As is customary I had my Weight Watchers meeting this morning and was happy to be down 1lb so I made up for last week and lost a bit more. I worked quite hard this week and I can tell that it’s getting more difficult to shift this weight because my losses are getting smaller as I get closer to my goal (now 12lbs away).

Even though I haven’t been losing much in terms of numbers I can tell that my stretching and exercises are paying off more because my pants I bought last month are getting looser (always a good sign).

My plan for this week is to invest in two 5lb weights to start working on my arms in order to get some sort of definition because I hate my flabby arms.

Hmm…. the only other thing in the past week that was exciting on this front is that I started volleyball again and am now working out at least 6hrs a week with my team. I have a huge bruise on my side from showing off and unnecessarily diving for a ball during practice. =) Several of the girls noticed I’d lost more weight since they’d last seen me at the beginning of December and that felt great. Actually, my flatmates and classmates have noticed too – lots of people comment about how different I look from when I arrived in the fall… and that is definitely giving me more motivation to press on.

This entry started with a friend’s post, which got me thinking… but this goes off on a wildly different tangent. =)

I think (like a lot of Christians) that I enjoy having a laundry list of do’s and don’ts. I understand that desire but I wonder if we want a checklist because it makes it easier to look at others and know if they’re ‘in’ or ‘out’. One of the most difficult things for me to believe in is absolute grace, the kind Jesus showed throughout his life – the kind that makes us love rather than judge.

I’ve noticed in my own life I have a tendency towards legalism. I struggle to believe I don’t have to earn God’s favor and neither does anyone else. That makes us all equal no matter our geographical location, political or religious affiliation… and egalitarianism is contrary to my culture which is set up on hierarchies of power and influence.

From what I’ve read, ‘sin’ translates as meaning “missing the mark”. I’m curious because in every church I’ve ever been in, there’s always a message of, “Sin separates us from God”. I recently stopped to actually think about that and am curious about this because it seems to contradict Jesus’ own life. I have a few thoughts, but there is no real conclusion – just more rambling.

I’ll start by assuming the universality of sin, which then implicitly means that humanity is unquestionably separated from God. Yet, many Scriptures make it clear that in fact God is the sustainer of the universe so God must not be far away but rather intimately near and involved – in addition there’s the issue of the incarnation and how entirely surrounded by sin Jesus was on earth. So if one believes sin creates a barrier to God then God can only dwell with people who aren’t sinning, which means God cannot be omnipresent. Jesus made it clear that ‘secret’ internal sins aren’t any better than outward sins. To lust is the same as adultery. Anger is the same as murder. Even the ‘best’ Christians continue to sin throughout their lives – is God always dwelling in them, or does God leave as soon as a dirty thought or angry feeling enters? Some Christians go so far as to fear that they will burn in hell if they die before having ‘asked for forgiveness’ for a sin.

This might sound nitpicky of me, but I’m really curious how we perceive sin and its effects because it’s a major theological issue. It is the foundation for so many other concepts, yet it isn’t all that clear-cut when I sit and really think about it.

We accept that Jesus was the ‘light’, he was ‘sinless’… and yet he didn’t just occasionally go into the ‘dark’ – he lived there, among sinners and outcasts, the poor, and contagious. Now perhaps if only Jesus did it then maybe I’d just chalk it up to a special ability, but then he commanded his disciples to follow his example. Not only did they hang out with people everyone recognized as sinners, but despite all the time spent with Jesus they continued sinning too!

Coming around full circle, I’ve been thinking about grace and its relationship to sin… and my perception of it all. Now Jesus certainly didn’t encourage people to keep “missing the mark”, but he didn’t leave them simply because they did. So even before Jesus’s death that Paul describes as the atonement for humanity’s sin, God was active in the sin-filled world – so what is different about the ‘dispensation of grace’? I suppose one could say the change from the requirements of the Hebrew law, to the lack of requirements of grace… or some might argue and say, the new requirements of grace.

Jesus’s best friends betrayed him and virtually everyone took issue with grace. The Pharisees hated the idea of grace because it meant their offerings and actions didn’t get them any closer to God. Many of his disciples hated the idea of grace because it meant accepting that non-Jews were no longer spiritually inferior and that their extremely important religious ritual of circumcision and kosher diet didn’t matter anymore. My guess is that today many Christians hate grace because it means that not even following a laundry list of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ will earn brownie points with God… at least I know I used to think I was on the fast-track to heaven because of all I did (and even more importantly) what I didn’t do.

There’s a verse that says grace without works is dead that seems to contradict the very meaning of grace, which doesn’t require anything. As I’ve thought about it though, it seems to fit in perfectly with Jesus’s message about the commandments we’re supposed to keep – to love God, and to love humanity. So basically all ‘works’ means is that we act in love (which also fits in well with certain aspects of liberation theology – something which isn’t a solution in itself, but that offers a lot of insight into the church’s humanitarian role).

I know this post is a bit jumbled so I  hope if you made it through that you caught my general drift. This is part of a much larger ongoing internal discussion I’m having with myself… it’s actually quite entertaining. Often times I just lay in bed thinking and debating myself, occasionally having ‘ah ha moments’, but usually just drifting off to sleep with more questions than answers. Such is life. =)