Unbalanced

Becky lent me the book Messy Spirituality by Mike Yaconelli. I've not finished it yet but so far it's great! So many Christian books I've read or tried to read have had really good info in them but were written in a way that made me get bored and not want to read them. This is NOT one of them. I have trouble putting it down.

The part I was reading tonight was about being odd. I'm not talking about wearing funny clothes driving a weird vehicle. I'm talking about standing out from the world. It talked about being unbalanced and not being the same. Although being balanced is something many of us have striven for in our lives, the book takes a different approach. Yaconelli talks about how discipleship can cause all kinds of seemingly bad things and unbalance in our lives. When we are different from the world instead of trying to be like everyone else, we cause tension. The book states that "faith is the unbalancing force in our lives that is the fruit of God's disturbing presence."

In John 15:18-19 Jesus say to the disciples, "If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you."

Jesus says that the world might very well hate us because we are different and that's ok with me. That means I'm doing what I'm supposed to. I'm spreading the gospel of Christ. I'm living out the Great Commission. I encourage all of you to be unbalanced, odd, different, hated by the world.