Christ-Dwelling Lives

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

When God called me to plant Embrace it seemed like such a distant idea.  Once I responded to the call I had a logical follow up question of where was it going to be?  As my team and I started praying God led us to the Woodland Park area.  This was ironic because Jason and Tawndee Dillard already were living close by. My first choice was to live on Columbia Avenue (the street I know live on) but it didn’t happen right away.  Instead I took the only place available to me off Richmond Rd., which was a one-bedroom basement apartment.  It was there that we started are Friday dinners in a crammed space with a wild puppy boxer jumping on everybody’s lap!  It was in that crammed place that Embrace was born. So when we had a storm and my basement was flooded the Lord worked through another Flood and this time it was to deliver me from that little apartment to a house on Columbia Avenue in the neighborhood I felt called to be in.  Andrew took a risk on me by moving in and since we have become better friends as we have gotten to know our neighborhood.  It was one thing driving by my neighborhood before I moved in and another thing actually living there now, walking the streets, and getting to know some of the people.  My team has become involved with others by “moving into” their lives. This is no different than 2,000 years ago in the fullness of time when God sent his son Jesus Christ to live among us and to move into our neighborhoods. John 1:14 as Eugene Peterson paraphrases it says, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes. the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.”

If we have received Jesus into are lives we are to live incarnationally.  As we say in our mission statement at Embrace, “We are Christian faith community called together by God to live Christ-dwelling lives…”  We are simply to be Jesus to one another.  We are to move into people’s neighborhoods or better yet their lives.  However this isn’t always an easy task and it’s sometimes messy but that’s the nature of our calling as Christ-followers to be Christ-dwellers, to be Jesus to the people around us.