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“When you are invited [to a wedding banquet], go sit in the lowest place.”
– Luke 14:10

There’s a secret place at the bottom of the world. Well, it’s not really secret. It’s just that nobody is trying to go there. And if someone happens to land there by accident, they try to get away as fast as possible. And so everybody’s eyes are always turned away from this place. They’re always looking up, trying to go higher. And so this place is ignored, forgotten.

Isn’t it true? Aren’t we all trying to make our lives just a little bit better? We try to be more comfortable. Healthier. Happier. No one has a skill and says, “I want to get worse at this skill.” No one tries to be the worst player on the team or the lowest chair musician. Everyone wants to improve their relationships, not destroy them.

And even the people who have fallen into the lowest place, they want to escape. We use substances or Netflix. We binge read or binge eat. We want to forget the things that are bad and go someplace better.

So the whole world is trying to travel in the same direction, higher and higher, better and better, happier and happier.

But Jesus went to the lowest place.

Philippians 2:6-8 “Though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

From God to human. From human to servant. From servant to death. From death to death as a criminal on a cross. Jesus’ mission was to go straight to the lowest place, the bottom of the world, the place where no one is trying to go.

I’ve gone to church all my life. But even in a roomful of Jesus’ disciples, it’s rare to find people who actually share Jesus’ trajectory. We want to follow him, but we also want to improve our church service. We want to build our stores of Bible knowledge. We want to become more loving and more holy. None of those things are bad things—but it’s very easy for the desire for them to paralyze us, pulling us upward, when Jesus is going straight down.

So in this blog I want to offer encouragement, share stories, map out tensions and contradictions. Let’s spur one another on: let’s put the hill at our backs and follow Jesus toward the lowest place.