It’s a narrow path, y’all. Why do we try to haul whole houses and careers and concerns up it? If we are indeed a new creation in Christ, and if we are indeed following hard after Him from time into eternity, why do we hold so fast to every distraction and comfort from the old way, trying like hell to bring it with us into the new? The world is full of emptiness, and Jesus the Boy saw it clearly from a young age. This was why He was about His Father’s business when His family was heading back “home” to Nazareth in Luke 2.
They had “completed” the law’s requirement for Passover. “Worship” had happened; now it was time to get back to normalcy, to get back to all the trappings and entanglements of their pursuits. But is that the worship God has called us to? Just another episode, and move on, unmoved? Unchanged?
I’m not saying it’s illegitimate to live a simple life in the trenches of the requirements of family life, careers, and the relationships we forge there. I’m saying we need to be careful not to deceive ourselves about our actual responsibility—our response—to the One who bought us out of the emptiness of the world with His own life, blood, tears, prayers, death, and resurrection. I know that for me, there’s much more in store. It must therefore be true for all of us.
It looks to the world like forsaking all others, that it's irresponsible, that it's abandonment, even unloving. It looks like leaving stuff behind, leaving career behind, leaving opportunity behind, and being crazy enough to walk forward in faith with nothing but my yes, trusting that God’s got my back when I’m about the Father’s business. This makes all the “adventures” I used to watch on a screen completely ridiculous. That’s not adventure. Walking with Jesus is. No more illusions, then. Not for me. This is my prayer.
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