Deficits

So one funky part about my fall on campus has been a feeling of deficit. Most of my work is relational and most of my days are spent on campus meeting with students. Some students I meet with weekly, others are one-time meetings.

But I've been off campus a ton these last couple months. Between Fall Break, Jury Daddy Duty, being sick and some off-campus meetings, I canceled on one student appointment four weeks in a row. That stinks.

So as I get ready to leave for sabbatical, the chapter organizationally is in a good place, but inter-personally, I feel like I'm in deficit. I feel like I've let people down, that I'm not caught up on people, that I haven't done all that I normally want to do in a normal fall. I'm not necessarily feeling like everyone hates me (I'm in a healthier place than I was in my post last week) but I don't feel like I'm heading into my sabbatical with the Hollywood-perfect ending.

I was praying about this the other day and I came to the realization that deficit is reality. The story of Jesus coming, dying, rising again for me is about my deficit. The deficit is first and foremost with the Lord, true, but it also exists in relation to the people around me, my work, my parenting, my friendships, my relationship to the church and to my neighbors on my street whom I hardly know.

The reality is that I am perpetually in deficit in terms of who I am and who I was created to be. And the reality is that the gospel of grace covers my deficits on campus as much or more so than it covers my deficit before the Lord. My current, obvious deficits are simply a taste of the reality that I am able to cover up through time and life management strategies.

Grace must always cover all of me: all my relationships with students, with my fellow staff, with my wife and kids and parents and friends and church and work. Grace is reality. Either I can try to live a life in the economy of the flesh and strive my whole life to make life and relationships work, or I can die to all of that economy and enter into the economy of the kingdom.

Jesus inaugurated a new math. We're invited to be free from the old exacting calculus whereby we perpetually fall short and into the new way of the Spirit where we humbly acknowledge our need for Someone to perpetually fill all our gaps.

This doesn't propel us into laziness ("shall we continue to sin so that grace abounds? by no means!"), but instead invites us into the freedom of real life, real relationships, real forgiveness, real acceptance...and a much truer picture of who we actually are and what we can actually do.

And all of this in the relentlessly merciful and loving context of a larger God-story that shapes and changes everything: "Behold, I am making all things new!"

Even my deficits.