They say we all get our fifteen minutes. Our birth, marriage, and death all heralded in the hometown paper. Maybe there are other reasons that we find our name in print over the years, but we are born, we live, and then we die and return to the dust from which the first Adam came.
We leave a legacy or not. We leave fortunes or not. We leave our name for the world to remember and they do or they don’t, but our life is not meant to be famous.
Our time is not for our own notoriety.
In this world, it seems that if you’re famous you are without sin. The world of the famous forgives them their trespasses and turns blind eyes toward the spotlight that we put them in - you and I who aren’t so well known. The famous give their peers a ticket of absolution from every flaw of character that we would call sin, and the trap is to believe that a jury of your peers can really set you free.
There are debates about who’s guilty of what and when and does it really matter, they say, because he or she is a ‘great artist’? Isn’t making art most important, and all the sin that comes along is just incidental?
But the famous are guilty and so are we. We have the luxury of being more private and sinning before a few instead of a few million. We are all guilty though, and the famous may be absolved by their peers but that’s not forgiveness. It's not even grace.
It’s only scandal, and sometimes scandal simply breeds and feeds fame.
If we are known by One with cross-shaped fame , we are more than famous. If we are graven on the hands of the One who will live forever, who has lived forever and who welcomes us into His eternity - we are more than famous.
We are remembered.
Not for our sins or our past or our temporal achievements (that’s our scandal - that though we sinned, He gave us His righteousness and we can wear it now, on this guilty, dusty earth.) We are remembered because He chose to love us and we chose to be loved, chose to lay down a striving-life and live a surrendered one.
We are permanent because He will not forget us. We are guilt-free because there is forgiveness and no condemnation for those who are walking according to His Spirit, and not according to the flesh that pulls us to sin and grasp and clamor for fame.
Our only place of permanence is found in Him. Our only absolution is by His life poured out and poured in us. Our only hope is to be found in Him and to know that we are known by the One who matters.
Linked here: The Wellspring and #TellHisStory