Lost the Story, Part II

Enemy-occupied territory---that is what the world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful King has landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
-C.S. Lewis

It is this story that Christianity is about that is most assaulted and diminished. And regaining the Story is not an easy endeavor.

The plastic Aslan shield I found (See Lost the Story, Part I) had the effect of shaking me awake a bit to see how much of Reality I have lost over the last few weeks through routine and duty. God had me find it in order to raise that longing in me for a battle to be engaged in and for a King to fight for and for a people to help rescue, but there’s more He’s up to. The poet Henry David Thoreau warned us that “We must reawaken and learn to remain awake, not by mechanical aid, but by the infinite expectation of the dawn.” In other words, by believing beyond belief that we live now (and will live ever more fully) in a Story of great proportions. (It is argued that Thoreau never became a believer, but it is hard to dissect his deep thirst for life with the offer from the Life-Giver. Perhaps he never accepted the offer. Perhaps there’s more to that story we don’t know. But that’s for another time.) Apparently, there’s more God is up to even this week to reawaken me.

De and I went last night to a bookstore with some dear friends. I started looking through Philip Yancey’s new book, Prayer, per my friend’s advice. It is another piece of the discipleship-calling I hear Jesus inviting me into. He might as well have said, “Come, follow me.” Here’s what Yancey wrote:

When I started exploring the subject of Christian payer, I first went to libraries and read accounts of some of the great pray-ers in history. George Muller began each day with several hours of prayer, imploring God to meet the practical needs of his orphanage. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes allotted five hours per day to prayer and Charles Simeon rose at 4:00 a.m. to begin his four-hour regimen. Nuns in an order known as “The Sleepless Ones” still pray in shifts through every hour of the day and night. Susannah Wesley, a busy mother with no privacy, would sit in a rocking chair with an apron over her head praying for John and Charles and the rest of her brood. Martin Luther, who devoted two to three hours daily to prayer, said we should do it as naturally as a shoemaker makes a shoe and a tailor makes a coat. Jonathan Edwards wrote of the “sweet hours” on the banks of the Hudson River, “rapt and
swallowed up in God.”

I interviewed ordinary people about prayer… Is prayer important to you? Oh, yes. How often do you pray? Every day. Approximately how long? Five minutes – well, maybe seven. Do you find prayer satisfying? Not really. Do you sense the presence of God when you pray? Occasionally, not often…

Pretty to-the-point, huh? Here’s the thing. I didn’t feel guilty or condemned or running around in my brain grasping and trying to figure out how to pray more. I’m not even sure this is what Jesus meant in bringing me to that portion of the book. What happened, though, was a certain kind of drawing. Something inside clicked. I said to myself, “I want that.” I want a deeper intimacy through prayer, a life lived more fully by abiding more deeply and immediately in Christ.

The disciplines are an important part of life with and in God. I know that has been largely lost in the Western church, but there is a move to bring them back to their rightful place as aids to help us live the life Christ has won for us. Dallas Willard brings to light the fact that Jesus never commissioned us to make Christians of all nations, but rather disciples, those who would do what they saw Jesus doing. And, well, Jesus spent quite a lot of time praying and communing with the Father, among other things. John Piper described prayer as “the walkie-talkie on the battlefield of the world. It calls in for the accurate location of the target of the Word. It calls in to ask for the protection of air cover. It calls in to ask for fire power to blast open a way for the tanks of the Word of God. It calls in the miracle of healing for the wounded soldiers. It calls in supplies for the forces. And it calls in the needed reinforcements.” That, of course, only makes sense if you are living in a Story where battle plays a major role. C.S. Lewis understood that, calling this world “Enemy-occupied territory.”

So last night I have it in my heart to rise a little earlier than usual this morning, and I set my alarm to help me up. But this is where the phrase “Enemy-occupied territory” is stripped of all cliché and all romantic allusions. I struggle – I mean, really struggle—to get out of bed, knowing I need this like I need food or breath and yet unable to force my muscles to push against the weight of gravity and heaviness. I lay there for awhile and kid myself into believing I can pray without getting up. Naturally, I fell back asleep. Forty-five minutes later I finally roll myself out of bed and head for another room, where I am hammered again by evil spirits that are troubling me (like in Luke 6:18), and I cannot even concentrate because of doomsday thoughts swirling in my tired head. Finally, after half an hour of trying to break through, I give up and head to the shower.

