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The Silence and the Fury

Silence.
It falls quickly, quietly,
an elusive prey
in a culture priding itself
on do-this-get-that-turn-this-on-
noise,
the buzzing and whirling and whining
that is antithematic with
the chriping and blowing and splashing
movement of the wild outside --
or maybe antitheological,
this noise.
Silence
is a harder music to grasp,
and in the grasping
we lose the melody.
Maybe rather it is a predator
and we the prey,
and it grabs ahold of us,
and that is why we run
like zebras from savannah lions,
the multitasking, gadgetry-stripes
our only noisy defense
against its viscous and furious fangs.
Because when silence sinks in,
the ego is defleshed,
self-importance shattered
like illusory smoke-and-mirrors,
the bones of independence and self-protection
that we have used to stand alone
crushed to bits of sharded waste.
This is what silence does,
this not-so-silent killer.
We must have it to save our souls
and not seek to save ourselves
from its violent intention
to bring us face-to-face
with the Wild, Wonderful Creator-God,
this heart of furious love,
and His still, small voice
that whispers through the noise
the highest music.
To hear it, we must have
silence.

-Brian Fidler

The (Bloody) Way of Love

God has brought something really affirming to me this morning. I can at times come so close to being taken out by the brokenness around me. I feel it like a tremor in my bones sometimes, particularly with those closest to me. I hold to redemption -- I'm alive by way of that great work of Jesus and for the sake of it for others is why I'm in counseling school now. I battle for others that the Kingdom may be won in their lives. But it still threatens me, the hurt of others. Over the last couple of weeks I've felt overwhelmed and exhausted. I'm not trying to "fix" anybody; I'm just desiring life in the deepest and most glorious sense for those I know (and for myself). But what Jesus brought to me is that I feel these quakes in my heart because of love. It is proof that my heart has been made and redeemed to love. It is the same suffering that Jesus experiences (Philippians 3:10).

But what I need to do with that now is to learn to stand in the face of it, to stand as a warrior even as I kneel as a servant. To desire life and freedom for others but continue to walk with Jesus wherever it is He's taking me. The offer and invitaiton for others is the same. "The direct experience of God is grace, indeed," said Ignatius of Loyola, "and basically, there is no one to whom it is refused." But the responsibility of following after Jesus rests on the shoulders of each person individually. I am to "seek life in the spirit of furious indifference to it," in the words of G.K. Chesterton, even for others. We each must "desire life like water and yet drink death like wine."

I have a close friend that's going through a profound change in his life -- or the possibility of change, at least. He is in a desperate place, a frightening one. Rock bottom, really. But, I don't think he's in such a foreign place as I would like him to be. I'd be comfortable if the seeming waste and debris of his life were because of a sin or God's wrath or Satan's strongholds. But I rather think he's where he is because of God's love, that the fierce love of God refuses to leave him where he is, and that He is even now unwraveling him from the thorns and brambles that he's got himself caught in. It's painful, and it's bloody, but it's also redemptive.

God waits to be wanted by us all. Having Him and having his Kingdom come through our lives and the ones we love will require all the violence of our "Viking" hearts in full-throttle (Matthew 11:12). To borrow from Robert Service in his poem The Law of the Yukon,

I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,
but by men with the hearts of Vikings, and the simple faith of a child.

Maybe the disillusioned ex-literary professor vagrant Harry Sagan in The Fisher King said it best in relating the story of the Fool and the Fisher King: "...One day, a fool wandered into the castle and found the king alone. Being a fool, he was simple-minded, he didn't see a king, he saw a man alone and in pain. And he asked the king: 'What ails you, friend?' The king replied: 'I'm thirsty. I need some water to cool my throat.' So the fool took a cup from beside the bed, filled it with water, handed it to the king. As the king began to drink he realized that his wound was healed. He looked at his hands, and there was the Holy Grail that which he sought all his life! And he turned to the fool and said in amazement: 'How could you find that which what my brightest and bravest could not?' And the fool replied: 'I don't know. I only knew that you were thirsty."

May we find our hearts and follow the bloody and "foolish" Way of Love.

Large With Strength

"When I called, you answered me; you made me bold with strength in my soul." -Psalm 138:3, NASB.

I opened the Scriptures this morning to this verse. Immediately I felt drawn -- no, not drawn -- pierced by something in it. What is it, exactly, that has speared me? Something about strength in the soul. Something about God answering and making something in me. I pull out the Message Bible to see if Eugene Peterson's paraphrase might capture it for me. "The moment I called out, you stepped in; you made my life large with strength." Large with strength. You made my life large with strength. Yes, this is it. I hear His voice through the Scripture. This is God's word for me, spoken intimately and from His heart to say, "This is what I am doing in your life, my son, my dear friend." I'm trying to decide which is more incredible for me: this secret that He let me in on or the fact that He is this desirous for my communion with Him. I love both.

This is what God is up to: enlarging our hearts and the rule and domain of Christ within us (where the Kingdom lies), that He might dwell more fully and presently there. In The Sacred Romance, John Eldredge writes, "As our soul grows in the love of God and journeys forth toward him, our heart’s capacities also grow and expand: 'Thou shalt enlarge my heart' (Ps. 119:32 KJV)." And Isaiah cries out: "Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes" (54:2).

That my "tent" (the sanctuary of the Spirit of God) may be enlarged, I pray along with George MacDonald:

O Christ, my life, possess me utterly.
Take me and make a little Christ of me.
If I am anything but thy Father's son,
'Tis something not yet from the darkness won.
Oh, give me light to live with open eyes.
Oh, give me life to hope above all skies.
Give me thy spirit to haunt the Father with my cries.

-from Diary of an Old Soul

The Power of the Church

A few months ago I attended an AA meeting as an exercise for a class. I went as an "observer," though my experience drew me to understand I was more than that. I wrote the following afterwards:

I wasn’t sure what to expect as I entered the room. I had just met one of the regulars to the recovery group outside. I’ll call him Tom, a man who seemed joyous, whose friendliness and genuine interest in others was contagious. A man who reeked of alcohol. That had been, he explained, his addiction of choice, and he spoke of it throughout the time in the past tense as if it were something he had beaten. His conviction was so compelling that at several points I found myself wondering if maybe I had taken a whiff of something else, maybe a hint of alcohol wafting on the air from some other source. Maybe it had been on his clothes or even on his skin. Could it do that? Could years of abuse with the stuff cause it to meld somehow into the skin so that years later other could still detect it, I found myself wondering. A worse thought came to mind. Maybe I had imagined it. Maybe I had expected it and my mind had created the smell for me. I was repulsed at the thought. Throughout the meeting, though, Tom’s stumbling and slurred speech confirmed for me that he had not yet found his freedom from the clutches of the disease as he had so passionately declared.

Tom’s declaration of complete freedom from his illness seemed an exception rather than the rule. For the others, the tug-of-war between freedom (and life as its fruit) and imprisonment (and death as a result) would become the kind-of mantra of the evening, the theme to the lives of each of members who came. Addiction for the majority of them was not something they had completely overcome, but rather they had braved the journey away from it, and “addict” was not an identity they were quick to shed, aware of their propensity to return to its lair when the temptation came. It seemed to be an ever-present reminder for them of their desperate need of grace and strength from Christ. Nowhere before had I encountered such an immediate and practical appreciation of the Apostle Paul’s impassioned intention to “boast about my weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:5) and his understanding that Christ’s strength was made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Two ladies greeted me as I entered the room, Jane and Cheryl. Jane was quick to tell me that she had been a heroin addict for twenty years of her life. Cheryl’s addiction had been alcohol, though she said she had tried a variety of recreational drugs as well. They had both been sober for some time, but returned weekly to these meetings as a way to remind themselves that they are only a puff or a bottle away from destruction and that they needed the fellowship with others who could empathize with their weakness as well as remain authentic enough with them to challenge any inflated sense that they had it all together.

I took my seat beside a man reading his Bible. He seemed young, maybe in his late thirties, though his eyes and face, his numerous tattoos and scars, defied his age and seemed full of old secrets and stories. He introduced himself as Brad, and I came to see very soon that he was the elected teacher for the group. Whether he had been elected by the group or by God to teach I was never sure, for he was amazingly knowledgeable of Scripture and handled the Word of Truth with deep wisdom and passion. He spoke of addiction in terms of both disease of body and disease of soul, of both the assault from the Evil One and the assault from the flesh within. And he spoke of the real design and result of any addiction: the stealing of peace and joy, the killing of the deep heart and soul, and the destruction of relationships and purpose.

I later learned that Brad had once been a pastor, though it was unclear whether or not it was before or since his battle with addiction. For the benefit of everyone in the room, he was quick to tell his story and detail both the horrors of his addiction as well as his battle for freedom from it. And he was not alone in his gut-level honesty. It had seemed perhaps a requirement for the group, a kind of unspoken rule, that there would be no posing or pretending, and that each one would have the freedom here – if only here in all of the world – to be real and to share in the naked tragedies of their addictions as well as the unabashed triumphs as they came.

