Mark 1:14-20…Will you LIGHT for a minute??

I lean into life.  I’m awakened most mornings by the pull of a project, or a task, or a word.  

Meanwhile, my beloved sleeps, in the embrace of Psalm 127’s second verse.

It is vain for you to rise early

and put off your rest at night,

To eat bread earned by hard toil—

all this God gives to his beloved in sleep

Looking it up just now, I discovered that the first verse leads into this morning’s posting perfectly:

Unless the LORD build the house,

they labor in vain who build.

Unless the LORD guard the city,

in vain does the guard keep watch.

Mark’s Gospel leans forward too. 1/3 of the way into the first chapter, Jesus has already been prophesized by John the Baptist, baptized, tempted in the desert, and is into his Galilean ministry.  Mark’s my kind of man.  I recall Gust Kopack sweeping in from the milking barn, jumping out of his coveralls and putting on his fishing gear, calling to my godfather, “Come on, Joe, time’s a-wastin’!”  And off they’d go for our breakfast trout, the sun barely risen.

So it is no surprise that when I anticipated getting into this Sunday’s Gospel, it was all about the call of Jesus.  Drop everything and follow me.  Time’s a-wastin’.

But we’re a third of the way through this Gospel before Jesus calls Zebedee’s boys out of the boat.  His call comes only after he calls all in his earshot to “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”

Jesus didn’t say “believe the Gospel”.  I was all ready to jump up and go fishin’.  But the word in stopped me cold.  I’d never noticed that little word.  I am inclined to work at believing the Gospel from where I am, outside it.  I pick it up, read and study it, trying to understand it.  But Jesus called me to believe in it.  It was like He was a sweet old lady to whom I wanted to deliver a gift, who when she saw me, swing the door open, smiled and said “Oooo!  Come in!”

Looking at things from the inside is a whole ‘nuther thing than looking at them from the outside.  From the inside of a place or a person or a relationship, our affective faculties – our feelings – join our cognitive faculties – our thoughts – and we are given a three-dimensional picture, a four-dimensional experience. 

Do you lean into life too?  Can you join me for a few mornings in accepting the door-swung-wide-open invitation of Jesus to come in and light for a minute? 

Tomorrow: what it’s like from the inside.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.