The Invitation of a Lifetime

I've Moved!

2007-11-21T11:41:00.001-06:00

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The Silence and the Fury

2007-11-15T11:13:00.001-06:00

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

2007-11-05T09:24:00.000-06:00

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

2007-11-02T12:01:00.000-05:00

"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

2007-10-31T09:58:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-25T09:34:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-10-16T11:41:00.000-05:00

"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

2007-10-02T14:03:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-29T09:55:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-27T10:07:00.000-05:00

"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

2007-08-20T08:32:00.000-05:00

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

2007-08-08T12:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-26T10:10:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-23T16:11:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-07-18T05:14:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-27T14:42:00.000-05:00

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

2007-05-23T10:46:00.000-05:00

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

*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

2007-05-11T13:19:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-25T10:44:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-19T09:49:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-18T13:50:00.000-05:00

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

2007-03-15T14:02:00.000-05:00

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

Lost the Story, Part II

2007-02-27T15:31:00.000-06:00

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

2007-02-26T11:13:00.000-06:00

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

2007-02-24T01:32:00.000-06:00

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

2007-02-16T09:54:00.000-06:00

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

2007-02-07T08:44:00.000-06:00

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.

The Glorious Return

2007-01-30T10:47:00.000-06:00

LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel… has endowed you with splendor.
–Isaiah 55:5

God seems obsessed with this for his people, this notion that we will become glorious and full of splendor. It’s riddled throughout Scripture, and in fact the entire story of redemption is one in which we will come back to God, not just as a people ransomed from death and set back into right relationship with him, but as those who have seen hell and been dead and so coming back alive becomes even more amazing than having been alive the first time. In other words, our ransom and redemption is more amazing than our original stature. We are glorious ruins being restored.

I think it was George MacDonald that said that our spiritual journey is not of coming to God, but one of returning back to God.

Remember the story of the prodigal son? Why is he called prodigal, by the way, or lost, as some Bible translations have it? Would it be better to simply call him the younger son, or the found son? Or why not Henry or Jeff or Jake or whatever his name might have been? It is because we will forever remember him as the one who had come from squander and hunger, as the one who had left and come back. And as the son, we will forever remember his father, seeing him looking, looking, waiting, longing for his son to return home, and running helter-skelter after him when he was a long way off. And do you remember what happened next? A party. An extravagant celebration in honor of his return. Wrapped in his father’s robe, his father’s ring on his finger, sandals on his feet, his dirty and bony face now shining with relief and bewildered joy, the son was no doubt more glorious for having been found and restored back into the family than for having ever left to begin with. That’s what we understand by the inability of the older son to even enter in on the party of redemption thrown for the younger.

And if Jesus’ words are any indication, not only are we radiant now, but we are becoming so radiant that even nations will be summoned to us. That’s at least what the Lord says just earlier in verse 5 of Isaiah 55: “Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations that do not know you will hasten to you…” He is actually talking to us there, not about Himself. Surely this is what Jesus meant when he said that we are the light of the world, a city on a hill that cannot be hidden. The picture makes sense in light of Isaiah’s passage. Weary travelers would be drawn to the hope and promise of the city’s shelter and provisions. They would come to it on their way to wherever else they were headed.

Just a bit further into chapter 55, God says to us that we will go out in joy and be led forth in peace. “The mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

There again is the splendor. The mountains and the hills will burst into song before us? The trees will clap their hands? It sounds almost as if they are rooting for us, celebrating our journey, pulling for our arrival. They are in on some great conspiracy, some great drama, more aware of it than we are. (How’s that for humbling! Ha!) The rocks are in on it, too.

Loy Mershimer explains that our lives of distraction are actually a result of this refusal to embrace who we really are, or at least who we are really intended to be. "The human condition is a paradox of despair: We cannot cope with what we are intended to be, and so despair. Yet we cannot cope with despair, so we desperately try to convince the self that we are not really in despair. So we lead lives of distraction, luxury and success…"

I think we are more than we have come to believe about ourselves. I think our role now in this world and with our God is greater than we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine. Why have we shrunk back? Maybe because if we were to acknowledge who we were intended to be, it would require either a great God who could restore us to that place, or we would dive into despair. We have imagined God to be less than He is. We are his sons and daughters. We are his works, his collaborators, his co-laborers in this amazing story he is telling (Romans 8:17). Humility is not in making yourself small. “The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself,” notes Phillips Brooks, “but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.”

If we are endowed with splendor, imagine how majestic is the Endower. If we are his workmanship, imagine the Artist. If we have this treasure in jars of clay, imagine the Potter. If we are on the journey of faith, imagine the Author of that story. We are the prodigal sons, “prodigal” that we may remember where we came from, “sons” that we may recognize the extravagant grace of our Father.

And it’s not an easy journey, or an immediate transformation. We are being transformed “into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18). But the veil has been torn, our faces now radiant with the reflected renown of our King and Friend. The journey from here is a constant burgeoning of that radiance, “from glory to glory, until we all appear before the Lord in Zion” (Psalm 84:7).

Ready your hearts, my friends.

Feel the Heat

2007-01-18T11:25:00.001-06:00

Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking... They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God... and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing. -A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

Ice lays thick on the streets and in the yards and on houses and cars and everything else in sight right outside my window. The Midwest has been hammered with an ice storm this week, and we are among the lucky few that still have electricity.

As beautiful as it is, there’s something smothering about the ice. It’s... weighty. It’s heavy. That is, literally, what’s caused the power outages – power lines buckle under the weight of the ice, or are snapped by fallen tree limbs. Travel becomes treacherous. Moving becomes difficult. Everything slows to a frozen standstill.

Such often is the case with our own hearts. What is this reluctance, this gravity, this freezing up, that keeps us from rising up and shining and seeking after the heart of God? Why is it we can often go days or even weeks on some kind of spiritual momentum after contact with God, but then we soon slow up, our joints freeze, we grow cold, and frigid wind finds its way in through the cracks in our souls and snuffs out the fire within? Our desire is stolen. We quit our hope and courage. We lose heart.

I don’t want to use a very real and very prevalent and very painful phenomena as fodder for poetry. I don’t want someone to read this post and leave and think, "That was a nice bit of wording to express that little problem." There is something as sinister and intentional in our spiritual inertia as there was behind the 100-year winter in Narnia before the Pevensies showed up on the scene, if you remember the story from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. There are in this world real enemies bent on snuffing out our desire for God in any way that they can. As Thomas a Kempis said, "The devil sleepeth not; neither is the flesh as yet dead; therefore cease not to prepare thyself for battle; for on thy right hand and on thy left are enemies who never rest."

If the promise is true, and I believe it is, that we will find God when we seek Him (Jeremiah 29:13) and that in finding and knowing God we will have life (John 17:3), then it is equally true that we will not have life if we do not know God by seeking Him. It all begins with desire. Right? That’s what Jesus said, after all, that "blessed are those who hunger and thirst." Speaking to this character of the Father’s heart, George MacDonald said that "surely he may keep his plans in a measure unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul!" Desire does, indeed, play a crucial role. This desire, says Gerald May, is our truest identity, "our reason for being."

I’ll never forget the night I ran across that verse in Jeremiah 29:13. I had worked for a ministry at the time, and we had traveled to Africa to film a video documenting the plight of Christians in Sudan. It had been an exciting journey, but a challenging one. Among other things, the disconnection from technology and the whirring and buzzing of television, telephone, mp3 players and the like brought with it both a welcomed relief and a unsettling silence, a space in which God could speak and I could hear.

Our compound had set on a clearing on the edge of a small sub-Saharan village, surrounded by the deep greens of teak forests to the west and open bush to the east. The days had been full of hiking and filming and interviews, and the nights had been hot and sticky.

It was late on the last night of our stay, and I had been unable to sleep. Weary of staring at the mosquito netting tented over my bed, I flipped through some pages of Scripture until I landed in Jeremiah. My eyes fell on the portion of the sentence that I’d always passed by before, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."

I left my tukel and took a walk underneath a brilliantly massive starlit sky. There was no artificial light whatsoever, but the sky had enough to illuminate my way. I lingered over the verse and found that it had a strange effect on me. I had felt... despair. I felt as if I would never find God, or at least not find him in a deeper and more authentic way than I had known Him before. I had wanted God, or at least wanted to want Him. What that verse had to say must have been it, I thought. It had to be the reason why it had felt so difficult to engage with God, to pray, to read his Word, to offer life to others as he had said that I would, at least over the course of the previous few months. Because I had been trying to do so without all my heart in it. Even finding God was impossible without my full heart.

But instead of hearing it as hopeful, as in "Ah! Now I know what the problem is," I found it frustrating, defeating. I thought it was a set up for an automatic loss of heart. How could I ever have hope of finding Him if I didn't even do anything with all my heart? Enraged, I balled my fist and told Him what I thought about it. I cried to the heavens, "How can I seek you with all my heart when I don’t have all my heart?!" But there alone in the middle of a foreign continent, Jesus came to speak that night, and with a single word answered my dilemma, "Exactly." I came to see that all my efforts to get to him were futile, that only his work first on my behalf would enable me to find him. He would, as he promised, give me an "undivided heart" (Ezekiel 11:19), so that I could then find God, and live. He had been waiting for me to simply see that I could not know Him without first His restoration of some large pieces of my heart.

These years of walking with God since have been just that, a journey of restoration and reconciliation, and alternating cycles of deeper healing and more intimate communion with God, and usually an odd and beautiful mixture of both. Coming to Christ first gives you a beachhead, a place from which the kingdom will continue to advance. But there is more. There are new avenues of freedom and joy and even ecstasy to have. Even after the children came into Narnia, it took some time for blossoms to appear on trees and the rivers to unfreeze and run wild once more after so long dormant and cold.

So much of our life now is a process of both healing and of learning to walk in the new way of the kingdom of God. It’s what being a disciple of Jesus is all about, since he’s the One to usher in this new way of living. It’s him and his disciples and friends that Tozer was speaking of when he said to draw near to them and feel the heat of their desire after God. As we walk in this New Way, God sets our hearts free more and more vibrantly so that we may enjoy in constantly fuller measure what it is to really know God, to really love, and to really live.

I’m taking Tozer’s counsel to heart. I’m opening up the Scriptures to find the men and women who were delirious in the desire after God. I’m discovering that passion in David’s psalms and in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In John’s gospel and in Peter’s epistles. And I’m not stopping there. I’ve discovered George MacDonald, St. Athanasius, Dallas Willard, and Tozer himself. And so many other saints that have gone before and a precious few that are still around. But that’s not enough, either. Because God has given us community, where together with other glorious hearts we encounter the Living One and rediscover with forgotten joy His true intentions for us and through us. Don’t forsake that fellowship; it is vital for your heart and memory, to keep before your eyes the real gospel, that "in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing."

A Child's Wonder

2007-01-08T20:42:00.000-06:00

Then this weekend De and I had our niece and nephew stay with us. It's hard to appreciate how much time kids take when you really want to invest in them. We were busy with the laundry and the cooking and the dishes and the bedtime prayers and the baths, of course, but also with the deeper things of going after their hearts, discovering what it is God has made deep within them, teaching them through stories and adventures and leading them to explore the world and learn from what it has to teach them.

We played video games for awhile, but then we needed to go outside to where the adventures are far larger. We went on a hike through prairie grasses to a small lake. We ventured around it and into a dense forest full of thick undergrowth. Through that we found an old abandoned mining community. We broke glass from an old building, read graffiti on the walls (I censored it), walked across unstable floorings and loose bricks, wondered aloud what this machine used to do and about what function that portion of the fallen building must've been used for (we agreed it had to be the chamber where they tortured the bad guys for information). A large chat pile in the distance was Mount Kilimanjaro (we had already made the unsuccessful attempt of climbing it a week ago, when we abandoned the attempt after we nearly lost our tracker due to a rock avalanche). Next to it was its smaller mountain-cousin we called Mount Shasta.

In those couple of hours, we backpacked across the island-continent of Australia, trudged through the harsh heat of the Kalahari, and sailed past the dreaded Isles de Muerta. We came across swashbucklers, stomped as giants on ant-sized villages, and proved to ourselves that there was something greater in us than in the challenges we encountered in the tall grasses and weeds and mud and rock.

Especially for my 9 year-old nephew, he learned something about himself: that these circumstances not only arouse something in him to come through and, when he does, proves that he has what it takes to do so, it also shows him that he was made for adventure, made to both conquer and be conquered (by One greater than he).

And how good it was for my heart. At one point they pointed to ruins of an old bridge and with the wide-eyed wonder of children not yet exposed to the cynicism of adulthood, they exclaimed, "There is history here. This was here long before we were!" They said it with that sense of amazement and excitement that took me back and I thought, "It's true. The gospel is written in our hearts long before we hear it with our ears." In fact, I have a suspicion that we only encounter the gospel in our hearts, and all that the best hearing of it can do is to take us back again to that place we knew of when we were young, yet beyond it. I lose too often that sense of wonder and abandoned belief and simple delight. Here I stood leading these two beloved children further into the gospel, and all the while they are teaching me to recognize it as it comes.

Restless Heart Syndrome

2007-01-08T10:12:00.000-06:00

I’ve spent the last several nights restless, up at the early morning hours. I wrote this in my journal:

It's early in the morning, too early to be hammering away at the keyboard, but I haven't been able to sleep yet. I am restless and aching with longing and desire. I just finished watching an episode of Man Versus Wild on the Discovery Channel. Bear Grylls taught me how to survive my time in the Moab Desert if ever I find myself there with only a knife, a flint, and a canteen. It was intriguing, and the contrast between battling on the edge of survival and all it means -- eating raw raven's eggs, swimming underneath a debris field in deep cavernous water, fighting against Pygmy rattlers for sleeping shelter -- felt piercing when compared to my surroundings laden with empty boxes of carry-out pizza, a heating blanket with its controls sitting on my nightstand next to my cell phone (oh, who's call did I miss?), and a fluffy, cozy bed. I'm drawn into the exploration and adventure coming through the TV screen.

Keeping as quiet as possible so as not to wake my wife, I tiptoed to the office and turned on a small reading lamp and pulled one of my journals from the shelf and flipped randomly to an entry from a little over a year ago. I wrote it days before journeying to Colorado to attend a retreat geared toward helping a group of men discover the deep calling and passion placed within our hearts by the Father (Psalm 139). Here are highlights from that entry:

"...I keep wanting to act on the world instead of having the world act on
me. I want something real and relevant and holy to come from within me
like a spring gushing up instead of standing out waiting for the promise of rain
by elusive and swift-moving storms. I want to pour out to the degree in
which I am filled up... ...I answered a email questionnaire that asked ‘'What
did you want to be when you grew up?' My response is pointed, 'A pioneer
of some sort, leading the world into some new way of living.' Everything I
ever wanted to be or do comes from that, from an astronaut to a musician to a
speaker to an actor to a scientist. Exploration. Discovery.
Expression...

"...This is what I would love for Jesus to do for me this week in Colorado,
to say to me something of my true heart and calling, to commission me, to speak
into me as One who knows, and knows deeply. To say to me something in the
same way He spoke into Peter on the shores of the Sea of Galilee that fateful
and bright morn, 'Then (because you do love me), feed my sheep.'

And this is my desire still on this morning a year distant, a year further along on the journey Homeward. Frederick Beuchener said that in whatever other "official" way God may speak to us through the church and Scripture and such, surely He is also speaking through what happens to us, through the events of our lives. I feel this to be an important moment, full of holy ache and mystery, my heart itself becoming in some sense a wild bit of bush burning without being consumed.

Shadows and Dust

2006-12-29T11:54:00.000-06:00

The paltriness of our lives is largely due to our fascination with the trinkets and trophies of the unreal world that is passing away. Sex, drugs, booze, the pursuit of money, pleasure and power, even a little religion, suppress the awareness of present risenness. Religion dabbling, worldly prestige, or temporary unconsciousness cannot conceal the terrifying absence of meaning in the church and in society, nor can fanaticism, cynicism, or indifference.

-Brennan Manning, from Abba's Child

In an interview with Mel Gibson concerning the release of his Passion of the Christ movie, he was asked about his faith, about that which compelled him to make such a movie.

He recalled his ascent to worldwide fame by saying that he'd been to the pinnacle of all the secular world could offer him - he had attained all he'd ever wanted in this life. His wealth, his fame, any addiction that he could conceive - nothing that he'd desired was withheld to him. Anything he had ever wanted, he could get, he could try, he could attain. "And," he said to conclude, "it's not enough."

It wasn't for me money or fame. It was perfection, and meeting everyone's expectations-so-high. I prided myself on my impeccable performance in everything I did. Those things I couldn't do perfectly, I avoided. Those who would dare to see through my façade, I stayed far away from. Until at the end of years of this, I crashed. What I had most wanted I could have if I worked hard enough. But it was all illusion. I remember in the dark of my bedroom one night declaring the same, "it's not enough."

I have forgotten this, though, in the busyness of my days and the striving to do "good works". I've forgotten the reason for the hope I have. It might be only, "because it's not enough," and nothing more. But the desperation for the Enough is fuel to drive us passionately on the journey. Integrity Worship's book Desperate for You says, "Desperate people are passionate people... Desperation can drive us almost as much as it can drive us crazy. It's a fine, fine line. But probably the most worthwhile one we ever walk. If you've ever had that ceaseless ache in the center of your heart, you know the depths of the word desperate. Desperate people ache for fulfillment. And they'll go to any lengths to get it."