How Tom’s pretending fit into all of that I was never sure. No one called him on his obvious use of alcohol that day. He had seemed comfortable to share his struggle, though always in the past tense. Perhaps that was another stipulation of the group: that each member was free to be where they were on the journey, without fear of judgment or manipulation, the group itself acting as a kind of safety zone, a reprieve from the weight of others’ eyes and prejudice. Maybe Tom had needed this more than anything else, and he had found it here.

Nearly an hour had gone by as Brad led the discussion on the topic of knowing God and obtaining freedom from the imprisonment of addiction when the counselor brought in a well-groomed middle-class-looking couple and introduced them around. They took their seats across from me. The woman was pretty, well-dressed, and young. The man was tall, handsome, and fit, looking more like he belonged on a golf course or a basketball league than in a recovery group. The look of embarrassment on his face betrayed his discomfort. It was obvious that his wife was in distress, as if she would burst into tears at any second. After the introductions, the leader of the group, Shawn, asked the man simply and directly, “Alcohol or drugs?” The question dropped at the man’s feet like a lead weight, and he remained motionless for a few seconds trying to figure out how to answer. I had a picture in my mind of a trapped animal running back and forth trying to find a way out. He found none, and quietly answered, “D-d-drugs.” It was enough to burst the dam of his wife’s pain, and tears poured from her eyes. The man explained that he had smoked pot for years, and had hidden his addiction from his wife since their wedding a year ago. Devastated, she felt not only the pain of his addiction but also the betrayal of his secrets. It was Shawn, I think, who then said pointedly, “You’re only as sick as the secrets you keep.” We spoke more as a group to the couple, and the wife was given room to cry and to tell a bit of the story.

The entire meeting lasted an hour and a half, and then everyone got up, prayed together, said goodbye, and left. The introductions, the conversation, the teaching, and even the farewell had all been very simplistic, non-manipulative, easy. The regulars seemed to genuinely care about one another, and yet there were no attachments, no dependence upon one another outside of the concern within the meeting. Each, it seemed, had their own lives to attend to, to rebuild, to work at. And all gave room for each one to be human, full of weakness as well as glory.

What struck me perhaps more than anything else was this notion of “addiction.” Why is it that, though I do not have and never have had addiction to drugs or alcohol, I felt very much a part of the members’ stories, their lives, their teaching. Sharing with them I realized that we all have our whores that we run after instead of our One True Lover. My favorite bedfellows of resignation, of cynicism and noble despair – these are no less potent than those of drugs and alcohol, no less defining, and no less deadly. The power of the recovery group laid in authenticity with one another and desperate dependence upon the rescuing and sustaining grace of Jesus. The power of the church lies in the same.

Interactive and Conversational

I was up last night praying through some things going on in my world. Not worried prayers, not praying with anxiety (which I can do pretty well at times), but more conversational, more "Lord God, I can't wait to find out how this works out." He led me to some amazing things in Scripture, all concerned with our actually having an interactive, conversational relationship with Him, where He speaks to us personally, actively, clearly, and may at times confirm or encourage but at other times directs specifically and expects our response back to Him, like the way Samuel conversed with God in 1 Samuel 16. God told him to go to Jesse's house in Bethlehem to anoint a new king over Israel. Afraid of Saul, Samuel doesn't immediately go , but asks God how he's supposed to leave with Saul on his back. He's not doubting God or distrusting Him. It actually is an incredible act of faith to interact with the Lord God and effectively say, "Okay, I'll do this, but how am I to proceed? I believe that you'll do this and that you're out for the success of it, so I want to be on board with it, too." So, God gives Samuel him a scheme: to take a heifer and say that he's going to go sacrifice for the Lord. And so he does it. That's pretty specific, you know? And it's scheming, I mean God doesn't tell him to lie, exactly, but God's directive never initially included anything about sacrificing to the Lord. He's leading Samuel to be as wise as a serpent and then he tells him how to proceed step-by-step to follow God, almost as if God is in front of him walking through a wood, across a creek maybe, and He looks back at his son following and says, "Place your foot right there on that rock. It's a bit wobbly, so be careful. And then on that bit of log -- careful, it's slippery, and then that last rock and then you're home free". I dunno. That's pretty awesome to me.

After reading that I just sat in my chair. It was late but I was too excited to sleep. Earlier I had asked God to let me rest, to help me sleep but "keep my heart awake" (Songs 5:2), but I couldn't. I was "swooning," in the words of John Bunyan. He wrote in "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners" that after reading of the reality of his new righteous life with God (no longer sinful as default, but rather made right and whole and good), "I thought that the glory of these words was then so weighty on me, that I was both once and twice ready to swoon as I sat, yet not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace."

Yup, same here.

"We stand within a community of the spoken to," says Willard. Whoa. I just... my heart beats wildly with that thought, with the experience of that. I can't believe (I can, but you understand the expression) that God would be that intimate with us and caring and desirous of interaction, of wrestling even, with what He says. I love this. I love this reality.

Reflecting or Deflecting?

"You are not one of his disciples, are you?" the girl at the door asked Peter. He replied, "I am not." "Didn't I see you with him…?” Again Peter denied it… (from John 18:17, 26-27)

When Peter denied Jesus, he was not only betraying his friend and Lord, he was betraying his own identity. For the last three years Peter had been walking with Jesus. Think of what a transforming life this had been for him: watching miracles and even taking part in them, hearing Jesus’ teachings, learning to pray and to love and to know God and to be known by God in a deeply personal way (remember that Jesus called him “the Rock”). To breathe the free air. To put it another way, he had become Jesus’ disciple, apprenticing himself after Him, learning of this new way of being in the world and of relating to God. The girl who approached Peter in the courtyard asked him whether or not he was one of Jesus’ disciples. His flat out denial betrayed his own identity. It effectively refuted all that he had learned and come to in the previous three years. All the life he had come to evaporated in that renunciation. He relinquished the new name God had given him. Turning from Jesus, he also turned from his own honor, his integrity, his character, his uniqueness, his seity. His own individuality God had given him.

This, of course, was nothing new for Jesus. Moses had done something similar after Mount Sinai. God had, per his request, shown him His glory. He had passed by him, and the experience left Moses's face shining, his whole body and spirit radiant, alive, awake, alert, aroused. It may have been a bit like a man just coming from a sexual experience with his beloved, his face and lips flush, his eyes open wide, his breathing heavy. Moses was beaming, gleaming, blazing, resplendent, like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion (Psalm 19:5). He then carried down the stone tablets and was unaware that his face was radiant like this. And he scared the people to death.

"When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the LORD. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant, and they were afraid to come near him..." (from Exodus 33:29-30).

Even Aaron was terrified. And so you know what Moses did? He hid his face. He intimidated the Israelites by his having been so intimate with the Lord, and it must have frightened and embarrassed Moses, and so he hid it. By hiding himself, he hid the glory from the people that most needed it. He shrunk back and hid his association with the Lord God, just like Peter.

Nelson Mandela could have been speaking to the both of them when he said that “your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.”

He could have been speaking to me, too. “We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us,” Mandela continues.

Oh, yeah? We were? I suppose His glory is the gift He has given to his closest friends throughout history, a gift that He gives to us still. Recently my wife and I spent time with a local community of believers where we were asked to share something personal that God seems to be up to in our lives. I shrank back. I spoke, but only superficially, a rock skipping off the surface rather than going to the depths. Why? Because I think I am embarrassed of my place with God, of His intimacy with me. Perhaps I hide because I am in disbelief that He would have me in this way, fuddled and bashful that anyone would notice that I’ve just been with the Lord God, and afraid that others would reject me for it out of fear and intimidation.

But that is not letting my light shine, as Jesus asked that I do.

“. . . And as we let our own light shine,” says Mandela, “we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Holy Shift

Something has shifted in my heart this morning, an important shift, toward hope. It was brought on by several things that ultimately brought me again to the realization that I am in process, that I've only barely begun. There is so much more for me -- more of everything God wants to do, came to do. I'm not done yet -- and God is not done with me! The full presence and reality of Christ is still being formed in me. "Until Christ is formed in you" is I think how the Scriptures have it (Galatians 4:19).

The heaviness of the fall evident in peoples' lives -- people I know and love as well as my own-- can be an unbearable weight at times. The despair had thickened like a dense fog settling in, hopelessness like thorns underfoot. But it's lifting today. Oh, praise God. Jesus has reversed the curse and the effects of it, truly He has, by His work in redemption, in His obedience even unto His own death. In His resurrection. In His authority. And He is in me. In Him, we have victory! It's really true!

