Closing the Gap

I am officially a Bad Blogger. I haven't posted in almost two months. Bad! And as one who has learned by experience that interpersonal reconciliation is best achieved by plain repentance without an attempt to explain oneself, I won't tell you all my good excuses. I won't tell you, for instance, how insanely busy I've been, or the emphasis I'm trying to put on real life community, or the fact that my creative energies have been sapped by invested in work-related blogging. I won't tell you any of those things, because I hate it when people get defensive and try to justify themselves. It's not only godless, it's annoying.

I was reading an old journal this morning (Why? Because I have four whole days before I leave the country with a team I'm leading, so I was looking for something to stave off the boredom) and was startled by this prayer I'd written: "God, I want to close the gap between me and You."

Me? Close that infinite gap between a holy God and a depraved sinner? What was I thinking?

Granted, it was nearly ten years ago, and I suppose I ought to cut myself some slack for that lousy theology. What shocks me is not that I thought that way or lived that way -- I know that was the case, and I thank God every time I think about how He's rescued me from the dark weariness of striving to make Him like me. What shocks me is that I wrote that down and didn't even recognize that it was the opposite of the Gospel -- a Gospel I thought I'd embraced but clearly didn't understand.

All that to say, it challenges me -- first, to examine my own heart, and second, to examine what I teach, whether by word or by example, to make sure that any challenge to righteous living or obedience or godly standards is never presented without the why (because of love and for His glory) and the how (by His grace). Otherwise I'm just adding to a load that was never intended to be borne the way we tend to bear it because it was already carried with the cross and when He said "It is finished!" it really was.