the Beloved and the thief (SWE)

josh and i have spent the past couple days developing the theme that we will be weaving in to the curriculum of our spring adventure groups.  as participants are up in the trees, eating meals, enjoying one another's company, we want them to be contemplating unity.  

most of the groups that come through this spring will not be of the Christian influence; a good number of the groups will be confirmation groups—a very traditional, religious rite of passage in sweden that is as common as getting your driver's license in the states.  the students study the creeds and the doctrines of the church along with other complimentary studies and many groups choose to celebrate their confirmation with some kind of retreat (coming to holsby, for example).  we are told that the youth of these groups participate in confirmation rites for the following primary reasons:

their parents make them do it,

all their friends are doing it,

they will get a lot of money gifts from grandparents if they do.  

our hope is to give them an introduction to the Gift who will capture their hearts and rattle their world.  the message we will be passing on is one of Love, and Him unified.

in his letter to the ephesians, the apostle paul is trying to communicate a mystery.  well before he calls the ephesians to be a unified people, he urges the people to consider the Beloved;

the Blessed,

the Son.

what do we mean by "God loves us," apart from the reality that the Father loves His Son?  it is because of the Father and Son's love for each other that we can know love—He is perfectly One, perfectly Love, and it is out of Him (the Unified One) that we are blessed and saved from a life of pursuing counterfeit union.  since we are created in His likeness, it is not an option for us to not be “in union” with something or someone.  we simply are incapable of finding significance in anything else (even the person of social and technological solitude embraces an other—think of tom hanks’ character’s relationship with a volleyball in “cast away”).

our hope for the groups that come through holsby this spring is that they will consider to whom or to what thing(s) they are seeking unity with.  and when we consider how we spend our money and our time, light begins to shine on what we value as ‘our other’.  it is with an invitation to put on relational lenses that we begin to see the absurdity of what we are doing with our lives… so many of the things that we pour resources and effort into have no capacity to love us, and deep in our make-up, we long to be unified with Love.

ephesians 4:28 says, “let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.” 

by nature, you and i are thieves, desperate for that which we cannot buy.  consider the garden of eden: adam and eve partook of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil at the expense of unity with the Father.  make no mistake: something powerful was gained that day: we learned that we could indulge our appetites in our world, apart from Him—a very powerful tool of individual survival.  and from that day forth, the serpent has invited us to binge on drunkenness, sexual immorality, gluttony, and the like; but notice how it is always in the context of distrusting the Word that we receive this invitation (on the flipside, consider the One who stood firm against the serpent in the desert… the new Adam). 

we are thieves who are skilled in stealing a “unity” of sorts.  we are thieves, and we are fools, because Truth invites us to imitate Him as the Beloved (see eph. 5:1) and receive the love and unity we could never afford (see eph. 2:8). 

the prophet Isaiah pleads, “come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat.  come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.  why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?  incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live…”

we are thieves, and we are fools.  if we knew the gift of God and believed the truth about the riches of our inheritance as beloved children, we would actually receive the things of which we pursue the shadows of.  we waste our time and affection on shadows, but there are no shadows in Him Who is Light.

our hand reaches for the apple everyday; fruit of incomplete, worldly "unity".  knowledge apart from relationship.  if we insist on relying on our own efforts to feed our hunger for love and unity, we forfeit our inheritance as beloved children and are left foraging from apple trees.

josh and i hope that this season of holsby will be characterized by pursuing the Love of our life and being blessed in Him who is the Beloved.  our deepest desire is to enter into the labor of love, actually relating to the Giver of good things and learning from the Beloved, so that we might have something to give to those in need (“let the thief no longer steal…but have something to share with those in need”).

 

may our ministry here at holsby be the wake we leave behind as we pursue our Love!