Fr Robert Hendrickson

“How’s your walk with Jesus?”

That’s a question I used to hear with some regularity when I lived in Mississippi. More often it was shortened a bit to just “how’s your walk?”

As a Roman Catholic living in the south this was just about the strangest question I could imagine! It was so foreign to the way I had grown up thinking about faith or church or Jesus.

After the strangeness of it wore off I kind of came to like it though. I think what I came to appreciate was the simple, open way it encouraged people to think about their life with Jesus in an ongoing, daily way. Rather than simply being a kind of cosmic helper who has the skeleton key to the afterlife, Jesus becomes a loving and living companion. He becomes the way we walk.

It’s easy to reduce Jesus to one essential or another. We can trap him in the clouds or make him lame with earth-bound metaphors. But somewhere in between is where he walks and where he calls us to walk too.

We have to be grounded enough to see and know and feel the real-ness of life while also connected and grounded in a deeper, heavenly reality. We need that sense of divine possibility and passability (the exchange between Heaven and earth that is possible) in order to see beyond earthly limitations.

So our walk becomes a path that can feel razor thin or as wide as can be imagined — it’s a walk along a path which holds on one side the vast possibility of God’s call to us. On the other side is the whole human experience of love, loss, joy, and heartache — the quotidian realities of the just and unjust alike.

Between them walks Jesus. Alongside us, calling our attention back and forth between the two twinned realities is Christ, opening our eyes and calming our fears.

How’s your walk today?

Yours in Christ,

Robert