E-Letters

Weaver's Cottage

By Jeff Andrechyn
Jul 02, 2009

There is a wonderful story written by George Eliot (a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans) called Silas Marner. It is a provincial story that takes place in the 19th century English country side. Silas is a weaver and part of a religious congregation that wrongly accuses him of stealing church funds and he is excommunicated.

Silas moves to the back country (the stone pits) where he toils as a weaver saving all his money while having no relationships that nourish his soul. Silas buries all his wealth in the floorboards of his cottage, becoming fairly wealthy, but socially wounded. An evil son of his landlord steals his money one day leaving him without hope. As fate would have it, while Silas was away from his cottage, a women and her baby who were on a long journey came upon the cottage on a very cold winter's night . The mother succumbed to the elements but not before she safely placed her baby in Silas' cottage.

Silas returns home, finds the baby girl and falls deeply in love with her (Eppie) and his humanity is restored to him as he learns to love, care for, and sacrifice for this precious life.

This story is our story.

Banished from the garden of fellowship during the big bang of the fall, we are left to scratch the earth thinking that money is the answer while we live socially challenged. Then God comes to bring us what we really need. It is not reputation, position, or even money, but rather a life, His Life.

"I have come that you might have Life." John 10:10. This is the best news humanity ever received when Jesus says this. The gospel is not "sin less, give more, and try harder." The center of the gospel is His Life, poured out, for which He paid the ultimate price.

Jesus breaths in us the Spirit that is able to penetrate the hidden, wounded, weavers cottage of our lives where we live excommunicated from Him and each other. He gives us the one indestructible thing that the evil landlord cannot steal.

What is so beautiful about this life is that it sacrificially descends to the low and common places in our lives. Phillippians 3:21 says, "He will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body."

Jesus was born to a lowly Jewish girl in a barn. Raised in a forgotten town of Nazareth. Son of a carpenter (blue collar). And, He chose 12 nobodies to walk with him for three years.

Jesus walks with fishermen, tax collectors (the despised) and people of questionable background. It doesn't matter to Jesus, He is going to give them what they all lack--a new Life.

While this Life is full of the treasures of heaven it also walks with us into everyday human situations that are never too small. Jesus was fully God but also became fully man. This is a profound mystery!

The gift is this Life in us.

C.S. Lewis writes, "Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and trying to carry it out. Rather, the real son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself." He is beginning, so to speak, to "inject" His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [Life], into you; He is beginning to turn the tin solider into a live man.

The gauntlet of assaults we experience in life are all designed by the enemy to get you to believe that God does not care intimately about our lives or that He is distant.

He is not distant. The Heavens and He are right around you.

This Life has the power to change everything, to make all things new. The currency of the Kingdom is what you believe. What would happen in the Kingdom if today we prayed for everything? Pray for your son's little league game, for your wives headache, pray for your households and everything in them, pray for the brothers and sisters in your life.

Jeff