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.

 

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.

 

After the Fray

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill paints a picture of ancient Irish culture by discussing Tain Bo Cuailnge, an Irish prose epic. In the story, the hero-warriors Cuchulainn (pronounced koo-hool-n) and Ferdia are foster brothers who love and fight for one another. They trained together under the same master and fight beside one another through epic battles in the dense forests “in foreign lands after the fray.” Cuchulainn refers to their friendship as “fast friends, forest-companions… pupils, two together we’d set forth to comb the forest” of their enemies.

Concerning the hero’s virtue, Cahill writes, “What we can rely on are the comeliness and iron virtue of the short-lived hero: his loyalty to cause and comrades, his bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, the gargantuan generosity with which he scatters his possessions and his person and with which he spills his blood.”

Patricius, who later became known as Saint Patrick (the same Patrick whose life is commemorated each year on the celebrated day named in his honor), was able to evangelize an entire country by addressing these qualities found in their ancient literature. It is Jesus, he explained, who was the one who most epitomizes these virtues, and it was, in fact, the eternity set within their hearts that spurred on such literature, an eternity these men and women knew must by characterized, if by anything at all, by men as alive as Cuchulainn. In their literary heroes their hunger for Christ was given a voice. When Patrick came to bring them the “Godspell,” or Gospel, they listened only because Patrick himself, dead to himself and baptized in the fire of the Spirit of God, was the most loyal, courageous, and generous man they had ever met.

What Cahill writes of Ireland’s ancient fictional heroes is an apt pronouncement on the life of any Christian, that is, the life of Christ lived fully within us. When we allow Him to live through us, imagine what faith (loyalty), hope (courage), and love (generosity) is set loose on the world. We would have a second wave of revival not unlike in style to that of those wild and willing Celts.

The way to save our own civilization, as Cahill says, is not to think about saving our civilization at all. It is to become saints. Then shall we each be saved, not by government, nor technology, nor new (and age-old) ideologies, but by the Kingdom coming through us as we pursue and battle with fierce intention, a Kingdom not of this world, unshakable, peopled by “citizens of heaven” who run fast after the Living God “in foreign lands after the fray.”

(see Matthew 11:12; Philippians 3:20; Matthew 5:14-16; Hebrews 12:28-29; Luke 17:20-21; Mark 1:15; Acts 14; Romans 14:17-18; Hebrews 12:10; Ephesians 4:22-24; 2 Corinthians 7:1)

 

Falling on Holy Ground

Yesterday afternoon I headed out to the Falls, an area not far from where we live where a creek meandering its way through the edge of town cascades some 20 feet or so over a jagged cliff edge stretching 50 yards or so across. (It happens to be the state’s largest waterfall.) Nearby are the area’s famous chert glades, some of the last of their kind.

The bedrock along the bank is rugged and rough, with fissures and crevasses formed by the rushing waters of the river when rains would overfill it and cause it to flood its banks. This day the water level was still higher than average, though it had crested some days before and was now on its way down. I had my camera handy, ready to get some great shots of the rushing waters. I hadn’t expected to be climbing much, nor had I anticipated the water would be as high as it was. In order to get a shot I wanted, I needed to wade through some of the rapids on the edge of one of the drop-offs. Intending to later stop by a coffee shop, I wanted to stay as dry as I could, so I slipped off my shoes and socks and rolled up the legs of my cargos and headed across and down.

The thing about the rock is that it is mostly flint, and flint, as you might know, is especially useful if you want to make sharp edges. It chips away easily and also cuts nicely, as the Native Americans from this region knew full well. Underfoot, it’s not much different. Though the waters have smoothed some of its edges, much of it is still rather sharp.

