Dealing with Death

Many of my favorite authors say that they write what they need to read. Philip Yancey is especially fond of talking of his writing as a wandering journey of faith, where he is wrestling with and trying to hammer out his understanding of some aspect of life. He deals with grace and disappointment and longing for the Kingdom, those sorts of things. A lot of the stories I post here are things I need to read. Some time back, I told a friend that the only reason I post these things to the internet on a blog instead of keep them in my private journals is that it’s nice to have access to them anytime, anywhere. It sounds to me a bit ego-centric, but it’s a help for me to be able to access these stories and reread them at various times. I don’t have to go digging through my journals trying to find something. That’s especially true as I process through something someone smarter than me has said or realized. I work their insight into my soul like kneading yeast into bread. This blog is my work surface, the words my rolling pin.

This morning, I found myself re-reading the About the Invitation portion of this blog. I say there that “these pages..are the blood-and-guts expression of a man’s journey of passionate and at times faltering faith through this world…” I often write about the beauty or adventure or desirous seeking after God. My posts are most often expressions of hunger and reaching toward Christ. But, in the spirit of the About page, I realize I need to feel free, too, to write about “times of faltering faith.” I’ve got them. God knows I do.

So here it is, my first truly “faltering faith” post. I have no idea where it is going to end up, but this is where I need to start: a dream…

I’m standing in an overgrown field. It’s been neglected for quite a few years now. The barn is dilapidated. Where cows and horses once grazed, only weeds remain. The sounds of children running and playing have been washed out by the hollow drag of air across the fallen timbers. The sky, a bright blue in my memory, is now a pale grey, as if it is sick with mourning. No one lives here anymore. The life that once filled this place has vanished.

Another scene: I’m sitting with a man who has come to the end of his days, at least he wishes it were so. For as long as he can remember, though the days have been filled with activity, it has been activity for activity’s sake, and they have felt only empty, and he feels emptier having lived them. He knows nothing, and everything he once knew seems as dust. He has nothing to stand on. Life for him has been one long, unblinking daze.

Yet another scene: A woman sits across from me. She is broken, damaged by years upon years of neglect and abuse. Something deep within her was stolen as a little girl, and she has lived a desperate life trying to get it back. Nothing has worked, and in fact has only led her to darker and scarier places where she has had to bargain her way back again. She now exists with even less of herself than she had when she left her painful youth. She is alone, holding only tattered fragments of herself.

The stories continue. One after another after another. To say that “something” has been stolen, that “something” has been lost, is perhaps the greatest understatement of all time. To say that “things are not what they should be” is terribly, tragically, true. So much so that to look at life square in the face hurts deep within and freezes the soul like stone. Only the bravest can do such a thing, or those leaning on the crutches of addictions. And yet, this is the first place we are asked to go. This is the first thing we need to do, to see the desperation of our situation. We are utterly, totally, completely lost. We are barely alive, alive only enough to know we are not alive and the life we dreamed of has alluded us.

Don’t get me wrong. I have sit through hundreds of evangelical presentations and sermons to reach out to the lost with something of the hope of the gospel. They are (mostly) very good, and very true, and very needed. But they also often skip over the painful truth that we are not the people we should be. It’s often as if the presenter or preacher is also too afraid to look square at life and say, “We are a dead people. We have lost everything.” Yet, that’s where so many are. I know that to be true. My days are spent walking among the dead-at-heart and lost-of-soul.

Before the gospel, the good news, can mean anything, we must take a hard look at the life we have in our hands. Small. Silly, really, in the way we cling to such small things. Fragile. A shred of something, but we don’t really know what the original was. We hold a piece of a mosaic but cannot see the picture. Only shades of color, and even that is fading.

There is a hope. It is a great hope. The news is a great news — that we get to have life — LIFE. We get to breathe in gulps of life-giving oxygen again. Our blood gets to run warm through our veins again. Somehow, to our amazement, the broken fragments can come back together. The empty spaces filled. We can have again what we are made for. But it does not happen apart from taking a hard look at what we get and realizing, oh, finally realizing, we cannot get there on our own. We are dead. Only a life-giving Spirit can bring us back.

