2013...

Happy New Near! Yes I realize we're already fifteen (15!!) days into this year...goodness. If the first two weeks are any indication of the way the rest of this year will pan out, it will be amazing. And a bit crazy. But I rather enjoy crazy....

A few weeks ago I was reading some of my old journals, and looking back at this last year. I just have to smile at God's plan. Because even with all the ups and downs, it's so interlaced with His Love. It astounds me, all the time. Actually I don't think astound can even begin to cover it. It's so completely indescribable. The end. :)

It being the month of resolutions,  I've had many conversations on that subject over the last few weeks. But I've just had a hard time coming up with one this year...and I still don't have any specific ones.

Instead I've decided to choose a word that encapsulates what I hope for, expect, and seek in these next 12 months. Something that I feel God is calling me too.

Mhmm....Risk. I'm not talking about being risky in a foolish way, just for the thrill of it. (Though I've nothing against the occasional cliff jumping or caving adventure).

I'm talking about being done with the complacency, the settling for "good enough," the comfortable, the safe.

Is that really my goal as a Christ follower? To arrive safely at deaths door? I think not.

We are not called to be safe, we are simply promised that when we are in danger, God is right there with us. And there is no better place to be than in His hands.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver.“Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

There is nothing safe about the Christ who rent the veins and the veil to save us — He is Divine and He is Dangerous and He is Detonating.  He is no tame lion.

And I'm thinking that what the world desperately needs is more dangerous disciples of an unsafe God.

“The safest thing to do with a God like this is not to play it safe with Him. It is to never get so caught up in keeping the traditions or hastening the innovations that we forget to throw ourselves headlong into His brusque and tender embrace,

It is to never get so busy protecting God that we fail to take refuge in Him. It is to never become so preoccupied in our Keep God Safe march that we forget to dance before our God with all our might, heedless of the borderland’s rules, tripping the light fantastic all the way into the holy wild.”
-Mark Buchanan

I may not know fully what that means...but I unashamedly wild to know all of who Christ is and to make much of Him.

I think it is virtually impossible to honestly say that knowing God, as God intends to be known by his people in the new covenant, simply means mental awareness or understanding or acquaintance with God.
Not in a million years is that what “knowing God” means here.
This is the knowing of a lover, not a scholar. A scholar can be a lover. But a scholar—or a pastor—doesn’t know God until he is a lover.
You can know about God by research; but until the researcher is ravished by what he sees, he doesn’t know God for who he really is.
And that is one great reason why many pastors can become so impure. They don’t know God—the true, massive, glorious, gracious, biblical God.
The humble intimacy and brokenhearted ecstasy—giving fire to the facts—is not there.”
- John Piper

Until we’re ravished by what we see, we don’t really know who God is? Ravished? It sounds so...so terribly uncomfortable and risky.

But maybe that is the thing? Does God ever make His people comfortable and hasn’t He always called His disciples to the risky, the dangerous?

How in the world can comfortable Christianity ever be Christ’s Christianity?

 Real love is never safe.
  
And maybe real faith is seldom about formula but about believing in the risky uncontrollable and being done with the controllable safe. Maybe faith isn’t as much formula as the mystery of being drawn to, surrendering to, the overwhelming love and will of the most dangerous Reality in all the universe? 

God met Moses on a mountaintop. Who ever said climbing mountains was safe? Where are those who are willing to be the risk taking disciples of the unsafe God who is the safest of all? 

To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risk must be taken because I'm becoming more and more convinced that the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing! 

Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.

-Luke 16:33