And so now it is trust that counts, that and obedience. To really put my confidence in the entire person and God of Christ -- Creator, Redeemer, Master, Teacher, Captain, Healer, Counselor, Loving and Living One, all of that -- to really put confident trust in the full and entire identity of Jesus, then I am saved from the thorny snag of hopelenssness and the blinding disorientation of despair. Jesus crafts a crown from the thorns, destroying in ultimate finality the effects of sin and the fall against me, against us all. The fog lifts, a fresh wind clears the air today. As The Message has it,

With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is
resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have
to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in
operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has
magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal
tyranny at the hands of sin and death. (Romans 8:1-2)

At lunch I was drawn to sit alone in a quiet corner of a local McDonald's with my iPod, to actively engage in solitude with God, to worship and to journal. A song by Jeremy Camp was playing, called This Man. The lyrics capture the invitation I am offered through the work of Jesus for me: "And the veil was torn so we could have this open door. And all these things have finally been complete." All these things of reconciliation to God (2 Corinthians 5:18), of disarming of the foul powers (Colossians 2:15), and of restoring us back to His image (Colossians 3:10). We now have only to "embrace what God does for you" (see Romans 12:1-2, especially in The Message).

Covered in Dust

He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

-Psalm 91:1

The Jews have a blessing they give to one another that says something to the effect of "May you get dusty by walking with your Rabbi." The thought is that you would walk so closely behind your teacher that you would get covered in the dust left by his steps. I think this is the place we are called to still, and I think this is what we as lovers and prophets of God are to do: to walk so closely with Jesus that we are hidden in His shadow. It sounds like a pretty intimate adventure with Him.

That seems to be what He is continually inviting me into when I wake. He turns and asks, "What is it you want?"

What is it I want? Is he serious? Are you ready for this, Teacher? Here goes... I am fractured; I want repaired. I am a ruin of what I was meant to be; I restored back into it. I am ash; I want to be all flame again. I am impotent of love and ignorant of life. I have lost the story, forgotten my role, made my bed in the depths of hell and opened my sheets to demons that have raped and plundered and stolen. I want found and healed, my wounds dressed by leaves from the tree of life. I want sheltered. I want to remember my true name – Sought After (Isaiah 62:12). The Pursued. The Found. The Son Who Returned Home. And I want more than this. I want character of heart – nobility and honor and dignity and strength. I want the new to be greater than the old could ever hope to become. I want to be dressed in white, purified as if I had never been a whore. No, more. Purified so that my having been a whore is not a shame or a burden, but what brings great glory to the Holy One who chose me, sought me out, ransomed me, and brought me to his side. I want to know this God like I have known no one in my life. I want to work alongside him as a comrade-in-arms, a friend, a fellow warrior in battle, a lover and a be-loved. I want his friends to be my friends. I want all of this. I want restored.

All of this swirls in my tired head, wearied of all hoping and striving toward this end. And then I see this One who asks the question, this One who seems to know all of this in me, and looking into His eyes as they pierce me I am brought to my knees in the agonizing hope that He might be the answer to all this biting and burning desire. I grasp for an answer, but my response is a stuttering and stammering and stupid reply, "Uh, wh- whe- where are you staying, Teacher?" If only I could be with Him, just be near to Him. I must.

He only smiles, his heart swelling with joy that He has caught my whole attention and with anticipation of what He has yet to show me. His reply is the invitation into Mystery and a life "that is the business of life," as George MacDonald put it. He says only, "Come, and I will show you." (See John 1:35-39).

And I am covered in his dust.

Jehovah Rafa - God the Healer

"Christ was sent into the world to heal the broken hearted. " -D.L. Moody

"On hearing this, Jesus said to them, 'It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.'" -Mark 2:17

So many we know are hurt, so many ill, so many torn to shreds by the affect of the Fall, by sin, by the work of the Evil One. We are a fractured people, all of us. We are all of us the broken-hearted, in need of healing.

But the modern approach to healing (since the era of "modernity") is to try to fix only the outer shell. It's like taking a truck that's been totaled to an autobody place. They may be able to fix the external body for awhile, but the engine (the heart) and the frame (the soul) may remain a wreck. Eventually, the truck will be back in due to more damage. The bent frame will force it back into the ditch, or the damaged engine may throw a piston through the hood. Or, the outer shell will be unfixable because the frame or engine is protruding out of the truck and it will be deemed "terminal." "There's nothing more we can do." The thought of opening the hood and dealing with core structure of the frame doesn't even enter their minds.

The church, instead of being "central to the world and the world peripheral to the church," has taken on this incomplete reality and has largely approached people in the same way in our era, seeing them mostly as body only and not recognized, not really, not in practice, the soul or heart. That is why therapy and psychological sciences have only been around for the past 150 years or so. Before then, the church largely took care of the soul. For all his loony-ness, Freud at least recognized a gaping hole in the culture's ontology and began dealing with the unseen, deeper reality of the soul (what he termed the "subconscious" and mostly misunderstood and misrepresented, but at least tried to recognize.)

We now have the "medical models" in the healing professions that seek to diagnose a "disorder" and seek to fix it, typically through medication. It's a product of our culture, really. We are used to television shows that wrap up in an hour, to microwavable meals that are ready to eat in 2 minutes, to quick-drying glue and instant messages and packages that arrive to us expediently. The thought of an involved process is not new, but it is neither desired. And why is that?

To speak of process is really to speak of a journey, and in terms of the healing of our souls, it is a lifelong process. It is a journey, really, of becoming. Becoming whole, becoming holy. Jesus has provided us all we need for this life and all we need to become fully healed and fully whole, just like Jesus is (Philippians 4:19).

That is why the labels we use to identify "disorders" and those with them are so often unhelpful and even harmful. "He is bipolar." "She has attention deficit disorder." For one, it implies that the treatment must call for the use of drugs, which implies that the problem is biological. Second, it sets the person with the condition like a post is set is concrete -- it solidifies the two together, making it rather hopeless for the one with the problem. Usually their best hope is to find a medication that will "work" for them to "fix the problem." But the real problem is that the problem is not usually resolved, and the deeper issues of the heart not addressed, brought up, and exposed to the Light of day so that God may bring healing and wholeness to that person. The condition you see is always, always, a symptom of a broken heart due to the fallen world, sin, the work of the Evil One, or a combination of the three, which is usually the case.

I am taking a graduate-level psychopathology class in which we study the various mental disorders that are detailed in the DSM-IV, the psychiatrist's handbook and bible. I need to know the labels and the disorders listed here simply because it's the terminology that's used and so many have been diagnosed with these various illnesses. And make no mistake, these problems are real, for sure. It is what we do with them, how we go about discovering the real problems and treating them that is lacking.

I promise you, attention deficit disorder is not the core issue. It never is. I know of a high school student who has been on Ritalin since he was 5 years old. Why? Because his mom is a single mother, trying her hardest to balance full-time work with being the full-time and only parent for her children. He was an active child, a creative one. The quick fix? Put him on medication that slows him down, keeps him calm, keeps him controlled. A pseudo-parent. He is now 17 years old and has no idea how to be a man, no idea what to do with the manly and creative energy and passion of his heart. Not only is he broken-hearted -- no doubt due in part to the absence of a father in his life and now to the reality that there is no man around to lead him into true godly masculinity and manhood -- he has doctors and other adults around him telling him that his real problem is that he is too active, too "onery" and wild. Too wild?! But he is a young man! Wildness is his very nature! That is being medicated out of him, all the while the wounds go unaddressed and untreated.

Psychopathology is another way of talking about psychological abnormalities. But what is "normal," anyway? Seriously. Conformity to a standard? What standard? What one culture defines as normal is viewed as outside the range of the average acceptable behavior by another. It seems to be culturally defined. Jesus definitely did not fit what the culture of the time viewed as "normal." For this, he was misunderstood, rejected, thought to be "out of his mind" (Mark 3:21), and of course eventually crucified. In our day, he probably would have been diagnosed with disassociative identity disorder, fancying Himself to be Immanuel and all. He would have been placed in an asylum, given electroshock treatments, and dosed up on high amounts of reality-altering drugs.

But "normal" is not so relative as we would like to think. A friend of mine had a brilliant definition to the term. He said "Normal is the image of God displayed in His people." The "standard" of confirmity is to His image! Jesus, as the "image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15), is the ultimate standard and definition of "normal"! He is the one we are to become like. It is His image we are to bear. It is His image, His heart, His attributes, that we are growing by grace to inherit, to express, to extend even unto "the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8). We are on a journey to becoming like God. We are being "fully trained" (Luke 6:40) in righteousness, which is to say, in full living (John 10:10). He is showing us the Way.

Do you see how that definition of normality is so hopeful? It is because all the ways we are abnormal, all the ways in which we miss the mark, are redeemable. The healing and restoration of the broken places of our hearts is the very mission of this Intimate Savior (Luke 19:10; Isaiah 61:1). If I have problems that point toward something like attention deficit, maybe it is because I have lacked a father in my life. Well, let me be introduced to the Father of all fathers! If I have issues that relate to obsessive-compulsive disorder, let the deep waters of my heart be explored, the broken pieces found and set back together, that I may become "whole and holy" by the love of God (Ephesians 1:3, The Message).

