Or else what?

I could think of myself a victim of my own folly if not for grace and mercy. I find or rather have found myself time and time again torn between listening to your voice and giving in to the illusion of such. My condition demands confession. It may be more for myself to die to those wrong perceptions than anything else. I guess for a very long time we have tried to manufacture a freedom in regards to living in your love instead of simply living at first in that freedom.

I am in a place where i feel somewhat yet not utterly alone. Perhaps we (and by we i mean me) have allowed ourselves to be placed beneath the tyranny of the expectations of our man-made institutions rather than found at the feet of grace listening for the voice belonging to only you. I'm coming to the realization that this letter could be thus far defined by the rathers. Is 'rather' the word which best describes my existence thus far? That may be a bit melodramatic. However, I can't deny that i've spent a great deal of my life declaring, whether by word or by deed, that i'd rather my predicament look a bit different. I am speaking of purely selfish things here. Sometimes these desires are rooted in the depths of complex emotions. Often they are strictly self-serving and trivial.

I imagine a great deal of folks who talk of or claim allegiance to Jesus find themselves compromising that devotion for their own ambitions. If we are living in that space between Christ's victory and the healing of all things then what does that mean for the church? What does that mean for those who align themselves with Jesus? What does that mean for you and me? Where do our stories fit into God's story? The thing is that the more i think about those questions, the more i believe that the answers mean a great deal. They matter a great deal, not because we are all destined to be gameshow contestants or rock stars or astronauts, but because our stories are a part of God's story. They matter because our stories are connected. Your story and my story fit together into the story of God's love and creation and redemption and recreation of all things.

We should matter to one another in ways that we often don't allow ourselves to matter to one another.

(photo credit: zack bent)