By Ajung Sojwal

It’s now twelve days of a two-week visit to my parents in Nagaland, India. Conversations left unfinished the last time I visited them a year ago picked up as if we had merely been interrupted by the deafening sound of an airplane flying overhead. Life has changed no doubt since the last time I was here. My parents seem older, there’s been a couple of deaths within the extended family, cousins have gotten promotions in their jobs, there’s better Wi-Fi connectivity and there are taller and bigger buildings all around.

As I sat with one of my cousins catching up on the many relatives and mutual friends we know, I was struck by how often the phrase “he/she hasn’t changed at all” came up. The phrase could be the best compliment or the worse indictment about someone depending on who we were talking about. It got me wondering what change looks like and feels like within me. 

Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians says, “We are being changed into that same image (i.e., the glory of the Lord) from one degree of glory to the next degree of glory. This comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” A Spirit-led life seems to be about change deep within which, I suspect, makes for a real experience of conversion. To be changed into the glorious likeness of Jesus is, I believe, about his embodiment of God’s unconditional love for us that declared forgiveness even from the cross. Jesus forgives because, as he said, if we had known better we wouldn’t have hung him on the cross. There are so many things I would have done differently if I had known better. 

There is hope for me yet in what Jesus said from the cross, “For they know not what they do.” It tell me that God has more work to do in me. My hope resides in the invisible but transformative work of the Spirit from whom I learn and know that a Spirit-led life means more self-inquiry and less judgment of another making possible for God’s unconditional love toward the other to take root in my heart. For me, the Spirit-led life is fundamentally about the difficult and lifelong process of my self-centered heart’s conversion into God’s love. As Helen Keller said, “We should not think of conversion as the acceptance of a particular creed, but a change of heart.”

As clumsy as I may be with unconditional love, it is profoundly about hope that somehow in our fumbling to love one another, the Holy Spirit is at work changing us from one glory to another to become God’s embodied love. The Spirit-led life feels like and looks like learning to love another with the hope that we will together be changed into the Beloved Community. 

Ajung Sojwal is the Priest-in-Charge of All Saint’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto, CA. Ajung and her husband moved to the Bay Area after serving for many years in churches in the New York, Connecticut and New Jersey area. Ajung is passionate about conversing and learning to engage in community as the incarnational Body of Christ in a suffering world.