People are selfish.

This isn’t a newsflash. People have always been selfish, and I don’t see that changing any time in the near future. At the core, we’re always looking out for us. Me. My family. They matter most. I’ll do anything I have to do to provide and protect. Right?

I daresay most of us think this way–it’s the way the human brain is wired, frankly. It’s natural. 

But Jesus asks us to give up those natural inclinations when we follow Him. He asks us to put the souls of strangers above the health of our own.

59 Then He said to another, “Follow Me.”
But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.”
60 Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God.”~ Luke 9:59-60, NKJV

In so many teachings, Jesus is instructing us to change our perspective. On what we define as sin. Of where our hearts should be. Of who we should love. Of how we should love them. Time and again He challenges us to love our neighbor.

Time and again, He and the apostles make it clear that this faith, this trust, this decision to become a slave of Christ means giving up our lives–giving up the ME–for Him.

We’re in a time of trial right now–something that can be said a lot in history on a national or international scale and pretty much always on individual levels. I’ve heard a lot of fellow-Christians saying, “Don’t live in fear!”

And this is #Truth. Don’t live in fear. You don’t have to, because you know that your life isn’t your own. You know that you’re His. There doesn’t need to be fear for these bodies.

But let’s not be ignorant. We can say God has this in His hand, and that too is #Truth. But God had the Black Death in His hand too. He had the Spanish flu. He had every other worldwide pandemic. That doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be suffering and death, of both the faithful and the faithless, the just and the unjust. It simply means that He’s still Lord through it. It doesn’t mean we won’t die. It means if we do, He’ll welcome those who believe in Him with open arms. Yes, He can protect His children from any virus–but we know He doesn’t always choose to. We know it in the statics from past pandemics. We know it by logic. And we know it because we know that He doesn’t define tragedy in the same way we do. Christians can and do die all the time. It’s something we’re not told won’t happen, but which we’re instead told not to fear.

Where, then, is the line between fear and wisdom? 

More, where is the line between living fearlessly and still loving our neighbors?

If you didn’t follow that jump, let’s spend a bit of time on it. You do not have to fear. But what about the older lady next door? What about the stranger on the street? What about the coworker or the delivery man or the clerk? The mom whose child has immunodeficiency? The daughter whose father is in the middle of chemo? Do they have that certainty?

So what if your determination to live without fear and live life as normal endangers theirs?

This is the question my family is wrestling with as we determine what lines to draw in these troubling weeks. We don’t fear for us. But we’re not called to think only of us. We’re called to think of them. The people in need of Christ. The people who are at risk. The people who are frightened and without hope.

“Not living in fear” should not mean putting others in danger. Not our fellow believers who are at risk of physical illness, and not the rest of the world whose souls don’t have that certainty in Him.

Love your neighbor.

Love them with encouragement and faithful words and promises of Someone bigger than their fear. But love them too in wisdom and caution and care. Love them with distance when our leaders ask for it, and with praise to God that distance, in this day and age, doesn’t mean being cut off. Let’s be grateful that we can still be in the community through the wonders of technology, and let’s respect the wisdom of the professionals we expect to turn to when something bad does happen.

Let’s stop thinking about how we can keep from giving in to fear…and start thinking about how we can best show love to those around us. Be wise, and think of them. Knowing that if everyone thinks first of their neighbor, that means someone has our backs too.

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We’ve recently decided to read some of the writings of the early church fathers–things that aren’t included in our Bible because they weren’t written by an apostle, but which are still very early. We began with I Clement, written somewhere around 90 AD, from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth, which had gone through a huge upheaval. 

Clement takes a full two chapters to talk about all the Corinthian church had been doing right. They’d been earning the rightful praise of the other churches with their devotion, their giving, their piety, their love. But then…

But then…

Chapter three launches with this:

Every
kind of honour and happiness was bestowed upon you, and then was fulfilled that
which is written, “My beloved ate and drink, and was enlarged and became
fat, and kicked.” Hence flowed emulation and envy, strife and sedition,
persecution and disorder, war and captivity.

We all agreed from the start that the writer probably wasn’t just talking about a physical thing here, right? I mean, sure, the Corinthians were a wealthy people and were known for their appetites for all things corporeal–anything that brought bodily pleasure, including food. But we didn’t think it could be just that. No, this kind of falling away–this kind of WAR within a church–had to have its root in spiritual things. Spiritual conflict. Spiritual problems.

