Typewritten

a radical conversion.

I have been in church all of my life.  I’m fairly certain that my mother has been lying to me all these years when she says I was born in a hospital.  It was probably a church pew in all actuality.

I cannot remember living a life that did not have me in church at a minimum of two days a week… usually more, to be quite honest.”

While this sort of upbringing has its advantages, it has brought me to a point of great doubt and decision several times in my life.  I wonder about all of the things that I have merely accepted as fact, without actually figuring them out for myself.  I wonder about the ins-and-not-ofs that we can’t seem to get our head around.  I wonder about the people who seem to have an immediate “radical conversion” experience, in which they seem to be completely different people overnight.  I wonder why I doubt these stories.  I wonder how many times Jesus wants to tell me how much I’m missing the point. I wonder…

The thing about wondering is that you often wind up wandering.  And I do. I wander down strange patterns of thought and arrive at even stranger destinations.  So let’s find our way back to the highway and direct our thoughts for a second.

So here’s the thing.

Jesus once said that anyone who wants to follow Him must take up his cross and follow Him and that whoever wants to find his life will lose it but whoever loses their life for His sake will find it.

What does that even mean, take up my cross?

The cross was a hideous, blood-soaked torture machine.  It was, by far, the cruelest form of capital punishment that the world has yet seen (on a side note, I have a theory that that is part of the reason that Jesus came to Earth when he did… to endure the maximum pain and punishment possible, so as to say “there is nothing worse that I could have endured for you.”  But then, who really knows?…  I’m perfectly content to be proven wrong).

So really then Jesus, what’s up?  Did you come to give me “life to the full” or did you come to put a cross on my back?

Could it be that it’s by the latter which we receive the former?

We use this language in church like Jesus is meant to be our friend and someone who will be there to hold our hand and to mop up the tears when things are shitty.  And I think that He is that… but He is so much more.  He is ferocious. He is a Lion.  He is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  He is majestic and He is beautiful.  He is incomprehensible.  In Him, through Him, and for Him are all things.  He is the One to whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord.  He. Is. God.  Nothing less.

C.S. Lewis once said, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

So then, Jesus requires a choice.  Either pick up the cross.  Or don’t.

I find that I need to pick up that disgusting, blood-drenched, and beautiful cross… because while picking that thing up is actually painful and I find more of myself is lost to it every day, I’m finding freedom and beauty in every day that is indescribable.

So that is my radical conversion.  It’s been going on for twenty-two years and I don’t see any sign of being content exactly where I am.

2 Comments so far
Leave a comment