Every once in awhile someone will make a passing comment, or write a message, or I’ll read a passage, or hear my kids say something, and it sticks. It sticks because it hits me at my core. Hey, you haven’t been thinking right about that, and here’s a slap upside your head to set you straight. Or it will hit because it is beautiful, and I find myself turning it around as if in my hands, gazing slowly, carefully. I like the ones that hit because they make me laugh. And I am a person who needs laughter. So much.
This week, I thought I’d share with you the little nuggets heard or seen or read that stuck with me, and did me good.
Received
“Trying to stay humble and brave and not always succeeding. And so again, we fall upon the work of Christ”
A friend wrote this in relation to having tough conversations with our kids. But honestly, the phrase stuck with me because it speaks to how we can live and move through every part of our lives. So stark and simple, so clear and utterly theological. And so again, we fall upon the work of Christ. I see a lot of self-talk on Instagram these days, even Christian self-talk slathered in words that start to sound more like self-reliance than a robust understanding of our lives as built upon the Rock of Christ, his complete and all encompassing work on our behalf.
Perhaps the therapeutic self-talk I see is part of a current pushback against the over-emphasis on “preaching to yourself” which does seem to say that faith is all mind over matter: i.e., if you just tell yourself the truth (head knowledge), then the heart will follow. And while I think the renewed focus on our embodied faith is a good one, seen in such ways as James K.A. Smith outlines in You Are What You Love— that our physical habits often train our spiritual lives more than the other way around, the truth is we also veer so easily away from looking to the cross. Maybe because saying the words too many times have caused them to lose their power. Or because we don’t really know what we mean when we say “look to the cross”, and find it hard to practically apply it to our real life failures.
In Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost For His Highest, an old classic I’ve been enjoying lately, he writes about Jesus words in Matthew 26, “Rise, let us be going.” Chambers titles his section, The Initiative Against Despair. He writes, “Whenever we realize that we have not done that which we had a magnificent opportunity of doing, then we are apt to sink into despair; and Jesus Christ comes and says— “[…] that opportunity is lost for ever, you cannot alter it, but arise and go to the next thing.” Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ, and go out into the irresistible future with Him.”
Our days are full of what we fail to do. The old prayer says, “Forgive us for what we have done, and for what we have failed to do.” I feel that one too keenly. Forgive us also for looking too much at ourselves and not to Christ. I do think my friend is right in saying, we fall upon the work of Christ. We don’t heft ourselves up into his arms. We don’t jump confidently. We fall, exhausted and weak and ashamed, and he has somehow deigned it his delight to stoop to catch us.
Read
“He is the hidden abyss, but He is also the hidden home at the beginning and end of all our journeyings.” —Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans (v. 1:19-21)
Heard
“If we put all the ipads, computers, and phones up on the basketball rim, I bet Zoë could dunk.”
Seen
Thanks for reading what kept me afloat and even put a little air under my wings this week.
-Christine
Hahaha, I loved pondering what might qualify one to be raptured to the U.S. and why only one of you might meet this qualification. 🤣 So glad to be sitting at the table of His goodness with you.