Six Months Later

Joplin just commemorated the six-month anniversary of the tornado that wiped out a third of our city on May 22nd.

We all have moments in our lives that we will remember forever, that are etched into our brains with the searing heat of the pain and fear of tragedy.  My parents know where they were the day Kennedy was assassinated.  I can remember, as we all can, the details of the morning of September 11, 2001 with crystal-clear clarity, as if it happened yesterday, as I watched with horror as people jumped from the top floors, trying to wrap my mind around the reality of these buildings caving in on thousands of people.

May 22nd is that kind of day for this community.  I’ve heard a hundred stories by now, many in first-person as a therapist trying to help make sense and work through the twist and wreckage of a day that was supposed to be a normal, average Sunday.  I remember my wife and I driving alongside the tornado, only missing driving through the heart of it by a simple prayer and God telling us to go a different way.  I remember seeing the transformers popping and watching as debris swirled within and around the enormous black monster, thinking at the time they must be small pieces of wood and whatnot, and only later learning that they were full-sized buildings, cars, people.

I’ve not been a citizen of this community all my life, but at various times I have called this place home.  My wife and I have been here this time around for six years.  We developed and opened our own counseling practice, which has deepened our roots, as our lives have become intertwined with the lives of others.  We’ve worked in this community and for it, being a part of small church groups and large business ones, staying when we have had offers to move elsewhere.  These were our homes, our churches, our businesses that were destroyed.  These were our families, our lives, our friends that were taken and whose lives were irrevocably shaken.

What has struck me again and again, beyond the grief that wells up at times unexpectedly when I drive past my old practice, now only a slab of concrete in an open field of concrete slabs lined up like gravemarkers, is the insistence that we come back, that our community thrive again.  The overwhelming response of volunteers and people across the country was more than we could take in in those first weeks.  We were, I think, only partially able to appreciate the kindness and selflessness.  The search and rescue crews, the work crews, the cleaning crews, the city managers and politicians who fought for this place, the folks who, bleeding and bruised and confused, stepped beyond themselves to cover a cold woman in a wheelchair or look for a man lost in a crumbled house, and the business owners who decided to rebuild.  I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but then there are times in life when you simply have to recognize the drama for what it is.  There are days when heroism trumps tragedy, when an epic story overwhelms a mundane account of despair.  I think to do less with this day and the days following would be dishonoring to those of us who witnessed these things, and denial of the weight of these past six months.

Six months.  In some ways it does feel like six days or six hours.  Pieces and piles of debris still remain.  Trees are still uprooted, twisted, gnarled.  Some buildings that stood remain standing still, ghosts over the landscape, large and looming memorials who seem to grieve in their darkness, their windows like our hearts still shattered and no longer guarding what is now an empty and broken space inside.  Other structures still lay, flattened and sprawled, where they were knocked and beaten.  The landscape is still at times unrecognizable.  Scarred.  The path cut by the storm undeniable, and still hits you between the eyes when you drive through the city.

So there are these times it seems like days ago, and and other times, it seems like years have gone by.  So much water has now passed under the bridge.  To see new buildings and businesses, some built right on top of the old, like Jerusalem after it would be sacked and destroyed.  Grasses replanted.  Sidewalks reconstructed.  New traffic lights and a few replanted trees.  Houses have begun to be rebuild, some standing in stark contrast to the ruined ones just a block away that haven’t yet been dealt with, standing as proud and defiant reminders of reconstruction.  The hard-won smiles and laughter coming from a man who lost his wife, a wife who lost her child, a family that lost their grandfather, a child that lost her legs, a nurse who still sees all too clearly when she closes her eyes at night the blood and cries and shock of a hospital overwhelmed, a couple that lost their confidence and security in a quiet midwestern city and who lost their American dreams.  New ones, better ones, slowly seep to the surface to take the place of the lesser ones that were blown about in the swirling debris of that fateful afternoon.

I’ve said before that there were 50,000 tornadoes that day.  What I hadn’t thought of is that there are 50,000 stories of change since.  Fifty thousand sets of eyes that see slow and steady growth as well as the sadness still and the brokenness that remains clinging like tentacles through the city and around the hearts of those of us affected.  Fifty thousand kinds of hope, fifty thousand opportunities to come under the shelter of a God who didn’t abandon us and who loves us into wholeness and healing.

