Today at Sojourn, a pastor who is living in Houston with us who hopes to plant a church in Italy, spoke from the passage of Isaiah 61:10-11.
10 I delight greatly in the Lord;
my soul rejoices in my God.
For he has clothed me with garments of salvation
and arrayed me in a robe of his righteousness,
as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest,
and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.
11 11 For as the soil makes the sprout come up
and a garden causes seeds to grow,
so the Sovereign Lord will make righteousness
and praise spring up before all nations.
Isaiah 61:10-11
What stuck with me the most from the sermon was what he shared with us from a CS Lewis quote from his book, The Weight of Glory.
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
After our gathering, my parish went out to eat, and we spoke with each other about our own "mud pies", the way we half-heartedly settle for life in the face of Isaiah's claim to "delight greatly in the Lord." I've probably read the passage, heard the quote from CS Lewis, agreed with it and moved on multiple times before, but today, I was unable to shake it. I couldn't help but agree that there are so many areas in my life where I "settle." Settling for me has looked like a great many things. Sometimes it's busyness in work. Sometimes it's Netflix, Clash of Clans, or reading comics. This is not to say I should stop doing all of these things, but I think in my heart I know when I'm using those things to hide from the scary unknown of engaging people in relationship.
Having taught in a public school classroom now for about 2 and a half years, I've walked through failure, despair, and heartache enough with God to see how He would use even those situations to show up strong and bring joy to me and to those around me. It's to the point now where I can get up in the morning, have no desire to leave my warm bed and yet say to myself, "God, I'll walk through today with You. Despite my expectations for this day, what would you have for me?" And more often than not, it doesn't mean that I get to avoid the places I'm afraid of, the trial and error of working with kids and doing relationships with people, but I can at least choose Jesus Christ's love to be enough in the midst of them.
Something said often by the leaders of our church is of their desire for us to be a place of smaller communities where people are known, the scary, unnerving kind of "being known" where you'd rather sink back into the shadows rather than risk your skin. Over time and thanks to invitations like this from this pastor and Jesus Christ, I think there is a kind of bravery we can find. It's not a guarantee that we will not walk through that which we fear but that we can walk through those places with Jesus Christ and give Him the chance for His love to be enough.
Failure doesn't phase me as much as it did in the classroom because of this. I hope that one day, rejection and disappointment in relationships or any place in life will not either, because I'll have had the chance to see God's love BE enough even in their presence. I think that's the adventure our hearts long for.
I'm encouraged by the conversations I had today and of the many others that were brave enough to share their mud pies and to slow down and consider their hearts over a meal. Without that and this sort of hope, I doubt I'd even have the bravery to share the walk I'm on here with anyone who's interested in reading this post. If this resonates with you at all, come talk to me.
Also, here's some recent awesome pictures from life lately.
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| A pic I love of my parents and I. |
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| R2 the rat. |
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| A sneak peak of what a select group of exceptional science students will get to do on our Health Museum Field Trip. |
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| My cheek cells. |
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| A fantastic slide prepared by a group of my students observing "budding" in yeast cells in studying asexual reproduction. So cool! Anytime you see a smaller cell coming off of a larger one, you can see the cells budding. |