I am not trivializing the problems we face or trying to over-simplify them. They can be horrific and quite complicated. I'm actually recognizing them as much deeper and tragic than what we typically believe. We will not be able to treat them without the Healer Himself, the One who has come that we might have life to the full. Nor am I saying that medicine is a bad treatment option for some "mental" disorders (are they not "heart" disorders?). I am saying that it is not enough, and it never will be. The deep ministry of Jesus to our hearts is a grace, a gift. The Spirit that we are given is a Counselor, and He has come to stay. God must think that we need a lot of therapy. How great it is He has come (John 16:7). And how great it is God has given us men and women with compassionate insight and godly wisdom (Proverbs 20:5) that through their help as well we might discover and bring to light the lost and broken places of our hearts, that they might be fully healed, made whole, and set free.

Too Close for Comfort

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

-Psalm 8:1, 3-4

Can you imagine what the enormous black sky, peppered with a million bursts of light, must have looked like to David as he peered into it? No other lights to compete with its glory. No light pollution to drown out its splendor. The only noises those of midnight bugs and bats and prairie animals. He is overcome as he beholds its magnificence. His heart explodes with wonder as he ponders it all. Its vastness. Its beauty. That God had time and creativity and enormity enough to create it all – not just once upon a time, but this night, right then where David was. Unique. Never again would he behold it exactly as it was then. Everything would move. All would be different the next evening as God set out again to lavish his universe with His creative passion, expressing Himself to his children, pursuing their hearts. David got it. In this moment, he was captured by this God-of-Love. He recognized God’s pursuit and wooing, and collapsed into it.

“What is man that you are mindful of him?” he asks as his jaw drops and his breath stops in his throat. “How could you even have time for man?” his heart wonders. And yet… And yet… God not only had time for David, but he did it all for him, to have his heart.

But for our modern, sophisticated, educated minds it is too much to think that God would create such a lavish universe just for us. Sadly, we come up with anything we can to distance ourselves from His passion: scientific reasoning to explain away His creations, stuffy academic postulations to push back His passion; equations and formulations to eradicate His desire. Explain it away. Keep our distance. We are "enlightened" to learn that the earth is not the center of the universe at all and translate it to mean that we are not the center of God's heart or longing or the point of His creation. We become insignificant specks of particles on an insignificant planet held in place by the awesome force of gravitation (not the power of God Himself) in an insignificant corner of one of a limitless number of universes. To translate, it means that we have become not the center of a cosmic battle, an invasion, a rescue, a Redemption, but meaningless and pointless accidents in a sea of atoms and subatomic particles.

We come up with our scientific posits because the Reality is too much to bear, much like those in C.S. Lewis's The Weight of Glory who cannot bear to walk upon the grasses of heaven as they are because the blades are so substantive, and they only shadowy wraiths, that they puncture their feet and cause great pain. They are unwilling to grow in their soul-substance by standing in the blinding light of the unbearable glory. We rearrange the order of the Psalm to read not "what is man that God is mindful of him," but "what is God that man is mindful of him?"

I understand. I do the same thing. I often wake and rush off to my checklist of things to do rather than stand or kneel in the Presence of the Creator. I dabble in distraction rather than confide or be confided in by this Friend (see Psalm 25:14), to know His deep heart. I work to secure my place in the world and with the people around me rather than revere the Lord God (revere = adore, applaud, treasure, worship, wonder at, fall for, cherish, embrace, cleave to, enjoy, desire, grab a hold of, run after). I suspect we all do this. The disciples did. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John witnessed the astounding glory of Jesus revealed. Jesus took off his veil, so-to-speak, and Moses and Elijah were there, too, in their full glory. Peter and the other two were terrified and fell face down on the ground. Peter told Jesus that they could erect three shelters, one each for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses (Matthew 17:4). Tents, in other words. Tabernacles. Something to hide their blinding glory from the three disciples. It was too much for them. God honored their fear and sent a cloud to veil the glory from them. He will, it seems, only give us as much of Himself as we can bear.

But what happens when we pause and really consider even the work of creation? Spend half an hour doing nothing at all except staring out into the starry night. Don’t try to discover the constellations or name the objects you see; just let yourself be pierced. What do we discover when we do? That God is glorious. Copernicus gave us the heliocentric model of the solar system, that is, that the sun is the center and we orbit around it. We took that to mean that we were not the center of anything at all. That is where we got it wrong. Deadly wrong.

We are the center of more than we think.

Why would the earth need to “tremble before Him” (Psalm 96:9)? Why would “the heavens rejoice” and the “fields be jubilant” and the “trees of the forest sing for joy” (v. 11 & 12, 1 Chronicles 16:33)? Because the Lord “comes to judge… the peoples in his truth.” Or, in the words of Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase, “He comes to set everything right on earth.” Because of His redemption and rescue of His people… because He has set His heart on bringing us home (see Isaiah 44:23). Everything that God does is to bring us back to Himself (see Ecclesiastes 3:14).

God has made us for Himself. Adam and Eve lived in glorious union with God. But God’s enemy and ours came and stole God’s love from Him. Adam and Even fell from grace – that is, they fell from God. And now, a cosmic battle has ensued in which God has come with fierce intention to free us back for Himself. We are the center of a great cosmic battle. All of the earth is to shout to God with joy, you see, because He is powerful enough to cause His enemies to “cringe before Him” (Psalm 66:3) and to win us back from them. He is not only a restless Lover in pursuit of the bride that His enemy took from Him (that’s us), but He is also a Warrior with enough courage and power and strength to win us back. He will find us. He will win us. He will have us. Jesus coming, dying, and rising again has proven that much.

What is man that God is mindful of Him? Man is in fact God’s whole desire. His whole heart is bent on us. On you and me. Intimacy and communion and the adventure of His love is the whole purpose of God for us. That is the purpose for which we have been called (Romans 8:28).

God will give us as much of Himself as we will allow. Jesus is the glory of God fully revealed to us (Colossians 1:15). Through Him we can approach even God's throne with confidence and boldness, without fear or hesitation or reserve (Hebrews 4:16). We can come back to our Lover. We can come back home. This is the invitation of God to us through Jesus. This is our place. This is the beginning of our life -- the adventure of walking with God.

Psalm 23, Refurbished

Psalm 23, paraphrased by Dena Dyer:



The Lord is my shepherd—
In the midst of the war on drugs,
the war on terrorism,
and the spiritual warfare in my soul.
I shall not want—
with him as my Savior and provider,
I'm perfectly content.
While others strive for and worry about
a bigger house, a newer car, designer clothes and jewels,
I will rest in my calling and purpose—
knowing God and making him known
in this hurting, harried world.

He leads me beside still waters—
Cool, clear streams of peace
in the midst of orange alerts, space shuttle disasters, stock market fluctuations,
and baggage inspections.
When emotional baggage threatens my sanity,
he renews my mind.
When grief and despair descend,
he heals my heart.
When doubts and fears assail my tranquility,
he restores my soul.

Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death—
filled with threats of biological and chemical warfare,
nuclear bombs and ghosts of past regrets—
I will fear no evil.
Not AIDS, or smallpox,
not child abductors or doomsayers.
Thou art with me—
even when I feel alone in a crowd.

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me—
especially when I read the paper or watch the news.
(Why do I read or watch? I know the ending!)
Thou anointest my head with oil—
the oil of gladness and peace,
with a calling to be
light and joy in a dark, fear-filled world.
Help me to be a peace-full, grace-full person, Lord,
in the midst of a chaotic world.

Truly, my cup runneth over.
You have blessed me so much!
I have friends and family who love me,
a warm bed, freedom, grace, (more than) enough food,
and a fulfilling purpose.

Surely goodness and mercy—
your grace, love, forgiveness and compassion—
shall follow me all the days of my life.
Every second, every minute, you are before and
behind me, with your arms of love outstretched.

And one day—when all wars and pain,
terror and shame
will come to an end . . . (Come quickly, Lord Jesus!)
I will dwell in the house of the Lord,
your glorious kingdom,
where you've prepared an eternal home for me.

I'm Just Me

Lately I've been feeling a bit... small. Misunderstood. Grumpy. Irritable. Far from use in the Kingdom. I wrote the following as an exercise some time back when I was in a similar place. I'm posting it now so I can bring it up often in these days of myopia and reread it until the light of the truth of God's love of and call for me blind me from myself and give me clearer vision again of the life offered me. The life I, on my best days, find myself even now walking in. The life that extends into eternity and finds its source in Jesus Himself. Here's the confession and the promise...

