Holy Ground

“Trembling and bewildered, the women went out from the tomb.” -Mark 16:8

Trembling and bewildered. That is the only honest response to what the women encountered and discovered that day in the tomb. It is now the only authentic response to what is revealed in us: that this same risen Jesus has come to dwell with us and in us.

Some of my favorite woods to walk in are nestled behind my childhood home about half a mile, down a steep embankment that extends about 200 yards through thick underbrush, and past an open field. Beyond this lies something out of Lord of the Rings. It is Fangorn, and walking in it I half expect to see an Ent or a Urukai come out from around the bend. It is beautiful and inviting and mythic. The forest itself borders a river that slices and sluices its way through the wilderness like a fledgling Amazon.

I know these woods well; I grew up exploring them and playing army with my brother and cousins in their dark mysteries and overarching canopies.

The long, endless summers of my boyhood days had gone down to the cool of early autumn, and I returned to the company of these old trees as a grown man. I had been drawn to this place by the Lord God. He had summoned me here in his fierce pursuit of my heart and desire to be near me. And he was after something else this day, I suspected. There was something else he wanted to say.

Near the river’s edge I found a large fallen sycamore to stretch out on and enjoy the surroundings and settle my heart into listening, into quieting down. “What do you want to say to me, Lord?”

Nothing. I waited. Nothing still. I waited longer. Still, nothing. The sun was now settling in for the night, and I could no longer stay. As alluring those woods are at day, they are haunting at night.

As I set out and walked halfway through and among those giants of the forest, I heard the Lord very plainly say to me, “Take off your shoes.” It was so clear that I dared not argue. I stopped and removed my shoes. The bare ground was cold and prickly with twigs and small rocks. I stood again, and waited. “This,” he continued slowly and emphatically, “is holy ground.”

Whoa.

As soon as I heard this, I burst into tears. I understood immediately that the holy ground he was talking about wasn’t the forest; it was me. Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. I think then and there I understood for maybe the first time that this was the invitation of the gospel: a completely new life, a new heart, and God himself living and moving and breathing inside with so much reality that our old life is as substantive as a shadow. We are invited into life with God.

St. Augustine of Hippo once stated that, “Jesus departed from our sight that he might return to our heart. He departed, and behold, he is here.” This is as bewildering and holy a reality as the empty tomb was for Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.

Trembling and bewildered, I stood there in my bare feet as the sun set in the west across the water, casting deep and distorting shadows across the pasture to the east. I saw a bit of my own shadow stretch across the barren earth, and I set off walking again, shoes and socks in quivering hand.

Trained for Battle

So much of my heart’s courage (and with it, hope), passion (and with it, love), and desire (and with it, faith) is either stolen away by these enemies of mine – the world, Satan, or my flesh – or simply squeezed into such a small corner of my life as to be for all practical purposes nearly non-existent. This happens often. Too often.

Recently I had a conversation with the Lord God concerning this battle. I share it here. The italicized portions are the words I heard God speak; the others are my own.

Are you tired yet of so much of your heart being stolen from you?

Yes, Lord! Yes I am.

Then why do you allow it to be stolen?

When can I be released into my giftings for your Kingdom and for your glory, Lord?

My son, I love that desire in you. It is from me. But if you were to be released now before you were able to stand in my authority where you now find yourself to be, you would be destroyed. You must first be trained to walk in my authority. I want to develop that in you. Your giftings are not a replacement for character. Now, are you ready to stand in my authority and fight against all my enemies and yours in my name, enemies that have for too long now opposed that great and mighty work and life in you? Are you ready to fight to the death for your freedom, knowing that to live without it is to not live at all? Are you ready to bring down all strongholds against you and DeAnn and all that sets itself up against the knowledge of God? Are you ready, my valiant warrior, to walk with me into your full freedom and to remain there with me despite the cost?

What will the cost be, Lord?

Ah. The cost is high, my son. But two things you must remember. One, that no cost can be too high for freedom. The reward is greater still. And two, I have already paid the greatest cost. Nothing you forsake or encounter will measure against it.

Of course, my King.

Now, are you ready?

I am ready. I want to stand with you as you say, Lord God. I want freedom and life. I want freedom and life – more than anything – and I believe you came to give it to me and to others through me.

