Ravines and crevices

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24, NKJV).

Traversing this ravine called life confronts the rushing rivulets of time rippling over and between life’s rocks of hard testing. But we walk on, climbing from who we were to whom we are to become, wrestling life’s bothering rocks and crevices. Always the journey is outside of us and within, a tensioned rope between despair and hope. Becoming is such a climb, a reach for the mountaintop while the ravine remains and reminds.

There must come in time along this continuum called a faith life a yielding to every Christian’s call, that is, to possess a heart of mercy outweighing those human inclinations so learned and natured. Too easy it is in life to have as our first thought some inkling that says, “Me before you.” If this is a cultural ill, it is a human ill multiplied and made common by those desires we deem acceptable.

But the “me before you” is a master to which the Christian’s trust is tested until we yield fully to Christ. If we find that the testing raises questions about God, about this “me before you,” about the world we inhabit, know that God has raised these questions to lead us to desire Him, to reveal to us His divine will. To recognize this “me before you” residing within, the ravine below, is the precursor to “you before me,” the mountaintop above. But it is an honest and awakening recognition. Formed in the revelation is a tension the Christian finds to be disconcerting. But he loves God. So, he prays, he yields to his Lord, he searches for what God wants him to find, to become as God intends for His children.

The danger in this tension between what comes first, you or me, is the possibility of those rationalizations that say, “Well, this is just the way I am” or to give in to the despair that the “me before you” wishes to assert itself too often and too strong, to say “It’s not my fault.” Of course, this will happen. We will fall. But we must get up, dust off, and keep walking. We may question if we have done enough, but there is no enough. To think this means we have turned to ourself for the answer. Every Christian must remember God promises to stand by us. Because He is there, we must listen to what He might say to us. And “might” keeps our eyes on God. So kept, we turn our gaze away from the “me before you.”

Listening for God keeps our attention toward Him. He knows our frame. His mercy is everlasting. Living in the shelter of God, our master soon becomes “you before me,” the one we serve.

 Then one day your first thought becomes “You before me.”