fighting the grey

It’s just this, that we’re all so broken. We can forget it at times, but it always comes back. Especially among believers, it seems. We’ve been given black and white, truth and falsehood, light and darkness, but somehow in the press of living there grows a greyness over the divide. Adiaphora creeps in, and its danger lies in the fact that it doesn’t change reality as much as it blurs it.

We aren’t made to live in these shades and this blurring is our breaking. It only happens at all because we’ve fallen from that place where our whole heart, mind, and soul were pure and we as human beings were able to walk with our God in the cool of the day.

The enmity between a woman’s offspring and a serpent is our only hope—and this warfare is no grey blur. It meant death on a Roman cross, the defeat of demons, and the ransom of those who loved groping around in the dark. We live a saved people, a people undergoing transformation, a people awaiting the consummation of restoration.

Yet creation groans; and with it the sons of God. The worst part is not that we live on a battlefield, for the One who fights for us is mighty. No, it’s the cost of the fray. These days of the in-between are dire, yet in the midst we’ve been given a brotherhood sealed in blood and given the same orders as our own. God Himself has given a love beyond compare, and designed that the ongoing living of this love be carried out through common acts, words, and the unlikely moments of contact between pilgrims.

The love of an Almighty Father glows through our acts as those alive in Christ Himself through the Spirit. It’s bigger than us by far, but it’s no less true. We have the opportunity to live in the light, to act with extravagant care towards one another, to lay down ourselves in words and moments and actions that our God uses in ways far above the sum of their parts.

Our Father is in the business of changing lives, and He does this often through other common lives. He calls and loves, and through those called and loved, still others come to know themselves as chosen by the Creator of the world and loved by the Son of God to the point of death.

We face opportunities of this magnitude every day—often unawares, and we leave ourselves open to a million mirages thrown up by our flesh that loves ease, the world that glitters, and the devil who prowls. Sometimes it’s as easy as forgetting—but forgetting cost a nation its promised land. God preserves His own, yes, but He also inspired the writing of Hebrews, with its dire tone and message. The warnings against falling and failing in this great race were written because the risk of presumption is real. At the very least we realize that this is no game.

No indeed; this is no game. Which is why the breaking of fellowship between brothers undoes us. In the transferal from death to life we have been redefined by the living Body of Christ. It’s no less than a miracle, but it’s also no more than frail flesh and blood on this side of the new heavens and the new earth. Words written, spoken, implied—they cut deep, and sometimes the healing lies far off—farther off than we ourselves know, or our brother dreams. Too often, we forget that we live before the face of God when all we see is a person outside our conceptions or preferences.

Anyone would take Eden over the wilderness, but the heat of the desert grows all the more intense with the cheapening of sacrifices made, the devaluing of loyalty in the press of conflict when trust is betrayed and sacrifice belittled.

But hope deferred makes the heart sick. The realities of misunderstanding and slander and pride that so often flourish among us burn like the lies they are. Lies about who we are, who we’re called to be, and who we will one day become. We act out falsehood every day toward one another. All too often, wounding comes on fiercely and binding up is absent among those who were chosen against all reason and loved by One who was wounded for them.

Yet light appears in the unlikeliest of places, and hope ever grows that in this journey some few have your back; that among the fellowship of believers there is a knowing, an understanding that frees the heart for love and service. Our faithfulness grows out of His own heart for the unlovely, for we find ourselves selfish beggars apart from the grace which fills us to forgive.

The cost of love is great. Yet the shrinking is a greater betrayal. We are not our own—we who were bought with a price to show forth the excellencies of Him who called us out of darkness into His marvelous light.