I won’t feel so embarrassed by these people?” False faith judges everything and everyone and never lifts a finger to help lift the burdens of soul or body. False faith gets people all riled up about something, but then never does the nitty-gritty detail work to harness that concern and energy to fix whatever they got riled up about.
Even the pagans realized that. Word are cheap. Actions count.
How will I meet my Lord when this fleeting life is over? With my head in the clouds and all the deep thoughts I have thunk and the causes I thought about looking into? Will I meet him as an absentee landlord to the responsibilities of my life, the children he was counting on me to raise, the neighbors he was counting on me to look after? Will I meet him as the ardent churchgoer who never wanted to look dumb by trying to sing even singable songs, who never joined his heart with the preacher’s heart in even thinking about prayers spoken, and never realized Jesus was counting on me to encourage brothers and sisters in the faith to keep walking in the way of the Lord?
Or will I meet him with chocolate smudges on my robe?
Jesus was smudged. Long nights in prayer, long days in teaching, preaching and doing miracles. A long and inglorious death on the cross to pay for all the sins of a respectable world that didn’t want to get its hands dirty. Jesus was smudged by my transgressions. He was mucked up by your iniquities.
Give me the smudges, because that’s what happens when faith works. Give me the wrinkles from worrying about when the kids are going to get home, the rumpled shirts from being in them too long, squeezed in the middle because I didn’t have