All Things TogetherNäide

Day 1

BECOMING TRULY HUMAN

In a thousand ways, glittering and dark, graceful and blundering, the human condition aches toward integration. We long for a happy fitting together of the bits and pieces of our humanity. For a mending of our many fractures. For an un-numbing and a reconnection. We reach for it in moments of resonance, in some experience of lust or power or being seen to make us feel all right.

A hungering for happy endings courses through us, running far deeper into our soul’s strata than even our darkest cynical tendencies—and the dissonance of these longings and suspicions scrapes at us. Keeps us restless. Makes us homesick within our own homes loaded with customized comforts. Has us rattling about with anxiety.

And so, we live in the tension, wondering who we are to be. How we are to be. What we are to be. Wondering why we are haunted by a ruthlessly elusive joy. Why something always seems to be missing. Why the good life is so hard to come by. All questions we ask even when we don’t know we are asking them.

The way of flourishing in a fragmented world is found in apprenticeship to Jesus. In union with Him, the one who holds all things together (Colossians 1:17). A union that leads to abiding with Him and obeying Him, and results in imaging Him. “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV).

That is the central point I want to make in our five days together: Apprenticeship to Jesus is the way of in­tegration, a whole-life way of apprehending and existing in the world. It is in Jesus that all the outward flying fragments find their place and cohere. Apprenticeship to Jesus is the way, the process of change by which image bearers of God become more like Jesus, the truly human one.

Where in your own life do you feel the ache of fragmentation most deeply, and how might apprenticeship to Jesus invite wholeness in that place?