A Radical Re-embracing

When you haven't blogged for more than a year, the first thing you do (after you try to remember your log in) is read your last post. You come to it with a mixture of anticipation and fear, asking: Is that still me? Am I still in that space? Will I look back with chagrin, wondering what I could possibly have been thinking?

This time (I've been away, before), I breathed a sigh of relief. Yes, I still can embrace the me that was then. In fact, I feel a measure of peace and encouragement. The me that is me now has not been moved. I still stand where I stood. And I'm grateful to God.

In the last 17 months, "the world, the flesh and the devil" (I must add, both inside and outside the Church) have mounted a most merciless attack on my position. I've been wounded, but these forces have not prevailed. I'm still here.

That's not to say I'm unchanged. In some ways, I hardly recognize me. A good portion of my internal landscape has been scraped off and is in a rebuilding process ... but the key is that it still rests on the same foundation.

While the world has experienced its financial meltdown, I've watched something similar happen to the internal, eternal economy that keeps me going in the spiritual realm. As those who put their hope in money confront, rather dramatically, the inevitable bankruptcy of such a hope, I've had to confront my own bankruptcy. That's been a good thing.

It has not been fun, however. One must confront one's demons at times like these ... and its not pretty. And I'm not sure I can talk about them all. I'm not sure, either, whether that's what is necessary. What I can say is that I hope to join the ranks of those who quietly love their neighbors and their enemies alike and persist in love, doing what they see Jesus doing. Offering the thousands of little ministrations that make them, mostly unheralded, the Light of the World. And my mission here, if there is only one, is to cast a bit of light on what I think (but do not know) that kind of love might look like. Anyway ... that's the plan.

We'll see.

One thing I won't be doing is redesigning my blog, or shopping around for a new blog host site. I see people doing that a lot — they have an upheavel in their life, or it enters another stage, and they retitle their blog, change the colors, post new pictures, etc. Having been away for a while, it would be a natural thing to do. But not doing that, for me, is important. Although a lot has changed, my mission is still the same: Embracing the Shadow.

As I embrace that in me that is not light, and enlighten it with the love of Christ, I find that I can, at last, begin to embrace that which is not light in others. We are all sinners in need of a savior. I revisited, recently, that powerful thesis statement from the Gospel of John, the one you memorize in Sunday School but never quite get your spiritual arms around:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

What does he love? Not just the Church. Not just Christians. Not just "good people." But the world. Who has life? Whosever believes. Radical stuff.