Called to carry crosses, not boxes

In a loud world — certainty is what sells. 

People love the hawkers, the big talkers, the bloggers that sell certainty.

Turn on the cranked up experts, click on the screaming headlines —  and what people are shopping for is certainty. Certainty sells because we like to take home our boxes — to put people in boxes, put our life in neat boxes, put parts of the world into manageable boxes.

Turns out what we want most is someone to just sell us some certainty about who is who, and what is what, so we can have this sense of knowing what’s safe — instead of knowing Who is the Savior who calls us to love in dangerous, upside-down ways.

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But the thing is: Truth isn’t found in trite boxes — Truth’s found in the richness of Christ. Truth doesn’t come marked as simplicity — Truth comes marked with the fullness of grace, or it isn’t Truth. Truth is a Person and He is the complexity and the empathy and the integrity and the certainty and the supremacy of Christ.

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Because the Truth is: We’re not called to carry boxes — we’re called to carry crosses.

Boxes carriers are about buying certainty for living. Cross carriers are about carrying the complexity of living.    

Box carriers strain for the power of controlled lives. Cross carriers surrender to the power of the Christ life.

Box carriers box things into simple. Cross carriers unpack things and sit with the suffering. 

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Because it turns out: Christ-followers aren’t called to go buy certainty — we’re called to go walk by faith. 

Christ-followers don’t have a certainty to sell — we have a certainty who saves, and His name is Jesus. The absolute certainty we have is the Truth of Jesus — and He welcomes us into living the humble and complex nuances of a servant Faith.

Faith that says we are all just people who are both His good and our bad and He’s the only One good, Faith that requires His patient love and His merciful understanding and His servant actions and His willingness to suffer with and for the wounded.

--Ann Voskamp
from her blog post: here