Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'.
-Andy, The Shawshank Redemption
I want to write. I want to illustrate. I want to tell stories and relate them to this journey of walking with God. I want to tell the Gospel, and tell it well – beautifully, passionately. I want to relate the journies and battles I experience to the Great Story, to draw others (and even myself, maybe especially myself) deeper into this Life, this adventurous, risky, balls-out, all-or-nothing life with Jesus, Creator, King.
I want to communicate. I want to bring faith into focus. I want to bring clarity to peoples’ lives and show them what it’s really about (“What’s up with Life?”). I want to stir up the passion in peoples’ hearts to live full lives, full in the fullness of God, to offer fuel for the fire in their bellies. I want to kindle and stoke up the flames of love in the hearts of prophets and kings and lovers of God.
I want to tell this as I see the unseen as the heavier, weightier Reality. Really, maybe as the only Reality. I want to do this in story. I want to do this in word. I want to do this, maybe most importantly, with my own life.
I want to walk with Jesus on the water, this water, this tidal, wind-tossed sea that is at times so, so beautiful beyond telling and at others the most frightening force in the universe, the most dangerous. This life with God, both living it out and telling it (telling it with words and with the story of my own life) is romantic. And romance is both the deepest thing in life, deeper even than reality as G.K. Chesterton put it, and also the most dangerous, scariest thing in life, scarier even than death. Because death doesn’t demand anything. Love demands it all.
Remember those words that Jesus has spoken to me? Remember how deep and true and compelling? Remember how Real they were when I heard them, how they drew me into the depths like some hard-hitting harpoon? I remember. I remember the feeling of being pulled in. I remember how I both feared it and fought it for all I was worth and knew I had wanted this for a long, long time. I collapsed into it, surrendered body and soul to the Deep.
I will never forget writing my resignation letter from the bookstore where I first found God and fell in love with Him. I experienced Life and I knew immediately what wasn’t it. When we deterred from it unrelentingly, it was time to leave, and to leave with strength and hope. The feeling of these words coming out of me, these words that had been forged in fires of fear and passion, of angst and experience of the deepest intimacy with the Someone… it was… it was a ride. I felt these words, lived them, believed them from my heart. I had a right to them. They were not just words dripping like honey (or codliver oil, be it as it may) from my lips, born by my tongue. No. They were from the depths.
This last October my wife and I took our first vacation together since our honeymoon. We chose Cancun as our destination. While there, I had the opportunity to go scuba diving. They took us a half mile off the coast to a reef. In 30 feet of ocean I explored the reefs and all it had to offer me – exotic fish, stingrays, poisonous plants, underwater seashells. What I couldn’t help but pay attention to in this underwater world that allowed me to move in all directions was the force of the tides and swells even 30 feet under. They were forceful. I realized that the surface movements were either the cause of these underwater currents or the result of them. And maybe it was a combination of both.
The day I wrote my resignation letter, the surface tides came from the currents within.
I’ll never forget the day God gave me the words from E.M. Bounds. It wasn’t just a quote from some guy I didn’t know that sounded cool. It was God – this wild Lover and Friend – who spoke to me something about His own heart. He revealed Himself a little more through those words. Oh, and the night He gave me Psalm 18. Or the night He told me I am like David – that this was the man I could look towards to know something of my own heart. That was why I was so attracted to his story and life.
I’ll never forget the way Michael Yaconelli’s book A Dangerous Wonder had blown me away, had left me flat on my back with some ecstatic hope that I could just be myself and surrender to God and realize that walking with Him would be childlike. Or the passion of Rich Mullins’ voice and song that told me that this life with God could be that desirious, that romantic.
I remember, and will always remember, the time I learned that Jesus’ statement to the disciples, “Shalom. Peace I leave with you…” in the Upper Room were words meant to tell them that He was leaving Himself as the Peace. It wasn’t wishful thinking or a sanguine pseudopromise. It was words of life, and He acted on them when He breathed into them the Flame of the Holy Spirit – His Spirit. Himself.
There were the words from the Psalms more recently that He is like a roaring waterfall, His waves and breakers having washed over me, and how I got to tell David Crowder about those words and the way God used them to free my heart to receive from Him at the bootcamp I attended. And how, even more recently, He’s given me the names Wagon Builder and has been showing me what that means. And the name Son of Thunder to tell me also about my own heart and through that His own.
What about the conversation I had with my wife really recently about our friends’ opportunity to be ministers of the Gospel through their rental business and how they pretty much miss that and instead spend their money on cruises and vacations and one day hope to sell their rental property to go “into the ministry”. But right here in front of them are opportunities to love and give until it hurts.
And what about my own giving till it hurts? What of the opportunities right in front of me to also be a minister of reconciliation, a prophet of the Gospel of Grace?
I remember still the book titles God’s given me – I think as a starting place, a launching point. Will I let go the ropes and let the wind and waves take me where they will, trusting in this God who has spoken so much to me, brought me into so much life, redeemed the ways I have posed and faked my way through just to survive, revived my heart so dead? Will I set out with hope and trust and write those things He’s given me, that He’s revealed and spoken to me, believing that they are really from Him and not just for me but for a world lost in darkness and desperately needing his Life? What of “A Few Good Men” and “What’s Up with Life?” and the others (there are so many)?
Jesus, I come to you so often asking You to free my heart, to bring me deeper into freedom. I wonder if that’s the wrong thing to ask. I wonder if the truth is that You have brought me into freedom, having purchased it with Your own blood. It’s done, it’s already finished. Now, I need to learn to live as one who is free. To walk out of the cage that has already been opened. To stand up, to open my eyes, to walk forward in Your strength of heart, in mine. To throw myself into You and Your work – the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension.
Thing is, Jesus, and I’m sure You must know this perfectly, that I cannot go it anymore without You. The road from here on out, if I am to walk it at all, has to be taken with my eyes firm on You. It ain’t no yellow-brick road. It’s the tossed tides of the ocean. That's where I am to walk. I must fix my eyes on You and be undeterred, undistracted (both from my own fascination with walking the waves and with the stormy sea itself). This is the faith I need. And this is faith: the evidence of things Unseen. That is, utter and total consecration to and dependence upon This One who walks the seas, who calms the storms, who frees the captives, who gives sight to the blind, who teaches the lame to dance.
Teach me to live, Jesus, as one who is free. Cause I want to be like You.
If I didn't care, more than words can say,
If I didn't care, would I feel this way,
If this isn't love, then why do I thrill
And what makes my head go round and round
While my heart stands still...