As people who have had a taste of that Enough, be it ever so slight, we long, desperately to eat our fill. We are called "believers" not as much because of the creeds we profess and wear like garments as because of the panting inside us that propels us in a desperate search for the One we know we must be made for. And all this talk of feasts and bread and wine and water - we somehow connect with that. It is familiar to us because we have become intimately familiar with our ache that keeps us walking. And we wonder if it's not given to us as a gift, a treasure - or a compass, even.

Because now the words, "Come to me if you are thirsty" make sense. They reverberate in our hearts like an echo down an empty well.

Brennan Manning continues,

Whatever the addiction--be it a smothering relationship, a dysfunctional dependence, or mere laziness--our capacity to be affected by Christ is numbed. Sloth is our refusal to go on the inward journey, a paralysis that results from choosing to protect ourselves from passion. When we are not profoundly affected by the treasure in our grasp, apathy and mediocrity are inevitable. If passion is not to degenerate into nostalgia or sentimentality, it must be renewed at its source.

We will largely be unconvincing and unconvinced disciples until we come to the end of ourselves and realize even with exasperation that there's not enough wealth or fame or attainable perfection in this life to satisfy us. The best moments are fleeting. In this life, all good things do come to an end. That will take us to either the lowest places of despair, or the deepest places of desperation. As C.S. Lewis explains in Mere Christianity, "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exist. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in my self a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

Because, and here's the hope - it's I think as simple and humble as this - we will one day have it. All. It's still not going to be in the money or fame or booze or that one perfect relationship we are trying to hold onto or sex or performance or that beautiful bag of potato chips or that mission trip to Mexico. Those are just shadows. It will be in Him. All of it.

A few years ago I gave my wife as a birthday gift a jar of dirt. I know, I know, romantic guy I am. I had inscribed on the side of the jar the words "Shadows and Dust." We both knew well what it meant. It is a line taken from the movie Gladiator. Proximo, the trainer who originally purchased Maximus and trained him as a gladiator, had himself once been a gladiator. He had stood in the arena and had heard the audience cheering him on. He had participated in glory as a gladiator, and after he had been freed by Marcus Aurelius, he was haunted by it. "Shadows and dust" became a phrase he used to help him remember the reality of both illusions (shadows) and death itself (dust). Proximo, having tasted of the former glory of Rome, defied the Pratorians who had come to capture Maximus. He was killed at their hands. Moments before they entered the room, his face is set toward the sun and you can hear him whisper, "shadows and dust."

There will come a time when all things will be well, and all manner of things well. We will know God. We will know God fully. We will know and be known. And we will be home. Lewis finishes his though, "I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."

This life that we speak of is our heart's deepest and most passionate desire and the source of its most poignant ache. George MacDonald writes, "The thing that can mourn can mourn only from lack; it cannot mourn because of being, but because of not enough being. We are vessels of life, not yet full of the wine of life; where the wine does not reach, there the clay cracks, and aches, and is distressed..." It is also the most unattainable except by pure, undistilled Grace. Grace that this God who apparently wants us far more than even we could even want Him has lavished upon us. In other words, we get it, we get life. That, my friends, is indeed Good News.

"...Life must be assisted, upheld, comforted, every part, with life. Life is the law, the food, the necessity of life. Life is everything." -George MacDonald

All-Consuming

2006-12-11T16:16:00.000-06:00

It’s a busy season. Family to visit. Gifts to exchange. Shopping to do. I’m struck by the way so much of our culture has been able to recognize the deep need in the human soul and sell it, promising the life we’ve always wanted if we just purchase this pair of tennis shoes, or that leather coat, or this necklace for our wives or that extended DVD set.

It can happen with even the most important things. “The church, you see” explains Paul, “is not peripheral to the world.” Oh really? It hardly seems so when you watch television or visit the nearest mall. I wonder if Paul would have thought differently if he’d had a Macy’s or Sears in his hometown. This is, afterall, what Christmas seems to be about. Even many Christians I know seem to be caught up in the consumerism and commercialism of the season. But Paul is unapologetic in the finality of his statement. “The world is peripheral to the church” (Ephesians 1, The Message). The church, meaning the body of Jesus on earth where all the action is, where the life of Jesus happens.

There was a fascinating study done at UCLA where some mice were given injections of speed to see how long it would take them to run themselves to death. Control mice that weren't injected were placed with them. You know what happened? The control mice ran themselves to death just as quickly as the others. It's the nature of the world to run around purposeless, distracted, desperate to fill in the missing pieces with shopping, sex, empty conversation, complication in relationships, and the like.

And so, DeAnn and I have begun pulling back, resisting, refusing to allow ourselves to be taken out and ours hearts to be completely overwhelmed with the "needs" around us – the shopping lists, the family visits, the frantic pace, the buzzing and whirling and crowding. We are withdrawing to the center, turning our gaze to the One who came for us, and starting to remember.

John Eldredge recently wrote a fantastic reminder to the deeper and truer reason behind Advent season. It is so that we may remember and anticipate. “Not only is it an opportunity to reflect – for several weeks – on the fact that God came, it is also an opportunity to lift our eyes towards his return. He will come again.”¹

Together we are seeking out the stories that remind us of God coming through for us, and for His promise that He will come again to set all things aright. We are to love Him. We are to be consumed with Jesus and with His kingdom, with His presence and with His promises. We are to see Him, to set our eyes on Him, as a babe born in a manger, as the Son who came to take our place and ransom us, as a Warrior, as a Friend, as the image of the Father, as our one true love. As Dallas Willard has said, “The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him.”

We are among those He came for, and for whom He will again return. He came to make Himself known “to the humbled, to the fringes of the population, heralded by goats, by sheep, and by astrologers from the east.”²

May we remember. May we awaken to the deep and unbelievably great news that we have been invited into a Great Tale, “a Story that begins, “Once upon a time” and ends “And they lived happily ever after…”²

¹John’s letter can be found here.
² This comes from "Emmanuel, God with Us"

Setting the Stage: Jesus' Pursuit, Part 2

2006-12-06T22:11:00.000-06:00

Continued from The Question: Jesus' Pursuit, Part 1

John the Baptist has already been proclaiming some pretty wild stuff out there in the wilderness, wild words to match well his wild clothes and choice of food. John’s a wild man, and a passionate one. He is known as John the Baptist because he has been baptizing folks to get them ready for the coming Messiah. And some people are starting to believe that there will really be a Messiah coming. A lot of expectation is raised, and a lot of anticipation. What will this Messiah be like? What will he do?

Those who are coming by frequently to the Jordan where John is preaching were known now as his disciples, or more simply, his students. They were listening intently to what John had to say. Why? I mean, why would anyone particularly want to hang around this wild man who was dressed in camel skin and ate locusts for dinner? What was he saying to them that drew their interest, anyway?

To answer that, let me back up a bit to tell you about John’s father. His name was Zechariah. This guy was a priest who had been chosen to go on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the temple of the Lord to burn incense. This was a very rare opportunity for a priest, and Zechariah was no doubt scared out of his mind as much as he was excited.

One of the first things we learn about Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth is that they had no children. They wanted them, but Elizabeth was barren, so their hope of having any sons or daughters was waning fast, and the chances were slim.

Now, even as a priest, it was a very rare thing to get to go into the temple of the Lord. Very few priests were ever able to do so. And Zechariah was the guy chosen to go in. Now, to do so it meant that he would have a rope tied to his ankle just in case he did something wrong and he’d die in there as a result of God’s holiness and the others would need to drag him out. So this was a pretty heavy and serious matter. What made it even weightier was what Zechariah encountered in there.

To be continued...

The Best for Now

2006-12-04T11:02:00.000-06:00

You have saved the best till now.
-John 2:10, italics mine

The final project from singer/songwriter Rich Mullin’s prolific career, The Jesus Record, came about because he felt compelled to spend time thinking on the life and words of Jesus. Though there is much to think of in this journey with God, and much he did think of – grief and sorrow, battle, friendship, growing up and growing old and even growing young – this one thing he felt compelled and drawn to: Jesus’ life and His initiation and invitation and ransom through it.

I find that really instructive, and so that’s what I, too, and compelled to do. It was another saint who said that we should “fix our eyes on Jesus.”

So, here’s what I am seeing recently. When I look at people around Jesus, those who interacted with him in the gospels, I see basically two types: those who eventually fell in love with him and gave their lives to following him, and those whose hatred toward him and the kingdom he came to announce became murderous. There was hardly any middle ground. In fact, Jesus himself said as much – “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30).

Out of the four main socio-religious groups of the time – the Essenes, the Herodians and their friends the Saduccees, the Zealots, and finally the Pharisees – Jesus didn’t fit in. He couldn’t be categorized and so he wasn’t so easily dismissed. It’s interesting to note that those who hated Jesus were those whose fury came from their inability to own him, who couldn’t use him for their own agenda. Rich’s words are true here, that “the world can’t stand what it can’t own and it can’t own you ‘cause you did not have a home.”

Jesus came, of course, to bring his kingdom to us, to announce it so that we may be invited in. To open up for us a new way, a new reality, a new world order. His kingdom opens up for us the possibility of a new heart and with it a new and intimate relationship with ourselves, with each other, and, of course first with God. In Jesus, God stooped down to look us in the eyes and say, “I want you to be mine now. Join me. Become my friend.” [Incidentally, the Hebrew for “unfailing love” in Psalm 6:4 (“…O Lord… save me because of your unfailing love”) denotes befriending.] A better picture is God lifting us up to where He is, to a "high and holy place" - Isaiah 57:15. It is a new order outside of ourselves but coming from within, from hearts full of life (Proverbs 4:23).

While all of this is baffling and more than a little shocking in its implications, perhaps the most scandalous notion of all was the kingdom’s availability and presence. All good Jews in Jesus’ day knew something about a kingdom coming. This language wasn’t unfamiliar to Jesus’ hearers. For centuries, prophets have been describing and foretelling this kingdom. Many of the prophets before Jesus spoke on behalf of the poor and oppressed, the rejected and outcast. With prophetic tradition, Jesus spoke of the inward sincerity of the heart and authenticity – again, nothing too unfamiliar (though mostly forgotten) to his hearers. And, of course, just like the prophets before him, Jesus spoke of the coming judgment – that evil would be exposed and named for what it was. Finally, Jesus emphasized the coming of a new order of things, a time in which “in that reality, the poor and rejected will be embraced and valued and brought back to the community. In that new era, what will count is what is in the heart – not merely what is projected, pretended, or professed. In that new realm, evil in all its forms will be exposed, named, and dealt with. In that new kingdom, justice, integrity, and peace will overcome” (Brian McLaren, “The Secret Message of Jesus,” p. 23).

Most of the Jews should have known this much already, but only in the sense that it was far out in the distant future. That’s why for many – Nicodemus perhaps being one of them – Jesus’ arrival (and with him, the kingdom) was such a shock. It exposed their unbelief. When John the Baptist announced, “Repent!” (Matthew 3:2), not much of a raucous was raised. But he finished his pronouncement with, “for the kingdom of heaven is near.” What a fool he must have sounded like! Who would really expect the kingdom to be at hand, really? That came as a contradiction to what everyone thought and expected. No one expected the kingdom of God to happen now. “It could only happen then,” writes Brian McLaren, “after the Romans were ejected or eliminated, which in turn couldn’t happen (for the Zealots) until later, after the Jews were militarily mobilized and led by a great military liberator (or messiah), which couldn’t happen (for the Pharisees) until later, after the prostitutes and drunks and other undesirables were either reformed or otherwise eliminated. Put together, these conditions were so hard to imagine actually occurring anytime soon that they were considered (by the comfortably adjusted Herodians and their similarly comfortable friends, the Saduccees) completely improbable, no, practically impossible. The Kingdom of God? Maybe in some distant someday. At hand, here and now? No way!”

Yet it was just a few days later when Jesus strolled right in front of John and John yelled out, “This is the one I meant…!” The kingdom of God, indeed, is near – standing right before him. Standing right before us.

We get to live on this side of that amazing invasion by the King into enemy territory to bring about this new kingdom. And yet, we often do with it the very same thing those contemporaries of Jesus did. The kingdom of God can only happen then, after… fill in the blank. I go to college. Get married. Buy a home. Have children. Accomplish something big in my career. Get more money. Find a community. Be healed or feel better. Beat depression. The list goes on.

We miss Jesus in our midst because of this, and in the process miss everything that he won for us by the kingdom come – his reign and rule, living in the freedom and fullness of a new heart, offering love and invitation and truth to others. Essentially, we are not really living at all unless, and until, we live in and out of the kingdom of God now here, established in and from us by the King and by our Intimate One.

Father God, it’s true. I have bought into the lie that I have to wait until things change or get better before I can really live in the kingdom. I have squandered the most startling and amazing gift ever given that is fully mine to have, fought for and won for me by Jesus – life, life to the full and free and all that it implies: heart intimacy with you and with others, full expression of your character, glory and honor to you, and the beauty and dire need of your kingdom being established here throughout my own home and community. I have missed it. Why… and how in the world…? Forgive me, Lord. Jesus, come again in the fullness of your Spirit and establish me again into your kingdom as a citizen of it and may your kingdom in turn be established here, in, through, and from my heart, my household, and my domain. I give all of myself back to you: body, heart, soul, mind, spirit, strength. I am yours. Reign here. Move here. Speak here. Bring your presence and blessing here. Open my eyes and ears. You have saved the best for now, indeed. I am taken. I love you. I love you. Amen.

Holy Ground

2006-11-27T15:43:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoa.

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

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

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

Trained for Battle

2006-11-24T23:52:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

Yes, Lord! Yes I am.

Then why do you allow it to be stolen?

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

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

What will the cost be, Lord?

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

Of course, my King.

Now, are you ready?

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

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

More than anything!

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

The Burden of Love

2006-11-23T06:34:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss. Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets. And now, isn't it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You're more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you've come out of this with purity of heart.
-2 Corinthians 7:9-11, The Message

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

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

The Bridge of Sighs

2006-11-21T17:12:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

I call it the Bridge of Sighs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Silence, Speak

2006-10-30T13:43:00.000-06:00

I forgot the wisdom
of the poem is silent wisdom,
the space between letter
and letter.

-from I Forgot by Arnon Levy

Max Picard in The World of Silence says of the Hebrew language that its architecture is vertical. “Each word sinks down vertically column-wise into the sentence. In languages today we have lost the static quality of the ancient tongues. The sentences become dynamic.” His next statement is a piercing metaphor for most of our lives today, “Every word and every sentence speeds on quickly to the next. Each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence, and moves on more to the next word in front of it than to the silence…”

The same could be said of our lives. The same could also be said too often of those who speak for or to us, our pastors, our talk-show hosts, our news anchors, our politicians.

In the recent elections, how do we know who is who? Who stands where? How do we know when all we hear in the media is what this one says about that and what this one thinks about that one. Everyone speaks, and everyone speaks loudly, clamoring for attention and votes, and so no one is heard. It is like the clanking and clattering of dishes shattering on the floor of a restaurant by an overwhelmed waiter spilling his server tray that deafens friends, even if temporarily, to the conversation they went there to seek. Why is it that a quiet beachfront picnic or an evening over candlelight is more romantic for two in love than a night out at a carnival or a club? It is because there is silence, and in that silence each can hear the heartbeat of the other.

No wonder God often speaks in a whisper, and that in the deafening crowd of the streets no one will hear Him (Matthew 12:19).

Henry David Thoreau said it well. The more we are deafened by the drone and buzz of the noise around us, “we go more constantly and desperately to the post office [or to check our email],” but “the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while…. Read not The Times,” he finishes, “read The Eternities!” Dallas Willard summarizes Thoreau’s thoughts by stating that “conversation degenerates into mere gossip and those we meet can only talk of what they heard from someone else.” While I’m not sure I wholeheartedly agree with Eleanor Roosevelt’s thought that “great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people,” it is true that the mind and the heart itself withers by the constant sounds around and eventually almost entirely disappears, swallowed up by the life, or what we perceive as life, happening in a maddening speed around us.

James warned us to be slow to speak (James 1:19), and I think this is why. It must be from the silence and what we encounter there that words are formed in us – the tragedy of that silence and the weight of it, and the comedy that ensues when we actually hear from God, and the jaw-dropping, heart-stopping reality of what it is He actually tells us.

The Israeli poet Yona Wallach wrote to “Let the words work on you… they'll enter you, they'll come inside… let the words act on you, do with you as they wish.” We would do well to remember that is was out of the Word that Jesus came to dwell among us (John 1:1), a Word that the world didn’t recognize (John 1:10).

And how could it? The days of Jesus were tumultuous ones, no less so than in our present Western, modernistic society. It was only those willing to be done with the grasping to be heard and actually walk with Jesus who would later have the authority to speak, whose words would echo and reverberate from the empty hearts of millions that would follow in the centuries to come. No wonder the Psalmist tells us to “be still and know that I am God” (46:10), using for the word “still” one that means to sink down, to leave alone, to withdraw.

Last week God brought me to Mort Walker trail, a path that meanders through some woodlands in a conservation area not far from where I work. While there, I wrote this in my journal:

I am seeking the presence of the Father more immediate and intimate than I normally experience day-to-day within the noise and busyness of life. It’s in the silence that I am given “ears to hear,” as I have asked Jesus to give me, and the solitude beckons me into the secret place with Him. It always has.

I feel like He had this prepared for me like a secret picnic, a “table prepared for me in the presence of my enemies.” And here, in the deepest gratitude, surrounded by groaning creation as a reminder of what is to come – the feast of the wedding day – I eat. I dine. I linger here with the Wild Lover who wants me not to have him but to be haved by Him, who desires not that I possess but that I be possessed – with Him, with His life – and insobeing remain in Him and He in me.

