Every piece of our lives is telling God’s story, the Gospel. Are we learning to listen, understand, and live into it?
I know I’m learning this a lot more slowly and brokenly (Is that a word?) than I want to. I wonder if it’s because I’m not paying attention to the narrative the Lord is telling. Instead, I often still cling to an old story with a terrible ending, featuring me as the main character.
I’m realizing this about myself more and more as I am reading Tish Harrison Warren’s book, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices for Everyday Life. In this book, she goes through the ordinary routines of a typical day — waking up, making the bed, brushing teeth, getting irritated, etc. — and all the while noticing and participating in God’s story with intention.
I haven’t finished the whole book yet, but I am already captivated by the imagining of living my daily, ordinary life with my face turned toward the Lord.
I want more of that.
I think it’s getting closer to the heart of my desire to learn more about and practice these habits of the Christian faith we’re discovering in this article series. I want to grow (and I want you to grow) closer to the Lord.
Closer, not like proximity, for we are already truly with him and he with us in the presence of his Holy Spirit living within us and operating in the world. Closer, like intimacy of relationship.
I want more than anything (or so I believe of myself) to become more and more intimate with Jesus. I wonder if you share the same desire?
Another book I’m reading (re-reading, actually) is Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation by Ruth Haley Barton and it is helping me to dive even deeper into understanding this desire.
In the first chapter, Barton challenges me to answer Jesus’s question to Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46-52:
“What do you want me to do for you?”
Admittedly, this is a difficult question to answer. I thought of asking that all my family members would be a part of the family of God. I thought about wanting clear words to communicate the glory of God to my generation and those that come after me.
I thought of asking for my dwarfism-affected body to be healed (but I don’t really want an average body, anyway). I thought of asking for hope, joy, peace, purpose, competence, love and more.
But, in Christ–by the power of his Holy Spirit–I do have all these sorts of things. I know they are readily available to me when I just reach out to him for them.
So what is it I want Jesus to do for me? What is it, in my deepest soul place, that I long for from him? What is it that makes me desire to draw closer and closer to him in intimate relationship?
The answer is that I want to be whole and clean.
Because every day I experience the ways I am broken. I experience the ways evil has influence on me still. I understand that a broken creation cannot put itself back together. A creation tainted by evil cannot undo its own corruption.
I must have Jesus.
I must run toward him and throw myself into his arms to become who and what he imagined me to be when he formed me. To be enveloped in his peace, his wholeness, and to be made whole in him.
These habits of the Christian faith are my running toward and throwing myself into the arms of Jesus. They are actions to take to purposefully live into the miraculous story of the only wise God returning to wholeness what is broken, washing clean what is corrupted, and bringing us home to himself.
“Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives…”
John 14:27
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