And I'm just me. I'm not a spiritual giant. I have no special real estate on God. I'm often irritable, grumpy, and unloving toward others. Mostly because I often fail to fall into the wild, crazy, furious love of God in the face of Christ who has come so far in pursuit of me. But even that doesn't keep me from His love. I'm not always passionate in seeking after God - often lukewarm and displeptic. I don't spell everything correctly. I sometimes don't make sense when I talk. I get confused, weary, jaded, and cynical. My teeth aren't as white as I want them to be. I am skinny and not well-built. I can be exceptionally lazy. I tend to whine and complain when comforts I feel I deserve somehow pass me by. My mind can be a haze of jaded and cynical thoughts, usually resulting in biting judgementalism toward others. I can lie and steal and hate. But somewhere, down beneath all this that makes me a broken and fallen human being, deep within my core, dwells the Living God, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and End, who, in all His annoyingly and life-giving persistent love makes all things new. He heals and restores and rescues and brings life again. Even in me. One day I will be like Him. But that hasn't yet been revealed. I’m on my way, but I haven't made it yet. Not yet. But it’s coming. And one day He will take my hand, and pull me up, and all that I once feared that wouldn’t happen and dreaded that would will melt away and all these illusions I’ve held to will fade into the eyes of my God as I peer into His glory. A glory even I will share in. A glory generously poured out for me, so that I will know life. And in these days between now and then, I get to participate in that Something Big. I get to love like He loves. I get His eyes when He wipes mine with mud. I get to live big and live free because, even though I am so far from perfect, I am His. Forever. Promised. Sealed. Delivered. I get to know God and let that be my greatest and truest desire. Whom have I in heaven but Him, and what else could I desire here? And when all is said and done, that’s all I’ll be able to hold to anyway. And that’s so much that I won’t have room to hold onto anything else. Amen, and come, Lord Jesus.

A Confession and a Plea

There’s a lot that I need to process, to unpack, to bring up into conversation with God. Some of it I already have. Some He has brought up with me. Some I have faced through unavoidable circumstances, reminding me of what Frederick Buechner said about God speaking to us through the daily events of our lives. But now, I’m not even quite sure where to begin.

Maybe this is the best place to start… Jesus, what… where do we go? What do you want to speak to me? What do I need to hear?

Richard Foster says that we should pray about whatever it is we and God are doing together. And so it’s here that I have a confession. I’ve bought into the subtle notion that there’s not a whole lot Jesus is doing here, with me, in and with and through my life and marriage and home, that the real work of God is out there somewhere in major ministries and movements. Of course, that flies in the face of Paul’s revelation that we are to be conformed to the image of Christ, “predestined” – destined! – to that end. That’s our destiny. More that that, it goes against the very present reality and promise of the Evangel, that God is here, engaged, inviting me to live life, and live it large. Not meaning to go out there somewhere, but to “come,” to be home with Him, to pursue and seek Him, to learn the new language of the New Way, to be conformed to His image and transformed into His likeness – by His grace and to His glory.

I’ve been seeking the Lord God on a particular decision, needing so much to hear Him say to go either this way or that, and I’ve been frustrated and angry for not being able to hear Him speak. Is He silent on the matter? Am I unable to hear Him? Is there too much warfare or noise pollution around me? In the midst of these looming questions, my wife broke in with a brilliant thought last night: “Maybe you’re asking the wrong question. Maybe God doesn’t want you to ask which way to go, but rather what His heart is for you.” The implication is, of course, that His heart for me is where He wants me to go. It leads me to the freedom to follow Him wherever it is He’s going.

And so I need to hear from you, Father, not about next month or the one after that. Not even about tomorrow. I need to hear Your heart for me. I need to lean close to hear Your heartbeat. Help me hear You. I am Your sheep, and I hear your voice. I am Your servant and son. What’s more, I am Your friend in whom You confide. Reveal to me what You are doing and what Your desire is. Reveal Your heart for me. Show me the way, Jesus.

Amen.

Welcome Home!

When it's all said and done, I'll stand before the Living God and He'll ask me, "Did we know each other?" When that's asked of me, I want there to be a glean in His eye, and a widening grin come across his face before we both burst out laughing, He runs to me and knocks me down with a tackle-hug, looks me square into my eyes with that soul-piercing, all-knowing, all-loving intensity of His, and says (barely, before He starts laughing again so hard He can hardly get it out), "Welcome Home, my dear friend. Welcome Home! Come, enter into the joy of the Kingdom with us."

And then life, real and full, will begin...

Read more in Yet To Be Revealed

The Stormy-Hearted

The sea is never still; it pounds on the shore, restless as a young heart,
hunting. The sea speaks, and only the stormy heart knows what it says.
-Carl Sandburg

The community Jesus has invited us into as we share fellowship is the company of stormy-hearted ones, who have set their faces toward the Wind. The sun sets past some distant land, and the haze and glow of twilight settles first over the mast, and then the trim, and then our faces. The rope that once rested in our hands, with one end tied firmly to the dock, floats now on the restless sea. We have let go, deciding to let the breeze that's kicked up this evening give its all into these sheets. The wind of God's passion for us has taken us out onto the High Seas. We have set sail away from predictable, "responsible," organized, sanitized beliefs and lives, pushed out into deep waters, because we are ready to walk humbly with our Lord. We are ready to push toward and pursue others' hearts, just for the sake of their hearts, for freedom, and because we know they are worth it and they matter, because we matter and have mattered to God and we really believe and set our hope in that.

We have decided to trust in this wild, unfettered, unflinching, humiliating kind of love and model our lives after it. We are ready to move with the Spirit of Christ -- to be motivated, to be changed, to be daring enough to live in freedom and bold enough to believe it for others even when they can't believe it for themselves and love even if it doesn't immediately change things and to be meek enough to rejoice in inheriting something great from the Kingdom... maybe even, maybe even Christ Himself. And maybe, just maybe He is after all our hearts' greatest desire, underneath everything else. Maybe He really is our hearts' true home, the Lifter of our Heads, the Joy of our Salvation.

This kind of believe can be hard -- hard enough to take all the guts and violent faith within our hearts. The Kingdom advances by these violent and stormy hearts of ours.

Fathered

A week ago a friend and I canoed a portion of the Buffalo in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. One of the few remaining rivers in the lower 48 without dams, it snakes its way through the wilderness, buffeted on its sides by massive vertical limestone bluffs. Riding atop its waters is like something out of an epic tale – The Mission, maybe, or Lord of the Rings, with its strong currents, its green-and-blue glass-water pools, its quick turns and deep forests flanking its beaches. It’s a compelling beauty.

Usually.

We chose to go on this particular day because the waters were up, and the trip promised to be more demanding of us. We would barter leisure for the adventure of stronger currents and swifter waters – an opportunity for us to roll up our sleeves and be challenged a bit against the claim the Buffalo has on this land. Sometimes we need to be overtaken by beauty, to let it reach us and fill us with wonder and awe. And there are other times when we need to struggle and subdue physically as a way, perhaps, to wrestle with and prevail over something within. Passivity. Comfort. Safety. Ennui. Indifference. Dispassion.

We had checked the weather before we left. It would not be a hot day, or a sunny one, but overcast. A front was moving in, but was still far enough away that we felt like we could beat the thunderstorm coming on its heels.

We were wrong.

Very wrong.

In fact, we were barely a mile into our 9-mile excursion when the rain came. It was at first almost nice, refreshing. But within the hour the heavens opened and we found ourselves in a monsoon, at times so thick we could barely see in front of us. The blast of thunder reverberated and replied against the bluffs and cliffs. Other canoers had beached and were waiting it out under canopies and cliffs, but we continued on. Paddling hard, strategizing our way on the rougher waters as well as we could in limited visibility, we finished the course in just over two hours, cold and soaked to the bone, battered by the wind and rain, racked with aching and tired muscles, and feeling very much alive. We couldn’t have been happier with our journey. Something in us felt… stronger. I think you could say we felt honored, even, to have had the chance to battle with the wilds of the river and weather. And to be defeated by it.

And I knew that this is so much what God is up to in our lives. This is what He had planned for us that day, to be tested and called out of our safety and comfort into the wilds of His passion and life. To come alive as men.

Robert W. Service in his poem Law of the Yukon gave voice to the Canadian wilderness, to its demand of those who would brave its earth and rock.

This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:
"Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane --
Strong for the red rage of battle; sane for I harry them sore;
Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core;
Swift as the panther in triumph, fierce as the bear in defeat,
Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat…
Them will I take to my bosom, them will I call my sons;
Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with my meat…

The same could be said of the Father’s intention for his sons and, dare I say it, for his daughters. When Job speaks of this in 23:10, he says “when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.” In other words, God will prove him true. It was what God was about in Job’s life, and it is what He is doing in our own: giving us the dignity and honor of a place with Him. He knows who we are, and who we are to become, and He is ruthless in bringing that out in us. We will, indeed, come forth as gold.

It was over soda the evening of the trip that I asked another friend, “What would you do if men that you loved and respected showed up at your door one day and said, ‘Get your clothes packed and come with us. We have something planned for you,’ and then they just turned and waited for you. You had no idea where you were going, but you trusted these men. You went with them to find out that they had planned something very specific for your training and for your initiation. You didn’t pay for it; it wasn’t like going to a retreat where others were receiving the same thing. It was for you, personally. You knew for certain that their only motive was one of belief and anticipation and gut-level courage; believe in who you are and are to become, anticipation to see it fulfilled, and the guts to pursue your heart and speak into your life with theirs to make it happen. What would you do with that?”

Because, you see, that is a picture of fathering, of invitation into manhood, of a fellowship born not only out of “nurturing” friendships as brothers, but also look-you-in-the-eyes recognition of your truer name and identity by those in some way gifted with the wisdom and sacrificial love to help take you there, by fathers.

