“I was a runner who happened to be a Christian. I needed to become a Christian who happened to be a runner”
--Ryan Hall
I have decided to own this quote, albeit not in all facets. I don't claim to be a runner by any stretch of even the most creative child's imagination. I would even allow it to be argued that what the stumbling, staggering, mess of a girl that puts on her Ravenna 2 shoes and tramples up and down the neighborhood streets every evening does, is not really running. More like gasping excitingly.
But I am a _______ who happens to be a Christian. And what I want to be is a pursuer of Jesus who happens to be a _______.
Because I build my life around building myself, and finding myself, and becoming my own little self that I create. And I dream up dreams and draw up sand castle plans and focus on constructing who I am by building the what that I am. Titles and prestige and events and goals and accomplishments that are little more than names I can call myself. Names that are facets, or faces, faces that are ideas, and ideas that are really great walls that I can hide behind, putting up for each person I happen to meet. "See? This is me, what I am is who I am. Aren't you proud of who I am?"
It's off center. How disheartening to be the one who comes to the end of all things only to discover that all of the things that received the outpouring of the self were all the wrong things. All missed marks. How crushing to realize that when the walls are peeled away one by one, and you arrive in a life where they call you names of who instead of names of what, there still remains a little self. A little self created magnificently and fallen from glory, that is whispering the quiet little question that reverberates from it's center, it's very core. The question that the names that were faces that were ideas that were walls never answered.
Who am I?
And God answers. If I was to imagine the tone of His voice, in a most matter-of-fact sort of tone that never once wavers or hesitates, and finds the idea that the what might define the who as absurd as the created defining the creator.
You're Mine. And it is enough.
I am His child. The other titles or names might be happenstance, or arbitrary, or maybe even emanatory. But none of them could answer, and surely not usurp, the first.
I almost don't want to comment because the thoughts I have can't be written on paper. This is brilliant! Exactly spot on. Especially the questions we want other to answers in our every day lives: "This is me. Arn't you proud of who I am?" When, in fact, we put WHATS-- like, you said, achievements, levels in society, who we know, where we've been...etc-- in front. OUR improvement of self faces the world and WHO God knows we are goes in the truck, where only we and close friends may see.
ReplyDeleteThere's a message that I heard at at a college fellowship night. It was describing how our lives should be like a bike wheel. In the center is God and everything, every aspect, achievement, friend, decision, shoots from the center to create a spindle (?). Now that I think of it, the wheel/tire should also signify God. So that, no matter what becomes of our life, God is shown.