Inch by inch. Minute by minute. Day by day. It’s odd how things echo for lifetimes that are set into motion by little moments throughout one’s life. Though those moments don’t last they are sometimes immortalized, immortalized for a lifetime if not for a history of a town, country, generation, or a running stretch of humanity. But the reverberations of a moment in our lives have a tendency to trickle down the brain to our hearts, gathering there the collection of joys, sorrows, and phenomenal ordinarity. Moments aren’t all fleeting though. We have the opportunity for moment to kiss eternity, echoing not a fleeting pebble in a pond, making dinky little rings pushing merely a few inches; but instead these moments can be avalanches rushing into eternity.
In Matthew 19 there is a story of a rich young man that approached Jesus asking Him, “What must I do to get eternal life.” Jesus said, “Obey the commandments.” And the rich young man said, “I have since I was a kid.” And Jesus said, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” With that the man hung his head as head and walked away, because he had great wealth. As the rich young man, in his desperation, fought a short lived battle of defense in his perfection, he hung his head moments later in defeat as he found out that in spite of all of his great accomplishments to the letter of the law, the only thing that he could do to be perfect was the one thing that he was unwilling to do. The moment that echoed in him struck a gong of “Sell all that you own and give the money to the poor…” Despite all of his toil, as good natured or self-seeking as it may have been, somehow that moment defined him in eternal words and to this moment his feet shuffling in the dirt is what we know of him now. Maybe our own shuffling in the dirt is what will linger the most. With all of our accomplishments and failures, and our unwillingness to let go, perhaps we shall only remember the dust drifting and twisting on a breeze that is much more eternal than the moments that we breathe. As the psalmist scribed, “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him; for He knows how we are formed, He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass, He flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” We linger but a breath. Like breath that fogs for a split second on cold glass, we come and shuffle our dust through this planet in moments. But in defining moments we can decide that eternity is what we live our moments for. Moments where we walk up to the edge of the cliff that we know as the present, we can wildly hurl ourselves into an eternity even now by proclaiming that the lives we live, the breaths we breathe, the songs we sing, and the words we verbalize (or even don’t verbalize) all exist for our passionate desperation to live every moment in the abyss of the sovereignty of God.
I think what it means to hurl oneself into the sovereignty of God is to abandon recklessly every fiber of our make-up. I don’t think that there is a checklist. Rather, I believe that the line drawn for reckless abandonment is whatever our threshold of comfort can bare (plus one). It’s devoting every inch of our hearts, every detail of our plans, and every hope and dream to the last laugh and last tear. It’s giving our all in response to Him giving His all for us. It’s us finding ourselves in Him. In the end, I don’t believe that this recklessness is extraordinary Christianity at all, but normal Christianity. Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?” I don’t believe that the Christian life is something where we can separate our salvation from the discipleship and unity of us to Christ. It’s impossible.
I think Jesus was getting at this point when He gave His Sermon on the Mount. He said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” In the Greek the word used for “poor” here is “ptōchos” which means: pauper or beggar. In other words, blessed is the spiritual beggar, because of the one you’re begging for. Jesus is saying, “You’re blessed if I’m your everything.”
“So here I am Jesus my Lord, you are my everything. Utterly torn and silence worn, I lay my bits and pieces at your feet. As Your love closes in on my human heart, I surrender all of me to all of You. Oh Consuming Fire, consume me in this moment and the next. Draw me deeper to get lost in You. Consume me in this moment and draw me into eternity. You are all that I seek. You are all that I want. Amen.”