On Transformation’s Pace, Wisdom from Frederick Buechner, and Staying in the Waiting

A Note from Me

I return to this longing again and again in my diary: to live more completely like Christ, to stop circling around it in words and actually do it, love like Christ loves. But then I notice how much waiting there seems to be.

Waiting for deeper change.

It’s frustrating—the pace of transformation. Like staring at a tree, you know it’s growing, it’s getting closer to the sun, but you can’t see the movement in the moment.

The question, then, is not whether the growth is happening. It’s whether I can trust the slow, almost hidden pace of God’s work in me?

Can I keep showing up: praying, forgiving, listening, serving, trusting that the small deaths will one day take the shape of Christ’s life in me?

Maybe that’s what transformation takes: living with the mystery that trees really do grow, even when we can’t see it.

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A Voice from the Past

We have it in us to be Christs to each other and maybe in some unimaginable way to God too—that’s what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another’s pain and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another’s joy almost as if it were our own.

And who knows but that in the end, by God’s mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and though we would never have had the courage or the faith or the wit to die for him any more than we have ever managed to live for him very well either, his story will come true in us at last.

And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not like so many peddlers of God’s word but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by, the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all.

—Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life

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A Question to Carry

Think back one full calendar year, where do you notice one small sign of growth?

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More soon,

—Jon

P.S. Just as a reminder, my book Dwelling in Christ is now available for pre-order on Amazon. If you grab a copy, forward your receipt to book@jonathanrbailey.com and I’ll send you Chapter 1 so you can start reading before September.