How is Jesus?

Occasionally, I run into an old college friend that I haven't seen in awhile. We talk about where we've been with our lives, our families, our careers. Usually we get around to old mutual friends, and the question will come up, "How have they been?"

Part of what I love about the age we live in is that with all the social media out there, we can keep up with old friends, and even reconnect with people we haven't seen in ages. But even with all that, there is still one thing missing. Real personal contact. That question asking how someone has been goes far beyond a tweet or a status update, its deeper than the pictures they post, but it is also a doorway to a less 'safe' relationship. To get to how people are really doing, really feeling, it means opening up our lives to theirs, and vice versa.

I began to notice something recently amongst our fellow Gate members. We talked a lot about Aggie football, a lot about new movies coming out, or new games we'd played, even some about comic books or TV shows. We spent a good deal of time talking about the things that stress us out like tests and work, and even a little time discussing how to make the church stronger and more active in service to the community. We talked about God and religion.

But someone was going the way of the old college friend we hadn't seen in a while. Sure, he was on our minds, but he was far from our conversations. I can't say if this was because we were afraid to speak his name, or if we didn't feel comfortable talking about him so personally, or if he had disappeared from our personal lives so much that we just didn't care to speak of him.

We had grown silent on Jesus.

Sure, he was mentioned in our songs and our teachings, but our day to day conversation? Not so much. Honestly, I've always found it easier to talk about God than to talk about Jesus. Yeah, they are the same guy, but God is like a title, and can be ambiguous enough to not offend. Jesus is a guy's name. It's personal. It makes him more real.

Really, I was seeing our lack of speaking of Jesus as a metaphor for how we had become spiritually. See, speaking of God is way more 'clinical,' way more religion than relationship. We can discuss theology and talk God like he is a textbook case study. We can get at the facts and the details and the historical stories. But Jesus is deeper. Jesus is about relationship. Jesus is a dude you can really get to know, and scarier yet, he can really get to know you. We as a group- all of us, including us in leadership- had chosen to discuss things of a spiritual nature in a clinical, less relational way. And we were giving in to following a religion more than a relationship.

Then one day it hit me. If Jesus is like that old college friend that we haven't spoken of or to in a while, why not ask how he's doing? So I have come up with an approach that will hopefully serve to remind us of the RELATIONSHIP we are supposed to have with Jesus. When we see each other- and I am limiting this to people in our church and other close friends I know are followers (I'm not advocating doing this to random people on the street)- I'll ask, "How is Jesus?"

It is a question meant to cover two bases. One, have you thought about Jesus at all that day. And two, because he is active in our lives, whether we know it or not, it asks what he has been doing with or teaching to us. "How is Jesus?" reminds us to think of him not as a thing to be studied, but as a person to connect with.

I hope it will mean a deeper-than-Facebook type relationship with Jesus for not only our church, but for me personally. I realize that I daily need to connect with him, not just to mark off an item on the to-do list or to learn a new fact, but to know him. Really know him. And in knowing him, to share in his life, victories and sufferings. To know him like this:

I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. --Philippians 3:10-11.