To Write Love On Her Arms.*

"we are called to be lovers bold in broken places..."

the present.

"I do not know much about this man, but I do know that his whole life conveys this one message: 'anyone at any moment can start a new future.'"
-Robert Garaudy, communist philosopher

so many of us get lost in the idea that Jesus is the past and Jesus is the future. we forget that Jesus is the present more than anything. the risen Christ is now, today... yesterday... forever. He is available for any person at any moment. just like God breathed life into Adam, Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit into us. "And with that he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven." [John 20:22-23]

this Spirit is the living Christ that we tend to miss. Brennan Manning writes in his book Abba's Child that "pessimism and defeatism are never the fruit of the life-giving Spirit but rather reveal our unawareness of present risenness."

this present Spirit means we can cope with anything, we are not on our own. "I pray that you realize... how vast are the resources of his Spirit available to us." [Eph. 1:18-19]

this present Spirit is freedom. "Now this Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." [2 Corinthians 3:17]

this present risenness is the resurrection. "Know that I am with you always, yes, to the end of time." [Matthew 28:20]


following Jesus is an act of faith in Jesus as the present here and now.

"Christianity is not simply a message but an experience of faith that becomes a message, explicitly offering hope, freedom from bondage, and new realm of possibility."
-Brennan Manning

Little Desiree'.

Here's me at 5 years old. Not much has changed. :]

Story.

So after Donald Miller's talk as well as all the other great speakers at Jubilee, I've been thinking. I've been thinking alot. I've been struggling with this whole salt of the earth idea. I want to be the kind of salt that breaks things down or makes ground fertile. I don't want to just make things taste better. Most of the time salt is just a seasoning that covers up something that doesn't really taste that good at all.

Ok, allow me to elaborate. At Jubilee I learned something pretty profound that I kinda didn't know about before. Jesus calls us to be the salt of the earth. But not the table salt stuff. Actual, physical, big granual salt. Back in the day people used to gather the left over salt from the Dead Sea that washed up on the shore and used it to break down manure piles and to fertile dry, unproductive land. Salt brought life from death. How friggen' cool.


So back to me and my thinking.


I want to live an exciting story. I want to be life in a land of death. I want to glow in dense fog. I want to balance out my cushy life with someone who has no life at all. I run myself to exhaustion with all the stuff that I have to do that I need to stop and think that Jesus is here. And He wants me. And that is all the motivation I need to jump into a ....

time out. Jim just texted me. "can I tell you something?"
my reply... "always."
Jim's reply... "I think you'll understand. I wanna hold you hand."


that made me smile.


back to my thinking.


I want to dive into something that will make me lesser so that He becomes greater. I want to travel around the country with a big sign on my back that says street children in Guatemala are murdered everyday because no one is there to love them. I want to bring salt and love and friendship to the people who have no idea what that looks like. I want that story. I'm standing here in a knee length skirt, high heels and panty hose with a huge runner in the foot. I am so much more than this. I want out. I'm sick of working for a place that says "we love people" but the only reason they pretend to care so much is so they can charge over $200 a night on hotel accomodations. This ain't no salt. This is straight up cayan peppering people out of their own misery. And I want out.


I think I'm going to have a lot more to think about in the next few days.

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