Last Sunday at the Bridge around 9:30ish, after everything was ready, Gisy & Muriah were rehearsing, Mark was listening to his wife sing with hearts in his eyes, Donovan was dramatically overreacting to minor allergies, and no one else was there yet, I wrote this in my notebook:

“I wonder if the reason I have so little tolerance for pretense, acting, & hypocrisy is because the Truth is so much better? The Truth of who we actually are and that we are exactly where/who we are, that we are deeply, irrationally loved there, in that sometimes messy, sometimes ugly, sometimes painful, space. The Truth that we’ve been rescued.

See, the “show” is based in the belief that who we authentically are is somehow not enough, not accepted, not loved…that we are, first and foremost, NOT.

But instead, we ARE.

We don’t have to pretend any longer, we simply have to be us. We simply have to yield to His work, His grace, His love. Yield to Him, and that is all that is necessary, that is enough.

A need to create an image is a fundamental misunderstanding of who He is and what this story is (and how great that story really is.)

So when I see us hiding, masquerading, image-making, I actually see our empty parts, our missing parts, our misplaced belief in foundational NOT-ness

And Jesus has a different story, a different word.”

Then some people began to arrive and the thread was broken mid-sentence (here’s the sentence: The cross represents the old world and how far the empty ___ – I don’t know where I was going, I imagine the next word was ‘tomb,’ but I’m no longer sure.) I wanted to share it with you because we all so often struggle with our identity and our identity in Christ and how the 2 of them might not be the same. That disconnect causes us to contort ourselves into many unnatural positions, trying to be something we think we should be, or something we think they want us to be, or something whatever. Something else.

But it’s Easter, and what the cross represents is just how far Jesus would go to show & tell us who we are, show & tell us what we’re worth, most importantly show & tell us WHO HE IS and that all this pretending/hiding or how many shows we put on doesn’t change that at all. Maybe I wrote it then and maybe I’m writing it now is not because we didn’t know, but just because we need to hear it again.