What, though, would it mean to be spiritually fat?

My husband and I were talking about this on our way home from church. Our bodies get fat from eating too much…of the wrong thing. So what is the equivalent for our souls? It isn’t just having too much of the virtuous, right? You can love above and beyond, and it’s not going to damage you. You can be as gentle, good, faithful, peaceful, as you ever could manage, and it’s not going to lead to envy and strive and sedition.

No, this sort of fat is talking about something different. It’s talking about spiritual muscles going flabby with complacency. It’s talking about being full of thoughts of self instead of thoughts of others. It’s talking about getting to that point where you’re so comfortable in where you are that you forget to stretch toward something higher.

That’s when we start comparing ourselves to others. That’s when we start wanting what they have. That’s when we start bickering and fighting among ourselves. That’s when chaos sneaks in. That’s when our churches dissolve into civil war.

But as we were talking about this spiritual fatness, we were also talking through what the alternative would be: spiritual fullness.

I’ll never forget a lesson my French teacher taught us in high school–that when you’ve had enough to eat in France, you don’t ever want to say the equivalent of “I’m full.” That, in fact, means “I’m pregnant.” LOL. Which popped into my mind as I was considering this spiritual fullness.

Because isn’t that a perfect example? Pregnancy isn’t fatness, because it isn’t just your body storing up what it doesn’t in fact need. It’s new life. It’s creation. It’s your body becoming literally full with someone else.

And that is what our spirits should be experiencing. They should be FULL, but not fat. Full of good things. Full of life. Full of fruit. Full of Him. 

This fullness is the state of health. Not scraggly and thin and weak–just like our physical eyes recognize that in someone’s body as unhealthy, so too do our spiritual eyes recognize the same state in our brothers’ and sisters’ souls. But not spiritually fat and engorged and enlarged either–because that means we’re resting on our laurels, growing lazy and complacent, no longer working our spiritual muscles.

We need to strive for that balance. When we are well fed by the Vine, producing good fruit, full of Him, but never content to remain just where we are. Striving always to reach a little farther, stretch a little more, run our race with full commitment.

What do you see when you look at the Church today? Are we spiritually starved…spiritually full…or spiritually fat?

We love fruit in our family. Fresh fruit, canned fruit, dried fruit, jammed fruit, fruit from our own garden, or fruit from the other side of the world. We love citrus fruit, stone fruit, berries… Fruit can be a taste of the familiar or the tang of the exotic. We love to eat it raw, to bake it into recipes, to puree it into smoothies. Last week, I even learned to make homemade fruit roll-ups. With a kiddo who despises vegetables, fruit is often the way I get much-needed nutrients into all of us. And a much-appreciated taste of yumminess too.

Fruit is a pretty amazing thing. As a homeschool mom, I’ve had the opportunity to study it with my kids in our science classes. And as a Christian, I of course read about it a lot in the scriptures. For instance, take this passage from Colossians 1:3-6

3 We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints; 5 because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel, 6 which has come to you, as it has also in all the world, and is bringing forth fruit, as it is also among you since the day you heard and knew the grace of God in truth… (NKJV, emphasis mine)

Photo by Heather Barnes on Unsplash

To take out some of the phrases there for focusing purposes, that says “because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, which you heard in the gospel, which is bringing forth fruit.”

Now, anyone who knows me even a little knows that hope and I are good friends. I’m not only an optimist, I’m a see-the-good-in-everyone sort of person, a cling-to-hope-at-all-costs sort of girl. So any time the word is mentioned in the Bible, my spiritual ears perk right up. As we were discussing this passage in our Bible study last week, my mind kept circling around those particular words. Hope comes from the Gospel…the Gospel brings forth fruit.

As we talked about what this fruit is, it’s easy to come up with the usual answer: spreading that same Good News to others so that they can believe too. Yes, absolutely.

But, with memories of strawberries and blueberries and mango and peaches still fresh in my mind from my fruit roll-up making adventure a couple days before, I had to look at this a little more closely.