The promise of Jeremiah 31:13, that “maidens will dance and be glad, young men and old as well. I will turn their mourning into gladness; I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow” only happens as we are first familiar with our sorrow. Looking around at the brokenness around us, what other choice have we got? “Because of this,” wrote the prophet Micah, “I will weep and wail… I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl” (1:8) This is the only way to make sense of James’ command to “grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom” (4:9). Jesus promises us that He will turn our grief into joy again. Why? Because He will be all that we lost, and we will see Him. Our life. Our everything.

Maybe this isn’t so much faltering faith as it is a burdened heart. What is the only other appropriate response to suffering but to weep with those who weep for their loss.

The Gift of Beauty

Fall has come to the Midwest. I mean Fall. The things we fondly think of when we dream of the hot, dry days of summer transitioning over to the cool, colorful, lively shorter days of autumn: holiday plans, folks carving pumpkins and making hot apple cider, talk of what the winter might hold (cold and wet or mild and dry?), and, more brilliant than anything else, the extravagant change of colors. I think we forget how often the bright high sun of summer can sometimes mute the spectrum around us. Sure, you may have your dark greens and earthy browns and sky blues, but that’s usually the extent of what we get to see. The Fall promises to bring back to our senses the wild range of hues: scenes of radiant reds and deep purples, bright yellows and rustic oranges. Pinks and violets and even shades of green we’d forgotten existed before.

This Fall hasn’t disappointed. The Maples are especially proud, displaying their dazzling array of colors like peacocks lining the streets. Reds with purple-tipped tops, like they were dipped upside down in the sunset sky. The Poplars with their golden yellows. The majestic oaks with their orange glows. Cherries and Walnuts and Sycamores. Even the Bradford Pears, the last of the troop this year to lose their greens, clinging onto them like camouflaged soldiers holding the final line of the summer march, have started to join the others – yellow-topped and transforming before our eyes.

My wife and I live just a couple of hours from the southwestern-most stretch of the Ozarks called the Boston Mountains. (They are humble mountains. Those of you in the West would call them molehills, but we’re fond here of making mountains out of them. We take what we can get.) The foliage found here is like none other. The Ozarks may not offer skiing or elk hunting, but the view in the Fall is unbeatable. Naturally, we wanted to take a peak.

We grabbed our camera, hopped in the car, and set off toward the Mountains. Along the way, we would point out the most colorful trees, pick them out like a lineup. (We really get into this.) But, the longer we drove, the more disappointed I became. The last couple of nights had been cold – near freezing temps – and it must have been enough for the trees to drop much of their leaves and for the ones left to brown quickly. There were very few of the colors we’d seen driving around town – the yellows and oranges and purples. The Ozarks are still beautiful, but, this day at least, not for the brilliant array of Fall colors.

We made the most of our day, but I couldn’t shake my disappointment. It may sound a bit melodramatic, but I had been excited about the drive. It’s not just about trees. It’s about beauty and it’s about the adventure of sharing in it with my wife.

There’s something within the human soul that has a profound longing for beauty. Not only to see it, but to be enshrouded by it, to be enveloped in grandeur and majesty. I have often sensed that, when I am surrounded by the awe of something beautiful, my heart has room to unfold itself, even as it drinks everything in. I was excited that DeAnn and I would have this chance together to behold this dramatic transition from summer, as if God were giving us one last dose of this beauty before the long, muffled months of winter dulled the complexion of landscape in its brown and white shade and long shadows. (Winter has a beauty of its own, but it is a beauty of hope, that things will one day change and come back to life. Fall’s beauty is a last explosion of color, like the best firework that’s held for the last during a Fourth of July celebration.)

I think this is one of the ways to know more of God – to see His handiwork. It may be in fall foliage, or it may be in the splendor of a life transformed. It can come in the simplicity of a smile from someone you adore or in the innocent play of children. Maybe it’s the beauty of a job well-done, a construction job completed at last or a paper that came together just right. Or the way sometimes we have an incredible grace to persist through tough times and discover that our character has grown some through it and even by way of the suffering.

