Bent on Loving Us – Godspacelight

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by Jenny Gehman

“Please place your seat backs and tray tables of their full upright place.”

My husband and I lately flew to Colorado to have fun the completion of my coaching in religious route. Our round-trip flight meant we skilled two departures and two arrivals. Two ascents and two descents for a complete of 4 occasions listening to the flight attendant’s voice over the loudspeaker instructing us to imagine our upright positions. All in preparation to depart or arrive.

This acquired me eager about postures that put together us for what’s to come back. I started questioning if the airline directions stood in sharp distinction to these Jesus may need acquired for his round-trip journey to Earth. Had he are available his full upright place as King of kings and Lord of lords, he by no means would have match. Earth can not maintain him.

To organize for his arrival, he needed to assume not an upright place however a bent one. And bend he did, into the tiniest of seeds in a girl’s darkish womb.

When the time got here for his departure, Jesus bent but once more. “Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father” (John 13:1). So what did he do? He bent low to the bottom — into the form not of seed however slave — and washed his disciples’ toes in an act of affection.

In a devotional I learn, the creator mentioned God is bent on loving us. She meant that God is decided to like God’s individuals.

However the phrase rang in my ears otherwise. I heard it in reference to the methods God loves us: by bending and descending, by decreasing and leaning in.

We serve an upright God who’s bent on bending. Bent on loving us. And who has a bent for the bent ones. A bent for the burdened ones. A bent for those introduced low.

Within the gospels, we encounter Jesus bodily bending to the bottom to guard a girl caught in adultery from the upright ones about to solid stones (John 8).

We hear him defend a prostitute, bent on washing his toes along with her tears (Luke 7).

We watch in marvel as he bends inflexible guidelines and on the sabbath heals a girl who had been bodily bent for 18 lengthy years (Luke 13).

We marvel with the multitudes on that momentous day when Jesus blessed the bent — the meek and the mourning, the merciful ones, the -persecuted, pure and poor (Matthew- 5).

God is bent on bending and lifting up the low. To enter the doorway of the struggling, the sinners, the sidelined and the sick, our Savior stooped.

I discover this to be superb information for me — for us — once we discover ourselves, as Edmund Sears penned in “It Got here Upon the Midnight Clear,” bent beneath life’s urgent load.

Like the girl in Luke 13, my physique was bent for 18 lengthy years. I used to be dropped at my knees by toes that would now not help me and grief that stored grounding me. I don’t know what has bent you, pal — poverty, stress or ache. I don’t know your journey, previous or current, that has laid you low. However what I do know, and what I’ve skilled, is that our precarious bent place is the very posture that prepares us each for the arrival of God to us and our departure again to God.

It’s not the inflexible or proper however the bent and bowed who’re blessed.

Because the Holy Spirit kindly jogged my memory, this posture prepares us not just for God however for each other.

As I prayed for shalom in a number of relationships which have rubbed me mistaken, I used to be moved to admit the areas the place, in my very own sense of rightness, I’ve change into stiff-necked and straight. As I requested for the grace to bend, I spotted anew that typically we have to stoop so as to see once we can’t see straight.

An upright place could also be the popular one for a aircraft, practice or vehicle. However in our walkabout day by day lives, a bent body could serve us greatest.

God is bent on loving us. It’s how -Jesus got here and the way he left and the way he serves us nonetheless.

It simply could also be that once we are bent, damaged or introduced low, we’re in a ready place to enter a portal of grace, exactly postured for who and what awaits.

*Reprinted with permission from Anabaptist World journal, AnabaptistWorld.org.*

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