We live so much in a fatherless culture, and so this sounds foreign to our ears, strange even.* The mystery of initiation is something the systems of this world, in cooperation with and under the influence of the Evil One, has all but destroyed. But it is needed… at any age. 10. 14. 25. 36. 49. 62. 77. 88. We need to be fathered like this, and we need to know what this means. How, if we do not experience fathering, can we know who a father is to be, and if we do not know who a father is to be – our Father – then how are we to know who we are to be as sons and daughters? The entire rich tradition of father-son language and expression in the entire Bible becomes, then, cute, cuddly, nice, a happy illustration in a Sunday sermon. It remains only a metaphor, but never becomes reality.

Nothing that Jesus ever said was or is to remain a metaphor. “Heal the lame,” he preached – and then He did it. “I am the Son of God,” he proclaimed – and he was born of his Father’s life into a woman. “Seek me, and I will show you great and unsearchable things that you do not know.” And then He does. In Him, all things exist, as rock-hard reality (Romans 11:36).

I think the Father is up to this more than we may realize in our lives, this very intentional and pseudo-self-destroying, poser-shattering pursuit, this look-you-in-the-eye engagement in which He refuses to treat us as anything less than His sons and daughters – children that are less and less still suckling the breast and more and more tearing the meat off the bone; who less and less crawl and wriggle and more and more stand tall, walk upright, and run without growing weary; who less and less cry and demand and pout but more and more gather our growing strength to work alongside our Father and enjoy with Him the fruits of our labor. Men and women girt for combat and grit to the core. We are growing to inherit this Kingdom, where all is ordered by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and where life to the full – the lush greens of the field, our lungs bursting with free air and the fresh fruits bursting from the vine, and the laughter and joy of shared intimacy and the adventure of it all beyond our wildest imaginings – is ours not by right but by spoils, by victory, and the winning of this life by battle has made it all the more glorious because now we know beyond any and all shadow of doubt how great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called sons and daughters of God (1 John 3:1).

And I think that as we grow up in Him we are to turn toward one another and offer the same invitation – not an invitation to simply repeat a prayer or to walk the aisle and confess your sin through shameful tears, but an invitation to become the men and women we have been destined to become, won for us through Jesus. Beyond repentance into genuine, steady growth by the disciplines of a loving Father (Proverbs 3:12) and by others maturing in their journeys to the point that they can offer to the less mature something of wisdom and counsel and, believing enough in the treasure that Jesus came to rescue and free, recognize the weight of love and desire and delight the Father has for His sons and daughters (Proverbs 6:20) and go after others’ hearts in this way – seek them out, pursue them, give themselves for others as Jesus does and lead them into.

I think the Father is raising us up into that – fathering us and teaching us to naturally father others. We are not alone, for certainly He is our teacher in it all. And He is also our example. This is what it means to love, because He loved us this way (1 John 4:19). And this is how we know what it is to be brothers as well as fathers, brothers who stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the journey and back-to-back in the battle (Hebrews 2:17).

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless,” says James, is “to look after orphans and widows” (1:27), those left after fathers and husbands have gone. Those remaining after fathers and husbands have been taken out through war and disease and the cancers of this world. My friends, that describes us all. We are all in need of real men who can lead us to become fathers and husbands again. If we are to practice the “pure religion” that God recognizes as right and if we are to grow to become men and women ourselves, friends of God for whom He can entrust the keys of the Kingdom, we need to be led there.

It is for hope of this that we remain authentic with and true before God (1 John 3:3).

In The Man Watching, Russian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names…
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us…
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

That day on the river God was out to decisively defeat us, and we came away “proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand,” as Rilke goes on to say.

The Father is raising us as sons. “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons... Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. ‘Make level paths for your feet,’ so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.” -Hebrews 12:7, 12-13

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*In “Healing the Masculine Soul,” Gordon Dalbey tells the story of a common initiation rite for a boy living in Nigeria. To our mostly Western ears it sounds uncivilized, something our advanced culture has moved beyond. But notice the efforts of nearly every religious group to in some way offer what was missed through initiation (the process of growing up). Learning from a father what it means to be a father has been replaced by books full of parenting tips. How we “do” the spiritual life, too, has largely been cataloged and chronicled as a set of steps and procedures, mainly because we have so few who can lead us by experience, example, and wisdom. We have few fathers. Biblical stories will only make sense if we see them as one generation passing down something crucial to the next, an older to a younger, even (and especially) God to his friends, to those He wants to relate to face-to-face (gasp, heretical!).

Here is the account from Dalbey:

“In the rural village where the son lived, the father, who often has several wives, lives by himself in his own hut, while his wives each have their own hut nearby. A boy lives with his mother until he reaches the proper age, usually about eleven. Then, one evening the village elders and the boy’s father appear outside the mother’s hut, together with a drummer and a man wearing a large mask over his head. The word for ‘mask’ is the same as that for ‘spirit”; so as the masked man steps out first from among the men both to call the boy out and to usher him from the mother to the men, the spiritual dimension of manhood is understood from the outset as primary and essential.

At the signal of a sharp drumbeat, the mask/spirit approaches the mother’s door, dancing and shouting, “Come out! Come out! After several retreats and then thrusting forth to announce his presence and intention, the mask/spirit rushes the mother’s door and beats upon it loudly: Bam! Bam! Bam! “Come out! Son of our people, come out!”

Eventually – perhaps after two or three such “approaches” by the mask/spirit – the mother opens the door tentatively, shielding her son behind her. At this the elders and the father join in the chant: “Come out, son of our people, come out!” Significantly, the mask/spirit does not enter the mother’s hut to seize the boy, but rather waits for him to step out on his own from behind his mother. Louder the elders chant, sharper the drum beats sound, more feverishly the mask/spirit dances, and more firmly the mother protests – until finally, she steps aside. It is the moment of truth for every boy in the village.

Standing there before the threshold of his mothers’ house, he hesitates. Beside and behind him holds all that is tender and reassuring and known and secure. Before him, and within him, cries out all that is mysterious and sharp, and true. “Come out!” the men shout. Hesitantly, wanting but not daring to look at his mother, the boy steps forth from the dark womb of his mother’s hut into the outside – born again, this time the child of the father. At once the mask/spirit seizes his wrist and rushes him over to the father and the elders – lest in his fear he have second thoughts – where he is joined with the other boys called out for that year’s initiation. Behind him, a wail of mourning breaks forth from his mother; the men around him burst into a victory shout. The drummer picks up the sharp and decisive beat, and the group moves on to the next boy’s hut. Once gathered, the group of boys is led out of the village to a special place in the forest, where they are instructed for the next two weeks. Manly skills from thatch roof construction to hunting are taught first. Then the boy enters into a period of fasting for several days, thus turning the focus from physical satisfaction to spiritual discipline. During this time, the boy is circumcised and while he is healing, taught clan history. Upon returning from the wilderness ordeal, the boy is regarded as a young man; when he enters the village, his mother is not permitted to greet him. He proceeds directly to his own house, separate from his mother’s; that evening he receives from his father a gun, a piece of farmland, and a hoe – his stake with which to establish his manhood in the clan” (p 51-52)

The Treasure in our Midst

Some rough thoughts on treasure...

We have this treasure in jars of clay… that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.

2 Corinthians 4:7, 11

Treasure. Prize. Fortune. Riches.

The treasure that Paul is speaking of here, in part, is God’s life in us, the kingdom of heaven, the same kingdom that we are to take possession of with all of our devoted, fierce, desirous, “violent” hearts (Matthew 11:12). Treasure also means that that is “beloved” or “cherished.” It is that we are cherished by God that is our treasure, or, put another way, His love and rescue and invitation of us is our supply, our resource, our advantage, our fortune. The gospel, the rock-hard reality of God coming to win and have us, is our greatest prize. We get to be His, and we get in on all that He is up to. And He is up to giving us life.

When Jesus said that the sum of the law was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27), he was saying first to make God your treasure (or, better, to recognize Him as your treasure). Growing in love to God is real freedom, and growing to love Him is growing to know Him (to know Him is to love Him), and that is what Jesus said would be our very lifeblood (John 17:3).

Of course, to treasure someone is to begin to recognize what it is they hold dear, and to even begin appreciating it yourself, and even grow to prize it as well. My wife loves basset hounds. I never did. But we got one, and her love of that little guy has grown on me. I love him, at least to the degree I do, because he is important to her.

As we grow to treasure God we grow to treasure what He treasures, and He treasures us, what He calls “the world” (John 3:16). To grow to love Him is to grow to love others, to recognize others as His treasure, even as we embrace ourselves as His treasure. And what does it look like to love others?

It is to realize that there is something within the hearts of us all that Jesus came to have as His own. The possibility of having it, after all, gave Him enough joy to endure the cross (Hebrews 12:2). To recognize that this treasure lies within us all, or better, is us all, is to see others as the treasures of the Kingdom that they are. Beneath the masks, underneath the posing and posturing, beyond the pain and shame and scars from this world. Even for those who are not yet God’s, there is a hint, an echo, a scent of what was meant when they were created. That is what God wants back.