If I am to speak, then it will be from that place and from that place alone. For it is the place of love, and the Source and Fount of my life.

Mountaintop Intimacy

2006-10-27T14:32:00.000-05:00

Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view
Lookin’ back, I see the lead of love.
-Caedmon’s Call

I can’t tell you why, but I have always been bothered by the phrase “mountaintop experience” when referring to an intimate time of communion with the Lord. It always feels so… isolated, so estranged from everyday reality, as if you have to somehow climb a mountain in order to be with God or experience His presence. It makes me think of the Johnny Hart’s B.C. comic strip, in which the main character ascends a large mountain and arrives at the top breathless. Waiting for him is a man of wisdom who gives him some sage advice to take back down the mountain with him, which he will use when he enters back into his “real life.”

The phrase comes, I suppose, from Moses’ experience with God on the mountain face of the Sinai, where He gave to him the commandments. It was a wild experience for Moses, where the Mount was covered with smoke “and the Lord descended on it in fire” (Exodus 19:18). But it was isolated. It was a once-in-a-lifetime gig. And, although Moses and the Lord would speak face-to-face “as a man speaks with his friend” (Exodus 33:11), it was not constant. Moses, in fact, had to ascend the mountain several times in order to meet with God, and there the Lord would command him what to say to the Israelites, even at one point commanding that Moses bring Aaron back up with him on his next trip up the mountain (Exodus 19:24).

This is what bothers me most about using the phrase to refer to an intimate time with God. It’s used often when speaking about a seminar or a church service or a time of worship. Coming back from a Christian conference, a friend of mine commented that he will now have to “come down off the mountain.” A popular contemporary Christian music group sings, “When I climb down the mountain and get back to my life,” signifying the intimate time with the Lord as something that is sought or experienced apart from everyday life.

Back on March 30th, 2004, I wrote this in my journal: [A friend] told me how he saw me as someone who always sought the mountaintop and didn't live well in reality. I take that seriously, Lord God - because if anything, I want to live in Reality, in light of the Really Real, in the Kingdom of the Real, not in the illusions. Ever since our conversation I've been asking you what validity, if any, there was to such an observation...

Yesterday, two-and-a-half years later, the Lord God answered me.

Three things are going on at the same time. First, I'm facilitating a study this week that prompted me to go back through and explore my journals, where I found this entry from March 2004 and remembered the conversation and question I brought to God. Second, I've been in recent "conversations" again with this same friend. I use the term conversations loosely, since they are riddled with accusation and fear and belligerence. But I want him. I want his heart. I want to hold him to the truth in love. And the third thing that happened yesterday is that I read one of Kendall's blog posts called "CloSe, Hard." In it, he essentially says that with the arrival of Jesus on the scene, the kind of life we get to live, the kind of life we have permission now to live, is , in effect, a constant "mountaintop experience" (meaning up close, intimate, personal) with God. This concerns Jesus’ words to the crowd in John 6, when he tells them that his flesh is the bread, and that “if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” Here, here’s what Kendall wrote:

What if what is so "hard" about the teaching isn't about eating flesh or drinking blood? What if what is so "hard" is that Jesus is saying, "Yeah, that time in the wilderness with the manna and the quail? The whole Pillar of Fire and Column of Smoke being so uncomfortably close to you? The reality of God asking you to trust against all odds, even when the necessities in life run dry? Well, you ain't seen nuthin yet." What if Jesus was saying something like, "I want to be closer to you than I even was back then?"

Kendall continues,

Again, I am reminded that the Israelites seemed to asks for less and less direct interaction with God as time went by. It started mano-y-mano. It eventually became an isolated room in a temple that only a few guys could talk to, with a rope around their waste. Then there was a "silence."

Then, he concludes,

So, Jesus shows up and does some pretty cool things with fish and bread to get their attention. Then he lays it on them that the kind of life God wants is one that is up-close again, only not isolated to a wilderness experience; he wants it in the everyday. He says, "if you eat…I will come and make my home in you." Not just pitch a tent near by, but actually move in.

Through Kendall, God has spoken directly and in no uncertain words to my delimma. In fact, Jesus already addressed it with his invitation in John 6 to "eat and drink." Continuing from the March 30th '04 journal entry,

Why shouldn't I want the mountaintop?? Why shouldn't I want to behold the glory and splendor of my God?? If I am accused of wanting the mountaintop view, perhaps I am really being accused of having too much desire... an accusation I take delightfully. Open me up, though, Jesus, to more desire!

Amen. More desire, Jesus. This is your invitation and your desire. You have come to make your home in me now and forever. The glory of God has come. We no longer need the mountain. We need You. I eat. I drink. Make your home in me.

Welcome to Nowata

2006-10-18T23:00:00.000-05:00

My wife and I used to make a circuitous route from the town in Oklahoma where we lived to visit family in southern Missouri. Each time, we would pass through a particular town that stood out among the rest only because there was nothing about it that made it particularly interesting. There was nothing of it that would catch the eye.

It’s a no-man’s town, a place where now only a few remain after the farming and timber boom of the early 20th century died down. Struggling ma-and-pa shops find themselves next to long-abandoned warehouses and boarded-up structures. Houses seem old – not so much as in age, because you think that they could be made new again, antique and classic even, but rather in soul, as if the owners, if they exist at all, have long ago given up on strong look of solid brick and the clean curves of Doric columns and the fresh feeling of gardens and cut grass.

I remember a gas station on a corner. It remains open only because there is still a road that makes its long stretch between real destinations right through the town’s middle – still keeping the town alive but oddly lifeless, like the spinal cord of a quadriplegic. Its name was given to it at its birth, some 120 years ago, and its Indian ancestry has spiritual roots, and I laugh every time I hear it: Nowata. It’s prophetic, I think. We make jokes, matching its name with another Oklahoma town, “Don’t slip on Nowata, Eufala down.” but they never quite fit right, like mocking the homeless or shaming the sinner. It was only later that we learned the name was a mispronouncement of a Delaware word meaning “come here” or “welcome.” Welcome… to what?

We would zigzag through its heart as we glimpsed the occasional American flag in a front yard, a faded and dented stop sign marking its center, an old railroad track reminding us of its vital days when the St. Louis & Iron Mountain Railroad Company extended its line down from Coffeyville through Nowata County and on south to Fort Smith, Arkansas, shipping cattle and farming supplies between three states, straight through the heart of Indian Territory. And, ironically, the town thrived precisely because there was an abundance of water from the Verdigris River that fed the abundant prairie grasses with much-needed nutrients. That, and the discovery of oil a hundred years ago.

But what had happened since? What’s its true story? How did it find itself where it now is, and what kind of summer would have to blow in to revive the trees, to clean the streets and alleyways of debris, to caress and invite green life into bloom, bleach the buildings, intoxicate the people? What kind of wild wind and strong storm could sweep the place clean of weariness, of days upon days of hot Oklahoma-sun dreariness, and revitalize its soul from a long, dry drought? Are they ready for a storm like that?

Am I?

One Good Memory

2006-10-04T12:01:00.000-05:00

And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.
-Alyosha, The Brothers Karamazov

I love this line. As the “hero” of the story, Aloysha is the moral and relational center of the novel, and Dostoevsky considers his way of life the way of the heart in relationship to Christ and centered in His life. And Aloysha could not have been more right in stating that “good memory” may serve one day for our salvation.

It is memory that Jesus speaks to in these days through his Spirit. It is recognition. Remember that right before Jesus left he said that the Father would send the Holy Spirit in his name who would teach us all things and remind us of everything that Jesus said to us.

C.S. Lewis was right to understand that we need more to be reminded than instructed. He was not only speaking to believers by the way. Yes, those of us granted a new heart that now beats very much in rhythm with the heart of Christ will be compelled to follow Him simply by memory of where He has gone and what He has spoken to us. Have you ever noticed a bead of water on the windshield during a rain shower will usually fall in line with the one that went before it, forming a kind of wet trail on the glass? This is what Lewis meant. We have not yet tread where Jesus has gone, at least not fully, as there is always more – more depth to explore and more vistas with God to enjoy. But there is a memory of that life, an imprint, a path, a trail. And it is the work of the Spirit to bring us into it.

But Lewis was speaking also to unbelievers there (in “Mere Christianity”), and actually he did not try to make much of a distinction between the two. This is the reality that Lewis knew, that the human heart itself, wicked or not, deceived or not, was made in the image of the Living God. There is a kind of memory there of another life, or at least some better life, than the one we have. It is often only a phantom pain of something better, like the pain in the “hand” of a man who has lost his arm. But it is still poignant. Just take a look around. Almost everyone you see is engaged in a struggle to make their lives better. We want an increase in pay, or a better-fitting career. We often think that children will make our lives better or happier, or maybe moving to a new city or trying out a new wardrobe or a new kind of drug. And this is not just the American Way. I have been to the remotest villages in Africa and have seen the same. It is something intrinsic in the human soul. We know life as it should be, and we do not have it.

That is the dilemma – that somewhere deep inside we know life as it should be, or at the very least we know that somehow this isn’t the life we were meant to have. Not all of us have arrived at that realization yet, but we will. It’s a guarantee that nothing we use to delude ourselves against that reality will last long. Almost everyone you see is in the struggle to have it. The greatest tragedy, however, is in thinking that we can secure it for ourselves. Didn’t Jesus say that this would never work? “If you seek to save [secure for yourself] your life, you will lose it.” (Matthew 16:25)

So what do you do? What do you do with the thought that this life is not the life you were meant to have, that you were meant to live? What do you do with the fact that we are haunted by eternity, and to make it worse, there is nothing we can do to get there. We cannot sneak our way back into Eden, though we would sell our souls if it meant we could.

If you let that sink in and if you left it there, then it would lead you to despair, then cynicism, then despondency, and finally to madness. Some have gone that way. Think of Nietzsche and his philosophy of nihilism, which states that there is no objective meaning or purpose to our existence. Secretly, this view is held despairingly by many.

But there is another way. It is the Way of Jesus…

The Long Stretch

2006-09-27T11:19:00.000-05:00

And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
-Romans 5:5

'I saw the Lord always before me.
Because he is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will live in hope,
because you will not abandon me to the grave,
nor will you let your Holy One see decay.
You have made known to me the paths of
life; you will fill me with joy in your presence.
-Acts 2:25-28

I've been looking at the differences between longing (or desire) and hope and faith. I've come to think that longing is something that I will live with now in my new heart, that like an imprint it's there in my heart - like treated lumber as a frame for a house. It's just in there and I must learn to live with it. But it's not enough. Longing or desire is only that unless I do something with it. It's like hunger pains. It doesn't mean anything unless it leads me to Food. Hope is the expectation that you will find that Food and be filled. Faith is enduring in that hope, despite persecution and temptation to take the play off-broadway, in the face of a shortcut or a substitute to sedate the heart or slake the thirst.

I'm somewhere between the longing and the hope. I have plenty of longing, so much that it nearly takes me out. I think this was Jeremiah's condition of the word of the Lord being like a "fire in his bones." But longing by itself leads only to disappointment, then desperation, and then inevitably to despair. Only by allowing hope to grow within will that longing produce in us what Jesus wants: our hearts. That hope brings us deeper into Christ and further along on our journey.

I don't have enough hope that I will one day have what I long for, and that in this life it is my inheritance to have that very thing (deeper, richer, and more abundant life in God). This longing for life is the source of all of my heart's discontent, but the hope for it is the source of all my heart's joy. Hope is essential. "Hope is to the soul like breathing is to the body," says philosopher-theologian Gabriel Marcel. And so this is what I'm taking to Jesus, that I will be filled to the full with "all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit" (Romans 15:13).

We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, our labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.
-1 Thessalonians 1:3

It Must Be Intimate

2006-09-27T08:32:00.000-05:00

I came across today the following exerpt from John Eldredge's book Waking the Dead. It is what is what I need now, and must have, in a fellowship and community. I have come far with God, too far to turn around, and to continue on in any authentic way, it is fellowship with others "one in heart" that my wife and I must have...

Of course, small groups have become a part of the programming most churches offer their people. For the most part, they are disappointing and short-lived—by the very admission of those who try them. There are two reasons. One, you can’t just throw a random group of people together for a twelve-week study of some
kind and expect them to become intimate allies. The sort of devotion we want and need takes place within a shared life. Over the years our fellowship has gone camping together. We play together; help one another move; paint a room; find work. We throw great parties. We fight for each other, live in the Four Streams. This is how it was meant to be.

I love this description of the early church: “All the believers were one in heart” (Acts 4:32 ). A camaraderie was being expressed there, a bond, an esprit de corps. It means they all loved the same thing, they all wanted the same thing, and they were bonded together to find it, come hell or high water. And hell or high water will come, friends, and this will be the test of whether or not your band will make it: if you are one in heart. Judas betrayed the brothers because his heart was never really with them, just as Cipher betrays the company on the Nebuchadnezzar and as Boromir betrays the fellowship of the Ring. My goodness— churches split over the size of the parking lot or what instruments to use during worship. Most churches are not “one in heart.” (Waking the Dead , 193)

From The Ransomed Heart, by John Eldredge, reading 270
Ransomed Heart Ministries www.ransomedheart.com

For the First Time

2006-09-18T09:44:00.000-05:00

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspiried and success achieved.
-Helen Keller

How telling it is that Helen Keller would speak of strength and vision. It’s reminds of Ginny Owens, the blind Christian singer/songwriter, whose favorite song is Be Thou My Vision. Helen grew up as a girl both blind and deaf.

I was really moved after watching a video of her life and the dramatic way in which she came to see all that she had been taught by her tutor as her way of trying to reach her, to communicate to her. According to the film, Helen Keller’s tutor had taught her to speak using the tactical sensation of someone’s hand shapes in her palm. Speech would not work, since she was deaf, and sign language would not work, since she was blind. This technique was like sign language for the blind – done in a way in which she could “feel” the words. But for so long, she didn’t get it. She learned and went through the motions, but it never reached her. She spent her days isolated, cut off from others, unable to communicate in the most basic way.

One afternoon, she was fetching water from a well and felt the water running through her hands. She dropped the bucket and stood up sharp, a kind of contorted unbelief crossing her face. She felt the water again, then ran for her tutor. She made the sign for “water” in her tutor’s hand, so hurried and excited she had to repeat it. The tutor, who had finally given up on Helen after so long not connecting, almost couldn’t believe it. She started making the sign for “dirt” and “bucket”, for “dress” and “hair”. She got it. It all came rushing to her like an avalanche, a waterfall of understanding. The entire world suddenly opened up to Helen.

I wrote some words to a song I called “Helen Keller” at a time when that for me was a picture of my entering into Grace. Deaf to His calling, blind to His wooing, He came to speak a language I would grasp. He came to write it in the sand and in my palm. For so long I had missed it. Like Helen, I remember feeling the Water rushing through my fingers, dodging my grasp, and my heart skipping a beat in the moment it all came.

I run my hands through the water of life,
amazed to be alive.
In one flash, in one instant moment of grace,
I catch a glimpse of Your face,
my heart’s home, where I strive to be
but could never reach –
And so your waters rush over me.

And like a waterfall of love
rises the sun
Like the roar of an ocean
is your ceaseless devotion
for your precious ones
for me, your son
And for the first time
my eyes perceive beauty,
though they’ve never seen before
And my ears hear an invitation
from this, my Lover Lord

The breeze it blows to take me back
Into your secret place again

Modus Operandi

2006-09-07T11:06:00.000-05:00

I recently read a really great book on living in the love of God called “So You Don’t Want To Go To Church Anymore?” In it, a man named John approaches proselytizers on a street corner screaming at passers-by that they will be going to hell. He nears one of the accusers, and, full of sadness, says to him, "You really have no idea what motivates you, do you?"

It struck me as odd, this comment. Not because I’m not also put off by the accusers’ remarks, or by their apparent misunderstanding of the Scriptures or even the heart of God, but by the use of the word “motivation.” Reading through the story, you come to understand John as a man of God, a man who knows Him very intimately.

Thinking through it some, I think in that question John really cut to the heart of the matter, the same as Jesus often does in His approach to us. He is always interested more in what is in our hearts, the “why’s” and “what’s” and “what’s up’s” than he is in our actions, those “how’s” and “where’s” and “when’s.”

I recently had a conversation with a friend where I read a Fredrick Buechner quote to him. In the quote, Buechner essentially states that when we are thinking of a vocation for our lives, we should listen to the voice of our own gladness. My friend insisted that it is better to listen to the voice of Jesus and not our own gladness. I argued that I think this is what Buechner meant by his statement, that Jesus will often speak to us through the desires written long ago in our hearts, that the calling on our lives will be where we feel the most passion and energy. Going back and forth, my friend could still only see the actions that Jesus calls us to, and not the motivation behind them. Possibly the most important question of our time is “What is it, exactly that Jesus wants for us, not from us?”

If only the man known as the “expert of the law” had been able to see that question when he came to Jesus asking what was necessary to “inherit eternal life.” Jesus, probing his heart, asked him in return, “What’s written in the law? How do you read it?” (Jesus could very well have asked him, “You’re the “expert of the law,” right? Your identity is in knowing everything about God so that you can lord that knowledge over others, all the while stealing their God-given place of intimacy with me. So, you tell me. How do you read the law?”) The man replied as he was taught, with the Scripture to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”

And then comes the most confusing verse in all of Scripture. Jesus says to the man, “Yeah, that’s right. Do that, and you’ll have life.”

What? Do that? Do that? How does a man just “do” that, as if it were a task you could check off at the end of the day? For any of us who understand love even a little bit, it is not something you do, it is something that flows. That statement to us who have tasted love is equivalent of saying, “Yes, water is necessary to sustain life in our bodies. Do water and you will live.” It is nonsensical. How do you “do water”?