Now, I’m not saying that I am a loser for not being a “spiritual giant” like George Muller or Charles Wesley. It’s not my goal here to become a spiritual Charles Atlas or anything of the like. It’s that I genuinely desire to drink from the life-giving water that is God, and it is opposed.

It is hard to fight through all that is set against our life in God. If you don’t believe we are at war and that your heart is the target of our Enemy, just try spending unending hours in quiet adoration or passionate pleading or joyful communion with God. It happens, it can, it does. It’s won for us – that’s how we are called to come to the Lord God (Hebrews 4:16). But it does not come often without a fight. It becomes readily apparent why we must suit up in spiritual armor.

It was not until I was driving in to work this morning that something finally broke through. The lines of communication with God were unjammed somehow – maybe an angel came or my attempts at exercising the authority of Christ triumphed – and I felt as if I could breathe again, and lift my head beyond the ground just beneath my feet. I had the opportunity to take some time during lunch to drive around and pray. And I will set my heart to rise again tomorrow morning and “enter boldly into the throneroom of grace” and remain there throughout the day enjoying God and being enjoyed by Him. Because I must if I am to come alive to Him and to the Story of Reality.

Lost the Story, Part I

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.
-G.K. Chesterton

It’s been a difficult weekend, with so much of our deeper life and movements in the Kingdom of God opposed and thwarted. Homework this weekend has been soul-killing in its intensity and its propensity to steal time for other things, like sleeping and spending time with De. And I have not fought well for my time with God in the disciplines needed for my training in living well in this Kingdom, in my growing up into God: study, prayer, journaling, fasting, silence and solitude, service, and the like.

And I think I know why it’s been especially difficult to follow Him into those places of connection. The epiphany came while taking some time away from homework to take a walk with my niece and nephew who were spending the weekend with us. Being the imaginative kids they are, it’s hard for them to stay on the street when walking. And being the imaginative kid-at-heart I am, it’s hard for me to keep them on the street. We found a cement culvert that had collected all sorts of paraphernalia during the last storm. Walking among the mess, I saw a broken shield on the ground. It was in three pieces, and I only found two, but it was evident that it had been some kid’s play shield, made of plastic. The most striking feature of it, though, was the image embossed on its crest. It was a lion’s head, with full mane, and its face a mixture of kindness and ferocity, as if were this lion to come alive and step outside its plastic barrier you wouldn’t be able to decide if you should run from it or hold your breath in anticipation and hope that he would speak to you. It was clear who this lion was. Even the kids knew. It was Aslan. My nephew exclaimed, “This was Peter’s shield!”

My pulse quickened. It’s an odd thing to become alerted and aroused at the site of a plastic bit of trash, I know, but you should have seen it. It looked almost real, and only its flimsy thinness gave away the illusion. I longed for it to be real, to be heavy with iron and steal and leather. A real shield. For a real battle. In a real story.

And then I realized why my devotions are so hard to pursue lately. They are not necessary training, mission-specific orders, a place to have battle wounds healed, the interior tent where the Commander awaits our meeting, a time away from the front lines to regroup and recharge and reassess. They are a disconnected set of duties that have little to do with my life because I have lost the story of the Kingdom advancing upon the dark forces of the Enemy by the violent-hearted for the rescue of God’s precious ones. For were I to have my eyes opened, my ears attuned, my heart laid waste by that reality, I would be a fool to miss one weapon or one moment or one command the Lord of Hosts, the Commander of this Invasion, would give me, and I would set my face like flint to seeking Him for my life and, by way of it, for the lives of others He has it in his heart to rescue.