The most dazzling of all beauty is the Source of it Himself. “One thing I ask,” wrote the Psalmist, no doubt hungry for this Fount of all beauty, “that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.” (Psalm 27:4) All the days of his life. It must be an endless supply.

Apprentice Training

When we moved into our home a few years ago, we turned one of the spare bedrooms into an office.  Bookshelves line the far wall of the room, and sandwiched between two of them, right in the middle of the wall, sits a large desk.  It’s a simple one, with only a flat writing surface and some shelves beneath, nothing to block the view from the window right above it that looks out onto the street.  So not the best view in the world, but it does, at least allow for natural light and the view of an occasional bird or two and a small bit of the weeping willow in the front yard.

It used to, anyway.  The desk is now overflowing with scribbled notes, used manila folders, piles of books and notepads and journals.  Even the office chair will, on occasion, serve as an overflow, and more often than not now we’ll have to move stacks off of it to the floor in order to sit down to the computer, which also has as its residence the overpopulated desk.

When I started grad school two and a half years ago, I did pretty well keeping organized.  Everything had its place.  After each semester, I would place papers, folders, books, notes, and the like in a particular location, usually in a reserved spot on a bookshelf.  And my brain, too, would feel nicely organized.  Categorized, even.  Statistics and Research here.  Family Therapy there.  Human Growth and Development in another spot.  Marital Therapy in yet another.  None of that lasted long, though, and several spaces in my life are now simply flooding over.

Let me say something at this point about my field.  Marriage and Family Therapy is a really unique profession for several reasons.  For one, there are an endless number of problems folks can be having internally or in relationship to someone else for which they are seeking help.  Second, there are an endless number of  approaches to helping folks with these problems.  Third, how the problem manifests itself or seems to exist for one person may be totally different than for someone else, based on their unique personhood and experiences.  Many therapists will work in one of (you guessed it) an endless number of specializations.  Fourth, there are a seemingly endless supply of helpful resources, some of them written by wise and experienced healers and helpers, from which a therapist fresh in the field like myself can glean.  Fifth…. well, you get the picture.  Lots of possibilities.

One of the most exciting things about my present situations is that as an intern I am exploring these possibilities by working with a large number of different issues, and exploring a few different tried-and-true approaches to treating some of these unique problems.  (Even focusing on “problems” reveals a kind of approach, and not every approach focuses on problems.)  It’s been nearly a year now that I’ve been seeing patients, and I can still say that at least once a week I encounter something I have never seen before.  That’s another unique aspect of the profession.  I am constantly kept on my toes and forced to be not only humble in learning and creative in trying, but also deeply dependent upon walking with God.

Now maybe my stacks of books and mile-long Amazon wish list make a bit more sense.  I find myself often living out of the urgent: I must learn about this; I must be ready for that; I must be able to work well with this… It can be quite exhausting.  By the end of a work week my brain often feels like Malt-O-Meal: mushy and expanding, running out of my ears.

I’ve been searching for awhile for another perspective on all of this, a way to understand both what I am doing and what I need to do as I prepare, as my hands are “trained for battle,” as David put it in the Psalms (18:34).  This morning, I finally got a glimpse of a picture simple enough to work for me (and so simple that it was easily missed).

It’s from Jesus.  I mean, of course it is — God gave this picture to me this morning — but I mean that the words come right from His mouth, in Matthew 13:52.  He says this: “Then you see how every student well-trained in God’s kingdom is like the owner of a general store who can put his hands on anything you need, old or new, exactly when you need it” (The Message).

There it is.  It’s a simple thought, really, but there’s a lot there.  We get to be students of Jesus, trained in living life that is truly life, and who has these treasures stored up within our deep hearts, able to pull out what’s needed when it’s needed.  These treasures may be encouragement, exortation, caution, teaching, compassion, empathy, direction, clarity, meaning, joining with someone in the mess of their life — all these things.  More importantly, though, and more to the point of life in the Kingdom, I think these treasures have to do with presence, with the weight of our lives impacting someone else.  I think the treasures are, simply put, our hearts, and the grace to join in relationship with someone else from the heart.

