Redemption & My Golf Swing

I fully enjoy a sunny day spent at the golf course with my husband who may on occasion throw a golf club in my vicinity (unintentionally) after a sad attempt to reach the green. We encourage each other and laugh at each other and from time to time go home feeling good about our improvement.

Golf is a game I would give up completely if it weren't for the occasional beautiful (relatively) swing. It's that one swing that when it happens you know it's right and it feels so natural. The club connects and the ball soars ahead many more yards than the 10-20 I'm used to hitting. That one in fifty swing brings me back again and again.

Today I realized I often feel that way about Christianity. Not God. I know and sense that God is eternally good. But we, as humans, have a long, long way to go. My progress it seems is often slow, if it's moving in the right direction at all. Occasionally I think it flies back a few yards (as my golf ball does at times, nearly killing anyone standing nearby). But then there are those moments when I catch a glimpse of a tiny particle of my character, redeemed and beautiful as God desires.

I see those glimpes in the church as well. If you've been around it very long you can understand that there are moments you feel ready to walk away. You see what seems to be complacency and a lack of progress. And then there are those beautiful moments when the light of God shows through and somehow you see the possibility in others. Those are the moments that bring me back. When my hope is lost for what we can be, God gives me a glimpse of how far we've already come.

How often do we look at our culture, our society and talk about how awful it has become. Truthfully, if we know anything about history, we see that we've always been messed up. We've never had it right. There was never any "Christian" nation or even a moral nation for that matter. Even in Rome when Constantine made Christianity the main religion of the Empire, he was doing it for political reasons. And America? Our history speaks for itself.

My desire is that we can become a people who stop fearing the moral decline of a nation and instead, start catching glimpses of how God is redeeming all of creation and what a beautiful process we have been invited to take part in. I wonder if we will ask God to show us where he is working, if he will begin to give us those moments that bring us back again and again, believing that all of creation can be fully redeemed, beautiful in the eyes of God.