Wiggle Room

Sometimes, my spirit is just restless. There's really no specific reason, I just have the tiniest little ache deep, deep down; reminding me that something doesn't sit quite right. Yet. It reminds me that the obscured lens that I see life through still needs some cleaning before it can give me a clear representation of what I am looking at, and that, sometimes, things that seem so permanent are more temporary than the wind. I'm reminded of how often I use Jesus' name to grant me access to places and conversations that I really did not want Him to be part of, because I only ever meant for them to be about me anyway. The feeling also reminds me of the fact that I often do things in the name of being a disciple of Christ so that people will see that I am doing well and growing up and maturing and gaining wisdom and all of the sudden, Jesus' name is forgotten and in it's place, I set my own.

Anything to get me a foot ahead of anybody in life's little hamster wheel race. Anything that makes me feel just a little less insecure and a little more important. Anything that makes me look a little more like what they say I should look like. Isn't it interesting that the church plays this game as well?

It gnaws at me. The fact that I sometimes spend my time trying to model my life after the church. I am beginning to think that it is possible to spend years in a church and still have no idea what Jesus actually looks like. That it is possible to know the Bible cover to cover and be able to recite verses from memory and have no clue what being the Body of Christ actually means. The ache comes from a heart that was meant to be free and instead chooses chains. That terrible choice that we often make because we just don't know anything else. Chains are all we've ever known.


But Jesus came to set me free. To set us free. To take that aching little heart, all bound up in it's own passions and twisted perception of self, and release it. To open eyes to the freedom of living as He lived, and loving as He loved, and serving as He served. Such irony, that freedom is submission. But does that not make sense? In the end, you only ever had two choices. Be subject to your self. The self you do not know and cannot control. The self that destroys and seeks it's own, creating a black hole that self implodes and leaves brokenness in it's wake. Or be subject to God. The God who knows you, and sees you clearly, and loves you, and is able to show you life as it really is. Is able to show you truth.


And in remembering, the ache subsides ever so slightly, because I have hope that it won't always be this way. I have hope that I will look more like Jesus in time, and that my life will begin to remind people not how well I succeeded in what I set my hand to, but of how deep God's grace runs, and how a Father's love can transform. I have hope that the chains are slowly coming off, and that pain is a temporary lesson that opens eyes to the consequence of free will practiced wrongly. To disobedience. But also to a God who does not give up on the least of His children, and who pursues them to the end of all things.