nothing to offer

"Where do you find the love to offer he who betrays you
and offer to wash my feet as I offer to disobey you?
Your beauty does bereave me and how my words do fail
so faithfully and dutifuly I award You with betrayal."

I've been thinking a lot about suffering lately, and how Christians are supposed to suffer. I mean the bible makes it pretty darn clear that suffering is not an option for a Christian. The "dark night of the soul" is very real, and I think something that everyone goes through in order to see what this thing is really all about. I can say all the right words and do all the right things. I've been doing that since 5th grade, but what does it mean? Not in a theological sense nessesarily, but in a heart and hands type of way. What does "taking up your cross daily" look like? Who are we? What does "Christian" mean? We have to stop Christianity from being a merely intellectual pursuit. God wants us to stand before Him knowing fully what we are to him, we are men of unclean lips. We are betrayers, whores, and adulterers. Every single one of us must see ourselves as "the worst of all sinners." If we are not slaves to the gospel we are slaves to something else. When hard things come our boundness to it is tested, and we find out whether our beliefs are manifested physically, or if they are just of the mind. Matt Chandler talks about Bulimic Christians and how we digest what we hear in church and then throw it all up in the parking lot. God! I don't want to be that! What type of God is satisfied with that? What type of belief is that? No. No. No. I've been that before (In many ways I still am.). I can't keep doing that, God has made that quite clear to me. I've been reading about this lady named Simone Weil, and she has a lot of good things to say, but the thing that facinates me the most is that she literally starved herself to death because of an ideology she held. I'm not promoting that or anything, but that is what true belief looks like I think. It is believing something and taking it as far as it can go with actions with words and with thoughts. I mean if someone does THAT for a false belief, what should we be doing for a REAL belief? If we don't give everything then we give nothing and don't really believe what we say we do at all.

Of course ultimately it does not depend on our doing; God's grace is sufficient. I think that this giving everythingness is a result of that grace though. I think the two are so closely tied together that they cannot be seperated. God spoke the world into existance. His very word is action. I think we must learn, in our limited way, to speak/do as well.

What does "To live is Christ; to die is gain" really mean?
Life = Christ. How does that work? How do I do that? What does it mean that life is a person?

"What new mistery is this? What blessed backwardness!
The immeasurable one is held and does not resist;
struck by the wicked words and foolish fists of senseless men,
the almighty one does not defend."