One of the pitfalls of my graduate training is that, in focusing on theories of counseling and techniques of therapy developed over the decades by hundreds (literally) of practicioners, we begin to think, even subtly, that for every person, every issue, every broken place, every event, we have to have an answer, a fix, a solution.  Especially in the culture we’re in, where microwavable meals are ready in minutes, technology changes quickly, and medical advances allow for restoration of physical injuries and illnesses that would have spelled disaster even just a few years ago.

But that’s not the invitation of Jesus.  That’s not His way.  Think of it.  He could have handed us a playbook on day one, a set of principles and techniques to live out in every circumstance of life (though, admittedly, it would be quite a thick volume).  He chose instead of give us one, and leave out libraries worth (John the Beloved may have been expressing some of the frustration at leaving out so much — see John 21:25).  And the book He left us with is chock full of one repeating, alluring, frightening intrigue:  relationship.  Covenant.  Friendship.  Intimacy.  Connection.  Like it or not, that’s His desire with us.

And it makes sense.  I can’t imagine how disappoined we’d be if when we were young our father handed us some notes and said, “Son (or daughter), here is everything I know concerning anything you’ll run into over the next 10 years.  Inside are all the instructions that I want you to carry out and everything I want you to do, including where you are to be 10 years from now when I’ll come back and see how you’ve done.”  Forget that.  No way.  That’s slavery, not intimacy.  Rather, for those of us who had good fathers (and for those of us who didn’t, think of what you would’ve wanted with your father), we were invited into relationship… he taught us how to bait a hook, how to ride a bike, how to count money, what to do when you like a girl (or, for daughters, how boys only “want one thing” at that age), and how much he delights in us, how proud he is of how we’re doing.  We need counsel — we go to him.  We get hurt, we need his affection.  We get an applause at our school play, and we look for his face in the crowd.  With him we learn to walk, we wrestle, we feel his strong protection, we grow up to be like him.  Eventually, we share a beer and a steak with him and talk about politics and local happenings.  We share life together.  That’s the ideal, anyway.

That’s a picture of what we’re invited into with God.  He wants that with us, and more.

Jesus’ mission is one of healing and restoration, right?  It’s a ministry He laid out in Isaiah 61, that He announced in Luke 4:18-19, and that He comissioned for us to carry on — see Luke 10:19, Mark 16:15-18, John 16:8-15, Matthew 28:18-20.  He isn’t interested only in this work getting done; He’s interested also in joining us while we do it — or us joining Him while He does, as it’s probably better said.  This is the kind of work happening in the Christian counseling office.  He in no way intends to give us every technique we need.  That would rip us off from the relationship.  Instead, we get to walk with Him, hear Him, let Him lead and teach us — like a good father would!

In the context of that relationship, and the relationship-of-the-heart we offer one another, there will necessarily be healing and restoration taking place.  But it’s always, always, in that context.  That’s the way the Kingdom works.  It is a partnership — us with God and (because of His generosity), us with one another.  Understanding human nature, its corruption and disconnection, processes of restoring it back to health and wholeness, and techniques that lead to that — these are important, and crucial, in my opinion, for the Christian therapist to understand and implement in constantly growing clarity and skill.  But they are not a replacement for that really scary invitation to walk with the Lord Jesus, move with the Spirit of God, and know the heart of the Father.

I’ve got a few more months of grad school to complete.  There’s more to learn — more books to read, people to glean wisdom from, notes to take, documents and articles and ideas to work through.  I suspect there always will be — and I certainly hope that to be the case.  I’m sure I’ll be moving more piles around and trying to organize all the information.  But the important thing is not on the theory.  It’s not on the principles.  It’s not the formulaic approach to life.  The treasure is God, relationship with Him, and our hearts restored to the capacity to enjoy Him.  Forever.  To the extent that we can live in and offer that, whatever our profession, then we are learning to live well and easy in the Kingdom come.  Most of my core training in the Kindom comes from learning to hear the voice of the Lord God, to submit to Him, to allow Him to work in me, to join Him from the heart, and to be transformed.  Only from that Center will any of the rest find its rightful place.

