Dear, dear, dear.
Dug myself into a right old hole today and am only just surfacing now. Woke up feeling out of sorts, like I’d bruise if someone looked at me. Instead of fighting it, I flung myself at an old flame: self-pity. I know he’s a jerk, – but there’s something about a bad boy. You know he’s gonna hurt you, but you can’t stop going back.
Except that you can. Stop, I mean. It’s not easy: breaking old routines, challenging familiar lies. Refusing to cast yourself in certain roles. Victim, idiot, addict, loser. Your tags will be different to mine – but we’ve all got them. Maybe they were given to you by other people. Maybe you scrawled them on yourself. In some ways, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what you do with them now. The ways that they shape the way you live and think, in the present.
I’ve been thinking about 2 Cor 5:17: ‘I am a new creation in Christ’. It’s a nice-sounding verse, but can I really believe it? Is it actually true?
If it is, then everything is utterly changed. I’m not enslaved to certain behaviours, or the legacy of the past. I’m not my experiences or my family or my friends. I’m not my achievements or my failures. I’m not my scars or my sins. In Christ – and that’s the most important bit – in Christ, I am a new creation.
It’s tea-time now and I’ve been in a stonking funk all day. I’ve blamed it on on all sorts of things – sickness, deadlines, everyday worries. But thinking about this verse, I realise that it was a choice I made, to believe my version of life rather than His. In Him, every second is a new beginning, brimming with possibility and most of all, hope. It’s scary – but it’s never too late to become what we already are.
2 Corinthians 5 is fine, as long as you keep Romans 7 in the picture. All creation (that includes us) groans and years for the liberation that’s to come (which is where Paul goes after outlining the situation in Romans 7). Life before that is a pretty mixed affair for us right now at best.
Yes, that’s a useful corrective: thanks.
I’ve been telling myself something along those lines recently. It goes like this; “your job is just too big and demanding to be a Christian… it’s a big bad world out there and if you end up being a little bit nasty it’s no surprise – the world is like that…” Then I sit at my desk and quietly “f and blind” about people I’m frustrated with and situations that make me mad. I feel a million miles from my quiet time at 6.30. Can’t wait for heaven!
Hi Ben, yes: bring on the complete Jesus upgrade!
Read something hilarious from The Allender Center’s blog recently, along the lines of most Christians believing full well there is life after death but a lot of us struggle with the big question: Is there life BEFORE death? I find with myself, my nasty demand for perfection here and now is always getting in the way of a proper sense of gratitude for this amazing journey I’m being taken on by the creator of the universe. God has an incredible sense of humor. I am invited to enjoy it, if I can shut up long enough to hear the punch line. I’m not saying this is you, I just relate to wallowing in a funk, just to realize “Hey! I am CHOOSING to return to vomit, just like a dog! I don’t have to do this. He has made some wild promises and He (unlike me) always keeps his word.”
A great quote I used on my own blog recently:Whatever you think about heaven, remember it has to be real and it has to be now…heaven is about everything – the colour of your beloved’s eyes, your forefinger touching your own nose – it is about being risen and glorified right now. It is not something other than this world; it is this world perfectly offered in the land of the Trinity. It is all the moments of time and all the conjunctions of space as Christ holds them reconciled for the splendour, the sheer majesty, of the Father’s grace… and it is all of them held for the endless exploration of their depths – depths which we, even as at the moment of again, seeing our beloved’s eyes, have only just begun to suspect”.
Robert Farrar Capon – The Youngest Day.