Imperfect Practitioners of IT

           Every lawyer has heard this one, “still practicing law?  Let  me know when you get it right.”  Ha Ha.  Actually, it is kind of funny because it’s true.  No matter how long we practice law, we never do actually get it right—we just die or retire.  I think Christianity is like this.   A new Christian is like a lawyer who just passed the bar.  He’s got the rest of his life to get it right, but he’s destined  to die trying.  And that’s not a bad thing at all.  It’s the trying that matters.

When I was a newly licensed Christian, I met a man named Bill Grier.  He taught me something very important and useful in my fledgling practice of Jesus, and he did it without letting me know he was teaching me anything—which is good, because I surely would have resisted learning IT had I known what Bill was doing.  It took me about two years of watching Bill for me to even start putting IT into practice and I assume I’ll be trying to get IT right for the rest of my life because, right now, I have to admit that I am really not very good at IT.  Not good at all.

And yet, as poorly as I now practice IT, the effect on my life has been explosive.  As a result of IT, my wife loves me in a way I thought was impossible, my children honor me in a way that was unimaginable, I have made more friends in the few years since I learned of IT than the preceding 40 years combined, and (this part is weird) the practice of IT has made the practice of law seem like something I could do until I die, God willing.  I can’t believe I used to live without IT, yet I know I did because I looked in the mirror at least once a day.  OK, this is IT:  the practice of looking at other people through the eyes of Christ.  IT is asking yourself not what Jesus would do, but what he would see if he was looking through your eyes.  What Bill taught me was for a man to conform to Christ’s image, one had to imagine what Christ saw when he looked at a man—and that included me.  What did Christ see when He looked at me?  What I saw of me reflected in Bill’s eyes was a man sufficiently beloved by Christ that He went to the Cross—for me, and you and every other man, no matter how loathsome we may seem to one another from our high perches of self-regard.  To Christ, each man is beloved and Bill taught me that the only way to see that truth was to engage in the practice of looking out through the eyes of Christ.  And he taught me to keep trying, however imperfectly, until the day I die.  Anon Anon.