There is something beautiful about the World Race. More beautiful than the variety of foods and flavors, more beautiful than the many ways we travel from place to place, more beautiful than the harmony of different languages, even more beautiful than the expanse of landscapes we navigate through…
It is the people.
Their style of dress, the step of their gait, the way they motion and move, their many different faces, down to their fingers and toes, to the depths of their hearts – they are beautiful.
I get to live in their countries, learn snippets of their language, follow as best I can their cultural rules, co-habitate with them, fellowship with them, intercede for them, and be blessed by them. All around me they live, move, and breathe…And I get to watch them.
I am sitting in a train station in Kuala Lumpur just watching the people come and go. Malaysia is a country of glorious variety, it’s population layered and speckled with the dynamism of God’s creation. In every single one of these people is a heartbeat that carries it’s own unique history. It is utterly overwhelming to try and imagine myself capable of intimately knowing each and every person deep down to the color of their second-cousin’s eyes. I know that sounds a little creepy coming from me, but this is how God operates, how He experiences us, how He loves us. In thinking about this as I watch the strangers pass, my mind often wanders to those back home who I care about, who I long to see a beautiful collision of change occur in. When the Bible says we are beautifully and wonderfully made, that isn’t exclusive to myself and the people I know, it includes every single person. This may be getting to sounding a little clichéd, but just take a minute and think about it:
You are unique, just like everybody else.
God knows you, just like He knows everybody else.
God loves you, just like He loves everybody else.
God knows every single dang nook and cranny of you, His knowledge and understanding of you doesn’t deepen or shallow depending on how much you know Him. He sees you, knows you, and loves you just as you are.
He doesn’t need your love to exist.
But you need His.
Before you freak out thinking that I might be completely out of my gourd, let me explain myself. God’s existence is not dependent on whether or not you love Him with your whole heart. Nothing brings more joy to God when you love Him with all of your being, but He will not disappear or fade out if you never love Him. You, on the other hand, would fall apart at the seams were it not for His love.
He is holding you together.
Some of us choose to rely on ourselves for everything. We decide that we’re the one’s who will determine how our lives turn out, we go through life refusing to put down real roots, we avoid close relationships with people – all so we can maintain the illusion that we are the ones in control. We claim freedom in these acts of autonomy. I was that person, and let me tell you, that life was exhausting, painful, and ostensibly meaningless.
When we choose to fight for ourselves by ourselves, when we choose self-sufficiency over intimacy, when we allow ourselves to be ruled by the lie that have the capacity to know what’s best we drape one more set of chains around our necks and become beleaguered by them.
Do you know who wears chains?
Prisoners.
Slaves.
Captives.
Those deserving of punishment.
But you, you are none of those things.
There is something beautiful about the World Race. That I get to watch, as chain by chain, those who lived under the identity of the enslaved become true children of freedom. The funny thing about freedom is that a lot of people are afraid of it. They believe that by surrendering themselves to God they will lose their freedom. Well, let me ask you this, how free is a man who carries his own burdens, who is bogged down by the weight of his own sins?
That man is not free at all.
Freedom is letting God carry our burdens, freedom is living for only one simple purpose – to say, “Right back atcha!” when God says, “I love you!” Freedom is trusting that Christ can handle taking care of you, and believe me, your problems aren’t too big, your heart is never too dark, and your pain is never too much for Him to handle. That trust gets easier when you start to understand how supreme Christ is, because as good as you think you’ve got it down, you are actually quite incapable of taking care of yourself. Like I said, you would fall to pieces without the love of God. Technically, you can exist on this planet without embracing the marvelous, liberating love, but living a life without that emancipation from sin and death is only really a half-life, and assuredly our purpose is not to live each day only half alive. There is something beautiful about the World Race because there is great beauty in our creator, whether you see it at this moment or not. Part of the beauty is the freedom offered to us, a freedom that you cannot fully live without.
The earth and life as you know it would collapse without Christ.
Plain and simple.
“He existed before anything else,
and He holds all creation together”
Colossians 1:17
