He Gets Us: Diving Deeper | Plan 2Sample

He Walks with Us

Sometimes when you feel free enough to travel down unexplored roads, you feel a little lost. It’s a necessary step to find new paths. Sooner or later, that flutter in your chest subsides and you get your feet back under you. Nobody likes to feel lost but we like where it leads us.

Once Jesus joined two confused guys as they walked home from Jerusalem. They engaged in a lively conversation with Jesus and even invited him to dinner. And just when they started to eat, they realized who he was. (It’s a great story.) And it’s true.

Which takes us back to our look at Jesus’ life—his brief, torn up, broken, beautiful life. The man who history labels as one of the greatest people who ever lived, some even say the greatest, clearly identified with these new roads. They sometimes took unexpected turns for him, too. He sometimes felt lonely. His family wasn’t perfect. His friends turned their backs on him. At times he felt overwhelmed. He didn’t fix everyone’s struggles but met them on the road and walked with them a while. He gets our journey, everything about it.

And what’s more . . . this vulnerability was all by choice. Intentional.

Who does that? A closer look at Jesus reveals someone who is like us, and at the same time bigger than us. Will you give that a pause?

Jesus was like a Shakespearean king who put on a peasant’s cloak to blend in with the crowd. He wanted to experience and know first-hand what it was like to live as we do, with all the public and private pain, misunderstanding and injustice. The road Jesus walked was as real as ours.

He joins us on that unexplored path; he shows us we’re not alone. He relates to us in all our pain, broken by the same things that shatter us. Then at the perfect moment, he stepped out of the crowd, dropped the cloak, and revealed the truth.

And the best way to discover his actual purpose, regardless of the centuries between us, is to look at his life. Sure, plenty of books have been written about what he taught, but let’s look at his private side, the side you see when you walk with someone side by side down a new road.

Sometimes the best thing that happens when you wander unexplored, unexpected paths are these new friends you make along the way.