Can you imagine what it would be like to live this way, to recognize every person you meet as God’s greatest treasure, unique and desired more than His very life? We’d stop at very little to have God and to have others be His. To have others be rescued from captivity into the full freedom of real and lasting life. To push beyond the fear of a real encounter with someone. To fight all of hell for someone. To have His heart for His bride.

It would be to have the heart of Jack Sparrow. Picture this scoundrel from Pirates of the Caribbean. What does he want? What is he after? One thing. The treasure. Always, the treasure. He keeps nothing, has nothing, serves nothing but that will bring him what he wants. That is the kind of singular passion we are to have for God. And, as mentioned earlier, to be wild for Him is to want what He wants: His bride, His treasure, back home in His arms.

All of that means, of course, that we would be desperately dependent upon God for training, provision, skill, and passion for “seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness” (Matthew 6:33) and for all that entails. As I walk in intimacy with God and learn of His heart for me and receive His intimate council, I begin to see others as He does, or at the very least to recognize in holy fear that others are more than I see them to be (1 Samuel 16:7), and in humility that I am more than I see myself to be as well. It is as C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory, that we have never met a mere mortal.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare.

Having the heart of Christ and His character formed in us opens our eyes to see the unseen (2 Corinthians 4:18), namely the treasure of the heart within. Then, we are free “to say whatever needs to be said” and “to go wherever we need to go” (Ephesians 3:11, The Message). We will run and not grow weary; we will walk and not be faint, headed straight out to find what has been lost, alongside Jesus our Rescuer and Friend.

This is the wild romance of God with us, more passionate and intentional than we imagine. These are the ways of God, the allure of His heart for us, and the invitation to soar with Him where eagles are scared to fly.

There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a maiden.

-Proverbs 30:18-19

Diluted

A friend and I were discussing last night the movie Wild Hogs. He told me he hasn’t seen it yet because he doesn’t like Martin Lawrence. I told him that he appears alone in scenes fairly infrequently, since the thrust of the story is about four men discovering something together on the cross-country journey they have set out on. I used the word “diluted,” as in “Martin Lawrence’s antics are diluted in the movie, since he’s usually in scenes with other main characters.” That is to say, his presence is not as strong. His personality doesn’t come through as much. It’s watered-down, reduced, weakened, skimpy, washed out. It’s not a story about Martin Lawrence; it’s a story about Martin Lawrence and. It’s about the band of friends who call themselves the Wild Hogs.

I’ve been thinking about that word a lot since then, diluted. The other day my wife and I bought some “organic” lemonade, which means, I guess, that it’s a mix of fresh-squeezed lemons and a bit of water. At least, that’s what I thought until I took a swig, then I realized they labeled it organic because they want to warn you of its potency. They are trying to tell you that if you drink it you may grow a lemon orchard in your stomach, if your stomach survives the toxic acidity of the stuff and doesn’t melt into your toes. That is, if you can get it past your mouth, which puckers so hard at the first drop that not even air can get through and your jawbone nearly crushes under the intensity of your flexed masseter muscles. I quickly mixed mine with about 200% water and a pound of sugar and was able to enjoy the taste with what was left of my tongue. They should write fatally concentrated on the bottle, not organic. Pure. Potent. Strong. Undiluted.

It’s such a good word to describe what we do with our lives, this word dilute. Things around us are too strong to take in, so we dilute them. We do, all of us. Especially the most important things, the pure, fresh-from-the-vine, life-giving things, the organic ones.

Take the concept of grace, for example. There, you see, I called it a concept. It’s not a concept, it’s reality, it’s breath, it’s our heartbeat, our lifeblood. I have just diluted it into a “concept” or a “notion” or an “idea,” putting distance between me and it because if I were to receive it fully, 200-proof, undistilled, it could very well destroy me by its pure and unmerited extravagance. It would melt my ego and tear my sense of independence into shreds. It might even draw me close to God, and would that this would never happen, because then I might have to face the Really Real, and my identity that I hold so dear would certainly be crucified. It was this grace that Martin Luther encountered that launched the great Reformation, enthralled as he was when he encountered in the depths of his heart the reality from Romans 3:21-26, which completely ravished him for the rest of his life… destroyed him, really, for any other thing.

Or what about the gospel? I didn’t capitalize the word, did you notice? Officially, when you speak of the “good news,” you don’t capitalize the word, but you do when you talk of one of the four books about the life of Jesus canonized in the New Testament. Grammatically, you only capitalize “proper” names, those designating a particular thing, a specific or immediate one. The “gospel,” then, is not specific or immediate. It is, then, general, conventional, customary, commonplace, delayed, distant, removed. Distance. Do you see it, the way we dilute our experience with the gospel, with our experience of the Kingdom here, right here, right now, right among us, and the King here present in the here and now? Talk of the gospel as watered-down is prevalent in various circles of Christendom, and I won’t get into now how that is or where it comes from, because ultimately it’s me that waters it down, fearful of what it might require of me would I but believe it, enter into it, and encounter The One who brings it.

And so, we dilute things. It’s no coincidence, I don’t think, that another friend in that conversation last night mistakenly heard me say the word, “deluded,” as in to mislead, to elude or evade, to frustrate the hope of. That is an accurate description, I think, for what we do to ourselves and our friends that would otherwise fall hard and fast into the life and love of God would that we live and present it as it is with nothing added or taken from it.

The book of Hebrews says that Jesus offered up prayers and petitions “with loud cries and tears” to his Father, to the one, it says, “who could save him from death” (5:7). God heard him “because of his reverent submission.” The Amplified Bible has it “because of His reverence toward God,” and then goes on to describe His reverence: “…in that He shrank from the horrors of separation from the bright presence of the Father.”

In other words, He was horrified of being separated from the bright presence of the Father. He was terror-stricken at the prospect of separation. Why? Because He knew his Father, and He loved him with all he was. He was intimate with him, and reveled in being His son, the Son.

I think all our pale excuses and fearful shrinking and hiding in the shadows will be blown away by the bright presence of God. I have a suspicion that not only is a real encounter with the Risen One what we most fear and what we most need; it is what we most want. To open ourselves up to Him unreservedly, to plead and cry out for His life and presence with us, until we, too, shrink not from Him but from the horror of separation from Him. Wide-eyed with wonder. Sweaty with anticipation. Giddy with the hope and prospect of the encounter. Dry-mouthed, jaw-dropping, knee-knocking with expectation and trembling with awe.

In C.S. Lewis's A Horse and His Boy, Wihn is a talking Narnia horse who longed and rode hard for her home country, exiled as she had been. When she finally encounters the Christ-figure of Aslan, all she can do is, trembling, kneel before His beauty and declare, “I would rather be eaten by You than fed by any other.” It was the presence of his presence that was captivating and for her it would be a horror to think of separation from him. She would sooner have death. Or, in the words of a poet, she would rather be “broken in his hands than whole in barren lands.”

Keep me, Lord, with thee. I call from out the dark
Hear in thy light, of which I am a spark.
I know not what is mine and what is thine
Of branch and stem I miss the differing mark
But if a mere hair's-breadth me separateth,
That hair's-breadth is eternal, infinite death.
For sap thy dead branch calls, O living Vine!
-George MacDonald

Redeemed from Fire by Fire

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The One discharged of sin and error.
The only hope or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame.
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
-T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

The fire of God’s presence is consuming. Those who wish to know Him will be asked to walk straight into it. Nothing will be expected, but all will be required. Richard Foster describes the intimacy of knowing and walking with God as the incarnational or sacramental life, the “crying need to experience God as truly manifest and notoriously active in daily life.” The mystery of God made manifest in Christ destroys or feeble notions of Him, demolishes our own pursuits of security and safety, and dissolves our illusions that we can have life outside of God.

This is what T.S. Eliot refers to here as Love, the unfamiliar Name, who redeems from fire by fire. Our choice concerning God (which is to say, concerning our very lives) is actually rather clear: we are either destroyed by fire or consumed by Love so intense it can only be described as a fire. The way of rescue for us is through the flames of His presence, His life that is “the light of men” (John 1:4). And it is a constant rescue, a constant Presence with us. Moses was led by a flaming torch by night; we are led by the Flaming Torch within, “even unto the ends of the age.” It is not that we possess life, but that we are possessed by Life.

It is this incarnational life with God that has been often left out of the more evangelical church circles. And how can that be, since this intimate communion with God is the very heartbeat of our souls? Without this consuming and mystical connection, our pulse weakens, our skin grows pale and clammy, our hearts grow faint and cold. Calvin Miller, in his book Into the Depths of God, has this foreboding warning: “When the mystery is gone, so is the church – at least the vitality of the church.”

So what of these words by T.S. Eliot? Was he too mystical? Is the mystery of his poetry too far out there? Should it make us uncomfortable and so we turn the other way? Not at all. It is in this mystery, this mystical longing after God and recognition of His heart for us, that is ultimate reality. We cannot ignore our vitality in God, or try to tame the flames of it, without losing our very lives. Jesus said as much – “whoever wants to save his life will lose it” (Matthew 16:25).