In the same way, how do you “do love”?

And that was Jesus’ point. You can’t. You don’t “do love.” You live it. You live with it. You feed it. You abide in it. You enjoy it. You let it grow. And love is not the point. Our place with God restored is the point. He is the vine, and we are the branches of that vine.

Immersed in a society that is task-oriented and consumer-driven, most of our ears have been deafened to the call of the heart, much like the expert in the law. We hear “love the Lord your God” as a call to action, not a call to intimacy. We’ve all heard the famous Mountain Dew commercials that declare “Do the Dew,” when, in fact, all you can “do” with Mountain Dew is to drink it. It actually “does” its thing in you – either to hydrate you or to give you a rush of caffeine.

The tragedy of that encounter in Scripture is that the man left thinking he could just add “love the Lord your God with everything you are” as another item on his checklist as something to do to inherit, or earn or get, real life.

Can you imagine if a twig laying on the ground was thinking to himself, “Hmmm. I wonder how I can get nutrients. How can I grow?” He lays there baking and drying out in the hot sun. The trunk of the tree says to him, “You are a branch of mine. What do you think you must do to have life?” “I think,” replies the twig, “that I’ll go down my checklist. First, I’ll try to bury myself in the dirt…” and on he goes. The tree knows, of course, that the only way this branch will live again is to be grafted back into the tree so that the life-giving sap of the tree flows into him.

There is much action in the Kingdom of God. In fact, living the life of God is the most active and adventurous thing we do, but only as an overflow of the life of the heart. He loved us first, and our love is a response to His.

And then, we have life. It begins there, in intimacy with God, and it grows and it extends from it.

Picture Elijah. This fella was a prophet of God, which means that he was friends with God and that God entrusted to him his heart and words to bring a nation back into fellowship and intimacy with Himself. And what kind of life did he get to live? Well, let’s just say he didn’t spend his life in La-Z-Boy flipping through channels. At one point, God called him to Mount Carmel, where he was about to have a showdown with one of Israel’s enemies. 1 Kings 18 describes that encounter.

But even Elijah drew his life and breath from the intimate time he spent with God. Just after the encounter with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, Elijah fled in fear and weariness toward a cave. God tenderly ministers to Elijah, twice bringing him food and water. He travels to Mt. Horeb to hide and rest in a cave. God comes to him and listens to his laments. Elijah is worn out from simply “doing” and needs restoration. God sends a great wind to the mountain, and then an earthquake, and then a fire. But God was in none of these. Then, Elijah hears a “gentle whisper,” and it is here in the whisper that he finds God. There, in that tender embrace from God, Elijah’s life is restored. He is not doing. He is, in fact, fainting into the embrace of his God.

In the ‘80s BMX movie Rad, Cru is trying to learn to perform a backflip on his bike. Bruised and worn out from slamming on his back again and again, Christian finally tells him, “You’re letting your body move your head. Let your head lead, and your body will follow naturally.” On the next attempt, Cru lands his flip perfectly.

We’ve all heard the phrases, “Use your head,” or “Get your head in the game.” That’s another way of saying, “Put your heart into this. Let this be your entire focus of energy and passion.” But what if you can’t? What if you cannot put your heart into the game? Can you still play well?

In the Kingdom, the answer is no. The heart is central. The heart is first.

That is why, I think, Hebrews tell us to keep our eyes focused on Jesus. We will follow with action and intention what motivates us in the heart. If our faces are set like flint on the life of Jesus and the love of God, and if we are experiencing them daily as we abide in Jesus, then the effects of love will shine through. Our motivation will be love. Love, and the life of God, will be our modus operandi.

It was the summer of 2003. I and a small band had traveled across the globe to a small village in southern Sudan where we would be shooting some footage for a film we were making on the life of persecuted Christians. Unable to sleep early one morning, I flipped through the Bible and landed on a verse that had before given me a lot of encouragement, Jeremiah 29:11, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” Angry for reasons that I could not explain, I left the hot, cramped hut and walked outside. Due to the absence of electricity, I found myself enshrouded in a nighttime darkness I had never encountered before. There, under a billion brilliant stars in a sky that stretched wider than the continent, I lamented to God in despair, “I can’t! I can’t find you, then, because I can’t seek you with all my heart! I don’t do anything with all my heart!”

I didn’t expect a response, but I got one anyway. It was a single word, one that has ricocheted and reverberated in my soul ever since, and one that pierced me with its finality and invitation. It was simply the word, “Exactly.”

And possibly for the first time that night on the other side of the world, I got it. I understand what the cross had really done for me. I am grafted back in. My primary role now is to simply abide there with Christ, and to let His life and love flow into and through me. That will call for much action on my part, without doubt. Except now, that action can be a result of a newfound energy of the soul and desire of the heart. A new modus operandi.

"Life Sucks"

2006-07-13T09:46:00.000-05:00

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,--and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings'.
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

“Life sucks, then you die.” My eye caught the bumper sticker on my way to work the other day. I read it again, and then I glanced at the passengers inside the car. I couldn’t tell by looking what had brought them to such a state of heart. “Really?” I thought. “That’s it, then? That’s the final statement of reality on life. It’s simply a drag, then it’s over?”

It’s along the same lines, really, with the phrase I’ve heard a million times growing up in the Midwest, “All you have to do in life is pay taxes and die.” It’s said with a little smirk, and always just following a conversation on all of the duties and tasks that you have to accomplish in any given day. You just spent hours running back and forth between the license bureau and the tag agency to make sure your vehicle is road-legal. You hurry back from working eight hours to rustle up a quick dinner for hungry children before you have to get them ready for bed and prepare their lunches for the next day, only to find just a couple of precious hours left in the day to do a couple of loads of laundry and feed the dog. The doctor has diagnosed yourself or someone close to you with a serious illness, and you have some life-altering choices to make concerning everyone around you. Heavy decisions. Drudgery duties. A line like “all you have to do in life is pay taxes and die” feels at a time like that a lot like consolation, something you say to make yourself believe that these other things aren’t that important in the end, that all of life will be over anyway one day, so why worry so much.

So much of our days are a tug-of-war between worry and resignation, and we manically maneuver back and forth on that tight-rope walk fearful of losing our footing and desperate to balance everything.

And too often the church hasn’t offered much else to that dilemma. Still the most commonly preached message is that we need to shape up or be shipped out, and that if we can just get it all right morally (more to balance, you see), then maybe one day when we die we can find a little rest. In other words, “Pay your taxes (taxing duties) to God or to the church or to those that matter, and then you get to die.” The message is called salvation, but it has nothing to do with salvation, really. Biblical scholar Dallas Willard says that really the word salvation in the Bible could be replaced simply with the word life. Try it out. Give it a whirl. Look up some Scriptures like Psalm 13:5 (“But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.”) and Psalm 27:1 (“The LORD is my light and my salvation— whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life— of whom shall I be afraid?”) or 2 Corinthians 6:2 (“For he says, "In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you." I tell you, now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation.”) and replace salvation with life. Is that what those messages we so often hear really offer? Life to the full? Does your heart rejoice when you hear about how much more you need to get right, that not only your life depends upon it, but your eternity? Does it seem as if that message paints the Lord God as a “stronghold of my life,” one who sustains and builds up and brings life to your bones? Does it sound like that message of “salvation” is one of help from God?

Because here’s what I read: “How blessed is God! And what a blessing he is! He's the Father of our Master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him.” That’s from Ephesians 1. Do you hear the passion? “High places of blessing.” Whoa. Really? Okay, my ears are pricked. What’s that about? Paul is exultant. I mean, he is practically jumping up and down in his sandals. Why? What’s got him so hooked, so excited? He goes on to say, “Long before he laid down earth's foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love…” And he continues, “…to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!) He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son.” (Ephesians 1:3-6, The Message)

Look at the key words here. Blessed. Focus of his love. Whole and holy. Adopt. Family. Celebration. Lavish gift-giving. Beloved.

This ain’t your grandma’s salvation religion. We’re talking something wholly better and greater than we have ever yet dared possible.

In his daring book "So You Don't Want To Go To Church Anymore," Jake Colsen tells the story of working in a large, profitable church but feeling incredibly empty and dead inside. He encounters a man, John, who seems to know Jesus very personally, intimately. The conversation between them goes like this:

“You know what this whole thing is about, Jake?” John sat back on the bench,
crossed his arms over his chest and looked out across the playground. “It’s
about life—God’s real life filling your own. The life of God is not some theological abstraction. It is fullness…freedom… joy and peace of living in him that endures in the face of your worst circumstances. That life was in the Son and he came to share it with anyone who would put his or her trust in him."
“It’s not about working hard, big ministries or new buildings. It’s about life that you
can see, taste and touch; something you can frolic in every day that you live. I know my words fail to describe it adequately, but you know what I’m talking about. You’ve had moments like that, haven’t you?”

No Small Role

2006-06-16T11:58:00.000-05:00

What is it about days upon days of busyness that steal so much of what it means to really live? I'm always amazed at how long I can go on fumes, coasting in my most important relationships – with God, with my wife, with friends.

One of the most astounding works or results of the Cross is that the veil was torn away. Nothing separates us any longer from that most treasured and long-desired place of intimate communion with Christ. He came to seek and to save what was lost – what was lost between us and Him, what was lost in ourselves, and what was lost between each of us. He came to rescue and restore all of the lost fellowship of heart that we gave away at the Fall. It has been more than restored, but we must act on that deep work. We must appropriate it and enter into it and ask the Spirit of God to bring it into and over us daily. Otherwise, we end up living in a kind of casual agnosticism where we begin to think of the world as a disappointing but benign place to live and of God as a distant Sovereign King but not an Intimate Friend.

The Invitation of Christ has snapped me back into reality, back into the recognition that there are only two kingdoms in this world, and they are both fiercely opposed to each other, (Colossians 1:13 - For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves…) and back into the reality of our place in it. (You might call the gospel of Christ simply Reality, capital R, in line with Brennan Manning's reference to Christ Himself as "the Really Real.")

This Invitation is an invitation to watch and be confounded by the way Jesus loves, and then be broken by our call to love the same, knowing that to walk where Jesus walks is to inhabit a far more dangerous and far more glorious (and sometimes far less noticeable) role in this world than we ever dared fear or hope for. And it is a role we share.

I recently watched the new X-Men movie. I'm not a huge fan of Marvel comics and all of that, but here's something that blew me away about the story. Essentially there were two factions (or kingdoms) in the X-Men world – those who supported the mutants and those who wanted to oppress them. And you had to be on one side or the other. Those who weren't were sort of just pawns, really, or extras to make the cities fuller and seem more lifelike. They were not important characters. The movie builds to a final battle, one to end all battles. Ultimately, it came down to (no surprise here) the "good mutants" fighting the "bad mutants," but neither side fought alone. Each character had his or her skill or specialty or gifting, and each needed the gifting and call of the others in the battle. Each had their own sphere of influence and authority over certain things in the world – one could manipulate metal, one could manipulate the weather, one could manipulate fire, one could run through walls… you get the picture. To watch any one of these figures you begin to think, "Wow. I'd want that power." And then you see another one and you think, "No, I'd want that one." But then there would be another. Soon enough you begin to realize that, as glorious as each of these characters were in living out their identities, and as powerful as they could be, they are humbled by the giftings of others. The ultimate reason, you see, that each of them had these powers to begin with is because they were needed.

What a picture of our place in the Kingdom of God. Our roles are not small. And neither are they solitary. We will be taken out so quickly if we begin to think they are. Casual agnosticism is a deadly poison, and our Enemy will use the subtle erosion of busyness and distraction (the two greatest weapons used against us in our culture) to slowly euthanize us away from Reality.
"We must reawaken and learn to remain awake," warned Henry David Thoreau, and he couldn't have been more right. How? He finishes with a call away from the busyness and distraction that our modern world offers and into the hope that is the gospel: "Not by mechanical aid [or we might say by the aid of technology or entertainment or programs], but by the infinite expectation of the dawn."

The dawn is coming, sooner than most of us think, when all will be set right, when all manner of things will finally be well. Until then, we walk before the Lord in the land of the living (not the sleeping or the dead, Psalm 116:9) with our eyes firmly fixed on the Rescuing One, whose life is our light in this dark place (John 1:4).

Personal and Free?

2006-05-03T07:08:00.000-05:00

Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.
-Galatians 2:21, The Message

A living relationship with God that is personal and free. A living relationship, personal and free.

We have a lot going on in the church today, a lot of ideas of what it is to live the Christian life. But here, succinctly and directly Paul states the unequivocal, central purpose for everything we proclaim as believers – why Jesus came, what we are to do with it, where we are to go from here. Everything else we may do as believers falls second to that: evangelism, church attendance or lack of it, baptism, walking in our calling, feeding the hungry, Bible study – all of it. These are all fine things, and some very necessary, but they are second to a living relationship with God. That is central. A relationship with God often results in or overflows into these other things. But these are not first.

If I were to ask you, “What is the central reason you are here on earth?” what would you say? Or, maybe, “What does God want from you?” What would your response be? Think on that for a bit.

Don’t rush too quickly to the answers you’ve been given. Let yourself dream a bit. What do you hope the answer to that question would be?

Into Battle

2006-04-25T20:54:00.000-05:00

Oswald Chambers once said that if you want to learn how to pray, read the Psalms. I tend to agree. You’ll find there those who really are the passionate and violent at heart, a quality that Jesus said you would need if you were to grasp ahold of the Kingdom (Matthew 11:12).

This morning I was praying a request that’s become commonplace for me, but so crucial, that I would be given intercessors – men and women who would be drawn to pray for my wife and I. It’s so, so vital for us at this point in our lives. With that in mind, I thought I’d stir up a bit of what Christ is leading us into praying for our lives together and for his Kingdom come through us. This is how we often pray for our friends, because it is how we need to be prayed for by them.

That we would enter into full work of the Cross (Gal. 2:20; Col. 2:13-15), the Resurrection (Rom. 5:17; 6:5-11), and the Ascension (Matt. 28:18; Eph. 2:4-6, 1 Jn. 4:4) of Jesus.

That the Holy Spirit to be so near to us, our very present and wonderful Counselor, Comforter, Strength and Guide (John 14:16, Acts 9:31, Eph. 1:13, John 15:16, John 16:13).

That we would have the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, that we would know God better (Eph. 1:17) and that we would keep in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:25). We want that we would walk in the fullness of the giftings given us (Eph. 4:8, Eph. 1:3) and that we would be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power (Eph. 6:10-18).

In the same authority as heirs, we summon angels on our behalf (these "Mighty One" as the Psalms portray them, Psalm 103:20) to serve as ministering ones of for us (Heb. 1:14). Remember that it only took two of these glorious creatures to destroy all of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19). Ask for them over us.

Don't buy into the lie that we're supposed to be bleary-eyed and listless, so we should just endure whatever comes to us with smiles. Some hardship is given us so that our hope and love may deepen and our reliance on Christ may grow, yes (Romans 5:3-5, 2 Cor 1:9). But, sadly, some we endure for no other reason than we haven't taken our place yet in Christ or that others haven't been raised to pray for us. Don't glory in that. Rather, pray. Without ceasing, pray.

I want life for my family and friends. More life, more and more life (John 10:10). I want all our brokenness redeemed and our hearts restored, all blindness healed, freedom proclaimed for the prisoners, and the Good News given to us each. (Acts 16:40, Isaiah 61:1, Luke 4:18-19). I want this. Want it with me, and beat the ground with your desire (John 1:38, 2 Kings 13:18-19).

Paul had his own intercessors, raising the shield of faith and sword of the Spirit on his behalf. He talks about his time in Asia and how some great oppression had him in despair and the grip of death. In his letter to the church in Corinth, he recalls this time, finishing with "On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers..." (found in 2 Cor. 1:8-11).

The Living God has raised up intercessors for us. We are they. One day we'll see that fully. One day we will strip our sleeves and bare our scars and say, "this I took in service of the King in that great battle..." The hits we take for others are for the glory of Jesus, and one day we will share in all of that. That's the invitation. In the meantime, we fight past what we can see, one in spirit, contending as one man for the faith (Phil. 1:27).

And we offer Christ our gratitude for your faith (and with it, vision), for your hope (and from it, courage) and for your love (and though it, passion) - 1 Corinthians 13:13.

Peering through the Veil

2006-04-10T11:26:00.000-05:00

God has intrigued me.

This weekend God asked me what kind of man I wanted to become. The answer was immediate, as if it were waiting right inside my voice box and couldn’t wait to jump out. I gave it to Him, a response that was passionate and bursting with desire the way a fully-ripened grape does between your teeth.

And He smiled. And He held it for several breathless seconds. Understand, I had just let me heart out, I mean, I had just exposed a very personal and very passionate longing, an aching longing that I have. I laid it out there for Him. Now what would He do with it?

He spoke. “Will you trust me to take you there?”

My mouth dropped. Literally, I mean. I was in the car and it just dropped and I laughed out loud. “Really? You want to take me there, Father?” His silence was a serious silence. I started thinking about how this changes everything. All that I’m going through and will suddenly, in that light, has an incredible weight to it. It is both designed to form me more into that man, and assaulted to keep me from becoming that man.

I am coming into that age as a son that I am better able to see as God points out things heading this way on the far horizon. My 3-year-old nephew and I were up on the 5th floor of a building yesterday, and I was trying to get him to see a little car driving by. I kept pointing and describing the car and he kept looking at a spot on the window. I am now better able to follow God’s finger and focus on those things He delights in pointing out to me.

