Found in him

I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him. (Philippians 3:8-9a)

The image is crude and old, perhaps even childish. I hesitate to describe it, since it exposes how simpleminded and unsophisticated I can be.

I intuit the image as much as see it. It first appeared in my mind’s eye as an icon, a vision (?) … decades ago. I see or sense Christ, the outline of his body. I cannot see his face or features, just his arms slightly spread, and I am inside the image, enveloped in him.

I can call it to mind and feel almost nothing. But times come, like today, when it appears or simply awakens, and I see and feel and know myself inside him, enclosed, surrounded, safe within, my whole being bathed in a love that dissolves every anger, every anxiety and every memory that assails my heart. And I have a lot of those.

‘You are my freedom,’ I pray, during the blessed time of awakening, ‘my only real freedom.’

For I cannot chase away the disparate memories that conspire and converge in the night to accuse me of all the ways I have failed to be the human soul I wanted to be, the soul I hoped and once imagined I might become.

My mind is too weak to fight them off, and my heart is too honest to pretend it doesn’t matter.

Funny, isn’t it, how countless wonderful things can happen to you, and thousands of gracious words can cross your lips to bless friends and family and even strangers in decades of living. Often as not, these get filed in the dusty, disordered bottom drawer of memory.

But miniscule details from decades old moments of foolishness and vanity appear in lurid detail—impulsive, stupid things I have done and said trying to look better than I am, thoughtless anger and selfishness, ancient slights and rejections, the feeling that I have never really fit in anywhere and have likely been unqualified for pretty much every job I ever had, although I eventually figured out most of them.

But perhaps this is only my experience. Perhaps there’s only a few of us whose hyperactive memories point an accusing finger when desolating clouds descend on the heart. But I don’t think so. I suspect I have a lot of company.

We cannot free ourselves from this bondage, nor can we will our way to freedom. Only Love casts out this demon. Only Love silences every other voice but its own.

And Love constantly beckons us to come home, to see and find ourselves enveloped within the body of Love he is. For Christ, his love is our home, and his body contains and holds all of us and all creation, all that is … is in him, held in him, encompassed, surrounded.

This is what I see when some experience of beauty or love or grace or joy or even a child’s smile awakens the image, and I see myself there, in Christ, along with everything else.

Would that we all might find ourselves in him, that loving freedom might come.

David L. Miller