The search

Eclipse, 2024

We’re all searching for what we believe will bring us life. In that search, we can look upward or we can look outward.

Think of the cross, that horrific tool used by the Romans to demonstrate — in no uncertain terms, in a very clear, physical manner — who was in charge (Rome, not you). It consisted of a long vertical wooden beam for the body of its victim, and a shorter horizontal beam for the arms and hands. Its two parts came together near the heart and head.

Though Rome is long gone, the cross lives on as a symbol: Focus your search vertically and you’ll have life to the fullest; focus horizontally and you will be left empty.

Salvation, sanctification, and the broken heart.

Seven miles east of Wisdom, Montana. Summer 2023.

I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Ezekiel 36:26

I’d like to talk about salvation, sanctification, and a curious effect of the latter.

To be “saved” means of course that you’re now in God’s family, now a member of the Body of Christ. Your sins are forgiven — past and future — and your relationship with God is re-set.

Though some come to salvation via a lightning-bolt moment, others take a longer time, like someone awakening from sleep who becomes aware that they have for some time been awake.

Either way, salvation is a relatively quick thing, an event.

Sanctification is a process, one in which you are being made day-on-day more like Christ. It begins the moment you are saved, and it lasts the rest of your life.

Here’s the curious thing: At some point in this process, you’ll come to realize that the more you are in Christ, in the Spirit — and Christ and the Spirit in you — the more your heart will be broken by this world.

Like a patient with an ill-set bone, the good doctor must first re-break so that he might properly set.