Our family is having a four day break over the New Year on the Dutch-German border near the town of Coevorden. The weather is cold and foggy, and there is not much evidence of a thaw for all the snow that lies around. But it is a pleasant spot for a few days R&R.
A Christian book I have just started is called 'Your God is too Safe' by Mark Buchanan. I am still only in the first part, where the author lays out his hypothesis that for all too many of us as Christians, we are happy to live in a borderland. Buchanan describes a crossing point between Uganda and Kenya which is a no-mans land where neither countries writ runs, where people can trade and live as they please, in a state of domesticated lawlessness. Applying it to our situation, he writes:
"Borderland is a political and geographical reality. But it's also a metaphor. There is a blood feud that divides Christ's domain from the world's, and a cross marks the crossing. Salvation is stepping over the boundary from our old life, the old land: freedom from its rules, its laws, its gods. It's coming home from the far country. But sanctification is the journey into the new land: learning to dwell gladly in the Father's house.
"It's a way of life that's hard to learn. The shape of the land is, first, cruciform. It's dangerous, difficult terrain. There are feasts, yes, but also graveyards, badlands, boot camps. It calls us to constant dying. Borderland seems safer, a land of exile when the homeland is war torn. So we refine an aptitude for lingering, malingering: for borderland dwelling. For standing out in the muddy field, as smoke mixes with twilight, and refusing to come join the Father though He pleads with us."
This 90 days could be an opportunity to move away from the borderland and into richer and closer fellowship with God. It's quite an exciting prospect, but a daunting one.
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