Already, Not Yet

This morning, in a rare display of generosity that can only be the firstfruits of the fine parenting that he is receiving, Davis shared his trains with Zoe. Perhaps not an earth-shattering event in your world. But in the Kirk house, for Thomas and Percy and Rheneas to be handed over without total melt-down is a rare thing.

Eager to affirm this small act of kindness, I exclaimed to Davis, "What a good sharer you are!" It's not exactly true en toto, but it's the kind of person we hope and pray he is becoming.

One of the things that I appreciate about my co-staff Jennifer Hagin is her insistence on calling our students "men" and "women." They often don't like it. And quite honestly they often don't act like it. The men often act like boys and the women often act like girls. But they are in the process of becoming men and women. And to call them as such is both descriptive and prescriptive. It helps them to step more fully into what they are already becoming but have not yet fully realized or embraced or lived out.

In the Scriptures, God's people are often addressed as "saints." This is true even in the letters to the churches that are most difficult and most messy and the least saint-like. But the fact that these folks are not behaving as saints does not change their name. They are saints. They are becoming saints. Whether they are acting like it at this particular point in time or not is not inconsequential (there is harsh instruction in some of those letters, after all) but it is secondary. "Saints" is who they are. It is the name God has given to them.

So we, too, are saints. I don't feel like a saint today--I feel like a pretty normal guy who's got more on his to-do list on a Monday morning than I can get to. But God has called me a saint. He speaks a word to me that is both descriptive (who I am now, whether I feel like it or not) and prescriptive (who I am becoming, who I will be fully when all is said and done).

The challenge for those of us following Christ is to allow the names that God has given to us to become our primary identities, our primary paradigms and lenses for acting and viewing ourselves and the world around us. We then learn to live out of those names, to lean into them with all of our might.

We are already saints, righteous, redeemed, holy, beloved, rescued, transformed, healed, daughters and sons. And we have not yet even begun to taste the fullness of what all that will one day mean for the joy and delight of our souls.