Being a disciple of Jesus has its good days and bad days. Sometimes walking with him is smooth like butter while other days involve resisting the urge to pull our hair out and scream in frustration. There are times when we question our faith and times we doubt it altogether. The highs, lows, ebbs and flows are things that we just learn to deal with as we go.
All walking with Jesus really involves is putting one foot in front of the other and realizing that he’s with us every step of the way. The trick is to learn how to keep walking no matter what.
Living with Jesus doesn’t remove all of our problems. Rather, he walks with us as we go through them in order to make our struggles holy and draw us closer to him along the way. Being in a relationship with Jesus, and connected to his body, is like any other relationship that we have- we need to work at it and cultivate it over time.
Jesus is ever-present in our hearts, and he wants us to be close to him- to intimately embrace him in the depths of our souls. Not in some kind of detached, abstract sense, but in reality. Jesus is only a stranger to us when we keep our distance from him.
The blueprint for drawing close to Jesus is actually pretty simple: We imitate him, we follow him, and we pray- one foot in front of the other, moment by moment, day by day. He demonstrated how to dwell in the presence of God through his own life. He works wonders in the lives of those who believe. He asks us to believe so we can be blessed and be used by him to be a blessing to others.
He wants our attention, our adoration and our devotion. In return, his presence grows in our hearts and fills us to overflowing in ways that are impossible to describe with words. In some ways, cultivating a relationship with Jesus is like any other- we get out of it what we put into it. Yet, the depth of being in a state of grace with Jesus transcends anything that we can experience with anyone else, and it completes us.
All we have to do is believe, make him present in our lives, and invite him into intimacy with us. All it takes is a step of faith, and once we put one foot in front of the other, we notice his footprints too.
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