In other passages, we hear of the Gospel message as a seed. It’s planted, watered, fed. As it sprouts, the seed itself passes away and becomes a plant. It’s no longer a seed at all–it’s changed. Transformed. Why? So that it can become something more.

I love that it’s likened to a fruit-bearing plant though. Because part of the very nature of a plant is to spread its seeds. WHY do we bear fruit? Love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control? For OTHERS.

One of the things I learned in our science class is that the plant itself doesn’t benefit at all from the fruit it bears. The sole purpose of it is to be delicious. Alluring. To appeal to animals so that they come, eat it, and thereby transport the seeds elsewhere, so that they’re deposited far and wide and the plant can find new life somewhere else.

Photo by Brian Jimenez on Unsplash

So what is the purpose of us learning to produce those fruits of the Spirit? Not for our own sake–for His. So that others come, smell the fragrance of His peace, see the beauty of His love, taste the perfection of His Joy. Our job as Christ followers is to share those things with anyone who walks by hungry. So that they eat of it, and the seed nestles deep inside. So that He can water it and it can grow. And so that then that person too can experience the transformative power of God and turn from fallow ground with a dried up seed inside to a life-giving, thriving tree spreading out their limbs and offering His love to others.

I’d always considered the Fruits of the Spirit to be things we should want for our own sakes; or for their own sakes. Because they’re, well, good. Because they’ll make us better people. Holier. More worthy of Him. And that’s certainly true…

But that’s only half the story, isn’t it? The other half isn’t about us at all. It’s about THEM. The other people in our world. Our spouses and children, our parents and grandparents, and our aunts, uncles, and cousins. Our friends, our neighbors, the strangers in the grocery store. The drivers who cut us off and the customer service rep who won’t listen. The homeless man begging for money on the street corner. The mother desperate for clean water in Africa.

Each and every one of them needs the fruit–because that fruit carried the seeds of the Gospel, and that’s where our hope is found.

I don’t know about you, but that changes my perspective a bit on why I should be working hard to be the person He wants me to be.

And it makes me look at my beloved fruit differently too. My daughter and I joke that the orange marmalade we made is “sunshine in a jar” (because seriously!)–but it’s not only that. In a way, it’s hope in a jar too. A reminder that the goodness of others is our nourishment…and that our own ought to be theirs in return.

I’ve been thinking a lot about character lately. The kinds I write, yes…but also our characters. And how, really, the two are pretty much the same, hence the shared name. 😉

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I remember back in the day when I was a 12/13-yr-old, writing the first draft of the book that eventually became The Lost Heiress. As I wrote Brook, it didn’t take me long to realize she was a bit too, er, perfect to be a likable heroine. I’d paid attention to the lessons in my literature class–I knew that a good character was supposed to have–gasp–faults.

But Brook was, at that point, Idealized Me. She was what I wished I was. So I remember sitting down with a notebook and a pencil and scratching across the top of the page “Brook’s Faults.” I added things like “bad temper” and “impulsive.” Things I really couldn’t claim, but they seemed like more fun for a heroine than my faults.

The more stories I’ve written, the more characters I’ve poured onto the page, the less likely I am to ever enumerate their faults on a piece of paper. Do they have them? Sure. Faults…maybe weaknesses…sometimes it’s more an emotional injury…occasionally it’s what modern society would even deem an illness–mental or physical.

But as I’ve been pondering these things over the last week, thinking especially about the weaknesses that we might try to fix with medication, the kinds we have to manage, something has struck me.

The very things that we try to get rid of, to manage, to moderate, to medicate; the things we try to ignore, make excuses for, or are ashamed of…those are the things through which God uses us. The way by which He reaches us. They are the things that make us aware of our need for Him, and sometimes they’re the things through which His voice even comes.

That really made me stop and think. I’ve always imagined that God uses our strengths–which of course He does. But our hurts? Our insecurities? Our illnesses? The things the world tells us we ought to obliterate at any cost? How are those anything but bad?

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

In some cases, they do definitely need to be addressed–I’d never say they shouldn’t be! But through the addressing, God usually teaches us something. Through the managing, He reveals Himself. Through the hardship, He whispers grace and strength into our spirits.

When we’re lonely, we reach out for Him. When we’re sick, we lean on His arms. When our mind isn’t working as it should, there may be more room in it to hear Him. When our tempers rise, we often speak a truth that needs healing.

