Weekend to Midweek

What a wacky weekend/Monday and Tuesday and today too! Not to worry, but since this Friday past I have spent hours and hours just thinking about the cross, I’ve been to IHOP for all-you-can-eat-pancakes twice (the second time I found a huge hair in one of the stacks. weird), I was used as council of sorts in a crisis of a relational nature (those who know me pretty well may find that hilarious), I experienced the emotional equivalent of being kicked in the nuts, I purchased a new tire, I had a few people (including myself) mention that the CICS program seems really worthless, and in the midst of it all, I felt really compelled to thank God for the gift of Jesus.

On Friday, a buddy of mine loaned me a book called The Cross Centered Life by C.J. Mahaney. I don’t know why he thought I needed it. Well, that’s not true. I know perfectly well why he thought I needed it. Any whey, for such a short book, it seemed like it took a long time to get through the darn thing. That may not be such a bad thing when you consider how many hours out of the week I’m stuck sitting in a lab with not much to do. Well, at least not much to do that I feel like doing. Long story short, it was a really amazing book! It’s remarkable how easy it is for us as Christians to get bogged down with fighting sin and forget about how many powerful and beautiful reasons we have to love Jesus.

About 2,000 years ago, there was this woman who made a living by having sex for money. I’m guessing that she was uneducated, and I’m sure that she was looked down upon by those who would have presumably been considered the most righteous that men could possibly be. This lady was as good a candidate as any to buckle under the weight of her own condemnation and live in despair of her sins. But you can be sure that if she done that, she wouldn’t have found her way into this edition of This Blog and You. What she’s most famous for is washing Jesus’ feet with tears and precious perfume and drying them with her hair. She did this, incidentally, under the disapproving gaze of the religious figureheads of the time. If you’ve ever been made to feel small by an aggressively legalistic authority figure, then you may have a taste for the effect that these men were probably trying to exude upon this hapless pariah. She wasn’t having it though. She saw Jesus. She loved Jesus. Jesus had lifted the filth and disgrace of her sins and left her as pure as newly fallen snow. How could she possibly make it up to Him? Well, she can’t. She can’t even come close! It’d be dumb to even try. But, the Pharisees! But, her sins! Shouldn’t she at least feel bad? This story would lose so much beauty if this woman had acted as I act all too often. She knew what was better. She fell at the feet of her Savior and kissed them.

I’ve been listening to a lot of good music this weekend. There’s been a lot of Bebo Norman, a bit of Andrew Osenga, and also Josh Garrels and Derek Webb. Even as I was writing this blog, I was playing some Caedmon’s Call that I got yesterday, and the song Ballad of San Francisco popped up and made me smile. The first time I heard that song was in the Fortville Christian Church, May 2003. It was playing during a slideshow of some sort.

-Ryan