Still busy with sin and hell. Back in school I was that kid that irritated the living daylights out of people with my overzealous efforts to preach the “turn of burn” gospel. My brother was different. He hated Sunday morning church. He never read his Bible. He partied, smoke and drank. He was the anti-Christian type.
Every odd now and then I would let him know what I thought of his way of life.
No wonder we weren’t close.
Mean while I started to see through the system. I got hooked on the Way of Jesus. I was ready to love my brother without trying to change him.
Then he died, suddenly.
Accident at work.
At his funeral, one of his housemates (with the same lifestyle as my brother) gave a testimony.
“Pieter was the closest to Jesus than anyone I ever knew.” was his words.
It left me cold.
My religiosity blinded me. While I thought I knew God through a so called holy lifestyle, obeying
all the rules, God was right there all along in the life of my brother, waiting for me to acknowledge this simple truth.
His friends, who never went to church, who did all the stuff that church taught me not to do and who never did the other stuff I thought I was supposed to do when it come to the stuff of God, saw God in my brother.
And I did not.
Damn irony.
3 comments:
I get caught up a lot between the the two viewpoints of "You love God and therefore you have to do the 'right' things" versus "You love God, and therefore the relationship is not dependent on whether you do the 'right' things or not."
Trying to do the right thing all of the time is utterly restrictive, and creates a false picture of God in one's head. Not aiming to do the right thing all of the time does give one freedom, but (sometimes) also feelings of underachievement.
Maybe the problem is that we struggle to accept that His love and acceptance can be so unconditional. The age old question of: "It can't be that simple, can it?"
Maybe the "right" thing is love...
'May God give you peace and the ability to forgive yourself that you judged your boet.
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