Here it is!

The following story appears in C. Baxter Kruger's The Shack Revisited:

One Saturday afternoon years ago, when my son was six or seven, he and one of his buddies peered around the door at me as I sat on the couch in our den, sorting through junk mail and getting ready to watch a football game.  They were decked out in camouflage, face paint, plastic guns and knives, helmets--the whole nine yards.  Before I knew what was happening, two camouflaged blurs were flying through the air right at me.  The attack was on.  For five minutes or so, we went through several mock explosions and fights before the three of us ended up in a pile of laughter on the floor.  It was then that a sort of ticker-tape banner scrolled past the front of my mind: "Baxter, this is important; pay attention."

I had no idea what the message meant.  After all, it was Saturday, and a dad and his boy and his friend were just playing army on the floor of the den.  Surely there was nothing exraordinary about that.  The first clue came when I realized that I actually did not know this other little boy at all.  I had never seen him, and didn't even know his name.  I thought to myself: Suppose my son was in the back room with our dog, Nessie, and this boy had appeared in the den alone.  Presumably he would have known that I was Mr. Kruger, but that is about as far as things would have gone.  Not in a million years would he have come flying through the air at me, not by himself.

The little boy did not know me; he did not know what I was like.  But my son did -- and that was my second clue.  My son knows me.  He knows that I love him, that he is one of the apples of my eye.  He knows that I like him and that he is always welcome and wanted.  So he did the most natural thing in the world: in the freedom of knowing my heart, he ran to me to play.  The miracle was that his buddy was right in the middle of it all.  Without even knowing what I was seeing, I saw my son's relationship with me, go inside that other little boy.  And the other boy got to experience our fellowship.  He got to taste and feel and play in my son's freedom and joy with me (pp.207-208).

As I read this story, I was stunned!  The entire message of Christianity is summed up in this story.  Here it is -- In that day, you shall know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you (John 14:20). That's the whole message---that we, who are "in" Jesus have been taken up with Him into His very relationship with the Father:  in the same freedom and joy They have in Their relationship, we freely enter in.  There is no longer any separation -- any "Us" and "them."  We are one with the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.

Feeling that freedom and joy is a life-long process, and there is much that works against it along the way.  But our feelings and the truth are two different things.  If we know that Jesus is "in" in Father, and if we know that we are "in" Him, we can grow toward the relationship He came to give us.  He did not come to "show us how to live."  He came to live in us to bring us to the Father.  And why not allow Him to do what He most desires to do in us?