The Sweet Spot

In this social existence of ours, we live and work with people in many contexts. When we are working for someone, we enjoy most an effective and balanced kind of partnership. In cooperative efforts, the extremes we prefer to avoid are isolation and enmeshment.

Hovering can smother us in too much control. Complete separation can leave us feeling unsupported, with no chance to check on efforts made. There is a range in the middle that is the sweet spot we seek.

Thinking of our relationship with God and the way the Christian faith guides us in life, we have that sweet spot in play. Jesus, our savior and guide, accomplishes on our behalf what we could never do for ourselves, and teaches us his loving ways, so we can choose to conform to them. With Christ, we are not possessed and taken over by the Spirit. Neither are we abandoned and left on our own.

I have always loved the Collect of the Day coming up this weekend. We pray it in the middle of the Pentecost season (Proper 15 - Book of Common Prayer, p. 232) in mid-August. With it we request grace to accept the fruit of Jesus’s saving work, as well as the guidance of the way he walked. We want to live like Jesus. We want to receive gratefully the healing he affords us. This prayer embraces both these hopes:

Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life: Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work, and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.

Though the Holy Spirit indwells us, we are not possessed in a way that controls our wills. Moreover, though we are free moral agents, we are not left on our own to accomplish perfect righteousness before God. God rescues us in the things for which only divine grace and mercy will do. This loving God also provides in Christ the example of holiness as we struggle to walk in a holy manner.

We are not left on our own; we are not manipulated. This is the perfect synergistic balance as we move little by little toward fulfillment in God’s love.