Still, I’d rather have risked it than to get my clothes wet. Once down to the base of the falls, I found a few different angles that I particularly liked. I kept my shoes off thinking that I’d only be a few minutes, and, besides that, my feet were still wet and I knew there’d be a few spots where I’d still need to wade. I had dropped them on some bit of dry rock before moving on. One of the shots would have been perfect except that, as I zoomed in I noticed a pair of shoes oddly in the middle of the frame. They were now 30 feet away or so, across some pretty significant chunks of jagged flint. If I had them on, I would have been willing to make the trek back to move them out of the way, but of course at that point they wouldn’t have been in the way at all. I decided it wasn’t worth my time, and snapped the photo anyway, the shoes sitting lazily in the foreground.

When I looked back on the photo later, I thought there was something ironic about the scene. Something appropriate about the shoes with no feet in them sitting alone with the backdrop of the falls behind them. About the necessity of taking them off. About the pain of capturing the beauty with my lens. About the holiness of the beauty itself.

It was a fine day, as perfect as we’ve had yet this Spring. Trees have come awake from the long winter sleep. Winter itself seems unfrozen, and the creek running away before me — almost after me — seemed full of life, like it couldn’t wait to move free again. The sun seemed to wrap it all in its embrace and offer it to me as a gift, something I couldn’t refuse. And something I couldn’t capture with my camera.

I suppose all beauty is like that — holy, so that the only way you can take it in is with bare feet that feel the sharp edge of it hard and piercing. And free, so that you breathe it, you fall into it, and you remember, because it cannot be completely imagined again, even in a picture. And a gift, something received and enjoyed while the day is day and the waters are swollen and the sun bright and the trees celebrating your entrance into it all.

Read the “Holy Ground” post for a similar story.

 

Large With Strength

When I called, you answered me; you made me bold with strength in my soul.
-Psalm 138:3, NASB.

I opened the Scriptures this morning to this verse. Immediately I felt drawn — no, not drawn — pierced by something in it. What is it, exactly, that has speared me? Something about strength in the soul. Something about God answering and making something in me. I pull out the Message Bible to see if Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase might capture it for me. “The moment I called out, you stepped in; you made my life large with strength.” Large with strength. You made my life large with strength. Yes, this is it. I hear His voice through the Scripture. This is God’s word for me, spoken intimately and from His heart to say, “This is what I am doing in your life, my son, my dear friend.” I’m trying to decide which is more incredible for me: this secret that He let me in on or the fact that He is this desirous for my communion with Him. I love both.

This is what God is up to: enlarging our hearts and the rule and domain of Christ within us (where the Kingdom lies), that He might dwell more fully and presently there. In The Sacred Romance, John Eldredge writes, “As our soul grows in the love of God and journeys forth toward him, our heart’s capacities also grow and expand: ‘Thou shalt enlarge my heart’ (Ps. 119:32 KJV).” And Isaiah cries out: “Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back; lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes” (54:2).

The NIV translates Psalm 119:32 as, “I run in the path of your commands, because you have set my heart free.” The literal meaning of “set my heart free” is an enlargement of the heart. That’s it That’s what’s happening in me. My longings are deepening, my desire burning hotter and purer. The river within being hemmed in so that the currents are stronger, carrying me Home. Because, after all, the morning star is going to rise in our hearts (2 Peter 1:19), and there needs to be room.

That my “tent” (the sanctuary of the Spirit of God) may be enlarged, I pray along with George MacDonald:

O Christ, my life, possess me utterly.
Take me and make a little Christ of me.
If I am anything but thy Father’s son,
‘Tis something not yet from the darkness won.
Oh, give me light to live with open eyes.
Oh, give me life to hope above all skies.
Give me thy spirit to haunt the Father with my cries.

-from Diary of an Old Soul

 

Redeemed from Fire by Fire

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The One discharged of sin and error.
The only hope or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame.
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
-T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

The fire of God’s presence is consuming. Those who wish to know Him will be asked to walk straight into it. Nothing will be expected, but all will be required. Richard Foster describes the intimacy of knowing and walking with God as the incarnational or sacramental life, the “crying need to experience God as truly manifest and notoriously active in daily life.” The mystery of God made manifest in Christ destroys or feeble notions of Him, demolishes our own pursuits of security and safety, and dissolves our illusions that we can have life outside of God.

