Jenner, Media Frenzies, & When Our Spiritual Eyes Are Influenced By Gravity

So, He modeled in Vanity Fair, as a girl.  Are we really all that shocked?

Don’t we know that darkness seeks hard to tuck itself tight inside holiness, split apart and divide families, take the innocent and devour them slowly?

Did we really expect anything different?

Satan came to steal, kill, & destroy.  And doesn’t that include, our identity in Jesus?

So, why are we taken back when a world with a black hole in it, includes emptiness, claws violently, changes or destroys itself internally?

If you have lived in this world for any length of time; childhood abuse, sexual confusion, and scandals of all types have gone on in all ages.

This world is filled with lost people, looking for something. Maybe the question isn’t who is failing to reflect Jesus, but what are we doing to shine the light of the one who made us?

For don’t we know, darkness left to its own devices will worm its way into any foundation, using the excuse as, “good person” to cover up sin?

So, why do stories like the Duggars and (whatever his/her name is) Jenner, really even shock us? Is it because we have been hiding from the world, ignorance of sin?

And why does the media really have that much power to control and manipulate us?  Why does worldly eccentrics have such a voice that we’d allow it to divide and separate us, as Christians?

And what has happened to our Spiritual eyes, our fixed-focus gaze, on Jesus?

And I wonder, why we are not surprised when our skin sags, when our feet slap against the pavement, when all of creation is pulled by the invisible force-field, down, toward this earth, by gravity….

Yet, we miss the opportunity to train our eyes to resist this world’s pull, looking up from the twisted, fixing our eyes upon the eternal?

Why can we sit up on high, as if God himself, picking apart and judging, separating and dividing as if dissecting situations will somehow ease our own conscious, somehow make us feel more in control in this out of control world we live in….filled with sin.

When has sin ever been controllable, anyway?

Scripture tells us, “every one who is born of God will overcome the world”. (1 John 5:4) Did you get that, “everyone”, not some, or few, not those that have perfect theology or do all the perfect things we are told to….

But those genuinely, authentically born of Him.

A few verses sooner, scriptures says, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.” (1 John 3:9)

And yet, we judge the unsaved as if they were saved.  We try to gauge, and peer into people’s beings, by looking at some magazine cover or t.v. series. When only God knows the heart.

We look for heroes and perfectionism in a secular sect of people….instead of pulling our eyes higher, letting God be our reflection of what it means to be “holy”, “whole”.

And, I don’t want to go around, evaluating the ethics of other people, when scripture tells us, worldly people can’t be judged in the same way as believers.

Too often, the thirsty look for water wherever they can get in.  And sadly, some mistakenly drink from mirages or desert puddles, poisoning them.

And yet, He calls each one of His disciples to lead others to The Well that never runs dry.

Yet, perfect love casts out sin. His love for us smothers all imperfection.  One moment in His holiness and we’ll never be the same.

Yet, I wonder if He wants us more consumed with Him than with the new, female, persona of Bruce Jenner?  If He wants us so caught up in overcoming, bringing light into darkness that we don’t have time to emotionally be weighted down by tornado of craziness sweeping across our land.

And I wonder, what if, like a world class weight lifter, we resisted nature, pulled up our eyes, and stood strong in our race, full blown conquerors instead of slaves to the culture we look at?

What if we were so busy serving others, digging into the Word of Life?  What if we loved people despite themselves, and clearly defined the goodness of God as asking us to come to him as we are…letting His righteousness alone change us, not some hateful sermon?

Could it be a world might stop running from us, and people might stop looking for hope and acceptance in sin, finding self worth, identity and substance in Him instead of the dark pit taking them farther from Jesus?

What if we contradicted gravity and pulled up our eyes, like a high jumper, defying logic by leaping over stumbling blocks, allowing what was put there to weaken us, to simply make us strong…

Keeping our eyes turned to heaven instead of focusing on others people’s sin.

And shouldn’t we feel sorry for a world torn apart, take examples from empires risen in the past, inevitably imploding upon themselves, destroyed by their own sin…because the righteous got silent and sin devoured wildly, the unsuspecting?

And instead of shrinking, fearing, or feeling sad about our world hopelessly reaching for something…Shouldn’t we get in the race, stretch our spiritual muscles and actually do what the Bible says,

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil, by doing good”? (Rom 12:21)

And let’s be honest….How many of us have rejection our God-given identity?  As the clay, told the potter what we should be making…even though we know better, as believers?

Will you join me in not feeding into the frenzy, opening up story after story of a man who deserves our pity, more than our time or the money he’ll make from the twisted filming of his recent gender change.

Will you stop scrolling and questioning, adding fire to a world that is filled with dried out kindly?

Can’t we find our faith not in the state of this world, not in the outrageous next thing, not in the state of the United Nations…

But in The One Place that never questions, never falters, never doubts who He is…and what He came for?

Turn up your eyes. Strengthen your spiritual muscles that while a world says, look downward and around us…we can push past nature and by grace and love…

Keep our eyes, resisting gravity, and on the Father, the Perfecter, and The Only One who made us and knows our DNA.

For after all, isn’t it Him, the only one worth all of us changing our broken identities for?