2023-04-09 A Meditation on Competitive to Love

“For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Co 9:16 ESV)

After a higher prize, our Lord was competitive on an unheard of level, for He outcompeted sin and Satan and death. His competition was founded in gentle love for the people, paradoxically. His competition was vocally to build up the downtrodden and utterly attune to a Real and Revealed plight of His fellow and woman. It was to have a chip on the shoulder to defend absolute kindness, as His special brew, His immediate call to speak up for the forgotten and maligned.

If life consists of choices, all the more so does life give us an illogic, and a spell away from utter manic decision making, from putting faith in substance or cavalier or needy outlays. We fear solitude, perhaps, or we do our day job only on the buzz of outpacing our peers or simply as a special place called intoxication, three cups of coffee the innocent variant of this nonetheless manic dependency. We don’t need it.

Then, unapologetically to reprise this competition, each of us is blanketed with an excitement born in utter need. An excitement to take the route of fellowship and excellence towards our peers, an excellence based on the same chip-on-the-shoulder, the same Love, the same no-time-to-delay race to pick up our crosses and follow Him. Before we’ve fixed ourselves, we trust in Applicability, Relevance, Belonging, Cause-and-Contribution. Before we have all the answers, we trust God to hold us and to delight in our journey.

For He rose to show us an ecstasy, a joy, a delight in going to this our Cross. Suddenly a stanchion is moved, the Spirit speaks, we see deeper into the plight of our fellow or gal. We suddenly intuit what makes a man an atheist, or what is called Christian faith. It is a bleating of a Lamb called Faith, that is witnessed by a Christianity shared across the pews, for we know Jesus Himself had help in carrying the Cross. So our crosses are the opposite of seizing upon might, a la Nietzsche. We worship at the individual discovery of a call that will not guarantee any accolades, for it is our special brew. Individually meted out, and in the embrace of a loving God who has taken us through untold fears old and new, untold sense of abandonment, untold patient prayer in those same church pews.