Wednesday, June 13

The Saver

Read Psalm 16


Have you heard about this Extreme Couponing craze? These people get pile and piles of stuff for free by clipping coupons. It’s crazy. I confess, I dabble in the art. And I do pretty well. I don’t pay money for shampoo, deodorant, toilet paper or toothpaste anymore. I’m not extreme by any means. But I manage to stretch my dollars pretty far.


I’m a saver, and I come from a long line of them. My mom reused her Ziplock bags and tin foil long before going green was cool. Waste is a bad thing as a general rule. Weather we waste money, resources or talent, waste just doesn’t do anyone any good.


You know who else can’t stand waste? Jesus. But while I clip coupons and shop Groupon, he is in the business of saving people. We all know this though, right? That Jesus came to seek and save the lost. That he is not willing for any to parish (read “be wasted”). People are incredibly valuable to him.


Many of us are walking wounded. Battered by the consequences of original sin, we suffer physical ills and emotional wounds. Frankly, we aren’t worth much to the outside observer.


Are you familiar with the term upcycling? It’s like recycling only cooler. It’s when you take something that’s over served it’s purpose—say an old t-shirt—and you tweak it a little to do something different and more awesome. Like turning it into a super cute and trendy scarf.


This is what Jesus does with us. He saves us from certain death and brings us into eternal life when we ask him to. But he’s not content with eternity. He saved us so we could survive certainly, but he also saved us so we could live abundantly.


Terrible stuff happens. Diseases torment us, cruel people abuse us, crime robs us, and the evil one tries his hardest to destroy us. But Jesus will not waste us. He picks up our pieces and makes us into something more. Something so much better than we imagined. If we let him.


It’s easier to hold onto pain and tragedy. It defines many of us. As Christians, we believe in heaven and forever, but steeped in trauma, it’s difficult to imagine a life that is more than just getting through today. I believe this is one of the devil’s trickiest lies. That it’s always going to be this way. That things will never change. Mucking through this life is not what he meant when he said, “I have come that they might have life and have it to the full.”


He will not waste circumstances. He is crafty enough to work glory out of every circumstance we can hand over to him. He will stretch us, he might even break us, but on the other side, we come out just dazzling. Because his business is saving people.

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