You,
“Absolute
joy on the other side.”
There is something to being
wrong in the form of a thing but getting the substance absolutely right. The best
example I know of this has to be the early apostles. They knew of the second
coming. They expected to see Christ again. Yet they interpreted His “soon” as
our soon and though they did not all expect to see him in the flesh, I can
hazard a guess that they did not think we would be waiting for Him two thousand
years on. They got the form of His coming wrong but they lived the very
substance of worship that was His life.
I am convinced now more than
ever that God does not expect us to get things right. I think while we are
obsessing with how things look, He is looking at how things are. While we are
trying to frame the right words and do the right acts, He is reading what our
hearts are really saying and what these acts really mean. He is trying to
perfect the parts of us that will live on forever. Every single interaction
Jesus had always revealed the heart behind the action or the word of the other
person. He was so transparent that He laid bare not only His own soul but the soul
of anyone who came to Him.
I get this wrong many times.
I begin to think I ought to perfect my inside state and let everything else go.
Then I look at how God with us addressed the desperate seeker. He said: follow
me. He said this every time. The light burden we have now is to be honest and
open to Him. To assume He knows every act and thought but also knows how to
lead us to the absolute joy that is on the other side of our limited vision of
the present.
We have to start small. We have
to give up the pretense and posing. We have to unburden in prayer and learn at
the feet of the master how to be transparent. There lies the secret of being
more like we were meant to be. There lies the truth about being more like Him. There
lies the start to truly changing the world.