So You Want to Talk About Jesus?

Someone asked me recently:

“Tell me about your relationship with Jesus.”

And I did not answer.

At least, I did not answer in the way the question appeared to require.

I simply continued speaking about what I had already been speaking about.

I noticed this only later.

For a moment, I wondered whether I had been dismissive. Whether I had somehow avoided a question that deserved a direct answer.

But when I returned to the conversation in my mind, I realised something else entirely.

I had answered.

I was answering while the question was being asked.

Because my relationship with Jesus is not a subject I occasionally retrieve from somewhere inside myself and place on the table for discussion.

It is not a compartment marked faith.

It is not a story I tell when someone asks the correct question.

It is operational.

It is moving underneath everything.

If you want to know something about my relationship with Jesus, listen to what happens when distortion enters a room.

Watch what happens when something almost true is presented as truth.

Watch the refusal.

Watch the insistence on going back again, stripping away language, assumption, ego, convenience and inherited interpretation until whatever remains can stand without manipulation.

That is where you will find Him in me.

Not because I am always right.

Not because everything I say carries divine authority.

And certainly not because I have somehow become indistinguishable from the Truth I follow.

The distinction matters.

He is Truth.

I am someone attempting to live in allegiance to it.

And allegiance has consequences.

It changes what you can tolerate.

It changes what you are willing to say.

It changes how quickly you are prepared to abandon an idea you love when you discover that it is false.

It changes the way you move when protecting your pride would require violating what you know to be true.

It changes what you do with power.

What you do with insight.

What you do when nobody is watching.

What you do when truth costs you something.

So when someone asks me to describe my relationship with Jesus, I struggle with the premise of the question.

Because “relationship” makes it sound as though there is me over here, Jesus over there, and a series of interactions occurring between us that I might recount.

But increasingly, that is not how I experience it.

The relationship is becoming architectural.

It is reorganising the structure.

The way I think.

The way I discern.

The way I speak.

The way I correct myself.

The way I refuse to turn revelation into status.

The way I resist the temptation to make myself central to things that were never about me.

The way I return to Him when my own understanding reaches its edge.

The way I recognise that intelligence without submission can become arrogance remarkably quickly.

The way I understand that seeing something does not make me its owner.

The way I know that being entrusted with something does not elevate the vessel.

It increases the responsibility of the vessel.

This is why I cannot simply tell you about my relationship with Jesus as though I am describing a friendship.

I can tell you things about Him.

I can tell you what I believe.

I can tell you about prayer.

I can tell you about scripture.

I can tell you about moments in which His presence became impossible for me to deny.

Those things matter.

But they are still descriptions.

And eventually every relationship reaches a point where description becomes inadequate.

If you asked someone whether they trusted gravity, they could give you an eloquent answer.

Or they could simply step forward.

There are things we believe propositionally.

And then there are things around which the entire body has reorganised itself.

Jesus is becoming the latter for me.

Not an argument.

Not an intellectual position.

Not even merely a belief system.

An orientation.

A governing reality.

A constant correction.

The final reference point.

Which means that sometimes, when you ask me about Jesus, I may continue speaking about truth.

Or integrity.

Or distortion.

Or human behaviour.

Or consciousness.

Or responsibility.

Or love.

Or power.

Or grief.

Or the strange mechanisms through which we deceive ourselves.

And it may appear that I have changed the subject.

I have not.

You asked me about my relationship with Jesus.

I am showing you the place from which I am speaking.

Perhaps this is what I failed to understand in that moment.

I thought I had not answered the question.

But maybe there are questions that cannot be answered by stopping the operation in order to explain the operation.

You do not have to pause a heartbeat to prove that the heart is alive.

You observe what the blood is doing.

So you want to talk about Jesus?

We can.

I will gladly speak His name.

But if you really want to understand my relationship with Him, do not only listen for the moments when I say “Jesus.”

Listen for what I refuse to distort.

Watch what I am willing to surrender when truth contradicts me.

Watch what I do with what I am given.

Watch where I return when I reach the end of myself.

Watch what governs the whole thing.

Because a relationship with Jesus, if it is real, cannot remain a topic.

Eventually,

it becomes an operation of the whole being.