Where They Lie

For the Son of Man came to seek and save what was lost.
–Jesus of Nazareth (Luke 19:10)

I’m pierced by how personal the gospel is. I mean, how different it applies to each of us in such specific ways, and yet it is the only salvation for us all, this daring rescue by Jesus. I’ve come to believe that he was about more than just granting me some kind of asylum, just “letting me in” when I die. And frankly, I’ve always heard this bit of Scripture quoted from Luke 19:10 to mean that I was a lost bit of wretch, but now with Jesus appearing on the scene I can be a “found” bit of wretch, with “found” meaning still really messed up on the inside, but I get to spend all my messed-up days playing harps on clouds in heaven when I die.

Yea.

This, my friends, isn’t what Jesus was saying. The good Jews of Jesus’ day would have well recognized who Jesus was talking about when he referred to himself as the “Son of Man.” He was referencing the Old Testament accounts and prophecies that used the phrase and referred to the Messiah, such as Daniel 7:13-14. But He was communicating so much more than just a simple nod to the reality of his divinity.

Let’s catch up with Jesus there at Zacchaeus’s house where he made the statement.

All right. Jesus comes into the town of Jericho, and he is swarmed (as was usual) by this crowd that were a mix of people who wanted to see Jesus do something really cool (they were there because he was happenin’) and those who were genuinely desperate for Jesus to heal them, or touch them, or speak to them. This day, it was the man in the sycamore tree that caught Jesus’ eye.

We know a lot about Zacchaeus, even in the brief description we have of him. He was a tax collector, and he was wealthy. Which means that he was a conniving scoundrel who stole from anyone he could, a traitor to his people, and apparently pretty successful at it. Oh, and he was short. And he made good tree-climbing decisions – sycamores are easy trees to climb.

So Jesus walks right up to the tree. Can you imagine what Zacchaeus must have been thinking? He only wanted to get a better lay of the land here. He only wanted to see who this man that everyone was going on about really was. And having the great people-reading skills they taught him in dirty-trickster-traitor school, I’m sure he felt pretty confident he could size this fella up pretty easily.

Except that Jesus came right up to him. And worse than that, he singled him out in the crowd. But maybe worst of all, Jesus invited himself over for dinner.

But, and here’s where something amazing happens that we have to infer from what we read here, Zacchaeus welcomed him gladly. And more than that, he made amends from his heart for what he had done in his identity as a traitor-thief. He gave it up – not the actions, but the identity and security of being wealthy and untouchable. Something really deep and very real was sought out, was reached, was touched, and was healed in Zacchaeus. Maybe it was that Jesus simply said his name – how did he know who he was? Had he always? Did Jesus know him whenever he had ripped that old widow off and stole everything she owned? And whenever he had sold his friend’s life off for a few pounds of silver? And whenever he had cursed God under his breath when he thought to himself, “I can never be touched – I am wealthy.” And yet Jesus came to him, yet he singled him out, yet he still wanted to be with this “sinner”?

Whatever happened, you have to admit it was pretty dramatic. And it happened pretty fast. That’s when we catch Jesus saying that he came “to seek and save what was lost.”

Now, notice the word he uses. He says what was lost. Not who. What. In other places, he means who. But not here. He means what.

What does he mean “what”? What “what”?

Back to how personal the gospel is. The “what” that Jesus sought out and saved in Zacchaeus was a place in him, a part in him, something shattered, broken, tossed aside, frozen, stolen. Something deep (look how transforming it was for him to have it back) and something crucial (he could not recognize God without it) and something personal (so much so, that we easily miss what just took place).

This is not an isolated incident in the gospels, by the way. Jesus did something similar with Peter in John 21 and the woman at the well in John 4 and Nicodemus in John 3. It’s all over the place, in fact. You just need eyes to see this really beautiful and really restorative and really personal aspect of the ministry of Jesus.

Okay, so a few minutes ago I was standing in my bathroom looking at myself in the mirror and this realization hits me that I am afraid. I cannot name the fear. I do not know what it is about or where it comes from, but I do know, at least, that I often suppress it or ignore it or just try to bury it. Tonight I let it rise from within me and I asked Jesus what was going on there. It is the result of some lies, hidden and subtle and undiscovered, that I have bitten into, that I have believed – about something really important – God’s heart, maybe, or my own, or my place with Him. I simply prayed, “Come, Jesus, show me where they lie.”

