Why Loving Jesus?

Because I am absolutely crazy to presume that I know Jesus, much less love Jesus; and yet I have never loved anyone the way I love this man. To me he is as annoyingly disruptive and delightfully interactive as any number of my friends, except with Jesus it's worse, way worse - or I could say way better. Jesus gets down inside my soul in a way no one else can. He is the grittiest, most raw and real and brutally honest person I know. When I talk to Jesus, I know I can't play pretend, and that's scary. That's actually what keeps me from talking to Jesus for embarrassingly long stretches. Of course I call myself a Christian, and I'm guessing you know about Christians by now. For some reason, they feel obligated to talk to Jesus regularly. So since I know I can't pretend while talking to Jesus, my no-fail strategy when I'm in the mood for pretending is to talk to a pretend Jesus. It seldom works. The real Jesus always listens in, nods at the end of my sentences, makes sympathetic sounds, etc. until pretty soon I'm forced to acknowledge the real Jesus and abandon the fake one.

About that time is normally when my world falls apart, the world I create around me in high definition and three dimensions, a world constructed to look as real as possible so the actual real world won't be able to see me and I won't have to look at it. Jesus dismantles the facades we build as ordinary earth-bound humans, showing that not only is there a better way, but we want the better way - often in spite of ourselves. This is why I love Jesus: he puts me in touch with reality, yes, the very reality I've been fearing and running from my entire life, and when I get there I realize it isn't dull and gray and sterile like I imagined. It's colorful and lush and burning and bright and terrible and beautiful. It is life. It is truth. And the truth for me every moment of my life has been that Jesus is the way to a life of truth.

To read this blog, you don't have to sign a statement agreeing with anything asserted in the above paragraphs. You just have to be curious. And literate. If you're not literate, please stop reading this now. You're going to confuse people.