Beyond the temporary

More often, too often perhaps, culture portrays Christianity like some salve for a scrape. Rub it on and you will feel better. But then, the wound heals, the hurt is forgotten, and we go on with our considered normal life. A life lived long enough by faith knows this to be false.

Some ideas suggest the Christian life is more like an inoculation, the injection shields us from the disease, and the disease never touches us. This may be closer to the truth, but it, too, renders a false verdict. The disease, the one called life, the one where we miss the target, touches us, comes and goes, though our best efforts labor tirelessly to prevent it. Moreso, we cannot be protected from those convictions of grief, pain, guilt, and disappointment. We are, after all, human, and these are the symptoms along with the fruit of the Spirit.

There is a corollary. When the salve doesn’t work as prescribed, we exchange it for another one, and another one. To think this way means no good person who desires healing can ever be satisfied. Here, we see the meaning of a life in Christ in reverse for a life so lived in Him is satisfying, a decidedly different type of satisfaction, one that leads you away from complacency by disturbing your comfort, your normal, your usual thought about how life ought to be. A good disturbance, the one Christ taught, turns us around and enables us to see differently, to think differently, to respond another way, healed by His way.

Turned around, removed from his normal, the Christian finds peace amid grief, pain, and disappointment. He has not been inoculated, he has received an understanding, a knowing that there is an assurance when the disease touches him. Never is the Christian life what you think but what you receive by asking and more often an unexpected receiving.

Consider the man who has hiked a trail many times. In the beginning, the trail markers engage his familiarity, the expectant knolls and swales, the jagged outcroppings offering long views, the ever-present negotiated brambles and thickets, the softening breezes refreshing his hike. Along the way, the forest’s deciduous smell seizes him, interrupted by laurel blossoms. Before this day, he calculated what to avoid, where to step, the eventual “ifs” the forest presents. But this day is different. He sees what he knows, accustomed to the sight, yet no longer is he deterred. Heightened is his awareness to his surroundings. Everything he notices is new—his perspective, his response. He knows this uneven ground will turn an ankle, briars will prick him, horseflies and mosquitoes will bite and leave their welt. But he presses on toward the goal. The air in his perspective is fresh. The forest is the same forest, but his relationship to what he once experienced changes.

Though the thicket ensnarls him, the sun shines warm upon him, and the rain falls cold, through all, he sees beyond the temporary.