• Mood: thoughtful

Scandalous foolishness

Isn’t it humiliating to be told that we must come to Jesus! Think of the things about which we will not come to Jesus Christ. If you want to know how real you are, test yourself by these words— "Come to Me...." In every dimension in which you are not real, you will argue or evade the issue altogether rather than come; you will go through sorrow rather than come; and you will do anything rather than come the last lap of the race of seemingly unspeakable foolishness and say, "Just as I am, I come." As long as you have even the least bit of spiritual disrespect, it will always reveal itself in the fact that you are expecting God to tell you to do something very big, and yet all He is telling you to do is to "Come...."

—Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (8 October, "Coming to Jesus")

Dreamed that I returned to higher education to work with happy2beso at Seattle Pacific University. Before anyone goes thinking the dream is precognitive, please understand I also had a dream in which I was on the Enterprise-D (my first such geeky dream, believe it or not).

The above passage nails me. Something in me wants to work out my own redemption, even as I know full well that I cannot. I deal with that impotence by distraction and avoidance, doing nearly anything I can except come. Thank God He makes me tired.

It's simple, every time. My problems are complex, and so are many of my plans and my solutions. But the answer, the real answer, is always so very simple. He's almost an insult to my intelligence, or more accurately, my ego. Scandalous. "Seemingly unspeakable foolishness," as Chambers writes. Thank God He keeps it simple, too.

The week is going OK, with an occassional blowing of my stack and losing of my cool. Some people get under my skin and sometimes most people do. Wish we had the courage and security to be straightforward with one another, but most of the time we don't, immersing ourselves instead in games of relational hide-and-seek, mind reading, and clinging to our self-created worlds and prisons. I tire of others' and I tire of mine.

"Come," He says.