"Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well."

When Westley and Buttercup are walking through the Fire Swamp, he tells her about his time with the Dread Pirate Roberts. He worked for the pirate after he was captured in exchange for a stay of execution and every day, the Dread Pirate Roberts would say, "Good night, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning." And this went on day after day until the Dread Pirate Roberts who captured Westley retired and passed on the mantle to Westley.

Now I don't think that the Christian life entails a daily threat of death (or at least, any more than your regular existence in the world entails the daily threat of the unpredictable end of your life), but I do think there's a day-by-day transformational aspect to our lives and I think it's just as jarring as what the Dread Pirate Roberts' said to Westley. Or maybe it's just that tomorrow isn't promised, and we work with that in mind, finding that there's a habitual rhythm in the uncertainty. You don't count on tomorrow, but over time the threat of nonexistence is tempered with the reasonable assumption that you'll be allowed to continue the work you've started.

I guess what strikes me is how this anecdote reflects a bit of our salvation. It's not just the preparation of your community before salvation and not just the day itself, when your heart realizes how loved you are because of and in spite of who you are, that corrects the hearts of men. Westley asked for his life from the Dread Pirate Roberts because of the love he had cultivated in his life and the Dread Pirate Roberts gave him another day because of it, but after that day, there was another and another and another. Life goes on after we're preserved and we have to get up daily and live into that until our salvation becomes a routine.

No one tells us each night that we've done a good job or reminds us that life will most likely kill us in the morning but I think we'd live differently if it did. We've been saved once. We are saved again daily. How much more deeply would we live if we bent our lives around the knowledge of that grace, working every day, building up a lifetime of unlikely muscles? Imagine the exercise of those muscles in the world. The kindness. The joy. The love.

Imagine the work we could do with those muscles, how powerfully we could live into the promise of our salvation. Remember how much we need that right now. Remember how much we'll need that from here on out.

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