NONFICTION
Enough
Like many of you, our congregation celebrates Communion on the first Sunday of every month. This week we chose to use those little plastic cups that come prefilled with the “bread and cup.” As I was moving my journal to the seat beside me, I felt the hot slice that only a paper cut can deliver in such agonizing slow motion. The trickle of blood was just coming to the surface as the pastor, my husband, quoted from Hebrews 9:22, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.”1
The oddity of the moment wasn’t lost on me. As I sat there looking at my fingertip-sized drop of blood, waiting for the body and blood to be passed around, that verse spoke to me. I was struck with a thought. Could not a single drop of Jesus’s blood have been enough to have redeemed mankind? Perhaps “just enough” shedding of blood could have occurred that didn’t require so much? It confounds my mind to think, His power was so great that it took a brief touch of His garment to heal the woman who suffered twelve years of affliction. His breath and word alone healed across miles of desert for the Centurion’s daughter. Surely the shedding of blood didn’t require every last drop unto death? But that is exactly the requirement of sacrifice. It is all or nothing. It required that He surrender all. It requires that we surrender all.
Romans 12:1-2 says to, “present your bodies a living sacrifice”2 and “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”3 This New Testament sacrifice doesn’t require the shedding of blood, Jesus did that for us once and for all. However, being a living sacrifice daily requires our all. The Father desires our heart, mind, and spirit fully surrendered to Him.
I ponder here that many Christians would like to give a fingertip-size time or finance and call it sacrifice. Sometimes I have given “just enough” until it stretched me to the limit of what I could sacrifice, without faith becoming an uncomfortable necessity. That too was not sacrifice; I was still in control. In control of my time, my money, my remote control, my screen time, and well, you fill in the blank. Becoming a living sacrifice requires that I surrender all to Jesus, trusting that He works all things out for my good and for His glory.
I have worshipped in Holy Communion countless times; always focused on the remembrance of what Christ did for us on the cross. It is because of His sacrifice that mine is even possible. I can never thank Him enough for the cross and the empty tomb. This paper cut is already fading away, but even now I know that every future one will remind me what was required, and what is still desired. Every last drop.
1 ESV.
2 KJV.
3 NIV.
Jennifer Baker is an author and musician. She has played in music festivals from Seattle to Maine, writing and co-writing many original songs along the road. She was published in The Boats Against the Current, The Dirigible Balloon, and The Wildlife Activist journals as well as authoring her own book, Lessons Along the Riverbed. You can follow her on Facebook: AuthorJenniferBaker and on Twitter @FrostGlassPoet.
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Photo: Oww Papercut, Laurence Facun, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Modified by Veronica McDonald.
Heart of Flesh Literary Journal 