We all have our faults, whether we’re Christians or not. But what I’ve come to appreciate about those faults as I write them into my characters is that it’s in our very weaknesses that His strength best shows. A lot of society isn’t going to understand that–they’ll call us crazy, accuse us of listening to voices in our head, think we’re irrational.

They have a point. 😉 Faith isn’t rational. It goes well beyond that. But it’s when it’s irrational, radical even, that it changes us. Changes our families. Changes the world.

Because when we let Him work not only through our strengths, but through our weaknesses, then we’re making everyone around us think, “Why? How? Who?”

The answer to all those questions is the same: Jesus.

How has He worked through a weakness in your life?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Familiar words, right? We’ve all read those verses a million times. I was pretty sure I’d examined them from every possible perspective. But last time I read them, a new little seed of inspiration was planted that I’ve been keeping an eye on. 😉

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I’m a writer (which you obviously know). I love words. I love philosophizing about them. I love making art with them. I love harnessing them to express Truth and Light. And I LOVE when God talks about them–and about their power. Power which John 1:3 states in a way that sheds new light on the nature of those words I so love.

In Genesis, God SPOKE the world into existence. “And God said, ‘Let there be…'” Here in John, Jesus IS that Word through which all things were made. Have those two pieces clicked in your mind before? I can’t believe it took this long for them to click for me, LOL. That our Savior is the thing by which and through which creation happens. And THAT is why John calls him the Word. (To which my husband said, “Well yeah…” proving that I’m definitely late to this epiphany, LOL. But I’m going to keep talking about it anyway.)

So what does that say about the true power of words?

Words are the creative force. It is through words that things happen. 

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

I need to think about that for a minute. I use words for a living–I create a lot with them. Whole worlds, one might argue…but imaginary ones. When it comes to actual building, I guess I always thought that the ACTIONS were the more important thing. The other day my husband and son were building a desk together from some scrap wood (a.k.a. an old bookshelf that had collapsed, LOL), and if you ask me what effected the creation, I’d say “screws, wood, and a screwdriver.”

But do you know what else I noticed while they were building? The words exchanged. This is the first real building project they’ve done together, and I loved hearing the instructions float out to me in the kitchen. “Now this is how you do this…” my husband would say. And, “How do you want this part?”

Then would come my son’s answer. “Yeah, that looks good. Let’s put this piece here…”

Photo by Vance Osterhout on Unsplash

A simple exchange between a very earthly father and son who were repurposing something already made. The desk could have been built without those, right?

Maybe…because they are a very earthly, physical, corporeal father and son. The Father and Son, on the other hand, at the brink of our creation…they’re something different. They are, the Bible tells us, Spirit. That’s why it was such a miracle that Jesus wrapped himself in flesh and became one of us.

Pure Spirit doesn’t have hands like we do, or like we’d recognize. Pure Spirit certainly doesn’t have (or need) an electric screwdriver or cheap particle board. Pure Spirit does not interact with this physical world as we physical beings do. How does it?

Through words.

Let that sink in–I know I am. How did God create? With words. How did God interact with man from the dawn of time through each of the prophets? With words. What did God-Made-Man do when he began his ministry? Teaching and preaching–WORDS. Yes, he healed too. I know he did. And how did he often choose to heal? With words. Sometimes he touched, yes. But did he have to? I’m reminded of what that faithful centurion said in Luke 7:7. “But say the word, and my servant will be healed.“

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The fact that God shared these with us–gifted them to us and then exchanged them with us…that’s pretty amazing. More, it’s not only a gift, it’s a responsibility.

He gave us the very tools of creation. And what are we doing with them? How often do we use them to tear each other down instead of build each other up? To complain instead of praise? How often are our words careless, thoughtless, unbridled?

What might change in our lives if we could see what each of our words did, like we can see what God’s words do? We’d see the harm that thoughtless verbal jab really did to our coworker or spouse or child. We’d see what worlds were built in them instead when we instruct or praise or encourage. And I have a feeling what we chose to say would be very different.

Well, my friends, our physical eyes may not be able to see it–but it’s no less real for that. So perhaps our new prayer ought to be, “Lord, open our spiritual eyes, so that we might see the true power of our words…and use them for You.”