Light at the End of the Tunnel by Ericka Clay - HTML preview
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Wrecked (Like Ralph)
There's a lady I like watching on YouTube.
She doesn't wear makeup, wears a kerchief over her hair as a sign of respect for God, and is currently looking into flat earth theory.
And we are absolutely nothing alike. (As I'm sure you're already aware.)
But her heart is pure, and what she does is prompted by the Holy Spirit. She lives in the way God's asking her, and even though I don't believe all the same things she does (I'm more of a round-earth person myself and look like a 19th-century street urchin in any type of head dressing...), she is still a daughter of the King.
The old me would have watched her channel and desperately wondered why she was more holy than I was. Why her teenage kids don't talk back and how come every evening they break out the guitar to sing old-school hymns while my family and I just finished Ralph Breaks the Internet for the forty-ninth time.
What am I doing wrong?
Why am I wrong?
But how demonic to think the God who loves me, created me, and is in the process of sanctifying me is in the business of wrongness.
If I were to live like her, I'd be idolizing her, not worshipping Jesus. The Bible isn't a black-and-white rule book that shows me every little move I should make to be "right." It instead is a beautiful invitation to let God wreck (kind of like Ralph) my life and rebuild it with a strong foundation in Him (God...not Ralph).
So, as I continue to grow in my faith, I continue to grow in the "me" God created me to be, not the "me" others are called to become.
Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.
“Now if the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason stop being part of the body.If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact, God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.If they were all one part, where would the body be?As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it,so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.”