Tuesday, August 28, 2012

lower like Jesus



I wonder if Jesus wore the same clothes as a carpenter and a traveling minister guy. His Nazareth neighbors knew him as one of the wood workers who scraped by for years under the security of his dad's local business. Calloused hands, an eye for detail, at home with wood shavings and dusty shop floors. That's what they saw. That's what they knew. Did this twenty-something construction worker ever yearn to tell them he's more than what they see, that he has ideas born from another world, abilities to change lives? That he has desires to help people? That he longs to heal? That he has an "in" with the Creator of the world? That he knows people are really lost and hurting, and that he can join up with them and lead them back to the right path? That he knows that the role you play isn't always the same as who you really are? The humility and restraint not to expose and correct and prove. The faith to let it come out in due time.

Is it the the quiet people who are more misunderstood, or the ones who talk a lot? Jesus is probably the best model of someone whom people didn't get. I picture him on the quieter side than the noisier one. I wonder what went on in his mind when he was walking alone. He had lots of compassion, but compassion wears you out after a while. Did he ever just long to go back to the shop and rip some Lebanese cedar planks? To get lost in work, the kind you do by yourself with your hands? To make something and see it completed, unlike the work of ministry?

I used to think he was of such a single mind, so seared to his purpose of being the bridge to eternity, that he couldn't get distracted while he walked through the Middle East. And this left me with the familiar feeling of not measuring up. I try, but my mind isn't like that. It's not that single. It drifts from the long-term goals of financial security to the immediate needs of daily work and provision to the planning of rest with my family to the frustrations and challenges of waiting and knowing with more certainty the eternal purpose for my life. I wished Jesus was more human like me. But maybe he was. Distractions were, in fact, his norm. People were always touching him and bumping into him and bothering him with questions and pleas, even traps. And he just rolled with it. He was casual but unwavering. And that just attracted more people, more demands, more distractions, more compassion. People still didn't get it, but that didn't seem to throw him off. In fact, he just lowered himself more to meet them in their obscurities and misunderstandings. He came from heaven, from somewhere in eternity, to the earth, but once here, he didn't stop descending. He kept descending so people could have a chance to see and hope for that eternal connection with their Creator. He lowered himself into people's lives all the way till he died, and then he reversed things.

I wonder if I could, or should, try to copy that way of life, the lowering kind, the descending kind, the kind that steers away from upward mobility and climbing for security and gathering more stuff and trying to be significant and noticed. Maybe that's where the true treasure is, in the deeper parts of life, the parts you have to descend into to genuinely connect with people in those gray places of pain and hope and relief from the burdens of trying to make it all the time. Maybe that's where God's currents of grace run less hindered, even wilder, in those places under the surface a bit. Maybe there's more room for me down there than up here.

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