This weekend, I went on a retreat of silence to clear my head and connect with Jesus some more. It was great to head out of town and spend some time centering. With the busyness of the semester in full swing, it is important to spend time recalibrating and making sure that I am not going off in the wrong direction.
Jesus spoke to me a number of different ways, confronting some lies that I had started to believe, renewing my purpose, and convicting me about some of my actions/lack of actions. One of the lessons I want to share with you is about sanctification and the pursuit of perfection.
I went for a walk Saturday morning because I've heard that those are a good way to connect with Jesus. What I learned is that I do not connect with Jesus well when I am walking. Walking is a great way for me to think about stuff but it is not good for me to listen to Jesus. It is too hard for me to switch off my brain while I am walking. I am thinking about the path I am walking, my pace, that tree over there, wondering if there are bears on this trail, and stuff like that. I start thinking about ways to do ministry better, the conversations I need to have with students, and new ideas I want to try when I get back to campus. I do all sorts of thinking when I walk but I don't listen very well.
However, Jesus still gave me a great image on my walk. It snowed a TON out here in Missouri on Thursday, so there was still snow on the ground. However, it wasn't fresh and by Saturday, folk had already started to navigate around it. As I was walking, I saw this on the ground:
It's nothing special, right? It's just a path, part snow, part dirt. What I found myself doing though, as I was walking, was walking in the dirt for a bit, then seeing how many steps in the snow it would take before I had a clean footprint. The first step in the snow would be pretty nasty but after a while it would become clean.
Somewhere along the path is when it hit me that this image of the road is very much like our walks with Jesus. Hear me out here, ok? =0).
We all start by walking in the dirt. We are dirty, we are nasty, and we are ugly. Somewhere along the way, God picks us up out of the dirt and we start to walk on the snow. At that point, we are "snow walkers" but there are still marks of our old lives of being "dirt walkers." It is only through spending more and more time walking in the snow that we are made more and more clean.
Too often, we get frustrated and lose patience in our walks with Jesus. It seems like we are making the same mistakes and aren't actually growing as much as we want to grow. It is easy to think that following Jesus isn't actually working. The truth is that these things just take time. If we continue on the path with Jesus, we will eventually see that our old dirt is being taken from us. It may not happen as quickly as we want it to happen but it is happening and we have to be ok with that.
As a perfectionist, this is a really hard truth to accept. I want to be perfect right away. I want the process to be quick and painless. Trusting that things are getting better is hard. Still, I am working on it. I know that I am a beloved son of the Most High, whose love is not dependant upon my actions. Right now, and for the rest of my life, He is going to be changing me so that I act like it.
Have an excellent day!
~Adam
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