I think by the end of this blog post I am likely to find myself disagreeing with myself quite strongly. Lets go.

Here’s an attempted definition of what I think I mean when I say ‘fragile breakthrough’. I think its something that I have seen in my life as a Christian but I reckon it goes beyond that to any community that earnestly champions real belonging. None of this is meant as a slight to that most excellent pursuit, its a note on the inner experience that - once we are accepted wholeheartedly - causes us to be at once miles away from one another while sat across the same table.

There seem to be many ways to have a transcendental, transformational experience, the only ones I can can say with confidence in my own that have caused me to be not only changed, from an increase in my own efforts, but rather transformed - fundamentally reshaped - so that I could not fit into the moulds of who I used to be and how I used to live.

Real breakthroughs such as those I have experienced are just that, real. I have no doubt that those you see at work who are one person one day and someone entirely new the day after, later finding out they went with a friend to some church event, you may ask why they are pretending and how long they’re going to keep up this act. I may have thought that of myself in 2015 when I had my most real transformational experience. To the outside observer it would have looked very underwhelming. A 20 year old man, reading a scruffy Bible in his room on Azalea Street in Jeffrey’s Bay. The book looked well-read and well-worn, a result not of any study, but because of the few days it had spent in the bushes outside the house where it had been thrown in frustration earlier that week. Now he was sat reading the first three chapters of the book of Hosea on repeat as he cried.

I was made into someone completely new that day. That day God broke through for me. Those chapters tell of a resentful, wilfully disobedient and unloving partner of a Godly man. God speaks of his people, he says how they live the same way. As a man married to a prostitute, so too are we to the Lord. You read the words and you can’t help but shudder and bend low. It’s frightening. You feel all the expectation of anger and fury that are owed you. Then the truth that, if revealed to us and understood by the heart, would turn any man to God;

“Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Trouble a door of hope.
There she will respond as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt.”

It continues, beautifully. Perfectly. I saw Jesus in those words, the cross allured me, it spoke loudly and tenderly to me that day.

Here’s how its fragile. People, like me, who have experienced things similar, love stories like that. Rightly so! But that creates in me a person who believes themself loved for their story of encounter. They quickly forget and see themselves not loved before the encounter but after.

The man on the floor of his room on Azalea Street reading those chapters gets up. He goes downstairs and tells his housemates. They have lunch together, they go get milkshakes, head to the beach and hangout. They help the man go deeper, loving and celebrating all that God is doing in his life.

Then a few days later he goes to sleep. He feels afraid. He worries about the man he’s becoming. He worries about getting married and what he’ll do for work. Will he be a good Dad one day?

A few months later he finds himself in what the Bible calls the ‘sin that so easily entangles’. Well, now he is in a bind. His friends loved the story of the day of his breakthrough, rather, the day God had broken through for him. Don’t they love that guy?

Here is the fragility. You were given a gift. That gift was freedom and rest. You were purchased by the one who loves you and were called to restful abiding union with him. The only thing that all this requires is you. You have to turn up, truly as you are.

You must walk out of every room as though you just came out of your room on Azalea Street. You are not who you were, you were transformed. You do not fit into the mold you were in prior to that day.

“Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.”

There is not someone that you must be. You don’t need to caveat this with ‘but you do need to walk differently and live according to what you were taught’. No, all pressures are off. You are a man in wheelchair. Apart from him you can do nothing, but, in restful abiding union with him, well. Brother, no limits.

Fragile breakthrough; when the encounter that allows you to engage with community completely as you are, increasingly isolates you as you attempt to act as a person worthy of love and acceptance.

There’s nothing new here, but good to remember.