Idle and Blessed

What happens when we suck at it? Being like Christ. What happens when they can't tell us apart from the rest of the world? Or worse, they can tell us apart because we're even more incorrigible than the rest. I've read enough books and heard enough sermons. I know the answers and I know the Greek, but I still couldn't tell you the mystery of this thing called being like Christ, or really why I'm not getting there. Some days it bothers me more than others. We're supposed to be the body of Christ but I know very few who look like him. I don't. I just look like myself. For me this is fleshed out in how I focus my mind on Christ, in classes like Moral Vision of the Bible , yet continue to live for myself. Live for running, for sunny days, for the friends I like and the plans I make. Live for worrying, being anxious, avoiding the things that threaten me. I live for the future, I live in the past, I hold onto my things so I remember how to name myself...

Burdens aren't permanent. They're meant to be let go. They're made to be let go. They're made to be released. What are you carrying around with you today, that no longer serves you? When you let go of it, you create space for new life. You are shouldering a lot of weight not meant for you. Do not burden yourselves again with the yoke of slavery. Carrying your cross does not mean living under all that. It means dying so you can be alive to life. Free.

"He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life." -Genesis 3:24 I don't pretend to be acquainted with suffering the way most people are. I've grown up safe and well, my problems small and my community bright. I've been blessed with comfort, freedom, family, and education. I've both traveled far and put down deep roots. Even by America's standards my situation is enviable. I'm graduating from a private university just north of one of the richest counties in the USA, for instance. And still I am not blind to pain. In fact, privilege makes it extremely difficult to reconcile the pain I do experience, not to mention the pain I see outside my world. Going to Russia and being submerged in life there was my first real picture of deep pain. Pain without easy answers, without a near end. Going to Israel where the realitie...

When you go on a Spring Break immersion trip, you don't have a whole lot of time to process it. You fly back in and immediately start school again, which may or may not be your last semester of college, and depending on how introverted you are, it might be virtually impossible to process in the midst of that. I went to the border of Mexico with a group of 12 wonderful people from Belmont. We talked about the umpteen issues of the border and immigration. Poverty. Legal processes. Culture. Prisons. Criminalization. Agriculture. Economy. Children and families. Food justice. Education. Domestic violence. On it goes. And we learned. And we asked. And we lived in the gray. We didn't solve anyone's problems, but we listened to them, and we heard them clearly, and we were there. We allowed ourselves to be overwhelmed by it all. I'm back in Nashville now of course, living my privileged life, preparing to graduate. And I'm not sure I have anything in particular to share...

We saw the fence every day. It's hard to miss when you're driving down the highways of El Paso. In places it's chain link, in others it's a dark brown wall. In places you can tell which side is Mexico, in others the two countries look like two halves of the same face. But no matter where you are, the border snakes along, a symbol of what it means to live where privilege and poverty divide. Every morning I got up first and ran over toward the university. There's a paved trail over there, winding its way beside the highway into the distance where the Organ Mountains jut out of the dirt. And beside the trail there's a tall fence, chain link, keeping the speeding traffic on the right separate from the apartment complexes on the left. At first I didn't notice it, but after a few days of dwelling on the idea of fences, you start to see them. One particular morning toward the end of the week, I was running along the trail when up from the dust and dead-lookin...

Sometimes when we slow down, when we stoop down low and put our ear to the ground, we hear things we did not expect. Sometimes the things we hear are quiet and not as beautiful and we had imagined, even downright confusing and nonsensical. But we can hear them, distinguish them, all the same. Sometimes I go home to Spring Hill, and I spend Sunday afternoons on rocky dirt trails, and I walk around in the old cemetery I used to visit as a kid. It is a weird feeling to get away from the city, from the places I go and the things I do, because it puts spaces in the minutes of a day. Suddenly I don't need more hours; I need exactly 24, and there are blank white spaces within them into which I can draw things. And there is something in us - I think it's our soul - that responds to the things we hear this way. When we take time to listen to the river, to be alive in the woods, to notice how the wind blows the empty branches. I find sometimes I go through life all in my head, and...

“I am not all you need…to be happy always. I am not all you need to feel happy. But that’s not my goal, and that’s not who I am. I AM all you need to be alive – really alive – and to be sustained in that life. My Spirit is the source and spring and root of every good and perfect gift and you are sustained in it. If your body went without water it would die, but you would not. And that is the difference. I provide the things you think you need for survival, but when I remove them, your deep life is never in danger. Because you are mine, and no one in my presence is capable of truly perishing. “Suffering is different, and you are capable of that. Actually, expect it. Get comfortable with it because it’s where you learn the most important lessons and grow in the best ways. ‘Just because it burns doesn’t mean you’re gonna die.’ Suffering is different than perishing. “When you are hit with hard situations, it pleases me most when you respond in an act of worship....