Suddenly, the rest of the weekend I am full of hope. And hope, as Napoleon Bonaparte reminds us, gives nourishment to courage. I am entering with courage and even excitement into places that would otherwise strike fear into the heart of the most valiant warrior: a loved one’s hospitalization and extreme illness, building a relationship with another one I love that I had always missed out on, entering more deeply into the heart of my wife and dreaming together for our marriage. Whatever else may or may not happen, I am walking with Christ through these events, and through these events He is speaking to me and He is training me to become that man that I long to become – one that walks well in the Kingdom of God alongside Christ, who loves well, and who has the character of heart that I poured out to Him that day in the car.

What are those desires that burst forth from my heart? Oh, you don’t get to know those. At least, not yet. They are far too personal for me to say right now. I believe it was George MacDonald that said that often for the saints experiences with Christ are too personal to put words to. “Compared to His love,” said Thomas Aquinas, “all my words are straw.” So they are, for now, between the Lover of my Soul and me. But I imagine those who know me well can guess them. Oswald Chambers had, "Character in a saint means the disposition of Jesus Christ persistently manifested."

Continuing the Conversation

2006-04-04T15:09:00.000-05:00

These are the golden sessions, when our slippers are on, our feet spread out toward the blaze, and our drinks at our elbows, when the whole world – and something beyond the world – opens itself to our minds as we talk, and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are free men and equals, as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time, an affection, mellowed by the years unfolds us. Life, natural life, has no better gift than friendship. Who could have deserved it?
-C.S. Lewis

In an effort to capture that sense of wonder in peering into that something beyond the world that Lewis refers to here, and in a desire to continue the conversation begun so long ago in the depths of eternity past and that we are invited to participate in now, I want to share a bit of where I find myself to be this day.

Show me your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths… -Psalm 25:4

I am living right now in one of the most painful and one of the most dangerous times of my life because I know what my calling is – that is to say, I have some familiarity with that great mystery of my heart's presence and place in the Great Drama that is unfolding even now… I know what I am made to do and how I am to walk with God and even where, in a sense, it will be or at least what it will look some time from now to be walking with God. But, I am not currently living in my calling, at least not fully. I mean, I am living in this mystery, but there is so much more to it, and for possibly the first time in my walk with God, I see some of the more that is out there.

This discrepancy between the life I am living and the life I am called to, or at least the life that is offered, is the source of much discontent. It raises some concerns and certainly some questions. Am I not walking there because I am not yet ready? Because I am not walking with God well? Have I made a bad decision or series of decisions that is keeping me from that? Have I gotten lost somehow?

You have made known to me the path of life… -Psalm 16:11

These questions, and of course the confusion from the Evil One and his slew of Lying Tongues as they pounce on that like some wild hyenas on a carcass to shred and tear with their own interpretations and deceit, most accurate describe where I find my heart this morning.

Righteousness goes before him and prepares the way for his steps. –Psalm 85:13

In a sense, I feel like Ebenezer Scrooge peering in through the glass on the outside of the dance hall looking into his life prompted by the ghost of Christmas past, with the crucial difference that I am not looking into my past, but into a sort of future, a kind of what-could-be if I walk with God well, a peering further along on this path of life, and it is really exciting, and that the prompting is not coming from a ghost of Christmas but from the Spirit himself that gave us Christmas, the Spirit of God.

God has intrigued me.

Yet to Be Revealed

2006-03-29T13:54:00.000-06:00

Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.
-1 Peter 1:13

I've been thinking some this morning on what is to lie ahead for us. The one common thought that pervaded the lives of all of the saints you read of is the present and immediate hope of life to come. This hope drew them deeper into the life of and with God like an arrow taught on a bow's string. And it wasn't just hope - my gosh, that's found in a million different places... hope for health promised by medicines and physicians and diets, hope for prosperity found in careers and investments, hope for a stable family life promised by church programs and institutions - but rather an abandoned trust that life is about to explode for them, and they were about to be released fully into it.

We must rouse our senses and ask God for the courage to throw ourselves, too, into that same hope. Can you imagine what it will be like? Think on the greatest moment you've experienced over this last month - a great conversation with friends, perhaps, or a really special or intimate time with someone you love and someone who loves you, or a time when you were just lost in doing something you really love to do and forgot the time. Remember the joy you felt, the abandon, the sense that all was right in your world, that pleasure. Or, think on those times over the last month when you haven't had these, but wanted them. How do you know that you should have them, except that you were made for them? These are echoes, these times, given us to draw us further into that life. They are only shadows for what is to come, hints of that life that is coming to us.

It is coming, and quicker than most of us dare to hope.

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

Disappointment

2006-03-22T12:52:00.000-06:00

You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss. Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets. And now, isn't it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You're more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you've come out of this with purity of heart.
-2 Corinthians 7:9-11, The Message

I have spent some time journaling and have discovered something surprising as a theme to my days recently. Sadness, or, maybe a better word, disappointment. I realized that there are a lot of things going on that make me sad. It's surprising, because there are a great deal more things that are really good, events and relationships and desires that are holy and God-breathed. But my ultimate relationship, my tie with Christ and my life in Him, is suffering. And maybe that's not quite the right word, because I don't mean that it's falling behind. Rather, I mean that I want to take it deeper, and I know there is so much more depth to have and explore and enjoy.

And joy - in joy - where has this gone for me? No wonder I'm worn out. No wonder I'm exhausted these past few days. No wonder all feels heavy and thick and wearisome. Because if His joy is my strength, then the lack of it would mean a lack of strength for me. And so I'm asking for it. Come, Jesus, let me in joy You again. Come, Father, and breathe on me your breath. Come, Holy Spirit, and enter in like a fierce and wild wind.

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

William Law, in his work Second Call, says one of the most piercing statements I've ever read. He says this: "If you will look into your own heart in utter honesty, you must admit that there is one and only one reason why you are not, even now, a saint: you do not wholly want to be." It is both an indictment and an invitation. The promise is there: I can be wholly God's, but it will take all of the furious desire and violent passion of my heart. As Peter Kreeft says, "sainthood is simply love: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength."

So, even as I ride the high seas and long for the deeper depths, the tides turn and shift, the storm settles by sound of the One speaking into the night, and my eyes adjust to the grey and misty shadows to see a figure out there walking, arm outstretched, a laugh almost bursting the seams of his smiling lips. This Wild One has invited me further out with Him. And to Him I must go, come hell or high water, waves or high tides.

…But know that another [moment] shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy. When the figure of God's purpose is made complete.
-T.S. Elliot

Drink Deep

2006-02-22T22:08:00.000-06:00

Then Jesus declared, "I who speak to you am he."

Whenever I read the account in John of the woman at the well, I always read it too fast, like it would have taken just a few minutes. And, certainly, it wasn’t a long encounter (I suppose brushes with Life in our midst don’t have to be long, for they last a lifetime). But the more I thought about it, the more it’s like my own encounters with Jesus – with this wild God who is so good it hurts, who loves me so much it takes His life… and mine. Wow! I love this!

Picture what it must have been like for her. She came during the noon hour when the sun was scorching, because as hot as it was, it was not as searing or burning as was the scorn from the other village women. She was not respectable at all. In that time, to live with someone you were not married to was shamed, and to have been married as many times as she had was shunned. No doubt she was lonely, and you can almost see in her tired eyes the dreariness and weariness of trying to find solace from her hurt. The man she lived with she didn’t love; he just kept her company, even if it wasn’t all that good of company to keep. He no doubt didn’t return her love; he only kept the bed warm, even though with an unfamiliar heat. She can’t even remember if she’d met his parents, and –where was he from again?

All this she carries as she saunters and stumbles her way, alone, in disgrace, to the water hole. There’s not much for her to do anymore, and certainly her chances of finding anyone to love –heck, even not despise her—were slim, and shrinking fast. So, in the midday sun of her daily duty she came as she had always come.

Except today, someone else was there. Before she had arrived, he had been sitting there, waiting like the Father to a prodigal son who didn’t know he was even heading home. I can’t imagine her shock to find anyone there that afternoon, more less a man, and even more than that, a Jew in a Samaritan world. What was he doing here? Surely, if he knew who she was, he would mock her as they all do, scoff, and turn his back, walking away. Well, the water awaits and the sun is pounding, so she reaches for the water.

Watching her closely with deep eyes and an excited smile, the man asks (and you can almost hear his playfulness, his joy at what kind of discovery she would soon make) “Will you give me a drink?” Who was this man talking to her? Where was he from? Didn’t he know better than to talk to her? Did she have to explain the social and cultural implications of Jewish man talking to a Samaritan woman… and if only he knew…

But he pressed on, piercing something in her with his next words, with his forced movement towards her even though he shouldn’t even be here. Her own thirst was evident from her cracked lips and scorched soul. “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

Of course that was the line. Now she knew he didn’t have a clue where he was. This was Jacob’s well, for heaven’s sake. Was he so arrogant to think he was greater than him? Even this woman, as shameful her life had been, had an inheritance here, for this well belonged to Jacob himself. How dare him.

Still pressing, still gazing intently at this adulterer, this outsider, this ragamuffin, the man reveals even more, something even crazier than his last statement, something wilder than his eyes burning through the coats and hats this woman had learned to put on and take off against the world’s weather. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirst again,” he spoke. “But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.” Finally, she took her eyes off her bucket and directed them into his. “The water I give him,” he continued, “will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

There was an awkward silence, a silence that inevitably happens when someone encounters this man and his words that tear through flesh into cut into the heart. But this woman would not be touched. She had learned her defenses. Cynicism was her bedfellow. In a mocking tone that surprised her by the similarity it had to her own accusers’ torments, she blurted, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

With a smile now fading slightly, with creases on his brow as he considered other identities this woman had taken on, the hurts and lies she had accepted as truth, he leaned forward ever-so-slightly, and in almost a whisper, said, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

She had been here before. Many times. Without missing a beat, and with an aire of defiance to protect her from the coming gasps that would surely come as they always did when she admitted where she was, she said, “I have no husband.”

He knew. But he needed to let her know that he did, and it didn’t phase him. He knew it all, down to the very last hair on her head. And it didn’t phase him. Because greater than her sin, was her identity as the Created, created for Himself. In the next coming years, and in the lives of His disciples to come, He would show by His life and death, and then by the Spirit, that He did not come to condemn, but to give life, and to give it in abundance. He came to offer Himself as the Living Water to souls made only for that.

Just like we so often do when the Truth fillets us open, she points in the distance and aims the conversation at religion in order to take it off herself and her desperate need for Someone to love her. “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” But, oh, she didn’t know the meaning of the word worship. Not yet. As the old wedding vows go, “with my body, I thee worship,” God stood there, heart pounding in love toward his bride, anticipating the moment when she would know what real worship was about. “A time is coming,” he said, and the next words he emphasized with his hand almost pounding at his heart, “and has now come,” (and the angels in heaven rejoice with that statement, Jesus’s joy pouring forth), “when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

And now, with the bucket long sat aside, with a face drawn in an expression of anticipation born from a heart just learning to desire and dream again, she wondered –but what was she thinking? –but still she wondered… But would he come? Would he really come like they had said he would? The Messiah was supposed to come, but –and what was this man? Who was he, standing here, offering something she had never tasted of before and rarely, especially now, allowed herself to long for? There was something so strange, and yet so… so… so right and true and living in what he was saying. “I know,” she said, embarrassed by even thinking that – what IF it was true at this instant – this could be Him, “I know that Messiah called Christ is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” With that last statement, she half-wondered if maybe his explanations would sound something like what she had just heard. Not answers, but a deep calling; a drawing; an offering; a living encounter….

I just can’t get over what happens to people when they encounter the Living God, the earth-shaking, doctrine-shattering, reason-exploding, fiercely redeeming, Life-giving God of the Bible. The woman totally forgot why she had come in the first place to the well. She left her jar, left her shame, and ran to tell all her accusers what she had encountered. Could it be? Could it really be the Christ? In a matter of twenty minutes, this woman changed from a loose, desperate village woman to a passionate missionary who cared nothing of her own skin. She had been met by Someone, and this Someone offered her a taste of the Living Water that would leave her thirsting only for more of that Life.

That’s the God I want to encounter. No – bigger than this. Bigger than what I can conceive. I tremble at the thought that God would demand what He did of Abraham, after giving him everything he had wanted, promising him the stars. It scares me to think of what God allowed to happen to Job, and what he wanted from the heart of Jonah. It makes me weep to think that, in the words of my wife, the same God who carved out the Grand Canyon knit me together in my mother’s womb and hems me in, before and behind me. I want to encounter a God that would pour His life into me, and then call me to follow him to a cross. I want to experience the Life that blows away death, the community of fellowship and suffering that brings purpose clearer than the sky on a scorching day. I want to know the Truth that sets free, really free, not that false freedom I try to convince myself is what I really want. I want the Life, the real, abundant Life for which Jesus, with the joy set before Him, endured the cross and scorned its shame.

I want to drink deeply of the Living Water.

For more, read Oswald Chamber's thoughts on the "Impoverished Ministry of Jesus."

Made Alive

2006-02-15T15:54:00.000-06:00

It is good to revisit the cross of Jesus and His work there – what it means, what it has done. The writer of Hebrews calls this the "elementary truths" of God's word (5:12) and refers to it as spiritual milk, as for babies. He says that we should grow up into eating the solid food of the teaching of the righteousness of Jesus, and holiness (1 Corinthians 1:30). (The teaching on the righteousness from Christ is the truth that the church in the West has all but missed. God is restoring that to her, though.) But he does not say we should never revisit the work of redemption and rediscover its stunning and rescuing effect on our lives – in fact, the beginning place for the rest that comes through the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ for us. Our new life begins there. We still benefit from milk; we just shouldn't live on it alone.

I was scanning through some Scriptures this morning and came across this one in Colossians: "When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins…" I remember what it was like to be dead, as Paul puts it. Of course, I didn't know then that I was dead, but I very much was. A walking corpse, stinking and decaying from the inside out. And unlike Tim Burton's notion, a very alive groom cannot be wed to a very dead bride.

And so He came for me. He absolutely ransomed me out of that death-life. I don't know how; I can only say that being "circumcised unto God" now was not an easy or painless process. It's a lot like being ripped and torn from one world into another, and barely surviving to tell the story. But the wounds I took in that rescue were wounds of love, and God is the one to bare the scares.

Imagine Lazarus. Now here is a man who died – a friend of Jesus, I might add. He was laid in a rock tomb and the a stone was closed behind him, sealing him in, entombing his body. There he lay, rotting. Four days later – four days! – Jesus walks up and says that he will live again. There was a lot of broken hearts standing around, not the least of which was God's own heart. He wept over Lazarus's death, as he wept for those mourning the loss of their brother, their friend, their son, their uncle. He wept for the death that had come to so many of his friends. And I think Jesus was also broken over what it would take to resurrect this friend of his. Here would be a dramatic rescue, and for it he was adding to the weight of his own hell-entering death.

After commanding the stone be removed, Jesus speaks the words of life, words that, because they extend from the reign of life that is in Christ and that is Christ (Romans 5:17), bring a dead man back to life. Literally. Think about that. He was dead, decaying, rotting. His flesh was pale and cold. Worms had begun finding their way into his organs. He was really, really dead. And then these words of Jesus reach his ears. The eardrum vibrates. The tiny bones begin doing their small vibration-dance to the words and something sparks. Life again enters Lazarus body. His eyes open. His lungs suck in a deep breath of stale entombed air. He blinks. He looks around, trying to adjust to the darkness. "Am I dead?" he asks himself, and then frowns at the thought. Pain suddenly shoots into his back and down his legs from having laid on cold stone for several days. His muscles are sore. "Sore," he groans aloud, and then laughs because he knows he must not be dead if he is in pain. He rolls himself off the ledge where he was laying, and is suddenly blinded by the light that sprays into his face. More pain. His feet are tender, the skin new like an infant's, and the rocks and pebbles nearly pierce them. His skin is tight, crusted with blood long dried over his numerous wounds now healed but scarred. He stumbles out into the daylight, compelled by the sound of a familiar voice and startled by the gasping sounds of others.

Minutes of stunned silence went by while Lazarus slowly straightened his stiff back and adjusted his eyes to the brightness of the day. He looks around to see his family, his friends, all with their jaws dropping and dried tears covered over with new ones. And what a sight he was. The soiled grave clothes still clung to his face, his hands, his feet. He looked very much like a mummy. He was able to stand and walk, but not much else. The cloth bound him. Even breathing was difficult, although the stinging and burning pain of inhaling was almost too much to bear, and he hardly minded not being able to take the deep breaths his body now required of him.

And then he heard again that familiar voice. He heard laughter, a serious and at the same time excited laughter. Now his eyes caught those of his dear friend. Jesus' eyes were filled with that fire of love and passion that Lazarus had come to revere (before dying, that is), and Jesus never flinched when he added words not directed at Lazarus, but rather for him: "Unbind him." The disciples around Jesus and the others present – Mary and Martha, for sure – walked straight up to this dead man walking and began to pull off the stuck pieces of blood- and pus-soaked cloth from his body. Some fresh skin ripped in the process, and Lazarus pulled back in reaction. He could hear the still-stunned Mary chide him to be still and let them finish. He needed a bath, but that didn't seem to bother anyone at the time. All of them became almost giddy with excitement and began talking at once. Through the noise, Lazarus heard the unmistakable voice of love finish with, "…And let him go free." Jesus punctuated this last word by closing his eyes and saying it slowly, as if savoring the very meaning of it.

And now he was free. The resurrection life had come to Lazarus. For him, being set free was the same as being set loose – set loose on the world to dance with this Lord, to fly with Him, to share with all the adventures ahead in the great Story with this Lover so true. Coming back to life was not the end for this man; it was the beginning.

