Jesus, The Nonconformist.

It’s funny what you can learn about love, yourself, and Jesus when you step away from everything you know and try to find a wide abyss of figure-it-out. I’ve learned so much in the past five months as I decided to move across the country. It doesn’t always require cross country moving but that sure does help. We so often grow up with this idea of who we want to be, and then something shakes our shoulders to tell us, well, we don’t want to be that. Perhaps this is the way God intended - to ask all these questions, to take all this confusion and turn it into something. It starts in small things - like learning to live amongst many humans you don’t know and find some community in that, and then I think it gets bigger, like figuring out why I follow a man named Jesus, whose love was so reckless and out of the ordinary. The biggest thing I’ve come to learn is that when you are so certain and so prepared, you are most definitely, actually really wrong. Hear me out. From the moment I decided Jesus was my Savior to one random 3 am morning in my dark, Oklahoma bedroom when I hit a wall of doubt, I was so sure that I had the answers. “This is how God intended it!” “This is how it is supposed to be!” “That is just how it is!”That is just how it is. I was wrong. I will admit. I sat in that dark bedroom, and had the moment when everything I thought I knew shattered. I no longer was certain, I was now full of what about..?Jesus is a nonconformist. Jesus loves the lowest of the low. Jesus dined with hated people. And when you grow up thinking Jesus fits in a box and belongs in a painting above the mantle, it’s really hard to realize that He actually had more plans than that. He had an agenda for justice and love. And it’s hard to picture this scandalous, whole love. One early, sunshine filled morning I was sitting outside reading through Psalms when I read about Jesus visiting the Earth and watering it. This broke me. The picture of Jesus coming to earth and giving it abundance - how gnarly is that? A love so big, so kind, so zealous, that it waters the dry, the arid. He gives life in the desert and wholeness in the rain. Jesus is different. He embodies love. He is no picture of complacency, but of redemption. Amazing redemption. “You visit the earth and water it; you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide their grain, for so you have prepared it.” - Psalm 65words by Madi Houchin and photo by Hailey PierceSaveSave