Like Barbed Lightning

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