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Holy

           He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, (II Timothy 1:9)

          This passage hit on just a right day. There may be more than one day that would have been just the right day for it, but today is one. Someone from one of my writing groups asked what would make a character a strong woman, and six ideas popped into my head. So now, what makes a life a holy life?

          According to one source, holiness means apartness, separateness, or sacredness. For our life to be holy, it must be separated, different from the lives people around us live. For some, the idea is to go off somewhere away from everyone else to live according to a set of rules. Oh, that sounds so tempting sometimes.

          Another source suggests that it is specifically separation from defilement. Again, this produces a long list of rules about what you can, or must, or cannot, or must not do. In this case, our lives don’t have to be different from everyone else’s, just different from the “bad guys” – whoever we define as bad guys.

          The problem with these is that they are negative definitions. The focus seems to be on what we’re to separate from. There’s usefulness to that, but that’s the difference between Eve’s argument against temptation and Jesus’. Eve’s focus was on the fruit of the tree, and how she was to be separate from it. Jesus’s focus was on God.

          According to the Merriam Webster, holy means “exalted or worthy of complete devotion as one perfect in goodness and righteousness.” Now there’s something to strive toward. No, we can never achieve “perfect in goodness and righteousness” and the goal shouldn’t be that others consider us worthy of devotion. But what if our goal were simply to live in a way that is exalted and worthy?

          Still another source says that in the New Testament, “holy” carries with it a sense of heaviness or weight of glory. This doesn’t mean we throw our weight around, but that we live our lives in a way that has weight, that makes an impact on the world in a positive, God-ward direction. It’s a life in which what we do matters. And this is what God meant for us from before the beginning of time.

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