art & writing by mathew jon marquez

To “remain” is to sustain, endure, be longstanding, constant, and always stay - a word not conducive to our pop-up, A.D.D culture in the West. There is often an unexpressed anxiety with remaining with something or someone too long, right? We tend to prefer the sterile processing and scanning of the next thing for its most valuable assets and how it might most benefit us for the next unseen moment in our lives.


There is a quote from Jesus of Nazareth I have been reminding myself of lately, “Remain in me, and I in you.” There is a lot more to the quote, but the first sentence is what has encouraged me the most and caused me to stop my machine like processing of all my “what ifs” and draw deep breaths of relief from fresh wind.


The word “remain” hits me with its true meaning of Jesus’ request of my own longstanding commitment to be in his presence. If you are a follower of Jesus, like me, then you might feel the sting of this reality. How many times have we treated our relationship with him as casual as a one of our countless ‘friends’ on our Facebook or MySpace? You know, the ones that add to your total number of friends, but never make your top friends list. You are grateful for their contribution to your status, but have not connected with them in sometime.


Yet as followers of Jesus, he asks us to remain in him. To be in his presence constantly. To stay put and linger…and he will in ours.


I realize our hesitancy to yield to this sort of consistency. There is so much happening in the world, right? It just does not seem feasible to remain in his presence and risk missing the ‘other’ thing taking place. Maybe it just does not seem practical. I get that too.


What I also get is Jesus never asks us to stop being in the world. He just asks that we remain in him and he will re