I came to win it for you. You must walk in it yourself. Choose to, and be resilient, fervent, steadfast, and ruthless for it – for your heart, my son, and for others. It will take battle. I will lead you in it all. I will train your hands for battle and you will have skill over even what you have already experienced. You will know what it is to war and to be victorious over your enemies. Do you want that?

More than anything!

Then come with me. It’s time to stand.

The Burden of Love

You know how we (I mean we in the church) often say things like, "I am with you," and "I'll shoulder your burdens," and the like, and we may very well mean them, but after awhile it kind of feels overused, or maybe even a bit inauthentic? I've used them plenty of times before and even as the words came off my lips it felt a little cliché, even to me. I think that happens sometimes because either I'm afraid of really going there with someone right into the mud and muck of life or because I don't think it's the right thing to do. If someone is drowning in quicksand, you don't save them by jumping into it beside them.

But then I don't think that's the case anymore through Christ. I think that image is wrong, and sometimes I just say that to myself so I can feel better about keeping some kind of safe distance from the real pain of another man's circumstances. If anything, Christ is the Vine that I hold onto as I jump right into the center of the bog with my brother and hold on for dear life, if that's what it takes.

And I don't think that we can offer much if we aren't willing to go there. I'm not convinced that I can really contend for someone's heart or life or faith or anything else that's really important if I don't feel at least in a small sense the agony of that very thing lost.

When Simon from Cyrene was given Jesus' cross to carry up Calvary's hill, he felt the weight of that burden and then knew just a small piece of the pain Jesus was bearing, and was shattered by the thought of the ultimate pain he would endure. I think Jesus himself felt the loss of something so precious to him when he wept over Jerusalem while he almost whispered under his breath, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem... how often I have longed..."

I want to be a genuine man, an authentic man, in this world. I want to be real, solid real like cold stone under your feet or the blindingly real, dazzling blue of the sky or the agonizingly real feel of blood dripping from your skin like sweat in the night.

And I think I'm becoming that, slowly, as I learn to love. And it hurts.

My wife teaches me much about this. She has a way of engaging with a person’s life –friend or stranger – in such an authentic way that they often sense her love and trust their story to her. I’m blown away every time it happens, whether in the Wal-Mart check-out aisle or over the phone or over dinner. She will cry with them, or pray, or bring light and laughter in that encounter, and usually a beautiful mixture of all three. She will often leave those encounters with a burden for that person, feeling their pain, carrying it to Christ for them. And her heart is enlarged in the process.

In the end, I think all of the events, weighty with both glory and pain (and sometimes both at the same time), are leading us closer to and further into God. It's as Paul told the Corinthians, that distress led them to become more holy - that is, more God's, and that, in turn, led them to be more alive in all the ways one can be.

You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss. Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets. And now, isn't it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You're more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you've come out of this with purity of heart.

-2 Corinthians 7:9-11, The Message

Remember that in the Old Testament, the priests entering the Holy of Holies had to wear a rope tied around their ankles in case they were struck dead by God's holiness and had to be dragged out. After all, if they were stuck dead by entering into the place, who in their right mind would go in after them to drag out their corpses? Annie Dillard had it right when she said that, "On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return." Concerning the genuine love for others that the Spirit endows us with, I think this is accurate. Jesus has told us as much, that we are in for the ride of a lifetime.

So, even as we ride the high seas and long for the deeper depths, the tides turn and shift, the storm settles by the sound of the One speaking into the night, and our eyes adjust to the grey and misty shadows to see a figure out there walking, arm outstretched, a laugh almost bursting the seams of his smiling lips. This Wild One has invited us further out with Him, further into the burden of love. He awaits us. “He waits to be wanted,” as Tozer said. To Him and with Him we must go. In the light of His life, what else could we do?

The Bridge of Sighs

Extending halfway across a ravine at the far eastern edge of a narrow trail meandering its way through a dense deciduous wood is a small plank bridge. It overlooks groupings of birches and oaks and maples and sycamores, their branches, now stripped of their garments of leaves, forming a thin canopy for the carpet of fallen leaves and limbs below, thin enough for the autumn light from an angled sun to gather in strips and rays here and there scattered across the forest floor.

