I'll never forget where I was the moment I realized I was different from some of my peers. I didn't feel I was better or worse, just different. We all had our own lanes to go down.
I'll never forget where I was the moment I realized there was NOTHING wrong with me. I was just surrounded by a handful of people who didn't appreciate me for me. For whatever reason, they thought their lane was the only lane, and a better lane than mine.
I have no problem with people who are different from me. I have a problem with bullies. Where were you when you realized at least a handful of people had been short-sighted, fault-finding bullies who wanted to keep you beat down, and make you think you were the problem? If you've been alive longer than five minutes, you've met one or two of these individuals.
The nature of a bully, you see, is they want you to think you are the one in need of change, to conform to their ways. They want to inflict you with shame and regret about who you are at your core. We see this abuse in narcissistic marriages, in bosses who belittle their employees, and in groups of school children who pick on one another for sport. We even see it in some legalistic churches.
However, the only thing we should be concerned with is whether or not we conform to the ways and image of Jesus Christ. Who has He created us to be? My only concern these days is doing my best to represent Jesus Christ to the world well.
Throughout my twenties and thirties, grief and anger drove 98% of my mistakes. I can look back and see I was in deep pain each time I made a major mistake. Once I was healed, I didn't feel compelled to be stupid anymore. That's why we need to have mercy on the stupid. They're usually acting from a place of deep pain.
Jesus didn't condemn the stupid. He healed the stupid with a long-suffering that confounds most of us.
You want to know why Jesus disliked the ways of the Pharisees of the Bible? He disliked them because they valued their laws above mercy, forgiveness and second chances. They valued their laws above suffering long with broken people. They cared more about their rules than about the restoration of a hurting person in front of them.
Jesus is a Healer, and if we're to represent Him well to the world, we have to be in the healing and restoration business, regardless of how long it takes. It is no accident he chose to be a Carpenter when He walked the earth. Carpenters are builders and restorers. We have to run toward the broken and hurting with unconditional love, not away from them for the sake of our comfort, reputations or laws.
I call this death to our fleshly desires for reputation, comfort and ease the LONG, SLOW SLIDE. It takes a while to die to self ... to die to people's ways of doing things ... and to become one with the One who created us. It can feel kinda sad and depressing as we let go of the opinions of people, of our preconceived ideas of what we thought our lives should look like, embracing His ways instead of our own.
If we truly serve Jesus long enough, eventually He's going to ask us to love someone who is difficult to love. They won't be good at dying to self either, and they'll reject getting on the same page with us. It'll feel like an eternity as they learn to love, too. And, sometimes in this process, we will not have the support of other people. We may lose friends and reputations along the way.
Once we realize who we are, though ... beloved, accepted and called by the Creator of the Universe ... it changes how we approach life. Suddenly, all those earthly things we spent our life and time pining for don't seem that important anymore. Suddenly, laying down our life for a friend doesn't seem so daunting.
There have been a handful of times God spoke to me and asked me to do something for Him, and those requests required me to die to my sense of self. Obedience to God, and partnership with Jesus, murdered my ego. Ego has no place inside of a healthy relationship.
I see myself as part of the Bride of Christ.
As a bride of an earthly husband, I would be devoted, faithful and be all-in. There's nothing good I wouldn't do to support my husband. I would hope whoever I was married to would be the same towards me. As a Bride of Christ, there's nothing I wouldn't do to help build my Heavenly Husband's kingdom here on earth, if He asked it of me. He's my partner. I have His back and He has mine.
One of the aspects of Jesus' character, I've learned, is He is always a gentleman. He doesn't force assignments or callings on anyone. Him coming to me as a gentleman usually sounds something like the following:
"Casey, before I tell you what I'm about to tell you, you have to know once you hear it, you can't un-hear it. And, if you choose to hear it, and if you choose to go on this journey with Me, no one is going to understand it. You will be ridiculed, persecuted, misunderstood. You will not have a chance to explain yourself. You will lose friends. You will simply have to trust Me, accomplish [the thing], and then walk out the consequences silently and with grace. There's no immediate, earthly glory in what I'm asking you to do. It's not about reward. It's about being My friend, My Bride, My partner I can count on. I need partners in this world to love My children on My behalf. If I could be there to do the work Myself, I would, but I can't right now. I need you..."
Sometimes, I'm ashamed to say, I've told Him no. I just wasn't up for the fight. There's often a cost to our temporary comfort when we say yes.
When we say yes to God, regardless of the assignment, Satan is going to do everything He can to turn people and circumstances against us. That's part of the price we pay for joining the fight between good and evil. We are here, albeit temporarily, to help Jesus and His army of Angels hold the line until His return. There will be battles won. There will be battles lost. We will take some hits. We soldier on because we know the eternal fight has already been won, and the eternal reward will be great.
However, I no longer say yes to Jesus so I can receive my eternal reward. When I was a young Christian it was all about the eventual reward. Now, I just want to help and go on an adventure with my dearest Friend, Jesus. It's not really about the destination. It's about enjoying the journey with Him. There's nothing I'd rather do than go on an adventure with Jesus. I'd miss Him terribly and not want to accomplish anything if He were not by my side.
Sometimes that adventure looks like building a business, raising children, helping a needy family, building a ministry, or spending a weekend in solitude. Sometimes it is praying for the sick, comforting the broken, writing, or counseling the lost. Like a road trip to somewhere new, whatever form the trip takes, it never fails to be interesting.
May our children see our relationship with Jesus and want to go on adventures with Him, as well. May we teach the cost of laying down our lives for our friends, but also celebrate the reward and FUN of the adventure. May our children accept His simple, yet hard, assignments bravely, with courage. If they find themselves on a long, slow slide of having lost reputations, friends, or comfort for years at a time... may they keep their hearts safely in the trusting hands of their eternal travel partner, Jesus. There simply is no other slide worth going down.
My life-song has become Romans 8 in The Message translation. This whole chapter excites me...
ROMANS 8, The Message
1-2 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
3-4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
5-8 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
9-11 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!
12-14 So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
15-17 This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!
18-21 That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.
22-25 All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.
26-28 Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.
29-30 God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.
31-39 So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:
They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.
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