The Burden of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-2 Corinthians 7:9-11, The Message

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

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

The Bridge of Sighs

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

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

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

I call it the Bridge of Sighs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Silence, Speak

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

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

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?