Every Day
Why a dishwater disciple?
Not because my favorite place to be is up to my wrists in soapy water and dinner fragments, but because, if following Jesus is not more common in my life than dishwater, it is worthless.
He lived the life of a common human and called run-of-the-mill humans to follow Him. He ate, drank, slept, worked, wrestled with His brothers and learned how to read. If His life, sacrifice and resurrection do not have power and influence in my everyday life, I need to examine whether they have power at all! Some of us, if not for calling on Him in a crisis, would seldom speak with Him at all. He said He came to give abundant life, not to do occasional CPR on my spirit. I don’t know about you, but I don’t live a special occasion kind of life. As it turns out, a life of faith involves much more than simply “receiving salvation” and waiting for heaven…or maybe it is that salvation encompasses much more than our Sunday morning life.
Reading Hebrews 12 and 13, I find that a life of faith involves struggles that are to be endured but not with my teeth gritted, my fists clenched and my eyes closed waiting for it to be over. My eyes are to be open, focused on Jesus, who has gone before me in every way, and my feet on the racecourse that is laid out for me. It is easy to become discouraged and faint-hearted when I am being misunderstood, or to lash out in anger when facing direct opposition to the way that Jesus has shown me to live. Overwhelmed by the endless list of tasks unfinished, it is tempting to just sit down and give up. Jesus has suffered all these things and completed His mission; He can give me exactly what I need to finish mine, even the most mundane! He has never intended for me to do it alone!
What we see in Hebrews is that those hardships are part of His bigger plan to create a hunger in me for the kind of pure, absolute goodness that belongs to God alone, to push me out of my cocoon of wishful thinking into a life that depends on and reflects the power of God like a Monarch butterfly depends on and reflects the power of gravity and the beauty of an intelligent Creator. Part of that Divine nature I am being called to extends to how I relate to strangers, how I feel about other Jesus-followers, my responses to believers in chains of any kind, the way I think about my marriage, my bank account and my fear of rejection, and whether I receive instruction from those in authority over me. This is all part of Papa-God’s plan to create in me an everyday life that looks like His own, which is the life I am designed to live,
Following Jesus every day in the everyday,
Christi
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