It stops suddenly as if in mid-construction, but its finished railings and wooden support beams suggest that its intention was to bring a traveler to an end of the trail in as dramatic and poignant a way as is possible here in the shadow of the Ozarks. It is not elevated, but the descending ground beneath gives it a feel of crossing over a body of water or a gorge, and looking down you expect to see a surging river overflowing its banks. Instead, you see scattered piles of leaves, twigs, some small scrub bushes, and innumerable trunks of trees, briars, short stalky weeds, and, if your eyes follow the sloping land far enough into the horizon, the opposite side of the valley.

The Bridge to Nowhere. That’s what they call it.

I call it the Bridge of Sighs.

I’ve followed this trail to its end, and I’m standing now on the bridge looking out into the wilds of creation. There is nothing tame about the wilderness beyond the railings, nor predictable. But there is something veiled, something secret, something hidden.

It’s hidden by the shadows that creep over the rolling hills and in the barren branches just overhead. The wind kicking up the cold soil hints of it. The sun spilling light into crevices in the valley tells of it. The sky, having turned that ocean-deep, cloudless blue with the burgeoning loss of summer’s warmth – so deep, in fact, that you feel as if you could almost dive into it and be lost forever in its immensity – speaks of this something hidden like the waves on a beach break with a certain mystery of the push and pull of currents cloaked within the water’s depths. There are whispers here, haunting whispers – sighs – of something just behind and beyond what I can see, something narrated by all my eyes take in, and all they do not.

A gust catches in the branches like the heart in my throat and a couple of remaining leaves abandon their dwelling in the canopy and migrate slowly toward the ground.

Five months ago I walked these same steps and stood at this same spot on the bridge, but the air I breathed was much different then. It was full, moist, warm, like a lover’s breath, and the humid breeze kicking up through the foliage her kiss. I remember barely able to see the ground through the thick greens and reds and browns of forest life. Small animals scurried underneath me, and I felt the gaze of larger ones off in the distance. Sounds of wings and chirps and wind filled the forest.

But those images are hard to recapture now, the memories have somehow faded through shorter days and longer shadows. So much has waned, so much has been hidden. The trees like skeletons seem to groan now, shivering in their bark, stretching for the sun’s shelter, their long branches like arms reaching in the ache.

These woods are not old. They are, in fact, remains of an abandoned military training camp from some half-century ago, now taking over the landscape. But they feel old, ancient even. And if it is not them, then it is what comes through them that is old and timeless. That hint, that tinge of longing, that pang of ache, that hidden something – it is old. Old and full of wisdom.

I have always felt like the wilderness expanse gives room for my heart to come out, to stand and breathe the free air, to rise to its true –or truer—height and stretch its arms and yawn in its awakening. Something has been hidden in me for a long time, from a time more ancient, I think, than the age of the secrets these lands have to reveal, something echoed in these aching wildlands, something whispered of here. My heart, too, groans and awaits being clothed in its full and radiant and living glory.

Much of what happens when the Kingdom comes is turn the world on its head and shake it up until it no longer resembles it at all. In reality, it is the world that is a poor reflection of the Kingdom of God, not the other way around, a reflection marred badly by the gravity of the fall. In this Kingdom that Jesus came to announce, it is the one who has reaped that gets to sow (Matthew 13:23). It is the one who has much that will get more (Matthew 25:29). It is the last that will be first (Matthew 19:30). It is the poor that will have limitless real estate (Matthew 5:3). It is in dying that we will have life – real life (Matthew 16:25). It is through being held back that we will be released (Romans 8:22-23).

The forest is in a very real sense growing old. Its hair is falling out as leaves from trees, and the same trees’ branches are like the cold, frail extremities of an old body, too easily broken. Color has faded to pale. The breath is faint, the pulse is weak. The only way I can be out here this day on the bridge looking into this dying forest and my heart not break is that I know it will return to full bloom. It has, every year. The life will come back, and it will be all the more glorious for having been gone. The greens and reds, the black earth, the flowers bursting forth, the robins and caterpillars and bobcats – they will return. What is now hidden will yet be revealed.

And the glory to be revealed at season’s change is only a hint, still yet only a whisper of what is to come. It is being held back until we are ready with it to be set loose in the age to come. That memory, too, is weak, and the images faded. But they are being restored. I close my eyes, and stretch my cramped muscles, and imagine when the dam bursts and all is released into our full and true natures.

The wind has turned a bit colder, so I bundle my jacket a bit against its biting force. One more glance toward the trees, and then I turn to head back along the winding path, my heart pregnant with expectant hope and anticipation with what awaits.