Fall and Get Up

The journey with Jesus is long and hard and confusing. You will stumble. You will lose your way. Here is the only thing you actaully need to know.

Nobody tells you how long the road is.

They tell you about the peace. About the freedoom. About the life to the full. And those things are true - genuinely, deeply true.

But they don't always tell you aboyt the Tuesday mornings when you wake up and the faith feels thin and distant and you can't remember the last time God felt close.

Or the season that stretches on - months, sometimes years - where you're doing everything right and still feel like you're walking through fog.

Or the moment you fall. Again. The same way you fell before. And you're lying there wondering if any of this is actually working. If you're actaully changing. If the whole thing is real.

The long obedience

Eugene Peterson called it "a long obedience in the same direction."

Not a sprint. Not a dramatic transformation that happens in a single weekend retreat. A long, slow, somethings. grueling walk - in the same direction - over years and decades.

The saints who have walked this road before us knew something we often forget: the journey is supposed to be long and hard.That's not a sign that something is working. That's the nature of the road.

Formation is slow. Roots grow slowlu. The deepest things in human life - character, love, wisdom - don't come quickly. They come through repetition and resistance and time.

You will fall

Not might. Will.

You will stumble. You will sin the same sin again. You will drift from prayer for weeks and suddenly realize you've been living on your own again. You will say the thing you swore you'd stopped saying. You will be selfish when you were trying to be generous. You will be afraid when you were trying to trust.

You will fall

The question isn't whether you fall. The question is what you do next.

The only thing you need to know

John Climacus - a 7th century monk who spend decades observing how people grow and fail and grow again in their walk with God - reduced the whole journey to something almost embarrassingly simple.

Fall and get up. Fall and get up. Fall and get upThat's it.

Not fall and stay down in shame for six weeks. Not fall and construct an elaborate theology for why this particular failure doesn't reallyu counte. Not fall and wonder if you were ever really saved in the first place.

Fall. And get up.

The getting up is the whole thing. The turning back. the returning. The quiet act of saying If fell again but I'm not staying here- and taking one step back toward Jesus.

Shame is the real enemy

Falling isn't what stop people'formation. Shame is.

Shame tells you the fall was too far. That you've used up too manny second chances. That the gap between who you are and who you're tryng to be is too wide to cross.

Shame keeps you on the ground. And shame is a liar.

The father in the prodigal son story wasn't waiting at the door with a list of your failures. He was watching the road - and he ran.

He ran.

You don't have to crawl back. You don't have to earn your way back. You just have to turn around. And he's already moving toward you.

When the journey is long

When it's hard and confusinh and you can't see the path clearl -

When you've stumbled again and the shame is loud and the progress feels invisible -

When you're tired and you've been tired for a while -

Remember the one thing you actually neeed to know:

Fall and get up. Fall and get up. Fall and get up.

That's the whole journey. That's all of us. That's every saint who ever lived.

You haven't failed. You're just in the middle of the story.

Get up.