Looking For Life In All the Wrong Places

Do you remember that country song from the early '80s, "Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places"? The singer laments that everywhere he looked expecting to find love, he never found it in the places he thought he would. When he did find it, it came from a source he never expected. We never really learn how he meets his love, but we do understand that he did find her.

For the last several weeks I've been looking for "signs of life" in all the wrong places, expecting to see evidence or run into evidence of the life of Christ, on the OUTSIDE. Not really the outside of myself, but looking for those external signs that other people believe the same things or understand things the same way. Welcome to "Walking in the Flesh 101". When I try to determine what someone is or believes by their external actions or professions, I am looking to judge them by the spirit of the flesh. You know the one that says that believing this is good and believing that is bad and behaving this way is good and behaving this way is bad.

Just today, I woke up (almost literally) to the fact that I've even been looking at all. I re-realize that the Life of Jesus Christ lives within me and that this is the only evidence of life that I really need to be concerned with. Looking at other people through the crucified and resurrected Life of Jesus, I find there is no need to judge what they do or believe because there is nothing that they could do to make themselves any more alive by these things. And the only way to detect life in someone else is to have the witness of the One within me testify to His presence within another. Not some arbitrary fleshly judgment based on agreement, but the confirmation that there really is only one Way into Life that cannot be enacted by the effort of human will, free or otherwise!