Nouns and Verbs

Of the Christian life, Brennan Manning once said that we are not travel agents handing out brochures to places we’ve never been. We should not be about pushing people toward a kind of life that we are not yet living.  We are living a life that should be — or at least should become — compelling in and of itself, enough that someone taking notice might ask what it is we are holding to (see 1 Peter 3:15).  Not that it should be in itself the reason we are living it, that others would take notice.  Nope, the Christian life is meant to become the most un-self-conscious kind of life available, natural, easy, organic and fluid.  Life as it was meant to be (as much as possible in the part of the story we are in, this side of the return of Christ) and our character being formed as it was meant to be.

Early on in my life with God I would become really distressed, even frantic, over the bits and pieces of myself I didn’t like and all that I wanted to become. I was intrigued and taken by the possibilities that lay before me, and was scared that I would be left behind.  I wanted to become passionate.  I wanted to become a healer and one who lived the truth out before others.  I wanted to be done with some stupid habits and immaturity.  I wanted to offer life.

Pretty soon, my wife started telling me, “Stop trying so hard to become, and just be.”  Somehow, that spoke pretty deeply to me, giving me permission to rest a bit and not try so hard.  To start enjoying living the kind of life I bumped into rather than trying so hard to offer it.  I could enjoy being enjoyed, right where I was, by a God so passionate for me.  I could enjoy having the resources of the Kingdom at hand — community and friendship, truth about life that finally made sense that brought fragmented pieces of my own story together, taking in sights that I never could see before but always felt like must be there somehow.  A heart that was beginning to beat again.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand life with God to be about both being and becoming. We really do get the best of both worlds: intimacy with a God who is fascinated and fascinating and the chance to grow into a kind of man or woman that we only dare imagine possible.  For me, that is a man of deep heart and faith, bold, full of a consistent joy toward life and love toward Jesus, competent and strong and life-giving.  The first counts us as worthy because of Jesus’ worth; the second grows us up into that worth, like a kid fitting into his daddy’s cowboy boots.  The first is the adventure of knowing and walking with God, of being His companion — a state, an identity, a noun; the second, the risky business of letting the Spirit temper and heal and develop us into the thing that is most alive, to form the image of God in us — an active, moving, following thing — a verb.  The first is the chance of an intimate adventure beyond our imaging and one we’ve been looking for all our days; the second is chance to grow into a character that can handle that kind of life and that depth of living.  The first is to experience the Kingdom; the second, to extend it through an allied partnership with the God we’ve come to befriend and trust intuitively.

It’s not always pretty, this kind of life.  Good grief, I think much of what I see in friends around me and in myself is a kind of cleaning out and exposing of the wounds and brokenness that prevent us from taking on that life.  But the result, and the journey along the way, is worthy it.  It’s worth it.  I am more today like the heart of God, with a greater capacity to both experience and express it.  My joy is in being that man, and my hope is in becoming even more so.

 

Stout-Hearted

“Wait and hope for and expect the Lord; be brave and of good courage and let your heart be stout and enduring. Yes, wait for and hope for and expect the Lord.” -Psalm 27:14, Amplified

I’ve been in the waiting for quite awhile in this past season of my life, and even now.  My wife and I are eager, hopeful, yet live with much longing as of yet unfulfilled.  We are living well in it, but that is not an easy thing to do.  Waiting patiently but also passionately, intensely but also intimately.  Ultimately, the “stuff” we’re waiting for — the growth of our family a significant element of that — is really a longing for Jesus, for the Father, for the Spirit to abide and for the Kingdom to come and advance in us and through us.  That is what is behind the curtain, beneath our longing.  And that is the promise and guarantee whispered by God within…

“The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.” -Revelation 22:17

I want to be among the stout-hearted, waiting eagerly and expectantly (Romans 8:19), hoping, anticipating, actively, passionately waiting.  And in the meantime?  Fan into flames the inner fire of God’s life in me.  Stout-hearted, fiery hot, courageous, slaking my thirst in the waters of life.  I’ve not had the best balance of this.  My posts here have diminished, and with that, I’m sad to say, some of the flames.  I’m a chronicler; I write what God shows me, and by doing so I take it in, embrace it, let it do its work in me.  Paul tells Timothy to fan into flames himself the gift of God in him (2 Timothy 1:6).  That’s his job, his responsibility, not God’s.  I’ve been asking God to make me stout-hearted, and so He’s giving me longing unfulfilled.  I’ve been asking Him to set me aflame with His life within, and so He gives me the poker of writing and points me to the smoldering embers.  He Himself will be the bellows (John 3).

This is vague and general, I realize, but I’m only trying to recapture what the Spirit is breathing in me; refinement comes later.  Polish isn’t the point; it’s passion He’s after.  The passion is in waiting expectantly, hopefully, stoking all the while, courageously becoming large- and strong-of-heart.

 

Coming To a Close

One month left.  Three long, exciting, difficult, intense years in a graduate counseling/marriage and family therapy program has come down to one month.  Hard to believe.

