Part of being a Raleigh Fellow means aggressively assimilating into a new community of strangers so that we can really get to the good stuff in our short 9 months. Often this means questions, and a lot of them: “What are you passionate about?”, “What’s your family like?”, “Who has made the biggest impact on you?”, “What scares you?”, etc. That last one, “what scares you?”, is interesting. My answer, when asked, was something along the lines of loneliness. Getting somewhere in life, looking back and realizing that I’ve made few lasting and deep connections. I have a desire in the here and now to be with people. Above most other things I value getting to know people and having them know me in return. Being with people for me represents some sort of comfort, probably because it mitigates the chances of ending up in that lonely state I mentioned. So here’s the point: if I want to be with so bad, “why am I often scared of and running from time with God?”
This summer I led a couple weeks of a bible study with college friends and I decided on John 15. We had all been fighting the monotony of life during coronavirus, questioning what our responsibilities as Christians were during a time when it felt impossible to go and reach people (mostly high school students for us) with the news of the Gospel. We felt weird not knowing what it was that we could be doing for God. John 15 paints a different picture of what following Jesus is. Jesus says “Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.” This is the expectation that I needed to get through my head. Stop living to do things for God but instead remain and do things with him.
Here is where it gets funny: that being with God scares me. In relationships with people I can still hide. I can hide my feelings, my motives, my thoughts, my insecurities, you name it. But with God I’m exposed, and while every single time it’s a good thing that God exposes me I can’t stop myself from running from it, running from being with God. By that I mean being truly with God in the way that He expects. I spend time with Him on my schedule, when the expectation is walking beside him step for step as the disciples did. The plea from Him is remainder but my comfort is found more in treating Him as a dinner guest who comes and goes on my invite.
What is the point of this blog post? I truly pray that it is to the glory of God (John 15:8) because the way God hasn’t allowed me to escape this scripture has been the biggest blessing of 2020 for me. After revealing this truth of my lack of withness I was planning a trip out west with guys I led through Young Life and as I prayed it was clear John 15 was going to be our main scripture for the week. Then our director Ashley asked us to give a favorite scripture for which I said John 15, because I guess the scariest scripture is the best for me. Which I then had to talk about why I had picked it at our beginning of the year retreat. And then the next morning at the retreat we read John 15 as a group and identified it as a focusing scripture for our year together. Next, when we got home and the first lesson assigned to us as youth group leaders was John 15. Maybe that’s all a coincidence. Or maybe God’s pursuit is just the coolest most undeniable thing in the world. I think it’s the second.
Jeb Bowie