Life with Jesus is a split identity existence while in this world. The dual existence is not like that of the fictional Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who had a good and a bad side. Nor is it like a split personality disorder where two entirely different personalities exist in one body. Also, it is not my spiritual body versus my physical body.
The dual aspect of life in Jesus is a matter of death and life in my body. The death and life of Jesus are always alive and at work in my body (11).
Every day brings the possibility of new challenges, troubles, baffling circumstances, and hardships (8). I am not affected now when these come the way I was affected before I knew Jesus. Rather than lose heart, will, strength, and obtain despair, confusion, and regrets, Jesus’ life in me does the opposite. I am not crushed, I do not despair, I am not abandoned, and I am not destroyed (1b).
The new God-given positive reactions to adverse life events are similar to the God-given reaction my body does when it mends a broken bone. When I was around 13, a rope that my brother and I were swinging on snapped. I plummeted to the ground and landed on a bed of stones and clay. My wrist snapped. A doctor set it, and the bone fully mended in a few weeks.
Six months after the wrist cast was taken off, I broke it again. This time I was sledding down a hill with my friends. They challenged me to stand on my Red Rider sled as I sped down the steep hill. I accepted the challenge. When I came to the bottom of the hill, the sled’s front rails embedded into a snow ramp, causing it to abruptly stop. I was catapulted into the air and landed on the same wrist as before.
When I arrived at the ER, they took an X-ray of my wrist. The doctor reviewing the X-ray exclaimed, “It looks like the bone is broken in the exact same place. That is impossible because the mended bone is always stronger than the bone around it.” After enlarging the X-ray, he was proven right. The wrist bone was broken in a new place.
Similar to the mended wrist bone, Jesus in me is stronger than my old self in me. Though strained, I will not break as I might have done in the past. My “light and momentary troubles are achieving for (me) an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”
