What Do You Want?

The second of the Five Questions…and perhaps the one that critiques our personality the most.  If we are asked who are you, we can search hard to identify ourselves, or we can simply say ‘I am…’  but if we are asked what do you want, we draw on our thoughts, our feelings, our covetousness, our loves, everything that makes us do the things we do.  If I ask myself “what do you want”, I’m faced with a list of so many things…and not God.  Not Jesus as much as He asks us to want Him.  A source of regret or a source of impelling towards Him.  If I ask another “What do you want?”, I can get a sense of where their desires lie, and where their heart is.  Whether that’s a good thing, I don’t know, although to use such a question in missions would truly be a groundbreaking step.  But it is one of the most telling to see where hearts have been prepared for Jesus.  “What do you want?”  “To be forgiven…to be healed…to give up on our shameful ways.”

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Who Are You?

I recently started watching Crusade, the spinoff series from Babylon 5 that only lasted half a season.  There are five questions asked in the first episode, two of which were sub-themes in the original Babylon 5 Seasons 1-4 and the remainder of which serve to direct the flow of the series and the character development in Crusade.  These questions are deceptively simple, but get their hooks into you and don’t let you go as you think about them.  Who are you?  What do you want?  Where are you going?  Who do you serve, and who do you trust?  I was thinking about them as I was walking today, and they’re questions that need blog posts.  So you get a miniseries.  Tonight…who are you?

Are you man or woman?  Do you have a name?  Do you have a job?  Which of these do you answer when you are asked who are you?  Mostly, it’s one’s name that gets spoken.  I am…

But “who are you” asks more.  It asks how you identify yourself.  It asks how you are known to yourself and to others.  And in truth, we all hunger to be asked “who are you” because we need to know, deep in our hearts, the answer.  “Who are you”…I am beloved.  I am a child of the Most High God.  I am a Christian.  These are the answers that can spring from such a simple question as “who are you”.  It’s a question that has no easy answer.  But it has some true ones.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.