So that is Lazarus's story, or an element in it. There's much more that He's living in now, more than can be told (John 21:25). And that's the point, I think, of having our hearts circumcised to God, of being made alive with Christ… that we might live and go free. It's staggeringly beautiful, this redemption. Christ came for me and brought me out of darkness into his Kingdom (Col 1:13), and there I am to live with Him, to know Him, to enjoy Him, and to rule with Him.

We do have a role to play in our own redemption. Christ calls us; it is His work that brings us back to life, but we must awaken. We must rouse our own spirits to follow His voice, to come out of the tomb into the light of the new day. As Thoreau once said, "We must reawaken and learn to remain awake, not by mechanical aid, but by the infinite expectation of the dawn." That is our role in working out our salvation (notice Paul did not say working for our salvation, Phil 2:12). No wonder Paul adds, "with fear and trembling." Coming alive and walking out of the tomb of our small lives into the Great Life with our Creator is an incredibly dangerous and painful thing. And it is the only thing that will bring life.

A Living Expression

2006-02-13T10:50:00.000-06:00

Lord Jesus,

I love motion. I love to see the sun rise in the morning, and the movement of the waves in deep sea waters. I love to watch a man who is made to run lap a contestant in a marathon. I love to see my wife's hair dance in the evening breeze. I love movement.

Yet, there's more than rises in the morning than the sun and more that pulses in the ocean than the tides, to quote from Rich Mullins. I want to express that life that is a deeper undertoe to my surface-riding days. It's a life that pulls and draws and pulses and beats. It's a kind of rhythm undergirding everything, and it's heard in the stars that chant your name and the flowers that dance to your song. I want to express that song. I want to be an expression of that song, vibrant, virile, alive.

Jesus, do that in me. Pour into me that I can pour out into the world in worship who you are and what invitation it is that you are offering us. Let's whisper together, You and I.

You are my Everything, and I lift my soul to you.
Amen.

Like Barbed Lightning

2006-02-03T09:28:00.000-06:00

Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.
- from Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

Where does the love from heaven seem so intense in my life that it feels fierce?

I love that quote. I’ve reread it several times now. I love how C.S. Lewis describes the love. Pure – undiluted, undistilled, 200-proof love. And spiritual – meaning not aloof, but core, from the deepest places. And intellectual – full of imagination, creativity, thought, intention, purpose, and presence. This is a whole-self love that Lewis describes. No wonder it shot out of their faces liked barbed lightning. And no wonder it could be mistaken for ferocity.

I’ve encountered this love from Christ, or better, this love of Christ in a host of ways. And that is really just saying that I’ve encountered Christ in a host of ways. Lately, it has been His rescue of my heart from those subtle lies that knock me ever-so-subtly off course, away from the path of life. They’re hard to discern, those lies, but they have recently sounded like, “God is disappointed in you,” and “Your life has no impact and never will,” and “You will never live in the Kingdom of God,” and the like. But God’s words and His presence blow those lies out of the water.

This morning I awoke hearing the Father saying to me, “You are my Beloved. Remain in me and you will come to understand your belovedness. You are righteous (that is, alive) not by your own righteousness but because of my own that I poured out to you through Jesus.” In my mind I was replaying the chorus to “Nothing but the blood of Jesus,” and I knew this was God waking me “with the sound of [His] loving voice,” as David had it.

I have become most vulnerable in my walk with Christ over the last few years. This is what He does: He awakens my desire within – desire for community, for intimacy, for adventure, for glory… desire for life – and then He sets out to deepen it until it has been enlarged enough to fill with His life. So I have lived with some desire that has yet to see the light of day, desire like the root of a young oak vining its way into deeper soil when there are yet unsprouted leaves on the branches.

This is the point at which His love is the fiercest. Were it up to me, I would have thrown in the towel long ago. His love is fierce in bringing me into Life because it is a very painful thing, and if it is painful for me, it must be many times over for my God who is, in some very real sense, causing the pain. My heart sings in worship, “I want to run with You,” but my unsteady feet rock with the roll of the boat on the high seas of discontent. He knows, I suppose, that I must fall several times before my legs have the strength they need, and my soul the substance it needs, to run with God.

I’m writing in generalities because I could think of a hundred examples of the way God grows my heart and gives it strength and identity by placing me in circumstances that threaten to kill me. I love the Russian poet Rainer Marie Rilke’s line when he says that what we choose to fight against is so small, and the victory itself makes us small. But what wrestles against us is large, and the defeat grows us. So, this is what life is: to be defeated by constantly bigger things.

It is His intention that I inherit the earth. It is His intention that I inherit the Kingdom. It is His intention that I come fully awake and fully alive into Him and He into me. That’s where His love feels the fiercest, both because of His intention and because of His refusal to give up on me.

Maybe Rich Mullins sang it best.

What I'd have settled for
You've blown so far away
What You brought me to
I thought I could not reach
And I came so close to giving up
But You never did give up on me
I see the morning moving over the hills
I feel the rush of life here where the darkness broke
And I am in You and You're in me
Here where the winds of Heaven blow

Who Am I Becoming?

2006-01-18T09:04:00.000-06:00

The other morning I read from Romans 12:1, a familiar passage to me. "Offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship." I've read that verse a hundred times, and the word that always struck me was "sacrifices." We are to offer ourselves as sacrifices. But that word didn't strike me this time as the most important in the verse. The word this time that bounced back at me from the page was "living."

We all know that the early disciples and apostles and the early church believers were persecuted, most of them killed in gruesome ways, because of their faith in Christ. So often the church and parachurch ministries hone in on the sacrifice of these believers. "They were the great ones in the faith," I've heard proclaimed from pulpits. "We need to be able to die for Jesus like them." We've all no doubt heard enough of this kind preaching.

But I don't think that's how it went down. I don't think those brothers and sisters just clenched their teeth and bared it, willing themselves to go through the torture and death and all of that. I think they found and latched themselves to a secret, and I think that secret was life. I think they had begun really living, and living more and more in the Kingdom, so that when the time came for them to choose something else there's no way they could. They had tasted, and were now wasted, for life, the real thing, the full deal. They didn't choose death at all; they chose life.

And I think the law of the Spirit of life in Christ works like that. It's easy not to steal, but it's a quite different thing to give generously out of a full heart. It's easy not to murder, but it's another thing to love someone to death. It's easy not to curse God, but it's another thing entirely to walk intimately with Him. That's the work of the Spirit within; that's the work of Christ and the New Covenant.

That's what is happening in me. I am to be a living sacrifice, a living icon, a walking, breathing, loving, living Friend of God. In all the beautiful and often painful and wonderful ways that can look, that's what I'm becoming… a living being, walking more fully into that new life in God.

My journey with Christ for the first year was like Lazarus hearing Jesus call his name from somewhere outside the dark tomb. When he heard Jesus' voice, I imagine Lazarus started feeling electricity running again through his arms and legs. His eyes opened and tried to adjust to the darkness of the tomb. He sat up. He stood. He began stumbling his way to the tomb entrance. He came alive the moment Jesus spoke his name. But he was still in the tomb. He was still wrapped in death shrouds.

Lazarus then came toward the entrance and stepped into the blinding light. The disciples came over to help unwrap Lazarus from the shrouds so that he could walk again. That's where I've been over the last couple of years… until recently.

Now I'm hearing Jesus' invitation to walk with Him, to ride with Him, to "soar where the eagles are scared to fly," as Josh Young's song has it. That's what I want, that's what I'm after. My heart is very much alive, and His blood has covered so many wounds to make me whole. The death shrouds have largely been removed and I'm stretching my muscles in the light of the new day. Now life begins. Now the invitation is heeded. Now the desire born deeply in me years ago is spoken to, drawn out, and set free to take me to God.

This weekend I took a walk at the Falls, this area just south of town where the river forms a waterfall that stretches about 50 yards long and 20 feet high. The bedrock along the bank is rugged and rough, with fissures and crevasses formed by the rushing waters of the river when rains would overfill it and cause it to flood its banks. This day, all was bright sky and cool breeze and the hammering song of the water forming a backdrop to the event, while I explored the area with my trusty iPod as a companion. I had tuned into some worship, unsure at first whether I should just listen to the music of the falls or sing along with Josh Young. I gave into the latter, and tuned into his song, "Can You Feel It." It was answer for me from the heart of God in response to my question to him that day, "Who am I becoming?"

Here are the lyrics, with emphasis placed on the portion that pierced me especially with God's response:

All across the world
The river is flowing.
There's a passion that's growing
For the things we have not seen.

All across the world
the Spirit is moving.
There's a sound that's resounding
in the hearts of you and me

Can you feel it?
The rain is falling
Children dancing
Freedom's shining down
Can you feel it?
It's a celebration
The Father's laughin'
He's drawing us to Him
Can you feel it?

Inside our hearts
A new life is growing.
There's a warrior that's rising
With a need to be free.

Can you feel it?
The rain is falling
Children dancing
Freedom's shining down
Can you feel it?
It's a celebration
The Father's laughin'
He's drawing us to Him
Can you feel it?

The Haunting

2005-12-30T10:23:00.000-06:00

I am recently experiencing the Haunting of God through the edgy, sharply raw sounds of Alanis Morisette's voice and the music in her song "Wunderkind" from the Narnia soundtrack. I'm being awakened, again, into some epic story going on to which I know almost so deeply you can say instinctively that I play a part. A large part. Not by default, and not one I will enter into passively. But I am destined to a place, to a role, in a story where, as Alantis sings, "great will be done."

And this calling is beckoning me to take it, to press beyond all the earthly stuff that has kept me bound and forever attempts to coil my legs with his tentacle hands: those things of work and worries and dreams and will they survive to see the life of day? This Calling says intrinsically not to kill those dreams or desire but to let them go a bit so that they can be found again in a greater context - the context of my life lived in the Kingdom and in this calling. "Seek first this Kingdom," it seems to be stating through the fog of sleepiness and fear. "Abandon yourself to the mystery of who you truly are. Embrace that. Embrace Me," is spoken through the music and words by the Great One who is both present here and hauntingly beyond drawing me toward that life.

And this Beckoning - it is deeper, so much deeper than words, so that I find it difficult to even feign an attempt of accurately capturing it with words. Indeed, I'm finding that impossible, to capture it. So maybe a hunt to the thing, like a roadsign to a beautiful city, is all I could hope to do. And the response itself, like the calling, demands something deeper than words as well, a response that is authentic and to be so must come from the core, the heart, and must come from all of it.

This morning while listening to this haunting I find myself praying without trying and even without wordding any thought. It is deeper speech, and I'm almost basking in the listening, the hearing, of my Savior's utterances that are, once more, deeper than words, like the unspoken years and wooings of a groom's winking eye toward his bride and for him the golden rays reflected from her hair as she swivels her head in his direction to catch a glimpse of him, and their eyes momentarily lock and they know what no one else knows, that something and everything that binds them at the level of soul. It is the unspoken acknowledgement of a father sitting somewhere in a sea of onlookers as he nods his proud and approving head in the direction of his staged son who, after stretching all performance long, finally catches his dad's face, suddenly knowing that all along his eyes were never averted or diverted or distracted from his son, and the dad's delight stretches into the years when the boy will grow to be a man himself. O stem, O stock. And like a comrade's smile held by something known and about to be revealed to his friend as he quickly tilts his head in the direction of this something with the invitation to follow to this shared secret. Something between them, like shared battle strategies between army generals. No words are spoken. No words are necessary. In fact, the moment may be dimished by them. There is sahred excitement, shared knowing, shared joy, shared pleasure.

Jesus is saying this to me today. "Saying" is a limited word, as it is not speech, but then all these words are limited. He's inviting me to let myself be haunted and all things lost in me to be hunted and captured and rescued and freed. I feel Him saying to me to be still and let His voice come undiluted and even unchallenged by my own voice. This is my daily prayer today. It seems I have all today and that He has made all provision necessary without my asking anything, though I'm asking for Everything. Today I am to let my heart be taken in and filled with all He wants to bring me, and I am to stay with Him in it. Come, Lord Jesus. Bring all to my heart today of the Life, present and full, that You have come to bring.

To understand the words of our Lord is the business of life. For it is the main road to the understanding of The Word himself. And to receive him is to receive the Father, and so to have Life in ourselves. And Life, the higher, the deeper, the simpler, the original, is the business of life.

-from George Macdonald, Unspoken Sermons

Out of the Shadows

2005-11-23T17:30:00.000-06:00

The idle flapping of the sail is doubt;
Faith swells it full to breast the breasting seas.
Bold, conscience, fast, and rule the ruling helm;
Hell's freezing north no tempest can send out,
But it shall toss thee homeward to thy leas;
Boisterous wave-crest never shall o'erwhelm
Thy sea-float bark as safe as field-borne rooted elm.
-George MacDonald

A few days ago I was driving home from work and the Scripture came to mind about how the world will know us. I think in one of John's epistles he says that "they will know you by your love." I've always taken that to mean our love of God, our love of each other, our love of others, that kind of thing. And while I think that's still the gist of it, I realized something I've been missing.

John says that we will be defined by our love, that in a world full of despair and cynicism, hatred and fear, we will be known by those around us as those that still love, that still in some deep way have a capacity to love. And love what? Certainly God, certainly people, but I think we'll also be known for loving the things that are worthy and noble and true that Paul points out. I love chocolate molten cake hot out of the oven with vanilla bean ice cream melting quickly on top, spreading like some gigantic glacier sitting atop a volcano, and drizzled high with magma-like chocolate syrup. Mmmm. I love the way that the sunset each night invents new colors to threw into our sky. I love my wife's eyes, because in them I see the deepest and most beautiful heart I've know here. And I love God's Kingdom. I love to live in it. I love to learn of it. I love to express it.

For some time, I've had a real urgent and potent desire to walk in a specific calling God’s given me, to follow in that “tap on the shoulder,” as Calvin Miller calls it. I think God has given me some moments of clarity and I've been faithful to take note of them when they come, but for the most part I've hidden them away because, over and louder than the voice of God I have heard the voice of a thousand enemies shouting and taunting a thousand lies in my ears. I've been disqualified on every ground.

But after a very long and weary night of battling these same lies, I awoke to hear God speaking again. Compared to the noise and shriek of the others, His voice is the music of a snow-covered winter landscape, where all noise is muffled into a crystal silence and everything, no matter how scarred, is blanketed with beauty. He reminded me of some of the things He's already spoken to me and, maybe more importantly, reminded me how much I really want to walk with Him in the unique calling of my life, to set out with Him. Or better, to really continue on with Him, having already stepped out on this adventure.

It's more than a job or a career or a “calling” in the modernistic meaning of the word. It's journeying with God and His friends. It’s battling side-by-side with the hosts of heaven. It’s entering into the life of God. It's coming alive. I've been driving down the road with the radio off. Oh, I'll get there, but the journey is a rather long and boring and tedious one. Or, I'm at a movie theater watching some incredibly fascinating flick... with my eyes closed. Opening I find it's my very own life I'm half-watching scream by me on the movie screen.

So, it's time I jump in, let go the ropes of control, and set sail. I'm reminded of Thomas Aquinas's experience with God toward the end of his life when he stopped writing. Puzzled, others came to him and asked what happened. "Compared to the reality," he said, "my words are but straw." Earlier, God had spoken to him saying, "You have written well of me, Thomas. What would you have as your reward?" In the soulful response of a lover of God, he replied, "Only You, Lord."

Onward, then, and upward.

The Weight – and the Wait – of Glory

2005-11-15T13:36:00.000-06:00

This is a work in progress, but I want to put together some thoughts on our place of response to the Gospel and invite some dialogue…

Hearing the great invitation into the Gospel Story that God has been telling since before time began, with all its extravagant beauty, its breathtaking adventure, its bold intimacy, is not enough. It requires a response. Jesus will arouse our desire for that life with God, and He will invite us in, and then He asks for our initiation, our acceptance of the invitation. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” he says, and he very well means us to open wide the door. This is Romans 10. Paul says that the whole point in anyone being sent to preach is not just that others would hear the Really Incredible News, but so that they would “call on the name of the Lord and be saved.” Saved from death. Saved into Life. That’s the deal.

This reality bears an incredible weight. Although the provision has been made for our place in the kingdom, Jesus has left the response up to us. Oh, he’ll run after us, he’ll haunt us with desire and thwart our efforts to garner life elsewhere, and he’ll pursue and romance and woo us – boy, will he – but he will not force us in the end. We are asked to believe, and to just show up.

Here’s how Jesus describes it. He tells about the kingdom in the parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22. He says,

The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.

Then he sent some more servants and said, "Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet."

Ultimately, no one who was invited in would come, and they eventually killed the servants the king sent to invite them in. Enraged, he sends his army against them and kills the murderers. In a stunning turn, the king turns to the remainder of his servants and says, "Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find."

Picture it. Vagrants. Street sweepers. Prostitutes. Drunks. Normal folks just on their way to and from market. Street people. These are the ones the king chose to attend a wedding banquet fit for a prince.

Now, this is no ordinary wedding banquet. We are talking an all out, no holds barred celebration. Nothing is held back in the months of preparation for this event. There are decorations and ornaments, entertainers from afar, music and space for dancing, and a table laid out with food fit for a king - fruits from distant lands in all their exotic flavors and aromas, oxen and cattle (notice the plural) butchered and prepared for the occasion, wine, no doubt, prepared and cultured and fermented in stone casks for weeks just for this one event. This is going to be a real celebration to remember.

