No Sleeping!

I am probably one of the most ambitious people you’ve ever met. I love Saturday mornings when I wake up full of energy and with a list in my head. I’m ready to conquer the world! I’m going to do the laundry, clean the entire apartment, make a trip to Goodwill, do the grocery shopping, cook my meals for the week, get my reading done for the book discussion, and then, I’m going to get extra client work done! But before I even make it to the sink to brush my teeth, I’m overwhelmed by all of my good intentions and my list starts to shrink. And by the end of the weekend, I’m scrambling to get just the necessities done. (Maybe instead of doing the laundry, I should just order new socks on Amazon Prime. I mean, they deliver and everything!)

Y’all, one of the things I want more than anything — one of my great life’s ambitions — is to love people really, really well. When people think of me, I want them to feel loved. But y’all, that takes work!

Actually, it takes more than work.

I had a long conversation last week with a friend, and he was asking about what it really means to “be like Christ.” That’s such an overused term that a lot of folks don’t have any idea what it means. And over the days that I’ve thought about it, I think that really, being like Christ has everything to do with learning to love like Christ does. But that’s not something I can order on Amazon Prime. It doesn’t come in a vacuum-sealed package with a child-proof lid. And when I got almost to the end of this week’s chapter of our book, I found this:

“So it is through knowledge, plus meditation, plus application of the Scriptures to concrete situations in our daily lives that we develop Bible-based convictions. And, as we develop those convictions, we will be transformed by the Holy Spirit more and more into the likeness of Christ.” (Bridges, 183)

It’s work, y’all. It is studying all of the evidence (the Bible, plus my relationship with God and every other way He speaks to me) and really thinking about it and then figuring out how to live it out — walk it out — love it out. It’s not something that can be done on cruise control. It can’t be phoned in or microwaved or hollered through a microphone at a drive-thru window. It’s work.

And for me, that means not falling asleep on the job.

Note to self: Work it, girl!

This post is part of a weekly book discussion on Jerry Bridges’ book, “The Discipline of Grace.” Feel free to stick around and chat whether you’re reading the book or not. If you have read the book and written a discussion post about it, link up at the widget below. Then, skeedaddle on over to Jason’s place and see what my co-facilitator has to say on the topic.