I find it ironic somehow that I’m sitting in the same seat as I was four years ago.  Not much external has changed over the past three years.  My job, certainly.  The work I do during the day.  But the shift, the movement, has been largely an inward one.  As I thought of that, I got the picture of William Wallace coming back home to the place of his youth early in the Braveheart film.  Same homestead.  Same people around him.  He was the same person… sort of.  But a different man, a different kind of man than he had been a boy.  Had he stayed, the trajectory of his life would have led him to a different spot.  He’d been disciplined.  Trained.  Honed.  He had been primed as a warrior.  His desire was still for peace, a reflection that his heart had not become hard or wicked; rather, he had developed skill and cunning for battle.

And battle it is, each day where I work.  My office is Stirling, and every counseling session is a taking of the field.  A movement either more toward freedom from tyranny — if only a single step — or a retreat toward it.  I don’t battle alone; I can’t.  I don’t mean only that the Lord God goes before more, for surely He does, and I don’t mean in this case that, like Wallace, I am a part of a band that knows their place in the story, for certainly I am.  What I mean here is that the war we’re fighting is for “the sons and daughters of Scotland,” for the freedom and life of all these precious ones sitting on my couch.  They must advance.  I spend much of my time preparing the advance, or instilling hope and courage into their hearts to pursue the vision of victory in the dreaded battle they find themselves facing, as much as I “go to pick a fight.”

But, unlike for Wallace’s  men, this is where the battle lines are drawn — is it not? — right through the hearts of us all.  It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said that “the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not even between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts… [through] the heart of every man.”  This is where the Enemy has set up camp.  And this is where we are called to fight, if we are to fight at all.  And fight we must.  This is where we experience either the joy of ground retaken, or the bondage of captivity and allegiance to the false king in our midst, to the wicked prince of a foreign territory.

I have come to see that my life, though not only about battle, must be about the battle for truth and life.  If only we had those given to us on silver platters.  We don’t.  Instead, we are in a war where it is just as often our own heads that find their way onto silver platters.  But we are given the strength and resources to fight that these things advance within us and among us.  And we have a kind and quality of life guaranteed us if we are willing to give our lives up to have it.

My own training is far from over; in some ways, I’ve only just begun to recognize the meaning and need of it.  And Jesus always seems to be about growing us more into His image as men and women pursuing hard after His kind of life, and willing to fight through hell and back for others to enjoy it with us.  (What else could God have meant by telling husbands to “love your wives, just as Christ loved the church” [Eph. 5:25]  How does He love the church?  By “giving Himself up for her” on the field of battle.)  But I’m nearing the end of one phase of my journey, entering more fully into the next.  I long for peace for these friends whom I meet — in their homes, in their marriages, in their work.  But, in the words again of Wallace, “it’s all for nothing if you don’t have freedom.”  And freedom is hard-won.  Maybe that’s the only way we come to appreciate it for what it is.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Restless for Rest

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything, though I had intention to continue some thoughts on the Christmas theme I began some time ago.  I actually had a lot of ideas of what this Christmas season would bring, what I wanted to do.  (Hiking and writing were among the top, as was spending lots and lots of time with people I love.)  Some ideas came to fruition; others did not.  What I did not anticipate was the amount of rest I needed and the amount of rest that, by the grace of God, I found.

My life over the past six months or so has been a confusing mix of both exciting new vistas into a ministry I’ve desired to enter into for many years and the weathering effects of hour upon weary hour spent in preparation for it.

So I slept.  A lot.  For the last two weeks, that’s mostly what I’ve done.  I slept in.  I took naps.  And when I was up, I tried not to plan anything or even wander too far from the house, in case I wanted to lay down again.  I wasn’t depressed — nothing like that at all.  Just… worn out.  Exhausted.

It’s easy to forget the effects that tiredness has upon a life.  It’s not just a weariness of body, but one of soul, and it shows itself in my interactions with others that turn more superficial as I don’t have energy for the deeper reality, in my distance from God and even my own inner life (that part that is “hidden with Christ” — desires, hopes, fears, dreams, etc.), and in the sloppy way I end up completing things before me.  My intention is good, but eventually, something has to give, as I simply lack the energy to follow through.

We’re horrible at this in our culture.  Whatever the reasons — a sense of identity, distraction from existential meaninglessness, a misunderstood idea of purpose — the people I know tend to pile things on and stuff their calendars full of all kinds of things.  Busyness is the name of the game.  How often do you hear “Oh, I am so busy” in response to the question “How have you been?”  It’s usually said with a sense of pride and accomplishment, a mark of achievement, a sign that they’ve really gotten somewhere.  Jesus always seemed to move in the opposite direction than that in the gospels, always toward freedom and spontaneity and intimate time alone with his Father both for its own sake and so that he could enter deeply into the heart of the people he came across.  His time was always spent meaningfully, not busily.

