Abide || July 11
Welcome to Abide.
The world will spend all week telling you who you need to become. Every Saturday morning, we’ll remember who you already are in Christ.
Every Saturday morning, we'll spend a few quiet moments walking with Jesus together. We'll explore His invitation to live from His love instead of striving to earn it, to exchange fear for trust, and to discover what it really means to abide in Him. We'll talk about grace, identity, spiritual formation, and the ordinary ways Jesus meets us in everyday life.
My hope is that these weekly reflections encourage you to slow down, breathe deeply, and remember that your identity has never been something you had to achieve—it has always been something you've received in Christ.
Friend, I am so grateful you’re here. Let’s keep walking with Jesus together. Welcome to Abide.
Abide || July 11 - More Than Just Living
Over the past few years, I have found myself thinking a lot about the difference between being alive and actually living.
At first glance, those may seem like the same thing. If we’re breathing, working, paying bills, making dinner, answering emails, and crossing another day off the calendar, surely we’re living.
But I don’t think that is always true. I think it is entirely possible to spend years functioning without ever feeling truly free.
There have been many seasons of my life when everything looked fine from the outside. I was productive, responsible, and accomplished. I achieved goals I had worked toward for years. If someone had asked how I was doing, I probably would have smiled and answered, “Good!” because, by every measurable standard, I was.
Yet underneath all of it was a quiet restlessness I could not explain. No matter how much I accomplished, there was always another mountain to climb, another expectation to meet, another reason to believe that peace was waiting on the other side of the next achievement.
I wasn’t falling apart. But I wasn’t at rest either…I was surviving.
It took me a long time to realize those aren’t the same thing. Survival keeps us moving. It gets us through difficult seasons. Sometimes it even helps us accomplish remarkable things. But survival was never meant to become the way we live forever.
Jesus never invited us to survive. He invited us to abide.
That word has become one of my favorites in all of Scripture. In John 15, Jesus doesn’t tell His disciples to work harder, prove themselves, or become more impressive. He simply says, “Abide in Me.” Other translations use words like “remain,” “stay,” or “make your home.” I love those alternative definitions because abiding isn’t about visiting Jesus when life falls apart. It is choosing to make our home in His love every ordinary day.
There is something wonderfully unhurried about that invitation. Abiding isn’t another spiritual accomplishment to unlock. It isn’t measured by how many chapters of the Bible we read this week or how consistent our quiet time has been. It is the quiet confidence that we are already held by Christ, already loved by Him, already invited to remain.
The older I get (hello…30…I see you), the more I realize that so much of my striving came from trying to find somewhere to belong. I was looking for security in achievement, approval, usefulness, and certainty. But Jesus was always offering me something much simpler. The real thing I was always searching for.
Home.
Maybe that is what abiding truly is. Not trying harder to get to God. Not constantly wondering whether we’ve done enough or measured up. But learning, little by little, to live from the reality that we are already His.
I still forget that more often than I would like to admit - honestly, pretty much every day. There are mornings when I wake up already mentally rehearsing everything I need to accomplish before I have even taken my first sip of coffee. There are days when I catch myself believing that my productivity somehow determines my value.
When that happens, I find myself returning to that simple invitation. Abide.
Not because I have mastered it. Because I have not! But because every day Jesus is gently teaching me that there is a profound difference between merely getting through life and truly living it with Him.
That is my hope for this little corner of the internet.
Not that we’ll become more impressive Christians. Not that we will finally get everything together. But that, week by week, we might learn to slow down long enough to remember what has always been true - We are already loved. And because we are loved, we are free to abide.
Keep walking with Jesus, friends.
bytaylormcgee