Here’s to these last six months of hope, of a kind of demonstrable, tangible hope that I couldn’t have expected or planned for.  Here’s to six more, and may we in these next six months take hold of the kind of life that goes beyond and deeper than death, that brings life and freedom from the debris.

“And here, in dust and dirt, O here do the lilies of His love appear.”
-W.H. Auden

 

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.

 

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.

 

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?

 

Taking Up My Cross

What does it look like to love? It looks like Jesus. Period. He is Love, and as such is the perfect picture of it. And to model it, not only do I need grace in godly measure, I also must model Jesus in His life, even as He is in me — not only in the “spotlight” moments when He is interacting with someone, but (or rather) those where He is away in solitude and prayer with His Father, where He is fasting in the wilderness, where He is being baptized by His cousin. The sleepless nights where He poured His heart out to God, the reception He gave to the angels who attended to his hungry frame, His resistance — His persistent resistance — to the pressures and demands of the world’s kingdoms, its demands and rigors.

In short, to love is to follow Jesus in all of these things, the small, unannounced times of discipline and testing, as well as the grand on-the-spot moments of profound love and wisdom. I cannot expect to enjoy the latter if I do not maintain a consistent lifestyle in the former.

This all comes this week because of a friend of mine, and because by way of my broken-heartedness for him and even for the limited and fallible ways I have handled his heart and our relationship.

He’s a mess, this friend of mine. His life is defined in his struggle to run as fast as he can through his day, shoving through everyone in his path who slows him down, so that he does not have to stop and face the devastation he has left in the wake of his destructive living. To face reality for him would feel like his undoing — which ironically enough would be his undoing, yet the only true way to enter into something better. He would have to recognize the wounds he has inflicted upon those he wants to love, and he would have to recognize the wounds of his own soul inflicted by those who were supposed to love him, especially his family.

But instead of addressing the wounds, he has formed a life around them. It reminds me a bit of the Black Night in The Search for the Holy Grail. King Arthur chops his arms and legs off, yet he still hobbles around declaring victory against him instead of surrender. He is dismembered, bleeding, unable to walk — and certainly unable to love and protect those who have been entrusted to him — and yet he dismisses these as “mere flesh wounds.” My friend ends up wielding a sword that he is not equipped or well enough to handle, and as a result he slices and dices into the meat of his children, his wife, his family, his friends, and on and on. (More can be read of my friend here.)

The “In-Tension” of Love

I have tried to be faithful to what the Lord has spoken to my heart, and to act toward him in authentic love — love that calls him out to become the man he was born to be, while embracing in felt affection the man he sees each day in the mirror. 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. If Jesus goes there, I want to 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. Like Thomas when Jesus announced He was going back to Judea (straight into the den of lions, so-to-speak) out of this love for His friend Lazarus, and chose to go with Jesus even if it meant his death (John 11:7-16), so I too choose to go with Him here in the Way of Love for my friend. (Jesus’ love of Lazarus was a similar kind of tension. 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, where now, my King and Commander? Where now do we place our feet? In which direction are You walking? How — how, Jesus — How do I love [my friend] in this as You do? And how do I love him as You have called me to?

Be bigger than his sins and wounds. Be greater than all those who enable him and all who reject him. Be better than my failure to love him well — at least well enough to bring healing to him. Be his Savior, as You have been mine. In Your lovingkindness, deliver him from the shadow of death. Make him thirst ever more for You (Psalm 107) until he finds You through dry and desperate seeking!

And teach me to get out of Your way, that You may be his Counselor and Friend, even as You are his Redeemer and Suitor.

And come to my heart and bring me Your comfort. I put it to rest in You, broken, humbled, hurting, longing, and trusting. Ever hopeful in your boundless and endless love. Your wisdom. your grace. Your purposes. Master In the Ways of Living, teach me to live well in this.

Amen.

 

Riffraff

Our church sponsors a home in Cambodia that brings in homeless children from the streets and provides for them shelter, education, Christian influence — a home life, essentially. It’s not an orphanage exactly, in that these children are not adopted out to families. This is their family. The “parents” are American missionaries. The children are mostly riff-raff, literally, in that they are considered a socially lower class of people whose parents have abandoned them for various reasons. (The parents commonly name the children “Raff” or “unwanted.”) Or, more likely, they were sold to the streets, expected to sell their bodies to a perverted culture. (Often, sickeningly, it is foreigners who make them into prostitutes, using them for sexual acts. Foreigners to Cambodians means Westerners. Often Americans.)