And those that come must remember to come ready. After all, this is no ordinary dinner. This is a feast, a banquet, and all of the most famous and well-known and important in the land will be there – the king himself, the prince, his bride, together with all the nobles and the land’s most notorious rulers.

And now, all is ready, all is waiting, and in walk the guests…

Now, they would have no doubt been doted over and prepared in advance. They would have someone to clean them up and prepare them to be in the presence of such important folk. They would have been bathed and dressed in the finest linens, ready to celebrate with the prince and his bride.

Here they stand, here they sit, mouths open in astonishment at the extravagance of the place. Never have they seen such beautiful and expensive and ornate decorations. Never have they seen such exotic food and dancers and musicians.

Just when they thought they had surely seen it all, in walks the king himself to meet them. Jesus picks up the story from here, “But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. 'Friend,' he asked, 'how did you get in here without wedding clothes?'”

“The man,” Jesus said, “was speechless.” Yeah, that’s an understatement. The king himself walks up to this man, who just yesterday was out on the street corner scouring through the waste of fallen human indignity for some scrap of food and money, selling himself or someone else for a bowl of soup, and today he walks among royalty. But what’s more shocking to him than that reality is that he failed to get ready. His once-in-a-lifetime shot at being in the presence of the king, something so very few ordinary folk get to do, is blown. The king commands his guards to tie his hands and feet and throw him back out into the street “where,” according to the Storyteller, “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Why? Good Lord, what crime did this man commit in the presence of the king that the punishment would be this severe? Simply because he wasn’t wearing the right clothes?!

No. It was not that he wasn’t wearing the right clothes. It was that he hadn’t prepared, he hadn't believed, and his pride was the dishonor of many. Upon him had been lavished the most extravagant and unlikely of gifts, an evening of festivity in the presence of the king and his son. He had been given every opportunity to get ready for the event, and he had not. Why?

Because he didn’t believe it. Not until he stumbled into the room and met the others who were wearing their attire, and not until he smelled the food and choice wine and witnessed the months of preparation the king had undergone for this event, and not until the king himself appeared before him did he believe any of it. He wasn’t going to be duped. He wasn’t going to be shoved back onto the streets and hear the mock and scorn of his friends saying that he was a fool to believe that he would ever be invited in. Who was he that he could be in the presence of the king? No, he wouldn’t be foolish. He would be ready for the hammer to fall and the punch line to be delivered. He would be the butt of no joke. He was expecting to go back out onto the streets once this hoax was revealed for the sham it was.

And that is exactly what happened. He got what he expected – shoved back out into the streets where he came from.

Jesus finishes this strange parable by stating, in reference to the Kingdom and the Story he is telling, “many are invited, but few are chosen.”

This man was chosen. He came into the banquet hall not because he belonged there by birthright or heritage or accomplishment, but because he was invited in by the king himself. But that, apparently, wasn’t enough. The invitation itself wasn’t enough. He had to believe it, accept it, in hope against hope and beyond the cynicism and pride he had built up over the years. He had to enter in, fully, ready, dressed, as it were, for the occasion. Not because he deserved it, not because he earned it, but because it was his for the taking. If he had been honest enough with himself, he would have realized that there was no other place on the planet he would have rather have been but in on the festivities. But he couldn’t bring himself to participate.

In the end, he got what he wanted, or at least what he feared. He couldn’t bring himself to admit his desire to be a part. He played it safe, he didn't take the risk to desire, and what he dreaded overtook him (Proverbs 10:24).

Always, always, Jesus will invite us into something really fantastic by stirring our desire for life. Whatever else you think you want, and by whatever other name you know it – recognition, money, rest, peace, love (and your idea of it), sex, booze – what we are really after, all of us, is life. That is set within us, burned into our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). He will so often ask us, as he did to many of his disciples and friends and street people of his day, “What is it you want?” Believe it or not, Jesus says, this is us. We are the men and women of the street invited in to join the celebration of the wedding. And we are so much more…

Who, exactly, do you think it is that the prince is marrying?

I think the most difficult part of the Christian faith is also the most important: hearing, and believe, exactly what is said about us and our role in the Story with God. That’s really all that’s asked of us. “Come with me,” is the offer, “and I will show you life” is the promise. Do we want that, and do we believe that it is really available, really? Would he really do that, is his heart really that good? Could it really happen for me? All the rest of the work of the Spirit of Christ in us is to bring us into that reality and, ultimately, into that Reality that we are being prepared for.

I want to open this up to conversation. What are your thoughts, your stories, your hopes, your fears? What are some things that God has spoken to you regarding the invitation, and the acceptance of it. Has he spoken to you about it? How has he pursued you and invited you in? In what ways is he preparing you to take your place in this Great Coming Banquet?

The Undone

2005-10-26T13:46:00.000-05:00

It’s 3:00 AM when I awake. The apartment is a winter day quiet, the kind where fresh-fallen snow has muffled the sounds of the day into an almost tangible silence – you can almost feel it like you can the cold under your feet. The padded carpet makes little noise as I stumble, half-awake, into the living room where soft light from the parking lot filters in through the slats of the window blinds. The cooler air making its way in through the door jam betrays the frigid temperatures of the night air outside. Autumn came in suddenly this year, and is leaving quickly, as if Winter is elbowing its way in with its long, icy fingers and soon with long, icy months.

But, in all its untamed nature – or because of it - winter brings with it a certain romance. Stepping outside this early morning I am immediately transported into a different scene than the softly-padded carpet and whitewashed walls of the living room. All is real here, and in-your-face. My naked feet feel almost instantly frozen, and the air is biting like a thousand piranha assaulting my body. But I feel, and that is the point, I think. Having just barely awoken minutes before, I am now wide-eyed and aware. It is dangerous to stay long in near-freezing temperatures without protection, but the danger itself tells of something true. Out here, I am plunged into reality. My eyes scan the horizon and then the darkened sky. Closing my eyes, I hold my head up and stretch out my arms in amazement that I am this alive, that I can see and hear and feel and sense and that, in a deeper and more important way, I can love and enjoy and experience and know, intimately.

Stepping back into the warmth, I am struck by the twilight between summer and the colder months, how one has not yet left and the other not yet fully arrived. I am tight-rope walking as they play tug-of-war. And it’s not the only war occurring this night.

I am in twilight as well. There is, of course, the twilight between what I am and what I will one day become, between what I experience now and what I one day will know. That’s an anticipatory twilight, a hopeful one.

But there is also the twilight between the two kingdoms, an interval or a distance that is quickly fading into the advancing day as the armies of both advance upon this battleground. I find myself most days fighting between giving myself over to the Wild One, the Lover God, and being pulled by my own flesh, by the Enemy of my heart, and by this world quickly fading. I am walking a tight-rope in a tug-of-war between the Worlds: that of the kingdom of darkness, and that of the Kingdom of Christ. I have been given over to the Kingdom of Light, no doubt, but how far am I willing to walk as a disciple with Christ? It is as Watchman Nee had it, that a person given partially to God is of no more use to the world, but a person not yet given wholly to God has not yet come fully into His kingdom, and as such is of no help by God.

My knees hit the padded floor and I cry out in repentance. Oh Lord, there is life to be had, there is One my heart was made for and my life is to be lived for. I am yet undone, Lord. You bid me come, and I come. Expose these regions in me that are yet cold and unyielding, that I might be made whole and holy by Your love. Until the day dawns, Christ Jesus, and the morning star rises in my heart.

Song of the Soul

2005-10-19T16:30:00.000-05:00

The following is not a recent #1 pop hit, a gushy romance between a man and woman, nor even a Shakespearean love sonnet. It is an expression of a love between a man and his God. It is a picture of the kind of intimacy we are invited into, each. It reminds me of a present-day tryst between a disciple and his God.

On a dark night,
Inflamed by love-longing-
O exquisite risk!-
Undetected I slipped away.
My house, at last, grown still.
Secure in the darkness,
I climbed the secret ladder in disguise-
O exquisite risk!-
Concealed by the darkness.
My house, at last, grown still.
That sweet night: a secret.
Nobody saw me;
I did not see a thing.
No other light, no other guide
Than the one burning in my heart.
This light led the way
More clearly than the risen sun
To where he was waiting for me
-The one I knew so intimately-
In a place where no one could find us.
O night, that guided me!
O night, sweeter than sunrise!
O night, that joined lover with Beloved!
Lover transformed in Beloved !
Upon my blossoming breast,
Which I cultivated just for him,
He drifted into sleep,
And while I caressed him,
A cedar breeze touched the air.
Wind blew down from the tower,
Parting the locks of his hair.
With his gentle hand
He wounded my neck
And all my senses were suspended.
I lost myself. Forgot myself .
I lay my face against the Beloved's face.
Everything fell away and I left myself behind,
Abandoning my cares
Among the lilies, forgotten.

-by St. John of the Cross translated by Mirabai Starr

Fullness of Life and Discipleship

2005-10-10T07:12:00.000-05:00

The following is taken from Seize the Day with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by Charles Ringma, © 2000 Charles Ringma

Proverbs 28:14

I am sure we honour God more if we gratefully accept the life he gives us with all its blessing, loving it and drinking it to the full, grieving deeply and sincerely when we have belittled or thrown away any of the precious things of life.
-Letters and Papers From Prison

Discipleship does not mean that we live a life of deprivation, but rather a life of appreciation, thankfulness, and sharing. It is only the person who has drunk deeply at the well of life who can voluntarily lay aside things for the sake of others. But even then, one needs to return again and again to be filled, stimulated, and encouraged. Discipleship is not throwing blessings away in order to be able to identify with the poor and needy. It is drawing others in to share in the blessings that God gives.

The Father (Audio)

2005-10-09T22:01:00.000-05:00

Recapturing the Wonder (Audio)

2005-10-07T18:36:00.000-05:00

Note: It's actually hundreds of square yards worth of an old mining area, not hundreds of square miles.

That We Might Live

2005-10-03T15:13:00.000-05:00

A dear friend of mine and companion in this War Between the Worlds recently invited me to participate in a battle for the hearts of men in the Kingdom. I know none of them… yet… but they are no doubt key warriors, prophets, kings, and lovers of God, needed so desperately in this hour.

And I’m struck by the invitation. My response was an immediate, yes. What else would it be? What else would I want to give my time and energy to?

I feel like Thomas who said, in response to Jesus' insistence of going back to Judea where the disciples just knew he would be killed (and they with him), "Let us also go, that we may die with him" (John 11:16). Where else would they go, after all? (John 6:68). This was life for them, that they would know Christ, and part of that knowing came in walking right into the line of fire if that’s where He was headed. It makes me think of Paul who said that his worship of God was intrinsically tied to his serving Him, which meant that he would make this good news known (See Romans 1:9 in The Message.) The Amplified reveals what Paul meant by serving, “rendering priestly and spiritual service.”

I know by past experience the richness of encountering God in this type of battle. It is the glory of knowing a commander and being invited to participate in the strategies of war with him. It is the privilege of being a part of a Grand Rescue. And it is a part of the process of becoming “whole and holy” in the image of the Lion of Judah and by his awesome love, hotter than fire, more alive than breath.

Invited in, initiated in, I head into battle once more, for the treasures Christ came to ransom and set free. Through it all, I find it is me, as much as anyone, who is being won and known (Psalm 139:23)

The Question: Jesus' Pursuit, Part 1

2005-09-07T08:01:00.000-05:00

Be prepared to meet Him Who Knows How to Ask Questions.
-T.S. Elliot

When Jesus speaks to the disciples (who really, at that point, weren’t yet disciples) in John 1:38, he asks them, “What do you want?” Now, that in itself isn’t necessarily all that profound. I’m asked that question quite a few times a day. I ask it of myself when I’m in the drive-thru line or the 16 year-old kid with the Taco Bell hat asks it of me when I’m in line thinking seriously about one of those yummy crunchy tacos they have. My wife will sometimes ask it if me in the evening when we have a wide open few hours to do whatever we want to do together. Even the little dog on my computer screen that pops up when I need to search for something has a bubble above his head and the question, "What Are you looking for?"

So what’s so special about this time when Jesus says it? (As a sidenote, I’m just going to start living like everything that Jesus says carries a really deep truth, because I mean, afterall, he is the Truth, so it seems natural that just like a fountain gushes water because that’s what it does, Jesus is going to gush truth. It’s Dallas Willard’s contention that the reality that Jesus is the smartest and most clever man that ever lived doesn’t often enter our minds when we think of him as Teacher and Master of Life, and that is tragic.)

To get a clear idea what Jesus is really saying, and why, let’s set the stage a bit…

Continued in Setting the Stage: Jesus' Pursuit, Part 2

(Thanks, K, for the T.S. Elliot quote)

Your Love Is Amazing

2005-07-21T15:00:00.000-05:00

Taken from Desperate for You, A 30-Day Worship Adventure by Integrity’s iWorsh!p
And Roberta Croteau

DAY TWO / SEEK / Hallelujah (Your Love Is Amazing)

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of Genius.” -Mozart

Hallelujah (Your Love Is Amazing)

Brenton Brown and Brian Doerksen

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah

Your love makes me sing

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah

Your love makes me sing

Your love is surprising, I can feel it rising

All the joy that’s growing deep inside of me

Every time I see You, all Your goodness shines through

I can feel this Godsong rising up in me

Your love is amazing, steady and unchanging

Your love is a mountain firm beneath my feet

Your love is a mystery how You gently lift me

When I am discouraged Your love carries me

The cosmonaut landed his capsule bravely back on earth and declared there was no God. He had sailed through the heavens and saw no sign of Him. Too bad they didn’t send up a poet – he would have seen God everywhere.

Through the centuries scientists and artists have searched for God, each in his own way. One sits in a lab and waits for the smoke to clear to find the proof; the other sits with pen in hand and finds Him in the fog.

And even though He is the one who set the atoms abuzz and swung the cosmos into orbit and designed all the ebb and flow of life within and without us, I still think God is more poet than scientist.

I have yet to understand the science of god. I can’t prove Him there; I can’t understand His logic – sometimes it takes everything within just to believe He might really be.

The poetry of God I do see. I can fathom the epic truth of love degrading a Creator enough to step in for the death scene. I can see the rhyme, even when I can’t see the reason. Love is an amazing catalyst. It can send mere mortals to reach for unimaginable heights. It brought the Maker of the Universe down to an unimaginable depth.

“For God so loved the world” is the beginning of poetry – when the old world started dying, and the new world began. He is the poet who sees the promise of life in the ashes and the artist who can find the starlight in an empty sky. His science is too expansive for me to embrace, but I can see His art in every atom, hear it in every sound, feel it in every heartbeat.

I guess it’s not so strange that the wanderers who watched the sky and followed the road under it are forever remembered as “wise men.” Their wealth of wisdom didn’t stop them from taking on the quite illogical task of following one bright star through the dark, cold nights of foreign lands. And their reward was to find what the whole world seeks – God in a box – proof you can touch, a flesh-and-bone stranger who knows them more than they know themselves.

And that same singer, dancer, poet, painter of earth and heaven still flings Himself across a million miles of sky. Send up any contraption you want to search for the place He lives and you’ll still come back empty-handed like the cosmonaut. But I’ll bet you God was there all right, dancing in His heavens. And if you had looked with more than your eyes, you just might have seen Him there.

His Handiwork

2005-07-19T13:32:00.000-05:00

I will never forget the day my wife told me that the same God who carved out the Grand Canyon, who spills onto the canvas of the sky the beauty of the sunset, unique and gorgeous every evening, who springs up daisies and daffodils with his endlessly creative flare, knit me together in my mother's womb and is the Perfecter of my faith.

We are his handiwork (Isaiah 19:25), crafted and spun and birthed and breathed into being with more delight even than He takes in creating the heavens (Psalm 8:3).

Early Will I Seek You

2005-07-18T07:24:00.000-05:00

If you wake me each morning with the sound of your loving voice,
I'll go to sleep each night trusting in you.
-Psalm 143:8, The Message

How we need this. How desperately we must awaken each day into the Gospel Narrative, to be reminded deeply of our place in it and God’s heart toward us in announcing the Kingdom come for us. How quickly we forget.

In his book One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marques tells the story of the Buendía family, and through them the rise and fall of the township of Macondo. At one point there was a plague of insomnia that swept through the town. No one could sleep, and so the people began to slowly lose their mental facilities. Because they began forgetting things, they wrote down the names of objects around them and stuck them all over town. “Cow,” “Door,” “House,” etc. Then, they realized they could read the names of objects but not know what to do with them, so they described them further, “Cow: Milk in the mornings,” “Door: Push to open,” “House: Enter for shelter,” etc. On the outskirts of town, they even posted a sign to help them remember, “God Exists.”

John Eldredge tells about reading this story and finding it so ridiculous… until he realized how much like his own story it is. He wrote that he wished he had a sign posted above his bed in the morning so that when he woke up the first thing he would read was simply, “God Exists.”

That’s all of our stories. We wake up… and forget. God knows this. How He must know this. The Old Testament is full of stories of God in fellowship with his children that forgot him constantly.

And so here’s one of the greatest provisions of the New Covenant: He’s provided for this by giving us the Spirit of life to remind us and teach us as the disciples and apprentices we are called to be (John 14:26). How cool is that!

“You are all [children] of the light and… of the day… So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep… “ 1 Thess 5:5-6

I love how St. Francis of Assisi reminds us to “remember at all times – it is God himself, breathing within, who woos us and calls us to live as His sons and daughters.”

And so, we pray with Brennan Manning: “Jesus, Son of the living God, anoint us with fire this day. Let your Word not shine in our hearts, but let it burn. Let there be no division, compromise, or holding back. Separate the mystics from the romantics, and goad us to that daredevil leap into the abyss of your love.”

