Confronted with Jesus: My wife and I are currently reading the Gospel of Mark. In my own spiritual life, I had this sad yet strong hunch last week that I needed to be confronted again with who Jesus was and is. When we don’t return again and again to the Gospels, we will do little more than craft and image of Jesus that is socioculturally bound. I want to ensure that the Jesus in my thoughts and the One that I am following is not:
- White
- Republican
- Insanely conservative
- Concerned only with my personal relationship with Him (evangelical Christianity to a large degree in some places)
There is more to Jesus.
The Letters of C.S. Lewis: I am currently reading through Lewis’ letters when he was approximately 23 years of age. In a letter to his father about the death of an influential teacher in his younger life (Kirk), he writes of death: “I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left that one cannot believe something has turned into nothing.” Of course, Lewis was not a Christian at this time, so one should not be surprised by the “turned into nothing” which is colored with traces of nihilism. But the first part struck me: “extraordinary and rather incredible.” Since losing my dad in a tragic event, time and time again I have been struck with an overwhelming and almost unbearable sense of: “I cannot wrap my mind around the finality, the absence, the quietness, the deep and irreversible lost.” Gone. Just gone. That is all. That is it. A lifetime of stories, hopes, dreams, pains, etc., extinguished in a flash. I cannot make sense of it. I cannot get my mind and heart fully around it.
BJ Condrey, Ph.D. 