The Love of My Life

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jesus lately. Not that this is unusually or anything, I think about and talk to him a lot. More specifically I’ve been thinking about why it is so hard to talk to others about him. Jesus is so important, such a central part of my life, he is the only thing that is more important to me than my wife, and yet I find it difficult to talk about the one that I am so intimate with. In some ways I can make connections to my marriage, while I am willing to talk about my relationship with my wife with others, 99% of those conversations are about superficial things: Angie and I went here, we watched such and such, we did this. It’s not that I’m sharing about our intimate conversations, or the special moments that I treasure in my heart, or other deeply private things that we share. And that is the sort of relationship that I have with Jesus, and since he and I don’t go to the movies, grab coffee, or go on vacation together (we actually do, but that would be another article and it would be hard to get into the theological depths of that truth in a casual conversation about how Jesus and I ate at Subway together without people thinking I was nuts and making Jesus look that much less appealing to others), so it is hard to share what he means to me.
This really hit home for me a couple weeks ago when while at work I over heard a conversation where people were making fun of Jesus. Now I realize that they were actually making fun of Christians and the silly things that they say about Jesus, but still they were demeaning the most important part of my life. If they had been making fun of my wife I have no doubt that I would have stood up for her. But instead I said nothing, partly because I was not privy to the entire conversation and had no idea the context so I wanted to avoid seeming reactionary, giving further ammunition to some people that had obviously been turned off to Jesus by others that had talked about him in the past.
For me, sharing Jesus isn’t about me being right. It’s not about defending his honor because I don’t think he’s up to. It’s about my deep desire to have others know him and have their lives transformed by him in the same way that he came into my life and turned it upside down by his love. I need to be more confident about this passion and not get hung up on turning others off, when in humility and love I just might be able to introduce others to this Jesus, the love of my life and the one that already knows and cares about them more than anyone they will ever meet in their lives.