A New Naure

  “Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator, and become like him. In this new life it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us.” Colossians 3:10-11

  He lives in all of us because He died for all of us as atonement for our sin, the things that keep us apart from God. At-one-ment was and is the purpose of His life and death and life.

  I have to thank The Meeting House for those last, most important words about Jesus: He lived. He died. He lived again. They are beautiful in their simplicity.

  I think I am also getting a better understanding of what it means to follow Him because of it. So I lived, in the world, ruled by the world, full of fear and shame and guilt and a mountain of things that had served to keep me apart from God. I died to that person the moment I confessed to follow Jesus. A couple of years later, I was baptized into Christ, a resurrection out of the water, a literal washing away of sin. In Christ, I have lived and died, was buried by water, and rose out of the water to live again.

  And what a life it is!

  This life I have with Jesus hasn’t always been smooth. It hasn’t always been happy. It doesn’t always have faith and God at the forefront of all I do and say. It hasn’t always emulated my Lord in my dealings with others. I am an imperfect being who is being perfected through love.

  Life with Jesus is about evolution. Not the survival of the fittest kind of evolution because there is no grace in that, only greed. Survival of the fittest leaves no room for community. It is self-serving not God serving.

  

  Did Jesus come because the “survival” of the un-fittest was one of the most important things to God? (Smile.)  

  Oh, my goodness! YES! Story after story in the New Testament proves this true, how the unworthy of society were loved and healed during and through the life of Jesus: the Samaritan woman at the well, Mary Magdalene who was a prostitute, the lepers, the lame, the blind.

  I have to give thanks for Jesus helping me survive the days on the Black River. I often struggle with trying to reconcile my mental health challenges with a life of faith because of this idea, “I am a follower of Jesus, this shouldn’t be happening to me!”

  As if I could control them. Which, at times, I can’t. So God led me to Vitamin D. (Big smile!) 

  And I am able to put on a new nature, free of depression for now. I say “for now” because I hesitate to hope this is the end of it. God knows I am a bit of a pessimist who tends to over-think and worry and doubt and fear because I am an imperfect being. But pessimism has taught me to lean into God, to place my trust in Him with the sure knowledge that none of my human expectations (or lack of them) will ever come between us. Hmmm….maybe that makes me an optimist!

  See? A new nature. I love it!