A Daring Reach

Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
-John 20:27

In moments of duress we respond with either “fight or flight.”  How many times have we heard that adage?  It’s become so commonplace, we often take for granted that it is simply true.  We have only these two choices whenever we’re anxious, right?  We either fight or flee.  A centipede will do that.  As will a barn swallow.  And so will a cow.  Maybe that’s the point, that in our evolutionary-minded culture we just assume that we came from the same amoebic slime and have these responses as hold-overs to our ape-ish great-(to the n-th degree)-grandparents.  An article found on msn.com’s homepage today echoes this assumed reality: “The famous fight or flight response mechanism—yep, the same one that helped our ancestors outrun saber-toothed tigers…”

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess, I’ve always felt like these were pretty limited options and somehow pretty animalistic.  Maybe as a weary, worn-out people, this is what we often do.  Much of what I see in my counseling office is people anxiously combating or fearfully avoiding relationship or situations — and that seems to fit the bill.  What other options can there be?

Recently I was challenged to consider a baby’s response to his environment.  Raised in a healthy environment, whenever hungry and needing his mother’s breast, the baby reaches.  Whenever frightened and wanting comfort, he again reaches for his mother.  Whenever exposed to new things or people and uncertain about them, he reaches for security from mom.  There is no fight or flight in him.  Not yet.  It is all reach.

It is only as that baby grows and experiences the fallen world, repeatedly exposed to fearful and painful events where he reaches and finds no one, that he learns to defend or hide.  As an adult, then, he has learned to “live out all the other selves,” as Frederich Buechner put it, “which [he is] constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”  The original innocence is all but lost.  Accessibility, vulnerability, authenticity, strength — gone, or buried.  Buechener continues, “The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all.”

From my experience, when Buechener says, “most of us,” he is speaking literally.  It is extremely rare to encounter anyone able to live out some deep and true and good heart.  It is the stuff of fairytales and legends.  When we see it, we are stirred and even captivated.  We want to be like that, or be reached by someone who is like that.  Think of heroes in Hollywood blockbusters.  Or maybe the occasional firefighter running up the stairs of the collapsing Twin Towers to rescue bleeding and burning victims.  The reason we write books and make movies depicting such a character is not because we see it around us (or within us), but exactly because we often don’t.  Our souls are buried by demands, imprisoned by pain, blinded by fear.  Broken and lost to us.

The loss of this treasured “original, shimmering self” is one of the greatest tragedies of the Fall.  A tragedy so great, in fact, that it was for rescue and restoration of it that God launched the greatest invasion the world has even known.  It is for want of this back that Jesus came “to seek and save what was lost” Luke 19:10.  His mission in his own words is to, “bind up the brokenhearted… to comfort… to proclaim freedom for the prisoners… recover sight for the blind… release the oppressed…” (see Isaiah 61:1 and Luke 4:18).

One of the ways Jesus does this is by reaching.  When Jesus “reached out his hand and touched” the leper (Matthew 8:3) and “reached out his hand and caught” Peter (Matthew 14:31), he was both saving them (from death) and modeling for them the courageous act of reaching.  He reached the man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-15) and the woman at the well (John 4:1-26) in a similar way (just more indirect, though no less subtle).  The gospels are filled with stories of Jesus reaching out to us, of God stooping to face us and call us friends and bringing us up to His level.  My own life is filled with stories of the same.  So intent is He, in fact, to reach for and save the “original, shimmering self” that He obstinatly refuses to false self, the coats and hats we wear — which can often cause confusion over Jesus intent and motive. (Consider how confusing it must have been for the Pharisees that Jesus chastized and offended.  In his offensive way with them, Jesus was still reaching for the buried self, even in refusing to address the pretense.  Whenever one of them responded to Jesus with authenticity, Jesus would address him in kind [see, for example, John 3:1-21]).

