Running....

It's kinda funny - last night I was running around a new circle in a friends neighborhood, it's a four mile loop that is frequented by joggers, dog-walkers, and bikers; so it stays pretty busy.

Something occurred to me as I ran through pain and stomach aches (I ate pasta right before I ran, bad combo).

Every runner I past - we gave each other a little nod, or hand wave or something to acknowledge each other, as if to say "Hey, we are in this together, we both hate our bodies and love torturing ourselves in this primitive way" Kinda funny, but as I began to think through this it occurred to me: shouldn't we be able to recognize those walking with God and pursuing a life like Jesus - and at the very least wave to them.

I mean, when I am running and see another runner - I don't question if that person is running, I see them running and so I know they run. Shouldn't my life with God be that transparent for all to see? I don't think that it was difficult in the life of the early church believers to distinguish who is and isn't a believer. The believers were radically different from the world. They gave away their stuff, they gave food to everyone who needed it, they sold land to give to the church, they wouldn't shut up about Jesus, and the love that they showed was infectious.

Where has that gone?

So many times in my life I have asked or wondered - is that person a Christian? What a shame that we don't know simply by the way we live and move in our lives.

I am not thinking through this and writing any of this saying it is our job to judge a persons walk with God - but I think, as a person truly walks with God, the question would become irrelevant as the Holy Spirit works and molds and changes the life of the believer.

Just like I never questioned whether or not someone was running last night, I just knew.

What if we allowed the Holy Spirit to make us so on fire, so radically conservative - where we lived for the Truth of the Gospel of Jesus - and nothing else mattered. It's kinda what I see in the New Testament. It's kinda what I think Paul spends 13 books trying to convey.

What if we were able to tell who was fighting this war against the enemy, just by how the walked/ran through life?

What if we saw a world of people sprinting for Jesus - not themselves?