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“Where the Streets Have No Name" as written by Dave Evans Paul Hewson, 1993
These hauntingly beautiful lyrics, made famous by U2, were playing on a continual loop in my head this morning. I’ve often wondered at their meaning, believing this piece of art to have many layers.
Read more“The incarnation brings unceasing hope and an end to our exile, wandering, and despair. There is great comfort for our souls in the truth that he is just like us. Here’s why: the incarnation tells us that even though we sin, we are not alone; even though we’re weak and finite, he knows what weakness and mortality are because he was weak and mortal just like us; and even though we continually fail, he has committed himself to be part of a race of failures- and he has done so forever.”
-Elyse Fitzpatrick, Found in Him
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Incarnation means God became a man. Jesus is both fully God, and fully human. It’s a concept full of mystery. What does it mean for us?
Read moreAll of us know what it's like to feel alone, sometimes, even, when we're in a crowd of people we can feel that way. We long for true unity and union. This is why Jesus’s presence with us matters. We were made in the image of God. We were made to live in unity with God and others, but without the love and work of Jesus Christ, his grace, we are lost.
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Once again, I’m pulling a line from that beautiful song, Oceans (where feet may fail), by Hillsong United, to focus on, as I write about trusting God. He’s never failed. Who can say that, but God?
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We were created to glorify and worship God through a loving relationship with him. We were made to enjoy the type of loving relationship that is demonstrated in the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But love isn’t love if it’s not given freely. With our free will, we chose to turn away from relationship with God, through sin, but God sent his Son, Jesus, to die on the cross and conquer death, to pay the heavy price that we owed and could never pay, and to bring us back into the relationship that we were made for.
Read moreMy soul will rest in your embrace. What does that even mean? That phrase comes, once again, from Oceans (where feet may fail) by Hillsong. The soul, according to Merriam Webster, “is the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life”. It’s the spiritual part of us. It’s the part of us that trusts God- or doesn’t. How does our soul rest in His (God’s) embrace? I think it means that we need to trust in his unfailing love, and trust that he will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, in order to accomplish his will. He will show us what and how to do what we can do, and give us the strength to do it. We don’t need to be constantly striving and achieving on our own strength.
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That previous story about me as a little kid, trying to walk on water, blaming my inability to do so on my lack of faith is funny, but unfortunately, I held onto some wrong ideas about God, long after, the result of which led to some tremendous pain. I don’t want to tell this next story- but I will, because out of the pain came something beautiful.
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Here’s where you’re going to find out what a strange child I was. Keep in mind, I was a church kid- and if you were a church kid too, don’t even try and tell me you never did this. I won’t believe you. I tried to walk on water.
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photo credit: Pixabay- cropped, words added
In chapter one, I wrote about what trusting God looks like, and about the foundation of that trust, which is a faith in the gospel of what Jesus has done for us. I talked about why even the ability and the desire to believe in the gospel is gift from the Holy Spirit. We can’t muster that up on our own. Once we accept those gifts and decide to live in relationship with God, trusting and loving him, he sees us as holy, as part of his family. That’s what it means to be a Christian. And we are changed when that happens, with new desires.
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