A time comes in the lives of many a son or daughter of God when all that’s been invested in us just “clicks.” The love and companionship we’ve been offered from the very beginning of our tender years adds up to a conclusion, on one or another wondrous day, that fizzes up and over the rim of our self-preoccupation. We were created in love, sought out by love, offered companionship in the daily joys and sorrows of love and invited to roll up our sleeves and to make our own contribution to the ongoing work of love.
We are someone, that’s the short of it. We are someone because of the someone who chose — freely and generously — to share His being and His calling with us.
What finally “clicks” is that we’ve been created for the purpose of joining the company of God in a most incredible business, and not just of joining, but also of becoming co-inheritors. This business of God is an enterprise of such extraordinary dimension. The fact is that we can glimpse just how extraordinary it is precisely because we get to spend some time being one of its products, on the way to our becoming one of its producers.
Like the children who grow up on family farms or in the woodworking or leatherworking or butchering or baking businesses of their moms and dads, Jesus Himself grasped what his father was up to very quickly, and eagerly got to work while he was still a child.
“Didn’t you know,” Jesus said to his parents while he was still a child, “that I would have to be about the affairs of my father’s business?”
Jesus then picked up this theme with his disciples many years later. “I know, now, that the things I’ve told you and shown you have finally clicked,” Jesus exclaimed. “You’re ready, now, to do the things that I do—to love others the way I’ve loved you—not because you’re told to do it, but because it’s now inside of you. You’re owners now, friends! You’re family, and that means that we’re in this business together!”
So, it’s an extended-family deal. It is for each of us. We pick up the lines we’ve been given, God as the giver, our parents or aunts and uncles or grandparents or teachers or mentors passing on the gift that they, too, were given. We’re becoming like God, is the thing that must be said. We’re not becoming God; let’s not be ridiculous. God is God and God will always be God. We are not God and never will be God.
But, because of who God is, because of His bigness toward us, we are invited into his likeness. We’re His children, after all. His business is becoming our business. What He does, we will increasingly do. We’re growing up.
Even though our daily tasks are hilariously miniature, when compared to the scope and perfection of God’s work, the work we do is an act of participation in the work of God. The inadequacy of our effort—the flubbed line, the dropped stitch—these things don’t ultimately interest God beyond the occasions they provide for our continual discipleship.
It’s our growth God is more interested in, and so He patiently corrects us again and again, cheers us on and brags us up. We’re growing, He encouragingly points out. There’s a universe of creative and restorative work ahead, and His plan, His pleasure, is to let us help.
[An excerpt from With: A True Story written by John Stahl-Wert.]
