I have my moments. Those who follow this blog would testify, hands on the Bible, about just this fact. So would my siblings and my children…and the Hubby…except I would remind him of the ring on his fourth finger, and he would be persuaded to take the fifth.
Sometimes, usually when I am walking or jogging or gardening in the Great Outdoors of wherever I am, my moments surprise me in an exciting and beautiful way. Sometimes, after weeks or months or even years muddled in the complexities of my attempts to apply Biblical truth to my oh-so-real life, a little songbird comes to rest within my mind. It’s not really an epiphany in the “turn on the lights, the party’s starting” sort of way, it’s more of a gentle reflection upon still waters, a life-changing whisper. It’s that moment when a glimpse of the truth is completely satisfying to me. I don’t want to ask for more. I don’t wish for less.
How often do I spend all of my energies attempting to run from truth? How often is this decision followed by a complete lack of elegance? Followed by defensive posturing. Followed by wallowing in self-defeat. These aren’t pretty moments.
There was a day in my life…I can’t tell you exactly when the day was because it was indeed just a moment. It was a moment when I felt a knot release within myself physically. It was a moment which I can trace back to myself at age eleven and my decision to ask to be baptized, for the Old Me to be washed in the water and the blood of Christ. It was many years later, and by many years I mean some twenty or so years later….it was the moment that my journey took a new turn because my understanding of grace pulled into the forefront of my own priorities. It was a day that my own to-do list became a source of humor to me…as if doing can bring us to any kind of wholeness in and of itself.
It was the moment I tried on a new set of clothes which had been hanging in my closet for the entirety of my life. Elegant and intelligent in its design, this New Me was waiting for me to come to this moment, this revelation of self through much hard work and failure and prayer and silence and conviction and confusion.
It was the moment I realized that salvation via Christ’s death and resurrection is more than a successful system within which to transfer guilt. In other words, there comes a point where new birth means more than handling guilt and sin and others’ heaping piles of judgement into the hamper of my life story. There comes a time when the old garments get obviously tattered and torn and as outdated as an 80′s wedding dress, a time when a new “do” is in order.
I had this idea that baptism cleansed me of my former sin (and any little sin of omission which might have occurred as I sat on the front pew awaiting my turn in the dunk tank), and from that point on, the New Creation was the Holy Spirit dwelling mysteriously within me somewhere ready to take on my heaps of guilt and sin as they continued to occur within my life. I thought salvation was like a large-capacity washing machine where the water always had to be hot and the laundress had better never be luke-warm.
Do you ever wonder where all the mates to your odd socks are? Do you ever wonder what kind of IKEA shelving system exists with which God organizes the wrongs in your life? Do you ever put on a dress right before a party that is hiding in the chaos of your daily outfits, a dress you thought you might never wear, a dress that you bought on an ill-timed whim just because it was on sale or because you dreamed of one day fitting into a garment two-sizes smaller than you had ever in your adult life been?
You slip on that dress and it looks so beautiful and it just feels so right, so you. You wear it to the party and you dance and you have the time of your life. Then the next day, you put on your sweats and running shirt and you look pensively into the mirror again, and magically, still, you look radiant. You look the same. You look like the New You because you are the New You because you feel like the New You because you miraculously and wonderfully are. One day there is a moment when you simply can’t ever take the dress off.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here! 2 Cor. 5:17.
Submitted by Kerri Snell
No comments:
Post a Comment