And I’m always amazed at the difference rest makes, and how vital it is to my life.  I can see that again, this side of the last couple of weeks.  I awoke this morning early, severely early if you compare it to the mornings I’ve been able to sleep in, and felt re-energized and ready for the day ahead, even for the week ahead.  I was drawn to open the Scriptures to Hebrews, where I read about this needed rest we are to take (Hebrews 4).  Now I know when you read that chapter and the one before it, you get the sense that the author there is referring to “rest” as a kind of state of being that is opposite to the unbelief that the Israelities demonstrated in the wilderness with Moses.  It’s a kind of resting in Christ.  But isn’t that what I’m referring to anyway?  A state in which I am at rest and able to continually be at rest even as I’m fully awake and moving about in the world?

Besides that, entering into relational intimacy with God through Christ (what the author of Hebrews is in part referring to when using the word “rest”) does go hand in hand with resting from work, since this is what God did after his work of creation.  “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:9-10).  This is hinted to in the idea of restoration, a renewal of all things back into what they were intended to be.  Rest is a very holy thing.

For now, rested, and resting, I’m ready to get back into the swing of things, to enter again into the arena, knowing that soon I’ll need to take time away and regain my strength and sense of identity in God once more.  Resting is part of the cadence and rhythm of the life we’re meant to live.  The spiritual life is a lot like our physical health.  You can never get so healthy that you never need to eat again.

I just hope I can remember that before I get to the point of exhaustion this time.

 

In-Tension

The disciples did not understand any of this.
-Luke 18:34

The journey we’re on with Christ is one of great tension, of what can at times feel like a balancing act,  tug-of-war between two opposing forces and we are tight-roping the taut rope between, trying at times with all our might not to lose our balance.

But knocking us off balance seems like a favorite thing for Jesus to do.  And He seems very intentional about it.

What confounded the disciples was not that Jesus was laying out a black-and-white picture of something, a heaven-vs.-hell, and asking them to choose between the two.  He did that at times, for sure, but typically not to those already with Him.  No.  If you notice, the disciples were always confounded whenever they encountered something about Jesus and something about the Kingdom they did not understand, and perhaps did not want to understand, because it would require so much more from them (see, for example, John 12:15-17, Luke 18:31-34, Mark 9:14-29, John 9:1-3, John 4:27-33).

It was as if Jesus was wanting to open their eyes to see more of reality, to be able to take it all in.  It was as if He was expanding their hearts even as He was blowing their minds.  He was taking them by the hand and walking them into the “life that is truly life” (1 Timothy 6:19).

If we are not expecting to be confounded by Jesus when we encounter Him, if we are not anticipating our small-minded and lop-sided pursuits to be blown to bits, if we are not ready to hear what may frighten us or confuse us, we will never be able to hear the Lord God speak to us.  It was the Pharisees, not the disciples of the Living God, who needed everything to be perfectly clear and straightforward and predictable.

Let me offer an example from my life.  I have a sincere desire to love a brother of mine who is addicted to all sorts of things, making a mess of his life, and hurting a lot of other people along the way — wife, kids, family, friends.  But my desire to love this man is clouded by my anger about his actions, about where he’s taking his life.  To love him feels like being inauthentic with my own ambivalence toward him; but to embrace my hatred of his sin only is to become unavailable to love at all.

So Jesus speaks to me.  I know what I am to do.  I am to act toward him (to show in my actions) authentic love — love that calls him out to become the man he was born to be, all the while embracing in felt affection the screwed-up man he sees each day in the mirror.  In other words, I am to love him where he’s at, but not let my love for him stop there.  But these two actions feel almost contradictory to each other. Paradoxes of love. I’ve heard that God “loves us where we are but loves us too much to keep us there.” How? I know that to be true, and yet to live in the tension of that love is to expose your heart to forces fierce enough to break it.

But once again, humility begs me to confess that I’m the student in this.  If the Teacher goes there and beckons me on with Him, even if I don’t get this… well, then, I want to go there as well, whatever the consequences, for this is true life. There is life to be found in following Him — even in this — and nowhere else.  It’s like Thomas.  When Jesus announced He was going back to Judea (straight into the den of lions, so-to-speak) out of love for His friend Lazarus, Thomas chose to go with Jesus even if it meant his own death (John 11:7-16).  We must choose to go with Him as well, whatever the cost.

(Jesus’ love of Lazarus was a similar kind of tension, actually. Lazarus was dead, and Jesus came to him and wept for the loss. Yet He didn’t leave Lazarus there. His love for him brought him out of the tomb.)

So this is living in-tension-ally, to be comfortable with the discomfort and content with the discontent.  We somehow have to be okay with things not being okay, all the while trusting in the One who is out to set everything right again.  In this tension, we have to at some point come to see that Jesus is out for our good, to expand our hearts so that we may have the capacity for Him to dwell there in all His glory.

All good love — love between lovers or for a friend, love of freedom or a cause, love for life and love for God — all of these will require that we live somewhere between the Fall and the Redemption.  Our God is fully alive in this tension.  We are told to “consider Him who endured such opposition” so that we do not grow weary along the way and totally lose heart (Hebrews 12:3).  There is a way of living that allows us to make it through this world without getting torn to shreds.  Let’s find it.