“I have no one else like him, who will show genuine concern for your welfare.” 2 Timothy 2:20
“Are you weary, carrying a heavy burden? Then come to me. I will refresh your life, for I am your oasis. Simply join your life with mine. Learn my ways and you’ll discover that I’m gentle, humble, easy to please. You will find refreshment and rest in me. For all that I require of you will be pleasant and easy to bear”. Matt 12:28-30
As I talk with many in my world: colleagues, family members and friends, I get the feeling that they are searching for meaning and connection on a deeper level...at an accelerated rate. You probably see this, too. People are beginning to wake up and are becoming increasingly tired of this anxiety, loneliness, disconnection, sleeplessness, and pain… which seems to plague our culture more than ever before.
I truly do grieve as I consider the weight and toil this weariness has had on us all. And as we earnestly try to buckle down, comply, pretend…the cycle only continues.
Where is the relief we desire?
Hopefully, it is found somewhere in the heart of God. Yet His Heart is sadly mis-represented in many family and faith circles. There are those of us who were formed with a skewed narrative surrounding who God and Jesus are, who we are in His eyes, or expected to be in the world. This makes us tend to lose hope of any true connection, true transformation, true joy...no matter how many Bible verses we know.
That is, unless we are arrested with the captivating invitations of Jesus that Matthew and other gospel writers captured. Come. Simply Join. Discover. Find Refreshment. In my Sunday school classes, these were only nice words of Jesus, an unknown reality to me. And as I grew older…I wondered if I would ever experience their health and healing.
Then I noticed that Jesus needed nourishment, as a human, like we all do! And He can only say these words, because He experienced them. He admits this clearly in Matthew’s account 12: 25-27 as he describes the close, secure Father and Son relationship. And it seems like the Father invited Jesus into practicing and making space for this connection early on.
After all, Jesus entered a world that was mostly unaware of his dignity, unappreciative of his life, unable to see who he was, where he came from and where he was going.
Just like most of us experience the world.
What was he left to do? Be drawn to the One who created Him.
He goes to this safe place…where he can express his deepest emotion, with questions and tears. He goes to a place of comfort and connection. A place to be held and heard.
Jesus discovers, as you and I must, that no one fully understands him or cares like his Father does.
Jesus found the Father’s heart accessible, inviting, even playful while he was here on the earth. Which is exactly the way we see Jesus living out his days with the people around him! Accessible, Inviting. Playful. He accepted, received, soaked in the nutrients his soul and mind needed…and then gave them away to people like Zacchaeus, the Woman at the Well, Blind Bartimaeus.
Jesus arranged his life to be filled up with secure attachment to the Father…again and again and again. Among other important things in the Gospels, I see this is what Jesus modeled for us most in his humanity. Ways we humans can connect with the Divine…feel cared for….and thrive in the Father’s world 😊