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Lenten Devotional Series

Am I Accepted?

by Linda Zhou

"Am I accepted?" is a powerful question. Plucked from the Nine Essential Questions sermon series, this question got me thinking about the characters found in Edwin Abbott’s 1884 satire, Flatland. Abbott paints a picture of an imaginary two-dimensional world known as Flatland, where these characters are basic geometrical shapes. Lines are women; circles are priests/philosophers; triangles are soldiers or noble tradesmen; squares are castle gentlemen. These figures have length and width, but no height or thickness. Life in Flatland was unstirred and they were content.

At the turn of the millennium, a stranger from the third dimension appears and delivers news about the rich and beautiful 3-D world. It was a miracle in and of itself to have a three-dimensional object to intersect the confines of a flat plane. The mind-blown Flatlanders listened with their 2-D ears to the speaking stranger, however, they couldn’t visualize, let alone understand, the other dimension. They were different. They were unworthy outcasts from this dynamic, otherworldly dimension.

We are, metaphorically, the creatures of Flatland, and Jesus Christ to the 3-D visitor. Jesus kindly informs us of a world far beyond our existence and experience. Like the inhabitants of Flatland encountering someone from a higher dimension, we reacted with disbelief. We rejected the reality that the Kingdom of God where Jesus the Messiah originated was open-wide to outsiders, to us Earth dwellers.

The question, “Am I accepted?” may spark the growth of other questions, such as “Do I belong?” or “Can I sin and still be loved?” or “When everyone in my life asserts that I am not good enough for their love, do you remain loving to me?” Jesus would answer with a resounding “Yes.” Jesus came to us because He accepted us. He was not afraid to befriend and to share the good news to the unbelievers, the tax collectors, the poor and sick, the outcasts.

You and I are accepted in Christ where in Him, there is total pardon: “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God” (Romans 15:7). The word accepted is charitoo in Greek translation, which means “highly favored.” In a world where we may accept little to none of one another, Jesus reveals to us that we are “highly favored” by Him. He radically accepted us despite our messy lives, our disgraceful motives, impure hearts, and our Flatlander-like minds.

We are accepted---really accepted---by Jesus, fallen or failed. Mediate in that. As we journey through Lent, let’s not only rejoice in the fact that we are accepted by God’s active presence and constant grace, but let’s also enable our hearts to accept others, too. Why is accepting others important? Because acceptance carries the concept of forgiveness. In accepting others as God has accepted us, you are opening your life to friendship, to beauty, to love. 
 
            Thanks be to God! 

 
 
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