Peering into the well

I just returned from a brief week long trip to Beijing and Seoul where I got to spend consecutive days with my parents.  The time I spent with them showed me once again how little control we, as mere humans, have over others and even over ourselves apart from what our spirit enables us with.  In other words, without the spirit we are ravenous pigs trying to grab what we want when we want it and we want it constantly.  That want can be comfort, love, attention, recognition, affirmation, jealousy, admiration, confirmation, and perhaps for some that want can be anger or frustration, worry and doubt.  I fall into it like one upon looking down a deep well, I fall by example and by speculation.  Both land me in a puddle of despair from which I cry out for the only one who has the capacity to save me.  My mother and father may try to, my friends may make attempts, skilled professionals with ropes and ladders may give their all, but the big promlem is not that I am at the bottom of the well, but that upon being retrieved I always fall back in.  So, it is a repetitive, daily, hourly, secondly reliance on having a Savior who at at given moment will kindly have mercy upon me and retrieve me from the depths of the well again and again without hesitation or frustration.  Such a Savior has all my love, and when my love fails me or falls apart in a sea of entitlement, forgetfulness, vanity, or laziness, the well reminds me that I am saved by grace and not by my love.  Nothing I do, whether good or bad, will change my Savior's mind in saving me again and again, but for this reason I desire to fall less into the well, for perhaps what I am seeking down there was my Savior's attention.  However, if depravity is how He saves me, than joy in abundance must be where He desires me.  If I love His saving grace, how unfathomably will I be immersed in ecstasy when I feel his gladness in me!  Therefore, there is no more condemnation in me, but a hope that firms itself as I take steps away from the well and into Christ Jesus.  Looking up rather than down.  

I got a little carried away (as usual) with that analogy, but the time I spent observing my parents and their treatment of one another has just showed me that what we need, what I need, is not a good husband or obedient children or the affirmation that I will be a good mother, but it is simply that I need Jesus.  The more I see things the more I see how broken things are and that all along I was not alone in the brokenness, which made it all the more clear to me.  My parents are broken, they have a beautiful and strong marriage but it is not their security.  In fact, both of them probably fight their natural inclination to peer down the wells of their hearts, to want to grab from the other person what they feel belongs to them (ie: comfort, love, affirmation, admiration, etc) but the durability lies not in those things (though those are often products of their sacrifice of those very things), the strength of their marriage, to me, is found only in Jesus, through Jesus, all because of Jesus.  It may sound absurd to most people, the things I just wrote, but to me it could not be more clear.  I am broken and prone to wreck myself and the people around me, but when I love through Jesus, live through Jesus, speak through Jesus, respond through Jesus, forgive through Jesus, even make jokes through Jesus (as some jokes are sugar coated ways of being condescending) do all things through Jesus, then and only then will good things like joy come forth back to me.  As I live through Jesus it also becomes evident that there is nothing that can stand to threaten me, neither life nor death, for both belong in authority of Jesus.  

On the way back home from the airport a sister in Christ said to me that I reminded her of a girl named Katie Davis.  Katie is 21 years old and lives in Uganda fighting to adopt and save girls from poverty and loneliness.  She is from Nashville, tn and pretty much gave up her comfortable life, boyfriend, and any sort of American dream to live in a place all alone serving God by serving people.  She is nothing like me.  Yet I must have gave off some illusion of that, and if so I need to make it clear that there is nothing good in me aside from Jesus.  I can bet almost everything that there is also probably nothing good in Katie Davis apart from the grace and goodness God gave her to have such a heart and capacity to do what she is doing now.  So in that sense we may be alike, though in that same sense I am also like Hitler, a New York socialite, and the drunk guy at the bar. 

What we all share is that we all need Jesus lest we fall into our wells of despair.

Thank You Jesus for saving me again and again so that I could have the mind and hope to do Your good works.

J