“I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”
— Jesus (John 21:18, NIV 1984)
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There are some days when you need more Band-Aids than others. I realize that that could be a metaphorical reflection, but I don’t mean it to be. Today, I needed four. Two of them were required for a cut I don’t even know where I got; the other two are impeding my typing but helping a finger I sliced on a raisin box. (No, I don’t know how. But thanks for asking.) On the bright side, all four of them were Blue’s Clues themed, so that helped. One can’t feel too bummed about a cut on one’s finger if said cut is covered by the good ol’ Mailbox smiling back with his flag up and everything. He even has music notes by him, which means a certain song pops into your head and keeps running in there all day. (You’re welcome.)
But as I stood and stared at the Mailbox after he so kindly covered my finger, more than just a catchy song popped into my head.
Earlier today, I was working through some questions in an ebook called Love Yourself Healthy. The section was titled “Shift Your Desire” and was a discussion on identifying the deepest desires at the root of our actions with the intent of shifting these towards what really matters—i.e., what we really want and, ultimately, what God really wants—so that our actions and life direction begin to align with our (and, more crucially) God’s values. The questions I was working through were the following: “If you are really honest with yourself, what do you want more than anything else? Does that desire align with what God calls us to? Does it honor those around you, or is it only self-serving?”¹
I sat with this for awhile in prayer and ended up journaling the following:
I think what I want more than anything else is to look like Jesus. But this isn’t as great as it sounds because sometimes that gets warped into the desire to be perfect, to not mess up, to not do a bad job at representing Him. And that plays out in fear of authenticity, fear of failure, lying, stagnancy, and insecurity. None of that is what God has called me to, nor is it honoring to those around me because my attention is all on myself. How can I shift this?
The question baffled me for awhile. How might I shift a desire that sounds like a good thing but is really warped at its core? It revealed that my root desire here was to somehow not fail, to be the one disciple of Jesus that would be able to get it right.
But then I remembered something—or, actually, two things. The first: A disciple is a learner. In the words of Dallas Willard: “For to be a disciple in any area or relationship is not to be perfect. One can be a very raw and incompetent beginner and still be a disciple” (The Divine Conspiracy, 309). Comforting…but it didn’t help me switch the desire. Wouldn’t Jesus be excited if I could be a disciple that didn’t fall all the time?
But then came the second realization, a truth I’ve been chewing on for some time from Galatians. Paul writes, “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (2:21, NIV 1984).
Some context: Paul had been heatedly rebuking the Galatian churches for listening in to a group of false teachers who were trying to get them to follow Jewish law in order to be real followers of Christ. As part of his critique, he flashes back to a memory of when he had had to stand up to the apostle Peter when the latter had gotten nervous around some visiting Jews and stepped back from table fellowship with the Gentile believers. Paul rages at him—and for good reason. Peter balked out of fear for his reputation, but Paul makes clear that there is no room for an attitude of self-preservation in the Kingdom Jesus established. In fact, he says, there is no room for any attitude save a humble recognition that every person seated at those tables in fellowship was brought there by the sheer grace of Christ.
A bit later in this epistle, Paul speaks of this grace as “the offense of the cross,” saying that offense is “abolished” any time we get in our heads the idea that anything we have through Christ is ours because of something we did to deserve it (Gal. 5:11).
Bringing this home: My desire to be a perfect disciple of Jesus misses the point of His death entirely. It’s like saying His blood didn’t matter, like saying He “died for nothing” (2:21). It is, at its root, a wish that I could have accomplished my own salvation so as not to be an inconvenience to Him.
What an insult.
In another epistle, Paul wrote what has become all too cliché in Christian rhetoric but needs a hearing nonetheless: “…[F]or Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (II Cor. 12:10).
What I realized at the end of my journaling time—and realized all over again as I stared at the cut on my finger and then the happy Mailbox who covered it—was that the desire shift I desperately needed was to quit longing to be a perfect apprentice of Jesus and to aim instead to be an apprentice who can accept grace.
Paul could delight in His weaknesses and hardships because they reminded him who His Savior was. They kept him in a position where he needed grace. As Jesus put it, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (II Cor. 12:9).
Somewhere along the lines, I bought in to a worldview that said that weakness was, well, weak. I bought in to a life orientation structured around self-sufficiency and self-accomplishment, where the things on my résumé are the things that speak of financial success, spotlights, victories, and awesomeness.
But the life of the Kingdom doesn’t work that way.
The life of the Kingdom has only one entrance, and that is the grace of Christ.
My hope, now, is to grow into the kind of person who can accept that. I want to boast in my weaknesses as opportunities to learn that rhythm, opportunities to realize I need Jesus.
And that, honestly, is the only way to grow up. Another quote from Dallas Willard (complete with British spelling): “Ageing, accordingly, will become a process not of losing, but of gaining. As our physical body fades out, our glory body approaches and our spiritual substance grows richer and deeper” (The Divine Conspiracy, 432-3). Most of us these days tend to fear aging, as Willard says, as a loss. We hear Jesus’ words to Peter about another dressing him and leading him about to places he’d rather not go, and we picture our fingers wrinkling and the strength evaporating from our legs. How could this be a good thing?
Yet, Willard says this is an opportunity for glory to be ushered in. Weakness always is. Maybe we can be disciples who learn that lesson now, who start practicing with our present weaknesses how to be apprentices who accept grace. Decades down the road, maybe we can say with Paul, “…when I am weak, then I am strong” (II Cor. 12:10).
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¹ Love Yourself Healthy is an ebook written by Denika Spadafora and produced by Stand Unshaken. As far as I know, access is available only through membership with the Stand Unshaken Collective: https://www.standunshaken.com/.
