The Stone Ministries Blog

Made some empanadas the other night. During the process I chopped a bunch of Jalapenos - not that unusual for me. But later, I noticed that my lips were burning (and I hadn’t eaten the empanadas yet!). Then I noticed my cheek was burning just below my eye - starting to water.

Then my hands - dry from multiple washing throughout the cooking process and having been out in the blazing sun a chunk of the day - were starting to burn. Hours after finishing the meal, having delivered some to friends in crisis and returning home to my wife who had also happily eaten them - my hands burned more and more. I’ve always had a high tolerance for capsaicin - the molecule that makes spicy-hot food, but this built to a really uncomfortable level. After many hours, my hands were on fire. My lips were on fire. My face was on fire. Even my arms where my hands had touched were on fire. We searched online to find a few home remedies... have you ever tried dunking you face in milk? ...or a cornstarch paste? ...not all that pleasant. So, eventually, I was sticky AND on fire.

In the end, I just had to wait it out. Late in the evening the fire in my boiling skin had turned down to a low simmer, and I fell into a blissful sleep.

The next morning however, as I got into my car, the power of the smell of jalapenos hit me immediately as I opened the car door. Carefully sniffing the cloth, the radio, the dash, etc. I found that the oil that had seeped into my hands was all over, especially in the steering wheel. Of course, I washed it all off as best I could, and battled repeated bouts of trying to keep it off vulnerable skin areas, and eventually... and I mean EVENTUALLY... it stopped being so noticeable.

I’ve thought often since that I want Christ’s Life in me
to be just like that.

I want to saturate so much in the grace of Christ that my words, my behaviors, my attitudes seep the stuff of Christ. Jesus juice.

In Acts - the chronicles of the early Church - the Apostle Paul became so saturated with the reality of an indwelling Christ that anyone who even had his shadow pass over them, or touched a cloth he had touched, were forever impacted by the power of Christ’s life. He became an expression of the irrepressible, inexhaustible, ever-potent, super-saturating reality of grace.

To the Church in Colosse, he said,

“Let your conversations be always full of grace, seasoned with salt,
so that you may know how to answer anyone.”

What might it look like if people burned with conviction, passion, inspiration, and revelation of Christ as Life whenever they encountered us? Might we walk in greater Christ-confidence? Would we walk with the security of Christ revealed in and through us? Would we no longer be daunted by circumstance, deceived by the flesh, thwarted by condemnation, and stumbling over personal failure in pursuit of performance?

I want everyone and everything I come into contact with to be exposed to the scorching revelation of an indwelling God - like the burning bush before Moses - that burns with holy fire but is not consumed in the midst of it.

How about you? Ready to burn?

ridiculously graced...

-mike.

[originally posted on previous blog in fall 09}