The Halfway Point

There's something about morning in Uganda. The air is cool The cooking and rubbish fires haven't started yet. The busy traffic of the day is still for the time and the birds are busy in the early calm. It's incredible. I've been coming here every summer for five years and I always almost miss it. I almost pass over the peace of that early morning in focusing on the busyness of the day. Reading Ezekiel 37 in that early calm I was absolutely hammered by an idea.

I am ridiculously arrogant.

I've got this insanely self-centered idea that my sin is somehow past the point of God's redemption. I convince myself that I've done it, I've messed up too much, cut myself off, and felt that I'm beyond the point of saving. What's ridiculous I'm doing this in the same breath as I'm saying or stating or professing that I believe in a God that restores nations, that raises the dead, that breathes life onto dry bones. To say that I think that I'm done is to say that God's love can't handle my sin, which minimizes that love and is really arrogant... and probably a little blasphemous.

I was looking back at my journal from last year and realized that there's a common theme in every trip I take here. I leave with a desire to live my life unhindered; to run towards God with everything I have, arms flung wide. I'm not saying that I want to go all Mother Theresa or anything (well who knows) but I want to live with an authenticity that seeks to take every step in the identity that I've been given by God and not by myself. I just want to live in a manner that's true to the grace and love I've received and not selectively receptive to it.

I really wish it didn't take a trip to Uganda to remind me of these things. I really wish that I could hold onto it for more than a year. But hey... I'll take what I'm given.