2023-07-08 A Meditation on Ways We Deny

“22 This is the reason why I have so often been hindered from coming to you. 23 But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since I have longed for many years to come to you, 24 I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while.” (Ro 15:22–24)

Just the fact of having signed up to serve, in the church, in the spiritual army of the Lord, immediately presents the question: do you understand that the stakes are higher than any one of us? The patient follower of Jesus has aspects and garments that the devil wants. The patient liberator of the heart (liberating via repentance and faith) has something Important to share, if only they weren’t immediately bombarded with doubt and denials, with lame events horrifying us, even if somewhat forgiven and explained when love speaks up (can a gentler judge infer some innate humor?). We deny Christ. We panic around the most gentle and loving relationships in our lives. On some level, we choose the brotherhood with aplomb, but are nervous wrecks and deniers of the broader romance and one single soulmate motif.

All rationality aside, you will be tempted and beleaguered over facts and events that are easily dismissed, were they not questions of denying Christ. One moment we are denying, another caught in a whirlwind, whilst scarcely able to point to the war we find ourselves in, the former self a stockpile of experience and events that can be useful for demonstrations of what it means to submit our agency unto Christ. In this knowledge base we are nonetheless taught not to covet nor seek the safe road, but to be brave to announce the Love of the brethren and sistren. We are taught to take risks. Our lives are no more valuable than the greater Cause.

Forgiveness means to laugh with those who laugh. To bless mightily the soldier and fellow-in-arms (the gal just as well) who makes Decision and takes Decisive Action to love this one: to love us; to make up for all the patently loving communiques we have been denied, though those would better have buttressed us for the spiritual war ahead, for the denials, the divorce whether hypothetical or real, the Encounter with blokish dreary faults, with blocks and tumors, migraines and impediments, tightly pent up, wound up muscle and flesh. So they suppose to tell us that our discipleship is incomplete, when in fact—this is key—it is they who are asking us to deny that the War of Spirit is upon us. That we will look ridiculous, because it is God who teaches: today, the battle is bigger than yourself, but it is one that together with God’s Spirit and with the Trinity, can be seen through to the end.

Funny, that we wanted to be Ace Interpreter, Interviewee of Record, Knowledgeable Pundit, Big Brother of Love; yet through all this the aim was to teach us “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” (2 Co 1:9b). We have found a plateau of Life more abundant, where our own final gasps and grasping sins are exchanged for a Victor’s Crown, Resurrected new life and fellowship with the Trinity on High. Our own meager agency, gifted back to us the moment we gave in. We were not giving up, but relying on a Higher Power. And our lives are bearing testimony to this self-humbling, effusive burning wick.