Sick Day: recurring themes

Today is the Sunday before Thanksgiving. I am at home with a cold, taking advantage of my only opportunity to really rest until next weekend (and even then, who knows what will come up?) while the rest of the farm is in the city for church. I have some sermons on my iTunes that I haven’t listened to yet, so I pick one.
Greg, my pastor back home, reminds me first of all about God’s expression toward me: a continual smile. That’s something that is and has been very difficult for me to accept, because I have always imagined him regarding me without expression, waiting to see what I’ll DO and if it will be pleasing or displeasing. Having a foster son reminds me of that false belief a lot. How often do I treat little J. that way? How often does he feel that he has to perform, to be worthy, to do well, for me to smile and show him my love? When I discipline him, does he feel my love? Or only my disappointment?
But, as Greg says in this sermon I’m listening to, that is not something I can resolve to change on my own. Love and service toward others can only be an outpouring of a realization of God’s love toward me. Not until I understand that I am the guy beaten, stripped, and left for dead on the side of the road, on whom the Samaritan has mercy… not until I know that I am utterly dependent on Him will I be able to love freely and give generously and serve without reservation.
Of course, is that realistic? I don’t know… it’s problem we all have. Ever since the first people didn’t trust that God was good, that he loved them, we’ve all been born that way. And it affects us in every aspect of our lives: between God and us, with ourselves, between others and ourselves, between ourselves and the natural world. We need a radical, complete, holistic change.
I remember one line from Mel Gibson’s film, ‘The Passion of the Christ’. Jesus is staggering along the dusty road, carrying the heavy beam of the cross on which he will die. He stumbles and falls, covered in sweat, blood, dirt. His mother, Mary, is at the side of the road, in anguish. Her son, God’s son, looks at her and says, “See, Mother, I am making all things new.”
It gave me goose bumps. That’s what I want, that’s what the world needs… to be made new, in every way. And now, in Christ, we can once again walk with God in the cool of the evening, we can see him face to face without fear, without hiding our nakedness with fig leaves. We can know his love, through the lavish love of Christ. But I cannot make myself know it or understand it. I can hear the theology, but I have to wait for the Spirit to do the work of sinking it in deep.
And then, through faith and hope in the Spirit’s work, the world will change. I, too, can be a part of making all things new. When I overflow with that love, when I feel His smile, His pleasure on me as I am and do exactly and only what He created me to be (when I live ontologically), I will serve and love with reckless abandon!
Right now there are two Jamaican ladies here at Formando Vidas. Donna will be staying long term. Marion is a friend of hers and YWAM leader in Montego Bay who came to visit Colombia and help get Donna settled in. Marion is full of life, love, energy, excitement. She doesn’t speak much Spanish but said she wished she had some tracts or something in Spanish to hand out. Growing up in the South, I’ve felt and seen and participated in the misuse of things like tracts, so I don’t like the idea of “hit and run” evangelism (street evangelism, tracts, door-to-door evangelism… things that don’t have follow up from me/the group involved, things that are not relational). Marion said that she doesn’t care and she just says a prayer and uses whatever she has, that God can and will use whatever we have for His glory and purposes.
Moving to Bogotá from the Bible Belt, I’m realizing how many people do not know Jesus. Every day, on every street, every bus, in every store, I see people and wonder if they know that there is new life. If they have heard the good news. If they have hope and know that there are plans and a purpose for them; that they matter. I am seeing for the first time, that “the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.” Of course we need more ‘workers’, but what if the ones we have weren’t so scared of people’s reactions? What if we understood God’s love more? Enough to serve lavishly? Enough to lay down our lives, our schedules, our plans, to take time to be with someone? Enough to get over our cultural hang-ups, to pray and hand out a tract? Or to tell the street person that Jesus loves her when I give a cup of coffee?
Not because I have to, or because I ought to. Rather, because I have been loved so much that I can see I am incapable of love. But that I know One who IS love, who is in me and working through me, to fill the earth with that love and make it new again.