Blessed

Sometimes, a whisper is all that is left in my gut at the end of the day.

There are matters, at times, that leave me feeling tired, weighty and weak; because I don’t know the way out of the web I’m stuck in or have woven. Even that basic detail I can’t seem to clarify or sort out.

But, I know God knows all the inner workings of my seemingly complex problems.

And this is good.

But somehow, my flesh still feels some need to sort it all out before my eyelids close.

And this is stupid.

Why is ‘dying’ so hard?

Because this:

“The bedrock in Jesus Christ’s kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility – I cannot begin to do it. Then Jesus says – Blessed are you. That is the entrance, and it does take us a long while to believe we are poor! The knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works.” – Oswald Chambers

Real life requires dying first. And the enemy and my own flesh want to avoid that dying at all costs.

Because my flesh still wants to be rich and have a claim – whether it’s personal pride or desiring the good opinions of others – I easily get side-tracked on a loop of mental pretzel twists when I hit a chance to die a little more.

But, Jesus told me that I am blessed when I am poor in spirit and when I feel hated by others and when I am weak.

There is mystery in this that I am still unpacking.

Jesus Is Near

We were born on a battlefield, beautifully disguised as ‘earth’.

Yet, if we could see through the hologram of this material world, we would perceive a cosmic war waging over every precious soul, and Jesus there alongside each one of us, waiting to be invited to do the fighting for us.

Jesus is as near as my beating heart.

His love already crushed Hell, yet the enemy would tempt me into believing that, “Victory isn’t such a sure thing.  And Jesus is sort of elusive and unreliable, but look over here!  The world is so shiny, so full of shows and sidetracks; forget the big picture, plant your feet in all this temporal stuff and make yourself at home!” 

And how easily I succumb to the overwhelm, the distraction, the self-pity, and the grief; the fruit of this heaving world.

Here I live, where the battle seems so ‘flesh and blood’, where quotidian urgencies and relational explosives make here-and-now so frustratingly real and gory.  It’s easy to rage at the noise, the chaos, the madness, and the people that surround me, yet it’s all a distraction from that fact that Jesus is near and He’s already won.