Imagine meeting someone who knows us better than we do. This person is frank with us but never hurtful — always on-time with their insights and assistances.
They go with us everywhere; every nook and cranny of life we’ve been into they’ve also been — yes, the spectacular and the sordid alike!
Nothing’s hidden from God, but it doesn’t matter.
Truthful Contemplations
Contemplating that God might be present with us, and ever was, is a stark truth when we consider where we’ve been. Our Lord is no stranger to darkness. Perhaps it’s starker still to think where we might yet go, especially in our notional sin.
But God’s seen it all. Does the Spirit condemn such ‘demonic’ virulence for private showing?
The Holy Spirit is more patient than that. We might be asked to ‘go on’ with God, but this Lord knows we’ll gravitate back to squalor in a flash — it’s a plain rarefied reality.
A truthful contemplation is we’ll take God with us wherever we go. This alone is a great truth held in tension with accepting who we are, but fighting the flesh-bound pull to give into our temptations.
Either way, though, we have little to actually fear if we’re respectful of God and truthful with ourselves.
Meeting Jesus is Meeting Ourselves
Why is it we either have trouble accepting ourselves or others? Accepting all things in life is a vast maturity, for we have no option but to accept or change.
Both outputs of choice are set, first, in acceptance.
Problems in our relationships — whether with the self or others, or both — stem from uncertainty with the self, apart from those that occur due to chasms in shared values. Uncertainty with the self is propagated in a lack of peace; a practical rejection of the Jesus that would liberate us.
Meeting Jesus is permission to be ourselves. It’s loving despicable me.
Meeting this Jesus fellow is better than a best-of-friends-meeting experience because it’s like meeting ourselves, but when we’re at our very best.
It’s the apropos of the soul — a meeting of minds, but within one mind (i.e. ours) at allegiance with the Spirit.
The Lord desires for us to be at peace, and this can only truly happen when we design life around the acceptance of our particular realities.
It’s being ruthlessly honest with ourselves, knowing that Jesus knows it all, and still accepts us. This reality — our Lord’s acceptance — can never be in dispute.
I say again, meeting Jesus is permission to be ourselves. It’s loving despicable me.
© 2011 S. J. Wickham.
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