“Falling Back” (Again)

Lately, I really have missed writing posts; and I sure do hope that there’s at least a friend or two out there who has missed reading.  I’ve been speaking much more, which is an awesome privilege and one that has required much of my time and attention.  Last year, I had developed a pattern of writing about each event that I was asked to speak at after the event was over; but, as I started to speak more, I stopped doing it.  And I regret that I did so.  My intention now is, as we fall back today, to fall back into (silly pun intended) a consistent pattern; because, as a friend pointed out to me just yesterday, writers do just that…..they write.  And if they’re not writing, then something’s just not “right” (silly pun again).

Speaking of writers, anyone who knows me well knows that I read much C.S. Lewis.  And I want to share something from Lewis that I incorporated into a message I was asked to deliver last weekend at a women’s conference at Louisburg College.  It was The Whole Woman conference, the first one ever in Louisburg (my hometown), and it was about prayer and expecting change; and I was asked by the conference committee to give the closing communion message, to speak about the blood of Christ.

It was also my first Whole Woman conference, and I just love that the conference founder/CEO ends each one with communion.  And speaking about the blood of Christ, something the founder thought I’d have a unique perspective on as a Christ-follower who was diagnosed with blood cancer, was most meaningful to me–another moment in a long string of moments that continue to make it rather difficult to completely wish away the small “c” part of the story God’s writing in/through my life down here.

As Lewis talks about Holy Communion and what it means to be a Christian, in his book Mere Christianity, he says, “…..a Christian is not a person who never goes wrong, but a person who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble–because the Christ-life is inside them, repairing them all the time, enabling them to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ himself carried out.”  Wow, isn’t it good to know, to remember, that Christians are far, far from perfect.  The only claim any of us can make is one of a perfect leader, a perfect God, as personified in Jesus the Christ.  That’s what defines us.  That’s what sets us apart.  That’s what we cling to, run to, daily.

Yes, we will “fall,” because of the Fall (not the season but the original reason).  But, something, Someone, did happen and we were put upright all over again.  As Lewis says more eloquently than I, when we do go down, and we all will in various ways, we are able to get up and start over again because Christ lives in us; and this can only be so if we believe Christ Himself got back up after we, the willful world, put him so horribly down.  He suffered, he bled, in our stead, and then came back from the dead.  That’s the story.  That’s the one thing we must choose to fall back into again and again as we trip over ourselves and get knocked around down here.  He, Jesus the Christ, is what we most need to fall into.