What It Means to Live the Christian Life

My poor blog has been terribly neglected lately.  In keeping with the theme of my blog's title, I'd describe the part of the road I've been on for the past month or two as slow-going.  The kind of road where you have to put your car in 2nd gear just to keep moving forward safely.  But my class is finished and I am slowly revving back up. 

Below is part of a blog post by Connally Gilliam that I read last week.  Its description of the life of faith as lived out in our fallen world was encouraging and fortifying for me.  I hope it is for you as well.

We are all pilgrims on a journey.  The ultimate destination is, though I'm not sure what it will look like, the new heavens and the new earth (John Bunyan in "Pilgrims Progress" calls it "The Celestial City") with our loving and powerful God reigning smack in the middle of everything.  We journey in this life to Jesus, our Redeemer, and then with him and others we journey towards this, the believer's final destination, or first beginning.  It's actually, as CS Lewis famously said, Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on Earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

But en route, we aren't detached Buddhists, negating this world with its pleasure or pain.  We are women and men called to fully engage--responding to God's original call to worship and know him, to build families and communities, and to work to cultivate the most human good that we can (literally & spiritually).  This is what we were made for.  It got all messed up by sin, but because Jesus has come, we get to experience and help others experience something of how it should be--we get to be involved in helping (if always imperfectly in this life) to realize the redemption Jesus has inaugurated.

So as we go, the assured reality of heaven infuses our journey with hope, even as God's Spirit infuses our journey with love and strength.  We hold our unmet longings and unsought suffering in the open palms of our hands, an offering, even as we thank him for His incredible provisions.  And we pray like crazy for more and more people...to join in the journeying throng.