Covered in Dust: Thoughts for the New Year

There was a blessing commonly given to disciples in the day of Jesus: “May you be covered in the dust of your rabbi.” It is an image of walking so closely behind your teacher that the dust from the ancient Palestinian roads on which they travel ends up on you. It’s a blessing of position relative to the one you follow—because your position, relative to the one you follow, matters.

 As a church we will be taking next year to look at what it means to follow Jesus like that. We will ask, What does it mean to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength? And what does it look like to have Jesus permeate and infiltrate every single part of ourselves so that we and every single person we come in contact with are impacted? 

We will spend this next year asking and responding to these questions together—not because doing so will somehow earn us favor with God. He has already shown his love is unstoppable and given freely by grace. We will engage, examine, explore, and wrestle with what it means to follow Jesus, and respond to its implications in our lives because, whether we realize it or not, we will build our lives around something. We will put our faith in something. Our emotional, relational, physical, sexual, technological worlds will be shaped by something. We will closely follow after something to the point that we are covered in its dust. It is worth being intentional in our choice.

I’m excited for the year ahead, to get close to the generous, powerful, kind, wise and lovely teacher that Jesus is and to have that shape our lives in new ways. We follow a rabbi whose ministry brought life and who calls out from a time to come, “Look, I am making all things new.” 

We have experienced new things in the last year as individuals and as a community. Some of those things may have been welcomed and exciting and some may have been less so. But the people who proclaim Jesus to be Lord, Savior, and rabbi believe walking closely to him in every new circumstance is where we will find joy. It is where we will find the purpose for which we long, and it is how we will bring hope and peace to the world around us. That doesn’t mean that we will never experience hardship. We will all swim in the waters of pain and grief in this world. The question is what will guide us through those waters, and what the journey will produce. At Summit, we have been and will continue to be led by one man—Jesus Christ—because, in the words of Peter, “Where else would we go?” 

 We will all follow something. It is worth being intentional about it because our position, relative to the one we follow, matters.

So, as we head into a new year, with a God who makes all things new, may we be covered in the dust of our rabbi. And may that bring hope, joy and purpose to our days ahead.

Garry Abbott is the Orlando Pastor at Summit Church. Garry started feeding birds a year or so ago and feels like his transformation into becoming his grandfather is nearly complete, though he does still hate squirrels because they are unpredictable. He also enjoys cleaning and watching his son run track.