This is what T.S. Eliot refers to here as Love, the unfamiliar Name, who redeems from fire by fire. Our choice concerning God (which is to say, concerning our very lives) is actually rather clear: we are either destroyed by fire or consumed by Love so intense it can only be described as a fire. The way of rescue for us is through the flames of His presence, His life that is “the light of men” (John 1:4). And it is a constant rescue, a constant Presence with us. Moses was led by a flaming torch by night; we are led by the Flaming Torch within, “even unto the ends of the age.” It is not that we possess life, but that we are possessed by Life.

It is this incarnational life with God that has been often left out of the more evangelical church circles. And how can that be, since this intimate communion with God is the very heartbeat of our souls? “His Holy Spirit, moving and breathing in you” Paul was quick to point out, “is the most intimate part of your life” (Ephesians 4:30, The Message). Without this consuming and mystical connection, our pulse weakens, our skin grows pale and clammy, our hearts grow faint and cold. Calvin Miller, in his book Into the Depths of God, has this foreboding warning: “When the mystery is gone, so is the church – at least the vitality of the church.”

So what of these words by T.S. Eliot? Was he too mystical? Is the mystery of his poetry too far out there? Should it make us uncomfortable and so we turn the other way? Not at all. It is in this mystery, this mystical longing after God and recognition of His heart for us, that is ultimate reality. We cannot ignore our vitality in God, or try to tame the flames of it, without losing our very lives. Jesus said as much – “whoever wants to save his life will lose it” (Matthew 16:25).

“God waits,” Calvin Miller continues, “for those who will love him and who hunger for things too excellent to be understood.”

So where do we go from here? How do we come back into intimate communion with God, or rekindle the heat? How do we grow in our love for Him, in our desire for him and those “things too excellent to be understood”? I think the answer has something to do with our fainting, with out gut-level recognition that we cannot get there on our own. We begin by praying not, “Lord, I want you,” but rather the more authentic, “Lord, I want to want you.” Maybe that is all we can muster. But it is all that is required. If we are willing, and only if we choose, we can begin moving deeper into the heat of God’s life. In the same breath, Jesus told us, “but… but… whoever loses his life for me will find it.”

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis says that “there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away ‘blindly’ so to speak… the very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether… your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him… look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” Paul knew this. It is why, I think, he told us in Colossians that “your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”

So we are to find it. If God seems distant, it is because He is waiting, “waiting to be wanted,” as A. W. Tozer had it. As our desire for God grows (and only as He births in us deeper desire), we can begin seeking after God, wrestling for Him and praying to taste and touch and see the wonder that is God. “And in Him,” Tozer discovered, “we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing.”

If we heed the invitation to delve deeper into this Love, even in the smallest degree, we really can “mount up on wings as eagles” and learn to fly. Calvin Miller again put it, “Earth holds a strange power that ties us to dust, so that ponderous souls are bound to her crust. But the wind whispers tales of a force in the sky, and those with the courage to scorn dust can fly.”

The other morning, I heard whispers from the wind of that invitation into the intimate life with God. I took Him up on it – how could I pass? I recorded what happened next:

The breeze was some cool at that hour, so I put on the hoodie I’d been shouldering, and set out walking south down our street to the wooded area just beyond.

I had set off in the cover of darkness. It was a romantic early morning, and I knew the meeting place. But it was also my choice to go, weighed as my heart was with the need to be away to pray. There were some things I wanted to bring up with God, and He with me.

It was more than an hour I had spent there, and much was addressed in our time, too much to make mention of here, and things perhaps too deep to record – old wounds and accusations from my former life as well as new and enticing promises for my new one, this one, the one extending into forever. The work of Jesus for me. The ministry and counsel of the Holy Spirit. His fire, burning flame of love. The invitation of the Father into more authentic sonship. An heir of His, coheir, coheir (!) with Jesus.

He was so amazing it all of it – God, the Trinity. So strong, so tender, so engaged, so holy. So triumphant. So ready. So prepared. So delighted. So intent on my wholeness and holiness. So alive with life that is my light.