So the church has this home there, rescuing these children from the streets and giving them a place to live, a place to be children, a place to grow up in safety and an environment of love. They eventually call the missionaries who take care of them “Mom” and “Dad” — expressions of an attachment many of them have never had. One of the coolest things they do is give the children back their names, typically by giving them new names, from “Raff” to something good, unique, something expressing their new identities from “unwanted” to “loved.”

Recently, the sponsors found out about a 15-year-old boy and his 5-year-old brother both living on the streets. They came to them and invited them in. Because “foreigners” are often dangerous, the ones who abuse them in horrific ways, they are understandably wary and frightened. Eventually, though, the 15-year-old comes into the home. His brother has not. At five years of age he is still taking care of himself alone on the streets.

When the 15-year-old came in, he had wounds on his feet, sores that were infected and oozing. He was a mess, dirty and grimey from his days and nights in the alleyways and God knows where. The missionaries cleaned him up and fed him. The first night, they loved on him, and he welcomed it with surprising hunger, his fear melting into the delight of being the center of someone’s kind and generous attention. For the first night in a long time, he was no longer an orphan, but someone’s child.

One of the nurses was going through a bucket of medicines the house had received and was labeling them. One in particular she was unfamiliar with, and put it aside to look up later. She then turned her attention to the boy’s feet, and decided he must have ringworm. She looked up the treatment in her physician’s desk reference and discovered, to her delight, that the medicine she had put aside was the proper treatment for his infection.

My wife and I were listening to all of this testimony from friends that just returned from visiting the place, and she turned to me and said, “That’s a Psalm.” She started looking it up and found the Scripture. It says, “The Lord builds up Jerusalem and gathers the exiles of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3). Amazing. This is what God does for us, for exiles of Israel.

Digging further into this Psalm, we discovered something else really incredible. It concerns the law of God. The psalmist continues, “The Lord sustains the humble” (v. 6). He then expounds on the vastness of God’s artistry and power: “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit” (v. 4). “He covers the sky with clouds; he supplies the earth with rain and makes grass grow on the hills. He provides food for the cattle and for the young ravens when they call” (v. 8-9). The author continues praising the qualities of God’s heart, now entering into the arena of His love and desire. “His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of a man; the Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love” (v. 10-11, emphasis mine).

This is certainly good news. God’s heart is good, and He is for us. On and on the psalmist continues in this way, until he ends with the simple statement that is easily missed, “He has done this for no other nation; they do not know his laws” (v. 20, emphasis mine). He is suggesting that all of these amazing, praiseworthy characteristics of God’s nature are expressed by His laws. God’s laws enable us to know Him, to know our place with Him, and to know the reality of all things. This is life for us (see John 17:3). Essentially, God’s law, which is “perfect” (Psalm 19:7), is, in the words of Dallas Wilard, “one of the greatest gifts of grace that God has ever conveyed to the human race… It provides a picture of reality: of how things are with God and his creation… There is nothing lacking in it for its intended purpose. It therefore converts or restores the soul of those who seek it and receive it.” (This is why the “blessed man” of Psalm 1 “delights in the law of the Lord.” See The Forbidden Discipline of Spiritual Reading for more.)

Of course, the law became “weak and useless” (Hebrews 7:18) because of our sin, and so God sent a “better hope… by which we draw near to God” (v. 19)… that is, Jesus.

Psalm 147 paints a picture of what this better hope does for us, out of undying love, unfailing love. He brings us in. He binds up our wounds. He heals our hearts broken by being unloved, abused, neglected, homeless. He gives us new names. No longer will we be called Deserted; now we will be called Sought After. (Isaiah 62:12).

 

Treasures of Darkness

As I write this, I am in a café, sitting in the corner, trying hard not to make a scene. I am weeping, suppressing groans and cries and wails so that I won’t be asked to leave. I came to read and study for a class I have in a few hours. Instead, I am humbled and awed and stunned into… into weeping.

You will understand a bit better after I explain in brief what happened this weekend. I have a friend, a friend I have known all of my life (who I speak of here), who has lived a crushingly destructive life. The choices he makes consistently wounds those around him, and the closer they are, the more he is meant to love them, the more he cuts and tears at them. His wife and children come to mind.

