God With Us

Earlier this evening I posted this piece to Marcel's Lent Experiment blog, but it seemed fitting to cross-post it to my own blog.

This morning I met my personal trainer at the gym for another of our bi-weekly sessions. I am still sore from Monday, but today among other things, he had me doing lateral lunges: frog-like squats down the length of the room while simultaneously pushing a weight above my head. It’s all good, he tells me; it will build strong hips. But with my arms and legs quivering, in that moment all I could think was: 1.) This is exhausting! and 2.) Why can’t there be an easy way to achieve or maintain fitness?? And even in my exhaustion, it didn’t take long for my mind to bridge the gap between the physical principles and the spiritual. Everything worth having or keeping seems to bring me to a place where I am exhausted or desperately wishing for an easier way. And then I think of God, who’s the author of these rules we work and play by… Couldn’t he have made it so that we live by different rules? Couldn’t he have made this thing we call living more like what we cluelessly thought life was all about when we were children, wistfully (and sometimes defiantly) declaring the ease and freedoms that we would enjoy when we were grown and could finally shake off the hardships of being dependent and under discipline?

The phrase God with us comes to mind. It speaks to me of a togetherness-loving God taking on a human identity and experiencing life on my level to conquer the sins that I couldn’t, in hopes of drawing me into deeper relationship with him.

But today it also speaks to me of partnership. What God did for me and gave to me required all of him—to the point of death. For reasons that were infinitely more agonizing than my own, Jesus asked God the Father the same question I asked myself this morning at the gym. The answer was the same then as it is now. There is no easy way. But unlike Jesus on the cross, as I am confronted by exhaustion and difficulty, I now have the assurance of God with us. And while I still believe that means he’s always with me, I am coming to see that God with us is also an invitation for me to embrace the terms he’s set for living. To live as Jesus lived—recognizing that some days will be better than others, but there are no real shortcuts to fitness or love or anything worth having. In accepting this truth, I surrender my weakness to become his strength, I take up my cross, and I begin the journey of living life as it was designed for me.

God with us.

God… with us.