About eight hours ago I preached about the words of Jesus recorded in the last part of Matthew 11.
Tonight, stuck between a need to sleep and the restlessness of worrying about three sick kids and one in particular, I came to these words from Frederick Buechner.
He's right, I think. And this is why I often find myself suspicious of so much of what we know as Christianity, with all of its accommodations to and even brazen pursuit of comfort and affluence - and suspicious of my own Christianity as much as anyone's.
What if the whole thing is about knowing a kind of need we can't educate or earn or work our way free of, but we spend our whole lives doing all we can to avoid, resist, medicate, and evacuate such need?
I don't mean to suggest such an error would make us "not God's," but that we might somehow miss so much of the life available to us when we so effectively evade desperation.
And I suppose I mean to suggest that perhaps Jesus meant it when he said the first will be last and the last first.
Shared with permission.
Written by Thad Norvell, College Station, TX