Not only does Jesus reach toward us (and how far He comes to do that!), but His invitation is for us to reach back.  Even when we are living out of the cynicism and despair and unbelief we’ve learned in this world.  This was His approach to Thomas, who refused even to acknowledge Him at all.  Jesus simply offered, “Reach out your hand and put it to my side.  Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27).

I am constantly amazed at the courage of my clients that, after all the pain of living they have experienced, after all the encounters of reaching out and finding no one, that they are still reaching for something, demonstrated by the very act of coming to see me.  Something in them balks at and refuses to completely embrace in existential despair that they are totally alone in the universe.  Maybe it’s not the original expectations that someone would be there to offer the comfort and protection they needed, but the very act of stepping into my office and opening their hearts and lives to me is in itself a courageous reaching.

The reach response of an infant who hasn’t yet learned to fight in desperation or flee in fear, and the subtle and trepidatious reach found in some of us still hoping for someone or something on the other end, is an image of God in us.  Maybe the most glorious part of that image in us, that part of “eternity set in the heart of man,” as Ecclesiastes puts it.  In a way that is brutal and even demanding, Jesus still invites us to reach toward Him, out of the deepest love for us and desire that in the reaching, “we may have life, and have it to the full,” that in the seeking, we may both find and be found.

Return of the King’s

Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”
-Matthew 8:21-22 

Being in grad school can be pretty demanding, as can any number of things we engage in with our lives — marriage and kids, ministry, jobs, a crisis here or there, sickness, and a million other things.  The demands of life simply take their toll.

I’ve had some unexpected openings with my time recently.  I’m still in school, but my schedule has shifted a bit and freed me up a little bit through the day, creating some breathing room I haven’t had in quite awhile.  Not much, but enough that I’ve had time to slow down a bit.  There’s that, and there’s the space I’m beginning to make for my heart again, time to reconnect with the deeper places in me, and time to reconnect with God.

The trouble is, I’m so used to the whirlwind of busyness that when I try to slow down or when I have some down time, I can’t seem to sit still.  When I try to quiet my mind and heart, to try to listen to the voice of the Lord speaking to me, all I too often seem to get is the rising anxiety about what I should be doing, or the worry about tomorrow’s activities, or the unsettled restlessness of things in my life.  Me, me, me.  Though I’m involved in a lot of beautiful things that are bigger than me, when I slow down the vertigo-of-soul seems to indicate that in too many ways I’ve become the center of my own story.  I’ve become stuck in an orbit around myself.

I decided today that the only recourse I have is… well, is to realize I have no recourse.  I have no internal resources that can save me from this vortex of ontological lightness, as theologians call it.  If I am to follow Jesus again deeply, it must begin with Him coming into and speaking into this tornadic mess inside my heart.  Otherwise, I’m unsure where to go with my attention and energy.  My  mind only comes up with a few different places I could go — mostly either dead-end roads of boredom, distraction, or worry, as I’ve mentioned, or worse — dark corners and alleys that have crept into my heart as I’ve shied away from the Light of Life.

So, with no internal resources to rely on, I’m dropping it all and running to Jesus.  And this is what I pray:

Please meet me here, Lord God.  Spirit of the Living, God, I remember that You want to commune with me even more — far more — than I want to with You.  I don’t want distraction.  I don’t want the distance of worry and inattention.  I don’t want comfort.  And I must not wait to bury my father, to wait until all is fixed and well before taking off again with You into the deep.  I don’t want th eless wild offers of this world or of the Father of Lies.  I want You.  Jesus, I want you.  Everything else is dung compared with that — for you are the Pearl of Great Price.  I hunger for You.  My soul thirsts for the Living God.

Where may He be found?  Who can ascend His hill?  Praise be to my God, who has given us clean hands and pure hearts, that we might walk with the Living God, learn of His ways, be trained as master horseman with his steeds, be loved as a bride on the bed.  We are Yours, O Lover, we are Yours, for you have first loved us.  Jesus, you are our King and Suitor.  And I am your man.

