FollowBy Lars Passic
As I stop and reflect, this year has been one of wonderful mountaintop experiences and also a year of emotional, heartbreaking pain and loss. The year has also been extremely busy, and I have not always navigated it well. I have stumbled and failed my wife and daughter in numerous ways. But God has been so good to me, and I have so much to be thankful for.
I’ve been reading the book Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis with a coworker of mine, Nathan, and I came across this part about what Lewis calls the “Christ-life”:
As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not. A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way, a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble—because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.
Last month I was blessed with the privilege of baptizing my daughter Violet. It is so wonderful to watch my daughter grow and see her embrace the Christ-life. As I let Violet down in to the water, the words I spoke to her were taken from Romans 6:4:
We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Violet’s life will have hurts and stumbles. It is my prayer that God will help Rebecca and I teach Violet how to nourish and grow the Christ-life inside her.
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