The Christian Life

The Christian life, at times, is a barren room, exposed to the light with nowhere to hide. Windows and doors all seem the same; one blends into the other in ways that seem to offer confusion instead of solution. The floor seems no different than the ceiling, and both are merely separations from the glass and wood of old windows and doors in dire need of repair. The room, protected by these walls, floors and ceilings, is no room at all, at least no room fit for protection. It is a highly exposed vulnerable pedestal upon which we must sit. Nothing we are is concealed, and nothing we have is sacred... all is perched high so as to be offered as a target. And, yet, we sit in that room with doors that do not lock, windows with no shades, a floor full of dirt and a ceiling seemingly ready to fall in on us at any moment.

As Christians, we sit in this room on this side of heaven when Christ comes into our lives because it is not the "room" that protect us and takes care of us; instead, it is Him. We occupy this room in testimony of who He is in our lives and of our trust in Him, but I have learned, recently, that there are still other purposes for our occupancy of this room. This is the room offered to us by Christ, and if we possess the faith of Abram who was told to leave his homeland with no personal promise to him other than the promise of God's word, we gladly take this room over all others because it is in the right home.

There are other rooms in other homes, and those rooms have strong doors and nice windows with shades and locks and freshly painted floors and ceilings. Those rooms are much nicer than this room and much more comfortable according to the world's standards. But, this room, the one that offers us seemingly nothing as a room, offers us everything in Christ. This room, as I have learned the hard way, also leaves you exposed to the world in order to reveal much about the world to you. The dirty windows are not pretty to look at and will not protect you from the rocks thrown at you, but they are still clean enough to see who it is that throws those rocks. The door is weak and offers little protection from the threats outside, but at the same time, its frailty offers little resistance to the weak who need the help represented on the inside. The room will not hide anything about you and will reveal everything about you, but it will also, by its vulnerable and seemingly shabby state, reveal everything about others to you. Some will shun you, others will look down on you, and still others will take advantage of you all because of the room in which you live.

You will also begin to recognize others in similar rooms as they recognize you. They, too, share what you have because they live in what appears to be the same room. There are still others who will claim that they, too, live in similar rooms, and, at one time, maybe they did live in similar rooms, but they have since replaced doors, cleaned and painted floors and ceilings and added locks to windows. The room was once like yours, but no longer bears any likeness to your room. These "others" have spent much time and money on the room, working hard to build that room into something great and forgetting that the room matters little in this life we walk with Christ. The temptation will be there to make your room into what their room is, but that temptation must be fought because the room can never become yours because it must always remain His. Those who have re-built their rooms have claimed them as their own and have forgotten the lesson that you are now learning... what matters most is not the room but the owner of the room and the home in which the room exists. This is the Christian life.
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