Rediscovering my Beautiful Feet

What is the good news (aka the gospel)?

Take a second to think of your answer to the above question before you read further…

…Got it...?

Ok, you either said “I don’t know”, or “it’s some weird fairy-tale my Christian friends go on about when they’re trying to convert me” or, “get to the point bro!”.

If you’re a regular church goer or just generally woke to the Christian scene, you likely thought of something which included some, if not all, of the following words; ‘sinners’; ‘justice’; ‘punishment’; ‘mercy’; ‘grace’; ‘Jesus’; ‘death’; ‘cross’; ‘atonement’; ‘forgiveness’; ‘believe’; ‘faith’; ‘relationship with God’; ‘eternity in heaven’

Like most people, up until recently, I would have given the exact same answer. Don’t get me wrong, as far as I know, none of these are the wrong words to use to describe the gospel, I proudly affirm my belief that Jesus was the son of God and he died for my sins and now through faith in him I have the opportunity to have a loving relationship with God.

However, if I am being completely honest, as a description of ‘good news’, it never really sounded particularly compelling to me. I certainly thought it was a beautiful story which demonstrated God’s unending love for me, but often found myself having to convince myself to be a little more excited than I actually felt. Don’t get me wrong, I was fully on board with it conceptually, but it just didn’t elicit quite the same natural joyous reaction as when I hear other good news stories.

For example, when I found out my wife was pregnant with our daughter, Eviya, despite being told only the month before that we might have difficulty conceiving. This felt like great news! At the time, it was the most exciting news I had ever heard. I was happy, nervous, thrilled and scared all at the same time. It wasn’t just a temporary feeling in the moment, it lasted for months. I was constantly hopeful and had something I was really looking forward to.

I felt naturally compelled to tell literally everyone I spoke to about it, even if they didn’t ask me, or had explicitly told me they weren’t interested. it just felt like great news worth sharing.

I contrast that with how I felt about the ‘good news’… it just didn’t quite move me the same way. And worst still, it didn’t feel like good news worth sharing with anyone, which is a big no-no if you’re trying to be a good Christian. If I’m being totally transparent, I was sometimes embarrassed to even tell people about it, because if anything, it sounded like major bad news, especially if they weren’t quite ready to get onboard with it #noairconinhell #helldon’tsoundlikefunforanybody

So, I had a few options, I could either keep going with the flow and continue to feel like the world’s biggest fraud; I could just give up on the faith entirely, which also wouldn’t be me being true to myself, because regardless of how I felt about the gospel as a narrative, I did feel a real and tangible connection with Jesus; the third option was quite frankly the most inconceivable of the lot. Maybe, and only maybe, I could open myself up to the very minor possibility, that I had got something wrong. That maybe this gospel was indeed ‘good news’ and, the problem was somehow with my understanding of it?

Through what I can only describe as a divine intervention and with some added support from the really clever guys over at the bibleproject.com (I wholeheartedly recommend you check them out!), I picked up my bible, put away all my pre-conceived notions and tried to just understand what it had to say about the ‘good news’.

SHOCK and HORROR!!! The bible didn’t use any of the words above to describe what it sees as the ‘good news’. The bible describes the good news as something else completely! Jesus, the central character of the whole thing, put it most succinctly, the good news from his perspective was that “the Kingdom of God is near” (Mark 1:14-15).

What does that even mean? From occasional conversations and sermons, I knew that the Kingdom of God was a good thing, and we certainly sang hundreds of songs about Jesus being king, but it just hadn’t quite registered nor was it ever discussed as the primary theme of the biblical story.

I had been taught that everything I needed to understand as a Christian, culminated in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And while yes, this is a critical part of the story, Jesus himself, both before and after the cross, kept banging on about the kingdom of God. Literally, almost every other sentence the guy said was about this kingdom, and he seemed absolutely convinced that this was in fact the real good news.

This launched me into a new and wonderful journey to understand the nature of God’s kingdom and how I could participate in it. I now understood the Kingdom of God to be a state where God reigns as king and his wisdom, will and purpose for creation is manifest. And that’s awesome news, because his true purpose for creation is a world where everyone is fully committed to loving and serving each other, where the needs of the poor and vulnerable are met, where all the evils and sufferings which plague mankind are eradicated and where we image the creative genius of God to make this a good and beautiful place for everyone (Isaiah 61:1-11).

This was what Jesus was so excited about, the time when this beautiful vision, which God had from the beginning, is finally here. What I found personally so exciting and invigorating was t

hat I wasn’t meant to just sit around and wait for it to come to me, I had been empowered to be God’s representative in making this dream a reality. Through me, the vulnerable, the lonely, people just like me in my community could experience this Kingdom, now!

This truly felt like good news, good news that wasn’t just a story, good news which people would not just hear, but would experience. Good news which people would recognise as good news!

Regardless of whether you are Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Agnostic or anything in between, we all share the same blended human experience, where moments of great joy are inevitably interrupted with moments of great sadness. At some level, we all want to live in a world where injustices, pain and suffering, as we each define them, are eliminated or at least minimised. And now I knew, this was entirely possible, it would only take amazing people, to selflessly start doing amazing things and this vision would become a reality, even if just in small pockets.

So, I started doing research to see if anyone else felt the same, only to realise that I was massively late to the party. There are thousands of amazing people all over the world who have selflessly dedicated their lives to eradicating the evils around them and creating a beautiful world. I really wanted to be one of them.

So, I launched this project, working with a group of friends with a similar desire as mine, to find as many of these amazing people as possible so we could learn from them, and document the amazing things they are doing. We want to find out what creative ways they are tackling issues within their communities, understand what motivates them as individuals, and most importantly identify opportunities for us to participate or replicate their good works in our own communities.

As much as we recognise that there are many people out there already doing amazing things, we also know that there are many others like us, who’s hearts are in the right place, but for whatever reason, it’s not being translated into our daily lived experience. If this is you, we would love to connect with you and support you in making this real. Because through you so many people can be blessed. This vision only becomes a reality when we all get on board, so we’d really like to bring as many people along this journey with us. Along the journey of re-discovering our beautiful feet.