The Really Real

I'm writing this from a really cool place-- the Summer Palace chinese restaurant right beside where I work. 

The food here is amazing ( I highly recommend the egg rolls!). But the reason why it's so cool is because I am the only Caucasian in the place and there is not one conversation that is in English- literally. 

It kind of strikes me how this environment makes me look at myself, to take note of how I'm different. It makes me more aware, challenges me and opens me up to see a broader picture of things. 

I think in churches sometimes there is a tendency to avoid letting outside events speak to us. We can sometimes be afraid that they will influence us negatively. And we want to honor Jesus by staying on track. The problem with this, however, is that we can also inoculate ourselves from experiencing the risen Savior because it might seem too radical and too beyond normal. 

I think it's clear that Jesus wanted his followers to come face to face with beyond normal when he rose from the dead and decided to walk, talk and eat with them. Dead guys don't do this!!

Jesus wanted to expose them to a new "real" because what they knew before was just simply not enough. It was too limiting, too restrictive. It didn't allow for the possibility of real beyond "normal". 

I like how followers of Jesus are described here by Jo Kadlecek in her book "A Desperate Faith":

"For Peter and Mary, John and Thomas, and the others who'd seen his battered body and were now watching the same shaggy-haired man eat and hearing him laugh and talk- how could they not be transformed? It was reality, their lives were radically altered the moment they knew that Jesus was alive. He redefined "real" for them."

Jesus redefined real. 

So a simple question for us all today: is our normal overwhelming the really real for us?  And is it possible that the risen Jesus that radically altered reality for Peter and Mary is the same resurrected Lord who wants to do the same for us today?

I pray that whoever reads this will find themselves soon in a room filled with something so foreign that it forces you to pause and consider the possibility that your "real" could be so much more!

May Jesus take us there soon.....

BT

Pastor Brian Tysdal

Rock of Ages Church

Saskatoon, Sask.