Stamped

I am very lucky because I own a lot of books. A lot. Enough to more than fill 5 tall bookcases. And this is very good thing, particularly when the books are in those forementioned bookcases. In fact, when the books are in the bookcases it doesn’t really seem like that many books. However, when stored horizontally rather than vertically, sprawled across tables and chairs and floors, it seems like very many books indeed. This makes it difficult both to find the book that you are looking and also to generally move about the house, sit down or use a table. My books are currently not in their bookcases because I am still in the process of unpacking after having moved in the summer, and unpacking books is no simple task. One cannot just unpack a box of books and put them on any old shelf. As they are unpacked the books must be organised, collected together with other similar books, the question is, how to organise them?

I must confess that I have rather enjoyed organising my books and have found the process quite cathartic and have allowed the process to be delayed by being distracted by the contents of books that I’ve not looked at for a while. The process of organising the books has been further complicated by the fact that not all of my books are actually, well, mine. Many of them actually belong to my sister and have been given to me for safe keeping/as a resource to be shared amongst any who might be interested. For a while I kept the two collections separate, but this meant having two separate sections for each category of book type which quickly got messy and confusing. Then I came up with a novel (pun intended) solution. A stamp. Well two to be precise, one to mark my books and another to mark Naomi’s books. This way the two collections could be mixed together and would look the same from the outside, but they could be told apart by what was on the inside.

As I began stamping the books, I began to think it was a bit like being a follower of Jesus. We mix in all different categories of the world, but we are marked as belonging to God. There are many things that mark out a follower of Jesus, all of which can be summed up in the fact that we reflect what Jesus is like. Of course we don’t always get it right, but this is part of the journey, in fact this most of all is perhaps the mark of Jesus in our lives; He convicts us when we’ve made mistakes so that with His help we can change and be more like Him. I recently listened to Mike Donehey talk about Tenth Avenue North’s new single. He shared about how Jesus always helped people change through kindness, and yet when he talked to himself about his failings it was never loving, gentle or kind like Jesus would talk. In fact, he said that if someone else talked to him the way he talks to himself it would be considered abuse. I think the same is true for many of us.

He went on to talk about how Jesus convicts us of sin, but often we turn that conviction into condemnation. The bible has many names for the devil, one is “Satan”, which means accuser, this voice that condemns us is not from Jesus. Mike points out the Latin roots of these two words. The shared part of the words “con” means “with”. Condemnation means “with Damnation”, that voice which says we are not good enough, that we are undeserving and even irredeemable and unforgiveable. “conviction” however, means “with victory”, the conviction of Jesus is not of despair but of hope. We are loved and cherished – too much for Jesus to want to let us continue making the same mistakes, but we are also forgiven, and with Jesus’ help we can learn to be all we were made to be. It’s sometimes said; "The Devil knows your name but calls you by your sin. God knows your sin but calls you by your name." So next time you slip up and the voice of condemnations comes up, speak Jesus’ kind words of loving conviction over yourself.