Yet the man sits alone in his wheelchair, slumped over, averting the gaze of everyone who passes, gasping for just one more breath from the machine that tries to keep eternity at bay…
Yet the woman drags a toddler, an infant, and a precocious six-year-old through the grocery store, alone, trying not to scream as the cacophony disrupts other shoppers who glare with angry stares…
Yet the student hides her eyes and her wrists, repacks the locker that was stacked with ugly, and crumples the “Kick me” PostIt note she found on her backpack…
What if we stopped making holiness a game? What if we turned religion into relationship? What if we took all the ticks from a christianity checklist and started sculpting our hearts against His heart? What if we averted our eyes from the rockstars of faith, the heroes on the pulpit/altar/stage/ whatever, and turned our eyes out toward what we defined as darkness on the fringe edge of church?
What if we vipers, we white-washed tombs, we blind guides, we who are more wicked than Sodom and Gomorrah, we who turn all that’s holy into an external dog and pony show stopped choking out new spiritual life with the heaviness of our hypocritical judgment calls? What if we started fearing our measures of holiness might be used by a Holy God to exponentially squash us? What if we started trying to palely imitate Abba and give new mercy every morning, to wipe the slate clean, to forget the wrongs done us?