Being awakened is, of course, just the beginning. We come into the Life that Jesus promised us.

The psalm finishes:

Point out the road I must travel;
I'm all ears, all eyes before you.
-Psalm 143:8, The Message

Taking the Leap

2005-07-12T07:58:00.000-05:00

Speaking about some great Invitation and about the Life that is found in God – with all the intimacy and beauty and mystery of Him – is great, and so vital for our time. Dallas Willard explains that in order “to trust in God, we need a rich and accurate way of thinking and speaking about him to guide and support our life vision and our will.” He says that biblical language provides such way of thinking of God, of course, but so too has this language “continued to be carefully crafted in the works of Christian writers well into the twentieth century.” And, I would add, on through to our time.

But, until we take those leaps following after the Risen One, we run the risk of just talking. Words must be accompanied by experience, or better, preceded by it, and then followed through with real action. As Rich Mullins once pointed out, “faith without works, baby, it just ain’t happenin’.”

I usually balk at such talk, because I feel like it normally comes from folks scared of words and naive about their power (because they do hold such power as images and metaphors and expressions of our desire). It’s accurate to say that Jesus holds a high regard for words and the stories they tell and the responses they can elicit for those that are open to them. The Word of God is called the Sword of the Spirit for good reason. And his miracles were always illustrations of his sermons. That is to say, in the gospels we find that he was not just full of talk. He was full of the life and power and presence of God. (And still is.) With all of that, He is also intimate and conversational, personal and direct, defined by love and truth.

So, this is where the rubber meets the road. I came across a journal entry this morning from an author of a book, and, well, I gotta say that I feel that God led me right to his entry to read what living a life of risk might look like for me:

Jeff Taylor: Author?

It would appear so, I guess. I never really thought about it until now. I was looking in my archives from last July and here is what I said on July 7th (a year ago yesterday):

"I took a big step yesterday. That is all I am going to say for now."

What was the big step? Sending in a book proposal for the xx-xy affair, which soon became Friendlationships: From Like, to Like Like, to Love in Your Twenties! A year ago I took a risk. I risked rejection and everything and now, one year later, I am days away from the book hitting shelves nationwide. Friend, if there is something you want to do, just go and do it.

Back in high school, I was on my school's Academic Decathlon team. We were ranked first in the state going in to the state competition. In my mind, we were going to win. I did not allow any thoughts of losing enter my mind. One of my coaches told me that he admired my ability to stare failure in the eye and spit right in its face.

What are the things in life you want to strive for? Are you wanting that new job that you might not be qualified for? Are you wanting to ask that hot girl out that will probably turn you down? Just go for it. Jump right in and try it.

You need to realize that God wants you to experience joy in your life. He wants to be glorified through your risks. He wants to do great things through you. So, look shame and the fear of failure in the eye and spit right in its face. You could lose (like I did at that state competition) but you will at least know that you tried.

I may not sell a single copy of the book. It may get horrible reviews. But I tried.

Can you say the same thing about yourself?

(found at http://www.jefftaylorministries.org/)

What I can say about myself is that I find in me desires that are hard and fast and real. Those are meant to be stoked and fanned into flames (2 Timothy 1:6). I am beginning to see that I must live a life of risk to pursue those desires heartily. That pursuit will lead me into the calling and purpose of my life… and ultimately to Him.

I want to write. I want to find and redeem that language to help guide and support our vision and will as we pursue Christ. There, I admitted it. Now to taking the leap…

The Best Invitation

2005-06-24T09:57:00.000-05:00

And like a consumer I’ve been thinking
if I could just get a bit more -
more than my 15 minutes of fame
then I’d be secure...
-Caedmon's Call

My wife was just talking about one of the greatest lies of the Evil One that causes our steady walk with Christ to become a schizophrenic and desperate search for life outside of Him. That is the lie that life is somewhere else, somewhere outside of God. It sounds often like, "I would be happy if only I had fill in the blank. More money. More friends. Maybe a little fame. Maybe even just a little peace.

It's not that any of the words that fill in that blank are bad in themselves, its just that that sentences more than any other causes us to divert our eyes, if even just subtly, from God. We begin looking in a thousand places for something we think we need and divert our eyes ultimately from Life himself, forgetting the secret that Pascal discovered, that our hearts will remain largely empty until Christ Himself fills them.

Something from the verse from Hebrews that mentions "setting our eyes on Christ, the Author and Perfector of our faith" speaks volumes regarding this. I was taking a picture of something the other day, and I needed to focus on the object within the viewfinder. We all know what happens next, of course - everything else became blurry. But the photo was a beautiful turn-out. The object in the picture became brighter and easier to see.

Saying "yes" to God's invitation necessarily means we will be saying "no" to everything else. That's how Rich Mullins once put it, succinct and direct as it sounds. But saying yes to Him necessarily means saying yes to life and freedom and the most extraordinary adventure of a lifetime, of intimacy beyond our wildest imaginations of a God that has wooed us from before time began.

I think Peter put it the best when he wrote in 2 Peter 1:3, "Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God. The best invitation we ever received!" (from The Message).

Another version has it, "His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness..."

Everthing for life and godliness. To that... what else could we say, but (trembling, with sweaty palms and much anticipation) "Yes, Jesus, yes...."

The fine print:
There is a final element to this that is possibly the most staggering truth of all. Pay careful attention to what Peter says there. "Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been... given to us..." So, if you want to know how to please God and what a life that pleases him look like, check this out, follow along, read further... "by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God." So, our getting to know Jesus is exactly what pleases God. And, to finish off the verse, our getting to know Jesus intimately and personally is "the best invitation we ever received!" Another way to put all of that is that what our hearts most desire (knowing Christ intimately and personally) is the mind-blowing invitation already given to us by God himself, and what He most desires and what most pleases Him is our simple acceptance of that invitation. Our hearts' desire and pleasure and hope fulfilled is God's greatest delight. That is awesome.

Extravagant Promises

2005-06-21T14:45:00.000-05:00

I was praying over these, thinking maybe someone needed to read them as much as I did. At any rate, I remember that 'all the promises of God are 'yes' in Jesus' and that He will never break His promise ('He has written it upon the sky!')...

Proverbs 16:3
Commit to the LORD whatever you do,
and your plans will succeed.

Psalm 91:1
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

Isaiah 40:28, 31
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom…
…but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

Jeremiah 33:3
'Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.'

Zephaniah 3:17
The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing."

Psalm 32:7, 8
You are my hiding place;
you will protect me from trouble
and surround me with songs of deliverance.
Selah
I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go
I will counsel you and watch over you.

Stretching to a True Height

2005-06-07T21:43:00.000-05:00

I love my heart. I mean, I love the treasure that it is, the imprint of the Living One there. More than an imprint - his Life, with all the fullness of Him in his desire, his passion, his love of life and risk and me and his bride. That it looks different than everyone else's, that it's unique in that it has nuances and quirks and a story all its own and words spoken to it personally that bring it to life like some spring rain for the barren fields, that it likes what it likes and dreams and beats its own slightly different rhythm... this is not its shame, but rather its glory. It's like those mighty pines stretching on the ranges of the Rockies - they're made from the same stuff. And from afar, they all paint the scenes some brilliant green. But close up, they are all unique, bearing different scars from the wildlands and some curvature from restless winds. But they are all mighty as they dive straight into the sea of high sky above. They clap their hands in adoration of their Maker.

I want to step out today. Have you noticed the nearer you draw to the edge the louder the voices of condemnation and accusation become? Good grief. I know it's His voice calling me out of the cave, out of the shadows, but I can't remember now what it sounded like (and I just heard it yesterday, but today it's only an echo, which just shows me how much I can lose in one night). I feel like that boy whose house caught on fire late one night. His parents grabbed him and ran with him downstairs to safety, but fightened, he pulled away. His parents made it outside and screamed for him, only to see him on his 2nd-story window's ledge. His room now consumed with flames, the only way to freedom and rescue was a freefall into the night. His dad below yelled for him to jump. Gagged and blinded by the billowing smoke, the son could only choke out, "But Daddy, I can't see you!" "I know, son. I know," he cried, "But I can see you. Now, jump!"

It's time to come out of the shadows. Time to stretch to my true heigth and stature, next to the enormity of this Awesome God, desperately dependent upon him to come through, for his breath and living water. "And like a volunerable bud on a wide western plain, whose hopes outreach its strength as it streches for the sun and laments for the rain..."

This is my heart's cry in this day, Lover of my Soul. Rescue me.

All Eyes, All Ears

2005-06-07T14:48:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about a Bible study I went to several weeks ago per a friend's invitation. I was excited to go, excited to really dig in and learn some things. More than that, though, I wanted to go for this friend of mine. He hungers for God, but he came into the church through fear of his own flesh and never really got past that. The meeting took place in a man's garage (so far, so good). There are 6 others, my friend, and myself. Great guys. We get to know each other a bit, laugh, tell some stories. And then we get all serious to read a chapter of Ruth and go down this list of questions like "Why did Naomi tell Ruth to go to Boaz?" "What character traits does Ruth possess that are good?" "Have you ever given up something you wanted in order to server God? Explain." And the whole time we're going down this list of questions all serious-like, I'm getting the feeling that we're really missing something amazing here. One man, Rich, pipes up and says sort-of out of the blue in a real moment of honesty, "I don't have faith in God like Ruth did in Naomi." Seems like that made some men uncomfortable. I was like, "Hell yeah! That realness sets me free! Way to be done with the religious bullcrap!"

Then, something awesome happened. God showed up. Several of the men kept taking these rabbit holes to talk about hearing from God, discerning His voice, all that, which had nothing to do with the topic at hand. The leader was trying to get everybody back on course, but couldn't evade the desire set out there to talk about walking with God and hearing from Him. There was a lot of weird stuff said, like, "I know when God talks to me because what he tells me is the very thing I most don't want to do in the world."

Huh?

Then I decided to pipe in. To one guy's thought, "Wouldn't it just be cool if God would just speak to us? I wish He would." I said, "But isn't that exactly what Jesus promised? I mean, check out the disciples. These guys walked intimately with Christ for three years. Granted, most of the time they were dumbfounded, but they walked with Jesus, learned from Him the art of living. Jesus taught them to live in the Kingdom and to be His own. He called them his friends. To Peter, he gave a name and a place and restoration to his heart. To John, he invited him to recline against his breast. And Matthew - this scalawag got to leave all his money-minding hustling on a dime and follow the Living God up and out and into all that was real and true and most alive. And Jesus Himself said it was better if He go so that the Spirit would come and be with us, teach us, remind us, counsel us. That sounds pretty damned intimate!" And then I talked about how David walked with God like this. One of my favorite Psalms says, "Lord if you wake me in the morning with your loving voice, then I'll go to bed at night trusting in You. I'm all eyes, all ears before you." And then again in Psalm 119, something about "God, I'll remember ever word You've spoken to me about life; I'll treasure them; I'll not let go of them." Finally, I just talked about some of my own experiences with hearing from God and how intimate it gets and how inviting it becomes. Yeah, I'm taken by Him. Yeah, I want to go down to the village. Hell yeah.

It was a thrill to see where God wanted to take things, and then just go with Him there. Other men started speaking up about the same thing, about their own experiences walking intimately with Christ, as if they had permission finally to actually desire communion and friendship with God.

I love pushing past the religious bull that I see around me most days, push past that into something Real.

Nothing 'Till I Give It To You

2005-06-03T10:42:00.000-05:00

Christ, I have learned so much of the ways of this world. I have seen things I wished I’ve never seen, learned secrets I wished I’d never learned. I’ve learned how to lie, how to scheme, how to fake it.

But I’ve also learned how to dream and how to face the truth and what it means to be made real by your love.

All that I’ve learned, everything that I know, well it’s nothing till I give it to you. These words from Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” is my prayer to you...

I know just how to whisper,
and I know just how to cry.
I know just where to find the answers
and I know just how to lie.
I know just how to fake it,
and I know just how to scheme.
I know just when to face the truth,
and then I know just when to dream...
And I know the roads to riches,
and I know the ways to fame.
I know all the rules
and then I know how to break ‘em,
and I always know the name of the game...

The beating of my heart is a drum, and it’s lost
And it’s looking for a rhythm like You.
You can take the darkness from the pit of the night
And turn into a beacon burning endlessly bright.
I’ve got to follow it, 'cause everything I know,
Well it’s nothing till I give it to You...

With Loud Cries

2005-06-01T18:08:00.000-05:00

I’m wanting to awaken tonight. Or better, reawaken. I want to wake up to all that is real and lasting and eternal, to take at heart what Thoreau once said, that "we must reawaken and learn to remain awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn."

Dan Haseltine, the lead singer of Jars of Clay, wrote that there are three things in the universe that are eternal. God, of course – His overreaching reign, His infinite (in both quality and quantity) love that He lavishes on His own, His pursuit… that pursuit that rocks the religious and knocks the prodigaled off their feet, His desire that names him a "jealous lover." The other two are the human soul – that part of us most living, and the human heart – that deepest and truest part of ourselves, which is constantly expanding (2 Corinthians 6:11).

But I’m not wanting to write about that. In fact all I want to do, all I feel I can do, is just utter a plea to the Eternal One born from longing and molded loosely by words like some bit of moist clay on a wheel. I want to pray.

My Lord Jesus Christ,

My greatest desire is to be with You. You are the Bread of Life, who came down from heaven in order that I might live, the Living Water for my parched and weary soul. You offer Yourself as the Living Hope, the Only Way, the God of my heart and soul. In You, and in You alone, my Christ, do I find all that I have ever longed for and desired but have never found in this world or in myself or even in others.

I attest that you are the Sovereign Lord of my heart, the creator of the Universe and my soul, the One who knit me together in my mother’s womb. In You, Jesus, is Life… and that Life is the light of men. And by You and by You alone do I see.

Lover of my Soul, Holy One, Almighty God, here and now I die to my flesh and to the world. I am crucified with You and yet I live. Not me, but You who lives within me. I die to my fears and denials and regrets, to my pride and unbelief and idolatry. I crucify upon Your cross my shame, guilt, blame, and deadness of spirit. And I live to You, my Lord.

Thank you that the Kingdom of God is really here, really here, within me. Because You have come and have bridged the gap that would have forever separated me from You. Now I am convinced that nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus. And I rest in that. Though I cannot contain You, and though I cannot fathom such a foolish kind of love (such a ruthless, reckless, raging, furiously tender kind of love like You show and like You are, that You would care so much for me and delight so much in me, that You would call and equip and make and surround and delight in and rejoice in and dance over me and give everything to ransom me), I rest in it. I trust in You. I lay here at Your feet, face first, because I know that I am empty, and having nothing to offer You except my heart and my life and my affection.

And I am painfully aware of my need of further grace from You. I desire so much more to abide more deeply and move more freely in your Spirit. Open my eyes again, Jesus. Reawaken me deeply. I press on, ever more, toward the prize… which is You, my reflection in Your eyes. I set my heart on home, my face heavenward like flint, my soul alive in Your hands. I lay all down for and to You. You have loved me with that awesome, everlasting love (that I don’t understand but know I am made for nonetheless).

Lead me on with Your love. Shake me free and blow through me. You have called me. You have opened my heart to Your deep love. Come, fill it. Bring the full ministry and presence of Yourself here, right here.

You are Lord, Life, Love, the Way, the Truth, the Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth, and the Lover of my heart and soul. You are a wild God, and I am Yours (because, in all Your wildness… or maybe because of all Your wildness, You have rescued me). I love You and cry out for You. I come home – limping and hungry, desperately hungry. I come home.

I ask for Your abiding Spirit and Your grace to abide more restfully, more deeply, more presently in heart and mind and spirit in You. Here I am, O’ I Am.

Amen.

And now, I want to pray with the way I live this night out. With how I treat the most startling image of God I can know outside of Christ – my wife, and the depth of beauty she brings to me and to this world. With what I do with my time tonight. With how I treat my next-door neighbor. With what I do with my heart, that little treasure of the Kingdom for which Christ died. Will I open up to the freedom and life offered to me tonight by God in the face of Christ? And how will I live in the Kingdom tonight? Will I run free "because [the Lord] has always stood up for me" (Psalm 63:7, The Message). Will I bring down strongholds and trample on the snakes and scorpions of this present darkness? And what, ultimately, will I do with Jesus, that one who gave His everything to be my everything?

All of heaven awaits, with, I think, bated breath.

It’s time to pray.

The Endless Immensity

2005-05-25T22:11:00.000-05:00

And Peter answered Him and said, "Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water." So He said, "Come." And when Peter had come down out of the boat, he walked on the water to go to Jesus.
-Matthew 14:28-29 (NKJV)

"Come." It is perhaps the simplest command ever uttered, and likely the most frightening. Jesus' words, the very call on our lives, echo off the caverns of our hearts. It is here we feel a weight so far unknown to us, as we peer from the edge of the our rickety boat of safety and comfort into the wild unknown Waters – a promised land full of mystery and depth.

"The call of God," Oswald Chambers reminds us, "is like the call of the sea. It can only be heard by those who have the nature of the sea within them."

The waves swell and the winds howl and somehow we know our place is with Jesus, wherever He is, even in the midst of the storm. Our call then is to simply come, to walk where Jesus walks, to live as He lives. And He lives with deep passion and compassion.

May we then like Jesus long deeply for the immensity of our Father God. And may we, like Him, pray "with loud cries and tears" (Hebrews 5:7) to our Rescuer as petition of, and for, and from our deepest hearts.

I agree with what Antoine de Saint-Exupery once declared. "If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

I am honored to be in your fellowship, walking on the swelling water in our longing to be with the Living God.