Sometimes the route to revelation is a little too personal to share with the world wide web. Normally I like to take people by the hand and lead them down my rabbit hole, using my White Rabbit-esque cane to point out the view; but in this case, you'll have to be content with the heart of the matter rather than going on the full journey with me.
I watched Crazy Rich Asians for the first time tonight and, as an indirect result, I realized how easily I get off-message. In my next life (or career, or maybe just sometime) I would love to be a speechwriter. There can be many different components to a "good speech" - something that makes them memorable; it could be the form itself, a particularly salient analogy, an undeniable pathos - but they don't all need to be included in one speech to make it good. Honestly, any of those things are a bit of window dressing, carefully designed to frame the actual vista - that is, the point being conveyed.
The thing is, I can get so wrapped up in what my curtains look like, or what other people think of them, or whether or not the last person who cleaned the window left streaks, that I miss the view entirely.
One of the things that most amazes me about Jesus is that he stayed unwaveringly on-message. I can't imagine how easy it could have been for him to get off topic, with scribes and Pharisees testing him all the time and his disciples saying crazy things and the crowds alternately lauding him or calling for his lynching. If any celebrity has felt completely off-kilter because of the amount of attention and clamor their presence originated, he certainly could relate. But the thing is, he wasn't tasked with simply "protecting his personal brand" or making sure Peter didn't make the front page of the Nazareth Inquirer; his job was literally to deliver a message from God Himself: "Turn away from your own way and back to Me. My kingdom is near."
Whether his critics were giving him grief about claiming to be god or leaders in the community were trying to get him in trouble over his views on paying taxes to an occupying force, his message was consistently the same, he came to seek and to save the lost. Many times people asked him questions he didn't even answer because they would have sidetracked him from his message and mission (wittingly or unwittingly); in those moments he unwaveringly adhered to his goal, communicating the reckless love of God to a people mired in slavery and anguish and pointing the way to true freedom.
At various points in my life, I have gone off-message, or maybe forgotten that there is even a message, or failed to see that my medium was incapable of conveying my message - so many ways to lose sight of the goals and I've probably perpetrated most of them. From pet projects like pro-life lobbying, to taking a stand as a version of virtue signaling, to coddling my own self-righteousness, I have failed many times at grasping and subsequently conveying the heart of a Divine Father to the humanity all around me: "Turn away from your own way and back to Me. My kingdom is near." I am, therefore, Christ's ambassador, as though God were making His appeal through me... but am I, really?
And then I think about the result of Jesus' single-mindedness and all it got him - do I actually mean the rhetoric I've spouted throughout the years? Do I actually want to "be like Jesus?" I mean, his message, his way of life, literally got him killed. And not nice and quick. Do I love people - do I love him - enough to actually lay my life down in all the little and big ways that will be required of me to stay on-message like He did? That's a hard question. If I'm honest, there's still a lot of work that needs to take place in me for me to love enough to be that single-minded. But one thing I do know, staying on-message means more than laying my life down, literally or figuratively, it means having the courage to stand alone as the woman I was created to be - putting on a new self that is far weightier and has the potential to make a cosmic impact. Maybe that's part of the view I've been missing.
I watched Crazy Rich Asians for the first time tonight and, as an indirect result, I realized how easily I get off-message. In my next life (or career, or maybe just sometime) I would love to be a speechwriter. There can be many different components to a "good speech" - something that makes them memorable; it could be the form itself, a particularly salient analogy, an undeniable pathos - but they don't all need to be included in one speech to make it good. Honestly, any of those things are a bit of window dressing, carefully designed to frame the actual vista - that is, the point being conveyed.
The thing is, I can get so wrapped up in what my curtains look like, or what other people think of them, or whether or not the last person who cleaned the window left streaks, that I miss the view entirely.
One of the things that most amazes me about Jesus is that he stayed unwaveringly on-message. I can't imagine how easy it could have been for him to get off topic, with scribes and Pharisees testing him all the time and his disciples saying crazy things and the crowds alternately lauding him or calling for his lynching. If any celebrity has felt completely off-kilter because of the amount of attention and clamor their presence originated, he certainly could relate. But the thing is, he wasn't tasked with simply "protecting his personal brand" or making sure Peter didn't make the front page of the Nazareth Inquirer; his job was literally to deliver a message from God Himself: "Turn away from your own way and back to Me. My kingdom is near."
Whether his critics were giving him grief about claiming to be god or leaders in the community were trying to get him in trouble over his views on paying taxes to an occupying force, his message was consistently the same, he came to seek and to save the lost. Many times people asked him questions he didn't even answer because they would have sidetracked him from his message and mission (wittingly or unwittingly); in those moments he unwaveringly adhered to his goal, communicating the reckless love of God to a people mired in slavery and anguish and pointing the way to true freedom.
At various points in my life, I have gone off-message, or maybe forgotten that there is even a message, or failed to see that my medium was incapable of conveying my message - so many ways to lose sight of the goals and I've probably perpetrated most of them. From pet projects like pro-life lobbying, to taking a stand as a version of virtue signaling, to coddling my own self-righteousness, I have failed many times at grasping and subsequently conveying the heart of a Divine Father to the humanity all around me: "Turn away from your own way and back to Me. My kingdom is near." I am, therefore, Christ's ambassador, as though God were making His appeal through me... but am I, really?
And then I think about the result of Jesus' single-mindedness and all it got him - do I actually mean the rhetoric I've spouted throughout the years? Do I actually want to "be like Jesus?" I mean, his message, his way of life, literally got him killed. And not nice and quick. Do I love people - do I love him - enough to actually lay my life down in all the little and big ways that will be required of me to stay on-message like He did? That's a hard question. If I'm honest, there's still a lot of work that needs to take place in me for me to love enough to be that single-minded. But one thing I do know, staying on-message means more than laying my life down, literally or figuratively, it means having the courage to stand alone as the woman I was created to be - putting on a new self that is far weightier and has the potential to make a cosmic impact. Maybe that's part of the view I've been missing.
Comments
Post a Comment