Nothing happened. Not yet. But I know it will. It has countless times before. This is what Jesus does to “seek and save” those lost places in us. To bring “the truth in the inmost parts” (Psalm 51:6). He will raise issues, bring up fears or hurts. He will take us back to where something in our souls was shattered like glass in order to find the pieces and bring them all back together, melted back into one whole piece by the fires of his Spirit. It’s the way Eugene Peterson phrases what Paul says in Ephesians 3, that we are to be made “whole and holy” by God’s love, or the Amplified’s translation of Ephesians 2:21: “In Him the whole structure is joined (bound, welded) together harmoniously, and it continues to rise (grow, increase) into a holy temple in the Lord.”

It is a glorious restoration. God is rebuilding the temple, and we are His glorious ruins. Stone by stone, piece by piece, He is bringing us back together within ourselves and within each other that we may be “for the display of His splendor” (Isaiah 61:3) – healing, rescuing, speaking our names, calling us, seeking out the broken pieces, showing us “where they lie” that we might know the truth that sets free – really free. That like Zacchaeus, salvation (life!) may come to us.

Restoring the Broken

My Father… cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit.
–Jesus, John 15:2

The average temperatures this winter in Missouri are 20-25 degrees below the average for this time of year. Not a big deal in itself, and not all that uncommon. We have moderately cold winters here every four or five years, where you wake up and the frozen layer of frost outside betrays the single-digit temperatures that ran throughout the night. Most of us complain about it throughout the months, though, used to having at least several days in a row where the rivers and lakes can thaw. Certainly the birds clambering for food from our feeder in the back yard are wondering now whose idea it was to stop short of Texas on their flight southward.

But this winter has been a mix of really cold and really wet, which, as you can imagine, begs a lot of ice and snow. Three weeks ago we had a three-round bout of ice, sleet, and snow pounding us in alternate blows, and they left their mark. Thousands of homes were without electricity, some even still, the roads were layered for several days with ice like glass, and trees snapped under the weight.

Driving to work this morning I pass through rural areas where it looks almost as if a giant played hop-scotch through the forests, the trees split and their tops dangling or fallen to the ground like crushed toothpicks. Clean up will go on for months, or possibly years.

I realized how much like my heart this winter has been, as if in peering out into the woodlands full of torn and broken branches I’m looking into a kind of reflection, the freezing winds stealing my breath and the heavy veneer of ice suffocating and slowing the beats of my heart into a slow and arctic rhythm.

Which explains why instead of being encouraged (read: given courage) in my walk with God by those who are ahead of my on the journey, those full of the life and character of Jesus, I am discouraged (read: courage stolen). It is because I see their fruit and desire it, but then try to make it on my own. There are holy and passionate men of God in Scripture, for example, that I read of – David and Paul and John the Beloved – and I immediately think, Yes! I want to be that way! But then I lose heart somewhere in the “long obedience in the same direction,” as Eugene Peterson has it, thinking that these men brought about their holy and full-of-life and life-giving character on their own.

I was lost in all of this on the drive when Jesus broke in and cut through (Hebrews 4:12) with ancient words that He spoke to his disciples, speaking them to some deep place in me, “I am the vine; you are the branch. Remain in me, and if you do, then you will bear fruit. Simply abide, that’s all. Come, rest yourself in me dwell here” (from John 15).

The words that Jesus spoke in John 15:2 concerning the Father cutting off every branch that bears no fruit used to scare me, thinking He meant that if I did not work up some good fruit before He came along, I’d be cut down and thrown into the fire. This is not what He says. There are dead branches in us, places within our inner being that have been separate from Him. The Arborist prunes them, cuts them back, destroys the dead branches that we might live and grow up in Him, producing the fruit of right living simply by living with and in Him. He is telling us here that we cannot do this on our own, and as I have tried I have been left with broken and crushed limbs. But He has come, not only to bring us into a place where I can have full life (by just abiding with Him!), but also to remove the dead places (“circumcision of the heart” – Romans 2:29) and prune back living places so that we can have even more life. This is the glory of God (John 15:8).