On Methods and Mystery

Recently I was counseling a young lady who by external standards had everything in life figured out.  On her way to getting her Master’s degree, she has been sought out by a prestigious company offering her a nice bonus for signing on with them.  She was dating a star athlete at her college.  And she had enough cash and friends to keep her evenings and weekends full and exciting.  She had everything in place.  The world was her playground.  Life was hers for the taking.

Except that she didn’t feel very much alive.  In fact, she discovered that all of the focus on these externals kept her spinning and dizzy with busy activity, but left her weary and full of anxiety whenever it stopped for just a brief moment.  It was like a marry-go-round for her.  As long as it was spinning fast, she had a blast.  But the bell had rung, recess was over.  She looked up to see a lot of the people she really cared about going on toward better things.  And her?  She only felt abandoned and seasick.

As you can guess by the neglected state of her internal life, her relationship with God was practically nill.  In fact, she wasn’t even sure that he was real.  After all, she’d never really felt him.  It was easier, she decided, to hope that God didn’t exist than to deal with a God who existed and yet she didn’t feel Him near her.  That would mean either He’s not interested or she’s doing something wrong.  Either scenario would be more painful to deal with than if He didn’t exist at all.  Agnosticism was a safer choice than facing the pain of the alternative.

Several silent minutes went by while she processed some of this reality and slowly gave herself over to this truth.  With her head in her hands, stated simply, “I’ve always lived my life like it were a formula.  Everything was a problem that could be solved with the right steps and procedures.  The right method.  The right answer.  But this totally breaks down with God, doesn’t it?”

And so the unknown beckons.  It is a safe life that demands to be formulaic.  It is only the bold and adventerous ones that have had to, at some point and with some things, throw caution to the wind.

We prayed together, and she invited Jesus to move and speak into places in her that had been left cold and desolate by the demands she’d placed on herself.  Her heart, you see, could not follow suit with her life lived only in the mind.  Somewhere along the way, she had bound it up and dragged it along behind her, kicking and screaming.  Now it’s snagged, and refuses to go along any longer.  It must be addressed.

To enter into the kind of life worthy of our living means that we will enter into the deep mystery of the human delimma.  There is simply no way around it.  The questions of our existence will surface, and so will the question of God’s involvement — or seeming lack of it — in our lives.  Where is He?  Where was He?  Where is He now?  There are no formulas for these questions.  No quick answers.  The only thing we have to go on is the hope that He’ll meet us in the asking, and give us His heart for the taking as we slowly open ours to Him along the way.

There was a subtle change in this lady’s life on this day.  Not dramatic, perhaps, nothing anyone else could identify.  But some quiet notion that life is to be had, and it is not easily won.  How much does she want it?

And that is where we must begin.  How much do any of us really want it?

An Enemy Among Us

I realize lately that when I write, I am consistently harping on the reality of busyness and its role in our lives.  This blog is as much journal as anything, a locale I come to occasionally to offer what’s on my heart and mind, and this topic is apparently a consistently weighty one for me.

In a sociology class I teach, I asked the students to comment on a portion of Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy I had given them.  It was an intro, a prologue, to the book, and there was very little in this portion that was what I would call particularly spiritual or religious, except that Willard was addressing our contemporary confusion over morality and meaning.  He termed it flying upside down, that in our present age we cannot tell what is up and what is down, and we are headed in a dangerous direction and don’t even know it.  Among several realities he referenced was the plague of busyness, the way we dash back and forth and in and out like rats in a cage, trying to find — or else thinking we have found — some sense of trascendent meaning and existential purpose.

In reading the responses of the students, I realized that I am not alone in seeing the problem with our living “in the matrix,” to borrow from the movie’s idea of a small, cramped, and unreal arena in which we act out our lives.  The comments from the students’ papers were consistent in labeling this as a problem they have come to recognize as well.  I was blown away at their perception.  The understanding of this thought of “flying upside down” is well-known, I suspect, something that we each recognize on some level.

I think it was Richard Foster that said busyness wasn’t a device of the Enemy; it is the Enemy.  Maybe so.  Maybe the Evil One masquerading as an angel of light.

