Limax maximus: slugs are my enemies, but this is a fabulous specimen, and, after all, we are called to love our enemies!
I was struck the other morning by the mysterious words at the beginning of chapter 3 of the letter to the Colossians. I had a sense of our inner beings being drawn out of a state of turmoil and darkness (3:1 you have been raised with Christ) into a place of warmth, light and safety (3:3 hidden with Christ in God).
Traditionally when we’ve thought of being ‘raised with Christ’ we’ve mostly talked about being forgiven our sins, about guilt and sacrifice, but as I read it, it feels like being raised up out of the consequences of sin – what has been done to us and how in our weakness and pain we have reacted – in an act of profound healing.
I had a good childhood, with a stable home and parents that loved me. But being a highly sensitive person, I took the inevitable knocks of life very hard. I became a very anxious child and suffered with inexplicable stomach aches that I now understand as an expression of my built-up stress. This later appeared in various forms such as free-floating anxiety and teeth-grinding. I tried to ‘leave it at the foot of the cross’ and ‘just trust God’, but it wasn’t until my mid-thirties that I realised I had to do my part and stop turning things over in my mind; viewing them from every conceivable angle in a compulsive attempt to solve the problem was only making things worse. Trusting God meant properly letting go, and with that came great relief.
I made a conscious step of faith aged 12, which I see as the beginning of my healing, of my being raised with Christ. If I were an artist, I would draw a figure in the bottom left-hand corner of the page drowning in a murky quagmire, or entangled in a forbidding thorny forest, unable to escape from their anxiety and distress. Then in the top right-hand corner there is an area of pure light where God is, out of which reach the hands of Christ to grab hold of the suffering person and pull them into the light. The person’s true self is also made of light, and that becomes visible as they are raised up out of their distress.
Then I would draw another picture, this time of God the Father holding the figure together with Christ at the centre of a warm embrace. It is a place of utter peace, love and rest, of light and wholeness… and there is room for everyone in the all-encompassing arms of God (3:11 there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!)
My experience is that the move from being in the quagmire to being aware of our safety in the arms of God does not take place overnight. As with every relationship, it develops in stages and continues to grow. Verse 10 says [you] have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. This present, active process started, at least as I understand it, at the age of 12, and since then my faith in God has been growing and changing in a surprising (and very non-linear) journey of discovery, and there is still so much more to learn!