The winter here isn’t over yet. Many, in fact, believe the worst is yet to come for us. The trees that will survive the season and come into the spring bursting and blooming with life will be those that have been carefully pruned back, those whose dead branches have been removed so as not to add to the weight of ice and threaten to snap the tree in two, those whose roots go deep into firm and good earth. This work is what the Gardener is up to in we who believe.

Sunrise Tryst

It started as a somewhat cryptic but no less alluring invitation. Three words, which were for me full of imagery and passion, stirring anticipation, inspiring romance because of who spoke them: “Sunrise. Tuesday. Wah-Sha-She.” They had come on Sunday as DeAnn and I were attending a church worship service. The church had thrown up onto the screen an image of a man on a rock facing a sunrise with his arms outfolded in reverence. It was then that God spoke, offering an invitation almost as if dropping off a lovenote: “Meet me there at this time. I want to see you. There’s something I want to show you.”

So, naturally, yesterday morning I arose early and headed off predawn to our predetermined rendezvous. I had been to Wah-sha-she State Park in northern Oklahoma only once before. It had been a cold but thrilling evening when DeAnn and I had found it by mistake while driving around in the Osage Nation Reservation. It was fall then, and the breeze was blowing in hard from the west across the water of Hulah Lake as we came onto the grounds. “Hulah” comes from the Osage word for “eagle,” and as I had stepped out of the Jeep onto one of those famous Osage boulders, the wind whipped through me and brought the sounds of a summer leaving, heading off into some distant gray haven, its voice promising a return through the evening’s energy.

And so I knew my way to this place, and I had timed it so that I would arrive as the sun rose in the east across the gentle rolling ridges of the plains. When I arrived, the sky had broken open only enough to allow mw me to find my way to the right spot on the grounds, waiting for me before bursting forth in all its glorious might just as I had prayed.

I found a hill from which to view the spectacle, and I felt it to be the place Jesus had meant earlier, our spot to meet. Saddled with my journal bag and armored in overalls, I trekked up the incline and found, to my great delight and utter surprise, beautiful and complex Osage rocks – boulders that looked misplaced up here on the rolling hillside – jutting here and there across the western edge of the slope, just at the apex of the ridge. They were the perfect size to sit or lay or climb on, and were flanked by woods behind and the rolling prairie before straight east running into the now rising sun. It was like theater seating for the event, only hidden from view to any who would pass by, and they themselves seemed to me as I reflect now the actual stage and the sun the spectator and we – the Spirit of God and me and our reunion there – the real affair itself. This had been planned, and all creation came onto this scene in perfectly timed harmony: the rising spectacle of light blazing the heavens in purple fire and baptizing the sky in glory the stuff only of artists and poets; the songbirds hidden in the grasses now caressed awake by the coming warmth; the clouds breaking away; the breath of wind on its heels like that from a passing storm.

The sunrise had no longer been the point. Oh, it was beautiful, to be sure. But its dazzling artistry was dwarfed by God’s extravagant character, its brilliant light shadowed by the splendor of the Father’s immediacy, its warm rays distant to the intimate embrace of the Spirit. My eyes had been set on the Great Romancer that had called me here.

I laid back on the rocks, absorbed and taken away by the presence and majesty of this Heart, and I laughed. It was hearty, and long, and unassuming, and shared. It’s better to say that we laughed, captured as it were by the affection and unity shared between us. This was something beyond worship, something approaching ecstasy.

The sun rose yet, and after more conversation, I left our place and headed back to the car. The sign on the entrance to the grounds stood as a reminder of a people who called this land home – “Wah-Sha-She” means “The Water People” in the Osage language. As I drove across Hulah dam, a song began playing in my head: “I wanna run with you. I wanna soar where eagles are scared to fly.” Just then, I turned to see a wintering eagle skimming the surface of the waters, a parting gift and promise from this Wild Lover God.