Closer Still

by Scott Evans

But discipline will not repair our brokenness, restraint will not bring light to our darkness.

I see now, as I couldn’t then, that everyone around me–– particularly those who looked the strongest––were fighting the same battle and struggling with the same brokenness.

I don’t know if I need it to be bigger than it was in order to justify the ways in which it crushed and broke me. But what I do remember clearly is the fear that going to school held for me, the anger at them tied with the longing to be accepted by them, the dreams before sleep of avenging myself or becoming one

who would not be bullied because I was worth more than that.

But there is no Richter scale for the earthquakes that shake our lives. Some will recover from what seems

the most life-shattering events, others will be unable to dismiss the echoes of words spoken to them or about them. We are all broken. We are all hurting. Our lives and hurts cannot be compared against each other. They can only be understood in terms of the damage that each message or blow has wreaked upon our hearts. They can only be measured by how they have altered our paths away from our potential and pushed us towards a life of reaction where we wonder if we will ever be able to regain control.

There is a fascinating sociological principle called the ‘Looking Glass’ self, the idea that we only ever see ourselves as worth the value given to us by the most important person in our lives.

What we as Christians have a tendency to label as sin is often just the visible growth of the weeds in the soil of our lives, but we often pay little or no attention to the roots that exist at a deeper level. So we run our lifestyle lawnmowers over their growth more and more regularly, only to have it grow back faster and stronger because they haven’t been pulled by the root that this darkness sprouts from. The temptation is to treat sin as the sickness when it’s really just the symptom.

Fear can do strange things to a person. It can cause him or her to question things that should never be questioned. I was so afraid and ashamed that I forgot my dad’s heart, assuming he would tend towards punishment, not because of who he is but because of my own perception of what I deserved.

That day, I learnt unconsciously that the ‘why?’ is more important than the ‘what?,’ that the dark things that drive us are more dangerous than their expression, that the sickness is more dangerous than the symptom.

As Christians I think we have a tendency to fight the symptoms more

than the sickness. We are more concerned with not doing whatever it is that tempts us than we are with asking why we are so drawn to it, exploring the root of the darkness or brokenness in our lives that is pulling us in that direction. So we train ourselves in the don’ts, and in doing ...

Sin is not simply breaking the rules, it is the state of living out of our brokenness––this is where God wants to change us. He doesn’t want simply to change our lifestyles, but to change our lives.

In Christ, we learn that we are worth dying for and that He is worth living for. The Bible is God’s message, not a book of rules, but the truth of who He is and who we are as a result, of our value, our potential, our true reflection in the mirror.

I am a child of God, worth dying for, pursued, loved, liked, rescued. A child that is healed because he has found his home, standing in a room of empty mirror frames, surrounded by shattered glass, looking into the eyes of a Father in which he can just about make out his reflection, his worth defined by the look upon His face as a smile breaks across it.

I will control my place, my image, my value. I will control what you see so that you don’t find me wanting.

A servant’s place is on his knees. A son’s place is in his father’s arms.

This is my greatest struggle: abandoning my right to control my own identity.

Religion is at its most disgusting when people become pawns in our power games.

If you want to love broken and messy people, then you’re going to have to go to broken and messy places.

The only thing we can control is how much love we show.

The biggest danger I’ve seen in 21st-century Christianity is an approach to Scripture that says you can take it at first glance.

Does this interpretation call me to a life of self-sacrificial and painful love of those around me?

if I am made in the image of God and worth dying for, then so are you.

A faith that calls me home to a place where I am healed is meaningless, self-help, psycho-babble spirituality if it doesn’t change the way I live towards others, if it doesn’t build the Kingdom of God and if it doesn’t change the world.

It doesn’t challenge us to love others, it appeals to what we want for ourselves.

Stop letting your religious life get in the way of love.

Not living in fear of being contaminated. Living with confidence in the contagiousness of grace.

Integrity is not the opposite of sinfulness; it is the opposite of hypocrisy. It means being the same person on the outside that we are on the inside.

‘Don’t tell me what you believe. Show me how you live and I’ll tell you what you believe.’

This is what it means to be Christian. To be defined neither by what we believe nor what we do, but to evaluate our lives by how this belief has taken hold of us.

Holiness is living what we believe, letting our lives become a manifestation of the God we have come to know and experience.

This is why God calls us to love our neighbour as ourselves––because when we love our neighbours less than ourselves, we live lives of selfish ambition and consumption. And when we love our neighbours more than ourselves, we live lives of inferiority in which acts of service perpetuate our self-hatred or need to earn love. Loving our neighbour as ourselves is wholeness and holiness.

‘You have one task and that is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be.’

As it happens, this pursuit leads us away from the things that threaten to destroy us but it is not defined by them. The difference is subtle, yet dramatic. It leads us beyond simple questions of right and wrong––‘What should I not be doing?’––into deeper questions like, ‘Who am I becoming?’

There is a reason behind every commandment––they are not simply boxes to be ticked, but clues to a deeper understanding of God.

Further is to ignore God’s law. Closer is to try to obey it. Closer still is to long for us to have it written on our hearts in such a way that we live it unconsciously.