Think about our culture for a second.  What is the typical response of someone you meet up with when you ask them how they are?  There are those few exceptions, but generally the reply goes along the lines of, “Oh, so busy” or, “Lots of things going on” or, “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve got on my plate” or something of the like.  Even in church circles — or, in my experience, especially in church circles.

Why is that?  What’s the story there?

Sometimes it may be a sincere gesture to try to catch you up on good things happening in life, especially for someone you haven’t seen in awhile.  Sometimes.  But not typically.  More often, it is a substitution for meaning, something nearly lost to us in our society.  But we desperately need meaning. This is not an option for us.  So we create it ourselves, replace it from something else we are familiar with.

And we are certainly familiar with busyness.

The other night I was listening to a Podcast of some theological discussion (honestly, I can’t remember what the discussion was really about), and was struck by some off-handed comment that the Bible is primarily about God, not about man, and that, in fact, man was only a minor blip on the screen of God’s live and story.  That is certainly not a common view of reality by Christians I know and read about.  We have become the center of everything going on.

I’m not good with that description either, by the way, the thought that we are minor players on the stage.  I happen to believe that God has given us a very prominent role in His cosmic script, but I do agree that we are not the central object around which the universe revolves.  I think most of us would agree that the Lord God is, of course, our gravitational center and around whom all things move.  Picture the planets encircling the sun.  ”In Him we live,” I think is how Paul put it, “and move.”  Even here, the sense is not so much that we live around Him, but within Him somehow, as if we are not so much planets around a sun, but rather the corona itself, prominences, solar flares.

But somehow we end up zipping off from our Center and shooting out into an endless and cold void, trying our hardest to find something larger than ourselves to clutch to so as to give us at least a small taste of our rightful place with God, so that we can feel even a subtle feeling of being held in place.  And these objects and events and ideologies we busily define ourselves by, they are so tempting exactly because they can make us feel connected and purposeful.  They do draw upon our need for transcendence.  Otherwise, they would not be so alluring.

Have you noticed how it can be anything?  We’ll take our hearts to the smallest and most insignificant moment or memory or habit or object or idea and begin building our lives around it.  A fragment or debris from some far-roaming object.  And before long, that’s all we can cling to.  How could we ever find our way back again, and so we cling desperately and tenaciously to what we must know is not great enough for us, not worthy of our devotion and worship.

School.  A person, even a romatic relationship.  A band.  Going to concerts or shows.  Sophistication.  Money.  A social cause.  An identity as a “good person.”  Reading.  Video games.  TV shows or movies.  Church attendance.  That new car we’ve got our eyes on.  The economic “crisis.”  Reputation.  

The list is literally endless.  I’ll give us this — we are pretty creative when it comes to our busyness.  Our godless worship.  Our idolatry. 

And let’s face it.  We are, all of us, guilty of this.  We’ve got to come there first if we are ever to break free from them and find our way back home again.  Step one is to recognize we are far away.  

Step two?  Own the fact that we are made for more, that we are made to encircle and have our being in God, and that only that will satisfy our longings that threaten to destroy us.

And the third step?  Only this: crying out to the only One who can save us from these things we cling to and that cling to us.  

I know this because I am here.  It seems sometimes like a daily experience for me to wake up, recognize that even through the night I have wondered from my place in Him, embrace my desire and longing for Life – which is to say, check my compass and recall that I am headed somewhere, and that this isn’t it.  And then cry out for God to rescue me.  This is why the Psalms are full of that very thing — cries for rescue and deliverance from their enemies.  To be restored and refreshed in this Life that is Him, to be reconnected to the true Vine of that Life.

My friends, the enemy of our day — not the only one, perhaps, but certainly one of the greatest and most effective tactics the Evil One uses — is “busyness” as a replacement for true meaning.  It’s a stow-away, a double-agent, an angel of darkness masquerading as one of us.  We’re made for more.  So much more.  Let’s find what that is.  Let’s remember what that is.  Let’s  be done with things that we know in our hearts will never be good enough.  And let’s ask our Creator and Lover to bring us back into the source of that Life.