We sang the Kendrick song, He walked where I walked, this morning in church. As I started to join in the first few words of the song:
He walked where I walk (echo)
He stood where I stand (echo)
He felt what I feel (echo)
He understands (echo)
I had a big question. Did he?
Yes I agree God was on earth, I agree with the statement he understands – partly. I have a big question over the rest and I find myself really wondering if Jesus has walked where I walked?
Jesus walked a very different planet. He experienced a very different humanity. A stressed, but still a very different, humanity.
Has Jesus experienced life in a fast moving, 21st century, post modern, post Christian and technologically advanced age? If he has not, then I can’t honestly sing that he has walked where I have walked, stood where I stand, felt what I feel. I guess a question of his understanding comes with that.
I guess we could argue Jesus is here all the time or that he is living through us. That would still mean his experience of 21st Century life would be as God, and not as a human being. Surely at best Jesus has had an experience of what life is like on earth, and because he is God that experience gives him a good basis to think what other stuff must feel like. Still, though, the experience is not first hand.
I can see what Kendrick is getting at here. God has created me, so in that sense he fully understands me. But knowing what it is like to stand where I stand, feel what I feel? I am not so sure. I wonder … he can observe my pain, my frustrations, my sense of hopelessness – and that saddens him. How, though, can he actually feel them if they are totally outside his experience when he was a human?
My point? Well I don’t know – it just grabbed me today! Except, one point, I guess, is that it has made me start to think about what we say and sing in our worship services. Could it be that it is very easy to write a song that says right and good things about God, but can still be a little inaccurate and possibly mis-leading in how those things are stated?
Kendrick fans … don’t hate me!
The Shiny Headed Prophet 
I get what you’re saying, and I s’pose your right…in that he didn’t experience all the things we go through as Jesus the human here on earth…but when I read the psalms I am faced by a man or woman who expresses emotions and feelings that I face every day…and things in David’s time were even more different!I think that even though circumstances change, our emotions, our feelings our mental, spritual and physical responses are all the same…and that’s why I think Kendrick has written these words..?