Red in the Ledger

This is a scene from the Avenger's, which is basically the best superhero movie I have ever seen. :)


Loki: What is it you want?

 Natasha Romanoff: It's really not that complicated. I've got red in my ledger, I'd like to wipe it out.

 Loki: Can you? Can you wipe out that much red? Drakov's daughter, Tugenov, the hospital fire? Yes, Barton told me everything. Your ledger is dripping, it's gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything? This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer... PATHETIC! You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will never go away!


This scene from the Avenger's makes me think every time I watch it. Natasha Romanoff wants to fix what she did in her past as a master assassin, and Loki yells some lies and a little bit of truth at her. He yells that she can't get rid of her sin, that she is unforgivable. This is a big fat lie. God can totally forgive us and heal our pasts. The truth that Loki says is that Natasha cannot fix her mistakes on her own. He tells her that she pretends to be above all the others in order to justify her past. Saving someone else to cancel out the wrong things doesn't wipe the slate clean either. We can't save ourselves, justify our actions, or even accomplish the task of saving someone else. 


On our own we are hopeless.


The thing that can save us from despair is that we know someone who can wipe our ledger clean. Someone who can redeem our past and make us whole. While I couldn't hope to save someone in order to cancel out my sin, a perfect God solved that problem for me. He sent his perfect son to die for little ol' messed up me. Jesus can clean up my life, he can help me deal with my past, and he can help me get right with God.I am so thankful that God stepped in to clean up my mess, to accomplish what I could never do on my own.

Without Jesus I'd truly be hopeless.

A Proposition

“It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. ”   -Jacob Bronowski

I think I agree with this quote. I don't want to be taught things that aren't true and live my life believing something that is false. I also have and interesting and possibly scandalous proposition for you.

What do you think would happen if we approached God like a barefoot ragamuffin? What if we questioned everything that we know about God? What if we started striving for a different sort of relationship with God? That we would gather our doubts, our fears, and all the things we just don't get about God and approached him with it?

Sometimes we think that we have to clean up our act before we can go to God. That we have to answer our own questions before we go to ask them. We subconsciously do this, it's like deep down we still think that God doesn't think we are good enough. We think this even though we know  that itself is preposterous and we know that God loves us despite our faults. We don't really think that if we went to God with our possibly irrelevant or even  irreverent questions that he would shun us or say "That's it you're hopeless, I am done with you."

 God  is a personal god because he is big enough to handle our incessant questioning. He doesn't  want us to worship him at a distance. He wants a deep, meaningful, intimate relationship with us. And part of intimacy is getting close enough so that we can ask God anything and everything. Sometimes when I'm in bed starting to fall asleep God just shows up and I won't be able to stop myself from laughing and grinning like a fool, and though it may be a little weird it's me and God and there's nothing greater than that.

 God wants to know us with our quirks, our messes and everything. I'm a mess; I am falling apart constantly. And when I worship it God it kinda presents itself. And that's okay. It is perfectly fine to go to church and cry through the whole thing because that's how you figure stuff out with God. It's okay to dance like crazy for God and then be sore for days afterwords because of how into worshiping God you got. It's okay to feel like you need to be super still to hear God or to need to  do something as an act of worship that everyone may look at you strangely for. 

He is before  all things, and in him all things hold together. -Colossians 1:17

God is big enough, he's strong enough, smart enough, and  confident enough to handle us and all of our burdens, worries, fears, and problems we have. Trust him to catch you. I promise you that it will be worth it.