“God waits,” Calvin Miller continues, “for those who will love him and who hunger for things too excellent to be understood.”

So where do we go from here? How do we come back into intimate communion with God, or rekindle the heat? How do we grow in our love for Him, in our desire for him and those “things too excellent to be understood”? I think the answer has something to do with our fainting, with out gut-level recognition that we cannot get there on our own. We begin by praying not, “Lord, I want you,” but rather the more authentic, “Lord, I want to want you.” Maybe that is all we can muster. But it is all that is required. If we are willing, and only if we choose, we can begin moving deeper into the heat of God’s life. In the same breath, Jesus told us, “but… but… whoever loses his life for me will find it.”

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis says that “there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak… the very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether… your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him… look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” Paul knew this. It is why, I think, he told us in Colossians that “your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”

So we are to find it. If God seems distant, it is because He is waiting, “waiting to be wanted,” as A. W. Tozer had it. As our desire for God grows (and only as He births in us deeper desire), we can begin seeking after God, wrestling for Him and praying to taste and touch and see the wonder that is God. “And in Him,” Tozer discovered, “we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing.”

If we heed the invitation to delve deeper into this Love, even in the smallest degree, we really can “mount up on wings as eagles” and learn to fly. Calvin Miller again put it, “Earth holds a strange power that ties us to dust, so that ponderous souls are bound to her crust. But the wind whispers tales of a force in the sky, and those with the courage to scorn dust can fly.”

The other morning, I heard whispers from the wind of that invitation into the intimate life with God. I took Him up on it – how could I pass? I recorded what happened next:

The breeze was some cool at that hour, so I put on the hoodie I’d been shouldering, and set out walking south down our street to the wooded area just beyond.

I had set off in the cover of darkness. It was a romantic early morning, and I knew the meeting place. But it was also my choice to go, weighed as my heart was with the need to be away to pray. There were some things I wanted to bring up with God, and He with me.

It was more than an hour I had spent there, and much was addressed in our time, too much to make mention of here, and things perhaps too deep to record – old wounds and accusations from my former life as well as new and enticing promises for my new one, this one, the one extending into forever. The work of Jesus for me. The ministry and counsel of the Holy Spirit. His fire, burning flame of love. The invitation of the Father into more authentic sonship. An heir of His, coheir, coheir (!) with Jesus.

He was so amazing it all of it – God, the Trinity. So strong, so tender, so engaged, so holy. So triumphant. So ready. So prepared. So delighted. So intent on my wholeness and holiness. So alive with life that is my light.

Confession

I believe in Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, my elder brother, my lord and master; I believe that he has a right to my absolute obedience whereinsoever I know or shall come to know his will; that to obey him is to ascend the pinnacle of my being; that not to obey him would be to deny him. I believe that he died that I might die like him—die to any ruling power in me but the will of God—live ready to be nailed to the cross as he was, if God will it. I believe that he is my Saviour from myself, and from all that has come of loving myself, from all that God does not love, and would not have me love—all that is not worth loving; that he died that the justice, the mercy of God, might have its way with me, making me just as God is just, merciful as he is merciful, perfect as my father in heaven is perfect. I believe and pray that he will give me what punishment I need to set me right, or keep me from going wrong. I believe that he died to deliver me from all meanness, all pretence, all falseness, all unfairness, all poverty of spirit, all cowardice, all fear, all anxiety, all forms of self-love, all trust or hope in possession; to make me merry as a child, the child of our father in heaven, loving nothing but what is lovely, desiring nothing I should be ashamed to let the universe of God see me desire. I believe that God is just like Jesus, only greater yet, for Jesus said so. I believe that God is absolutely, grandly beautiful, even as the highest soul of man counts beauty, but infinitely beyond that soul’s highest idea—with the beauty that creates beauty, not merely shows it, or itself exists beautiful. I believe that God has always done, is always doing his best for every man; that no man is miserable because God is forgetting him; that he is not a God to crouch before, but our father, to whom the child-heart cries exultant, ‘Do with me as thou wilt.’

I believe that there is nothing good for me or for any man but God, and more and more of God, and that alone through knowing Christ can we come nigh to him.

I believe that no man is ever condemned for any sin except one—that he will not leave his sins and come out of them, and be the child of him who is his father.

I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing; without justice to the full there can be no mercy, and without mercy to the full there can be no justice; that such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son, and the many brethren—rush inside the centre of the life—giving fire whose outer circles burn. I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.

I believe that to him who obeys, and thus opens the doors of his heart to receive the eternal gift, God gives the spirit of his son, the spirit of himself, to be in him, and lead him to the understanding of all truth; that the true disciple shall thus always know what he ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do; that the spirit of the father and the son enlightens by teaching righteousness. I believe that no teacher should strive to make men think as he thinks, but to lead them to the living Truth, to the Master himself, of whom alone they can learn anything, who will make them in themselves know what is true by the very seeing of it. I believe that the inspiration of the Almighty alone gives understanding. I believe that to be the disciple of Christ is the end of being; that to persuade men to be his disciples is the end of teaching.

-George MacDonald, The Unspoken Sermons, Vol. 3/Justice

Pour Out the Rain

Lord, when I get to Heaven… can I help pour out the rain?
-Buddy Jewell

What will we do in heaven?

It’s such an important question. Peter, this “Rock” of the church that knew Jesus in a profoundly personal way, a man who knew something of how not to lose heart, how to live with passion and joy, with desire and anticipation, says that we are to set our hope fully on the grace to be revealed to us when Jesus returns (see 1 Peter 1:13).

Really? Did you catch that? Fully? Set our hope fully on the grace to be revealed?

Earlier in the same letter, Peter makes this really astounding proclamation. He says, “Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we've been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for, including a future in heaven—and the future starts now! God is keeping careful watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you'll have it all—life healed and whole.” (from The Message).

The Day is coming. All will be ours. Life. A life healed and a life whole. Our wounds will be dressed with leaves from the Tree of Life. The burdens we have lived under will finally be lifted off. We will shed our dead skin and enter into “the joy of the Kingdom.” We will be feasted. We will stand in silent awe. We will laugh. We will enjoy. We shall be filled. We shall rest.

But then what?

No, I’m serious. What do we do then? We will be healed and made whole. Oh, praise God. This is such good news! But… to what end? For what purpose? Is it just to sit around all day? Because frankly, after a few years of napping, I’m ready to go again.

During the long days of summer when I was young, my parents would lay out a blanket in the shade for my brother and I to nap on after the hours of play wore us out. I somehow always woke up last, and to my chagrin would hear laughter and activity going on someplace around a corner -- playing in a waterhose or catching bullfrogs at the pond -- and I would always feel left out. The fun, the adventure, was elsewhere, and I was ready to be done with rest and enter into it again.

The question, “What will we do in heaven” is such an important one because how can we hope for something that we do not even look forward to? And who can look forward to an eternity of sitting it out, of napping, of “eternal rest”? It was Peter Kreeft who said that dullness, not doubt, is the greatest enemy of our faith.

A few days ago I went on a hike in the Ponca forest reserve that borders the northern edge of the Boston Mountains in northwest Arkansas with a few friends. It is a rugged terrain of deciduous wood, cut in two by the meandering Buffalo River, and edged by two- to three-hundred-foot sheer limestone bluffs. We came to an overlook, and stretched hundreds of feet below and before us was the river valley. It was breathtaking, and we sat and gorged ourselves on its beauty…

…for about ten minutes.

But then we took turns scurrying as close to the edge as we dared and started lobbing rocks off. And then we tried to knock over dead trees just behind us in the forest. And we looked for another rim to climb. There were waterfalls to discover and swimming holes to find and caves to explore. There was a lot more to do.

At the end of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, the great ones of the stories come together again, and at last. They enter into the fullness of the Kingdom of God, finally. And what do they do there? They soar up waterfalls and fly across the landscape. They breathe and they laugh and they discover and they create.

We were made in the creative image of God, and He has set out to restore us back into that image so that we may rule with Him. It is why He give us so much freedom – freedom to love and choose Him and freedom not to (see Revelations 3:20), and the experience of bringing the Kingdom of God now into this world (see Matthew 16:19). It is why in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) those who did well, those who lived from the heart and trusted in their Master were given even more to do, more to enjoy. It becomes apparent in that story that they were being trained and tested so that, when the Master came to see they could handle it, they were entrusted with even more of His spoils.

It is why Jesus said that we are in process to become “fully trained” to be like the Teacher (Luke 6:40). Because we will one day rule alongside Him in all that is to come.

There is much ahead, much yet to explore and discover. Can you imagine what it will be like to help pour out the rain with God? And carve out the canyons. And hang “gold sunsets o’er a rose and purple sea.”

And in the perfect time, O perfect God,
When we are in our home, our natal home,
When joy shall carry every sacred load,
And from its life and peace no heart shall roam,
What if thou make us able to make like thee--
To light with moons, to clothe with greenery,
To hang gold sunsets o'er a rose and purple sea!
-George MacDonald