A couple of weeks ago I came to the end of my patience with his actions and choices. I love him too much to be passive and watch as he destroys himself. I wanted to call the true man into the ring. I set up a time to meet with him. There were two things I needed to get across at this meeting. One was that I wanted him to begin seeing the damage he has caused, the hurt and destruction his life has left in its wake. I wanted him to take a serious, unflinching glare into it. And second, I needed to let him know that I would no longer relate to him on any level except the most authentic: his damaging lifestyle. I would speak to him on no other plane except to bring him to reality and then, to help him to change only if he so chose. But that would come later. First, I wanted him broken and humbled and contrite at what he has done to himself and others.

Not an easy task. I felt going into the meeting a bit like Jeremiah, the prophet of hard sayings, the weeping prophet whose message from the Lord to Israel was brutal and harsh, since she had turned from her Lover-Lord to pursue other bedfellows. Someone had to bring her back to her senses. I knew that chances of success were higher if he were to come to an autonomous decision and understanding of his predicament through exploration and insight into his life, rather than having someone thrust upon him in impotent explanation what he is doing. He needed to see for himself, from his heart, the effects of his choices.

I realized this was my desire for this man.

What happened the day the meeting came is hard to explain. I almost want to fall back on the mythic tone of Scripture to describe the nature of the events, the way that I participated in something already going on, that I had a front-row seat to some deep and mysterious and even mystical change in the core recesses of this man’s very soul. And I use the word “soul” in the most literal sense, as that aspect of the whole being “that correlates, integrates, and enlivens everything going on in the various dimensions of the self,” as Dallas Willard defines it. The “life-center” of the human being. My wrenching and mourning heart calling his to the same.

But he was already there. It was breakfast. We sat down to eggs and bacon and coffee, this man and me. I was prepared for what I’ve come to see as his typical defense against seeing the truth of his life: manipulation, control, threats, escape. I imagined him decking me or stabbing me with the yoke-soaked fork or just walking out, unable to hear what I was burdened to bring him.

Instead, he choked on the first words out of his mouth, words that I could barely understand but heard as “I am a bad father.”

I was stunned. I sat quietly while he tried to regain his composure. I came to speak honestly, man to man, and so I only said, “Yes, you are.”

The next four hours – four hours – we spoke about the decisions he has made in his life, of the way he cannot do what he has sincere intention to do (Romans 7), of the demons that have gained control over various aspects of his life, of what it means to be a father and a son and a brother and a friend of God, of repentance and forgiveness, of wounds and the messages about life interpreted from them, of his growing up and about his God.

Somehow, through it all, I came to see that I wasn’t doing anything but observing what was already going on in deep places in him. Before I arrived, I wondered how I would possibly be able to speak to the real man, to the deep and true person underneath the defenses and walls erected throughout his life to protect himself from abandonment and rejection. But I never had to. His heart was already ripe for the harvest, so to speak.

Understand, I love this man deeply. I want him to change for his own sake and the sake of his family. But I knew that in order to do so he had to recognize the way he lives first. The prodigal only began the trek back home when he looked around him and saw himself eating from pig troughs and remembered his father’s home. I came to meet this guy at feeding time and wanted to invite him to look around himself.

James tells us to “grieve, mourn and wail” and to “change our laughter to mourning and our joy to gloom.” And this is why. To look honestly at our situation and predicament often calls for that: mourning. This friend this day was mourning. God was “cutting the bars of iron” in the rescue of his soul (see Isaiah 45:2-3). And I got to witness it. I got to plunder the “treasures of darkness and hidden riches” of his soul and the vision of it redeemed. I got to participate so that I would know that “the Lord called me by name.”

I am barely able to write through the tears. This is what it means to praise the Living God, to be so grateful that you fall before Him speechless.

What I wrote a month back (in this post) about this friend and his situation was that “the love my wife and I have for [he and his family] is not enough to ransom them from this snare. They need the unyielding ministry of Christ in the deepest places.” And this is, it turns out, a great picture of what is happening for this man now: Jesus painfully and violently breaking him out of the illusions with an unyielding intention to bring him into truth and life. It is a severe mercy, this ransom of the treasure of his heart from darkness.