This morning I was scanning my feed reader when I clicked on
this giveaway by the Pioneer Woman (
who doesn't love Ree?). To enter the giveaway, each person just needed to leave a comment answering this question:
If you could have dinner with one person throughout the history of time, whom would it be?
I contemplated my imaginary dinner date for a moment, and I just about answered with someone
reasonable like Ronald Regan or
Hatshepsut (
yes, I really AM a geek at heart). And then something stopped me cold in my tracks.
Who did I really want to have dinner with?
I want to have dinner with Jesus.My disdain for mainstream rhetoric just about made me recoil from my own response. I mean, really...
dinner with Jesus? It's cliche at best and obnoxious at worst. But it was honest.
Any other dinner date that I could have picked would entertain me with their stories, fascinate me with their fame, or move me with their charitable promulgations. But not him...
He would challenge me by his love.Pure and simple. He would teach me how to love others by sharing his own vulnerability and genuine concern with me over a steamy pizza pie. He would challenge my theology. He would shatter my norms. He would make me uncomfortable. And he would do it wrapped in a package of perfect love-- you know, the kind of love that would keep me from being afraid of confronting my deepest inadequacies. (The kind of conversations we typically squirm away from in our "normal" everyday lives.)
But I would leave that dinner date completely, entirely and utterly whole and fulfilled, knowing that even though he issued challenged and posed dangerous questions, that He loved me perfectly just as I am.
One little question from the Pioneer Woman became the best "quiet time" prompt that I could have ever read. It tugged on my heart all day long.
So the next time we (
yep-- YOU AND ME) go out for dinner, a vanilla coke or dessert, I honestly hope that I look a lot like Jesus. Because I sure do think that He would make a great pizza date.
PS. Yes, I do, indeed, imagine Sayid from Lost every.single.time I imagine Jesus. And no, not because his character exemplified Christ by any means either. Just roll with it...
