Jesus is my Gatorade
I have always loved Gatorade. Its hard to find here, but its a treasure when you stumble across it on a rare trip to the giant grocery store five miles away. I don't drink Coke or coffee, just tea and Gatorade. Its not that I'm a health nut-- its that the drinks that I like happen to be healthier than others. (As they say here, "Guinness is good for you.") I like Gatorade and tea because they quench my thirst. On a hot, muggy summer afternoon in the south, Coke just doesn't do it. You need Gatorade. You need sweet tea. They don't create more thirst like syrupy carbonated drinks or coffee (even if its iced). Gatorade satisfies.
The Bible has been really refreshing recently- I'm not sure why, because its not always that way- but it has been fresh and liberating every time I open it. Being in a foreign culture means that I live with a constant sense of vulnerability, or maybe its confusion, or awkwardness, I don't know what exactly. Its not overwhelming--its a subtle feeling, underlying almost every minute of everyday. As I go through layers of cultural integration, one after the other, each deeper than the last, my life comes under the microscope. It means that a little more of the dirt in my heart is exposed everyday, and I have to stare into the face of it. Its not fun, nor is it easy. Sometimes I don't even realize how taxing it can be, until I collapse into my bed at the end of a long day.
I want to escape this examination, this microscope. Its not fun. Its not easy. I just want something that will promise to give me security, something that can handle my dirt safely. Or I want a way to forget it. So many things make one promise or the other. Girls, money, drugs--its not hard to find the escape hatch. Especially not in this neighborhood. But those aren't escapes. At the beginning they might be distractions. At the end they are slavery, and eventually self-destruction. The path from start to finish may be exciting, or it may be depressing, or both. But its not fulfilling. That much I know.
But then there are the things that promise the other--they don't claim to distract, but promise instead that they can handle all my dirt safely, that I will be secure and loved once I am in. Success and image and control and achievement and power and approval and religion. These are the things that really attract me. They are more acceptable in our society. They are not so obviously dangerous as drugs. And they make a greater claim, a higher promise. "The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success," wrote C.S. Lewis. When all I want is something that will quench my thirst for approval and acceptance and security, the temptation of achievement and success is so very tempting.
Perhaps that's why the Bible has been so fresh these past weeks. In the midst of my temptation, my exposed heart, it tells me the story that I long to hear. It speaks directly and tells me absolutely that Jesus has taken my dirt. He has loved me as I am, not as I should be. He has taken my dirt on Himself. I want to be whole, to be blameless before God, to be the man that He has envisioned me to be. I desperately thirst for it. But with muggy temptation all around me, the coffee and Coke of my striving leaves me parched. I need something that satisfies. I need Gatorade. Jesus is my Gatorade.