Day 14 (resumed):
[Jesus said:]
“This is how the world will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.” John 13:35
In the interim between posts, this space that has been filled with so much busyness, I have been asking, “why the need to reclaim my awesome?” Before I started my examination of this topic, some days, I was left believing I’d lost it, or buried it, or handed it over. Yet when I had gone looking for it, it was always on the horizon: first I have to accomplish these tasks, earn these merits, prove myself worthy in order to be awesome. But as I’ve already noted, my awesome is inherent in my design; its reclamation happened (and is continuing to happen) when I exchanged my depravity for Christ’s righteous, salvific work on the cross. My identity was restored to Awesome.
Following this restoration, daily attacks have been launched on my awesome to delude me into thinking that my awesome is gone. To keep me from doing what I was designed to do, be who I was made to be. Yet the truth is:
"I -- and every other person in the world-- must say: ‘I have my own special, peculiar destiny which no one else ever has had or ever will have. There exists for me a particular goal a fulfillment which must be all my own -nobody else's...His glory in me will be to receive from me something He can never receive from anyone else -- because it is His gift to me which He has never given to anyone else and never will.’"
- Thomas Merton
I am most aware, more fully embodying my awesome, when I am being who I was made to be; doing what only I can do. And when I am using my gifts and passions to love and serve others, I am allowing my awesome to be fully alive, through the Holy Spirit’s power. Frankly, when I am about my Father’s business, I thrum with life, with awesome, with hope, with joy, with a here-and-now kingdom reality. God’s kingdom announced and demonstrated here on earth: the greatest expression of awesome for which anyone of us may ever hope.
See this painting here
So in the next few weeks, I will share with you how we can embody our awesome, how to live it out loud. Find your passion, ignite your awesome; wear it. Walk around in it; set it free and watch how wildly it abounds. Its glow will illuminate the countenances of others, because your awesome was designed to call forth the awesome in others, to remind the stragglers and struggling that they are more than this fallen, mute, and grey world tells us. That they were created awesome. We all are.
Need a refresher to remember where we’ve been?
