The Seduction of the Middle

PRAYER OF CONSECRATION Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  1 John 1:5–7 (NIV) This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. CONSIDER THIS John shoots straight. We need that in times like these. Light or darkness. Truth or lies. Fellowship or isolation. I appreciate the simplicity of these binary terms. We live in an age where people hunger for a third option, a middle way, an in-between place. No one wants darkness, but we readily settle for less than pure light. This results in dimness. No one wants lies, but we willingly accept things less than pure truth. This results in the confusion of compromise. No one wants isolation, but we graciously make do with less-than-real relationships. This results in crowdsourced anonymity. Cutting to the chase: We want our relationship with God to be independent of our relationships with other people. We also want it to be defined more by the quantity of our quiet times than the quality of our relationships. We want to believe a living relationship with God is possible while our relationships with other people languish. Perhaps the biggest misconception we have is that our relationship with God will determine our relationships with other people. It’s just the opposite. If you want to know what kind of fellowship I have with God, examine my relationships with other people. If I don’t have fellowship with, say, my children, I am not walking in the light. The extent to which I am willing to ignore the problem is the extent to which I am willing to live isolated in the dimly lit shadows of half-truths. What is a shadow but a shade from darkness? What is a half-truth but a lie by another name? Something deep within the human condition doesn’t want black or white. We crave endless shades of gray. Thank God for John, who loves us too much to leave us in the comfortable death trap of neither here nor there, in the lukewarm water of somewhere in between. John shoots straight. We need that in times like these. THE PRAYER  Heavenly Father, thank you for inspiring these un-minced words from John. Reveal the mushy, undefined middle places in my life. In particular, turn your searchlight onto my relationships. Show me where I need to make amends. Come, Holy Spirit, and show me the way to walk in the Light. In Jesus’ name. Amen.