This week I have been living inside big ideas. Working on materials and gathering ideas and notes for sermons for Lent, Easter, and beyond, I've taken deep dives into Covenants (Lenten series) Resurrection (Easter and the weeks following) and Pentecost. I've contemplated steadfast love, Empire and power, and theological expansion. And somewhere in the middle of all that studying, I felt it.

The stretch.

Not intellectual stretch. That part's fun.

The deeper one. The one that quietly asks, “If this is true… what changes for me?”

It's one thing to preach that resurrection creates people who cannot stay small (By small, I mean stagnant and without growth). It's another thing entirely to realize that means I cannot stay small either.

Small is comfortable and familiar. Small knows how things work and who belongs where. Small does not require new imagination.

But the Spirit does not seem overly interested in keeping any of us comfortable. Peter had a framework. It worked. It told him who was in and who was out. It was faithful. It made sense of the world.

And then the Spirit moved ahead of his comfort and he saw

A sheet full of animals he had been taught not to touch...
A Gentile household he had been trained to avoid...
A realization that God was bigger than his categories...

His personality did not change, but his beliefs expanded. That kind of growth rarely feels triumphant in the moment. It feels disorienting, like the ground shifting beneath your feet.

I think we all have places where we prefer to stay small.

Places where we quietly hope God will not ask for further expansion. (Move along, please, nothing to see here...)

Places where we would rather protect our frameworks that sort people and ideas into neat categories, rather than being stretched into expanded loving.

But resurrection is less about life after death (though still that) and more about life after limitation.

It's discovering that the love of God keeps spilling past the edges of what we thought was possible, and definitely past what we feel is comfortable.

Growth, though, is not betrayal of what we once believed, it's just faith maturing in real time.

And if I am honest, I am grateful for a God who refuses to let me stay small. Though I do resist it and grumble a little (a lot).

But, every stretch has made room for more compassion and humility.
More light...
More life...
More love...

And that feels like resurrection that's lived rather than described.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that you will notice where you are tempted to stay small, and meet yourself there with kindness. I hope you will remember that expansion does not erase your past faith; it builds upon it. When the ground feels like it is shifting, may you trust that it is not falling away but widening. And may you find that the Spirit’s stretching always leads toward deeper love. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa