What Will You Do?

from Waking The Dead

So, let me ask again: How would you live differently, if you believed your heart was the treasure of the kingdom?

What does your heart need? In some sense it’s a personal question, unique to our make-up, and what brings us life. For some its music, for others its reading, for others they must garden. Our friend Lori loves the city; I can’t wait to get out of one. Bart reads articles on flying; Cherie loves a good novel. Bethann loves horses and Gary needs time working in the woodshop. You know what makes your heart refreshed, the things that make you come alive. I don’t get the thing with women and baths, but I know that Stasi loves them and finds a little retreat in a fifteen minute tub. “He leads me to soak in still, bubbly waters.” For me and the boys its the dirtier, the happier.

Yet there are some things all hearts need in common. We need beauty; that’s clear enough from the fact that God has filled the world with it, as he has given us sun and rain,

Wine that gladdens the heart of man,
Oil to make his face shine,
And bread that sustains his heart. (Psalm 104:15)

We need to drink in beauty wherever we can get it – in music, in nature, in art, in a great meal shared. These are all gifts to us from God’s generous heart. Friends, those things are not decorations to a life; they are what brings us life.

The skies of blue
The fields of green
Are all for you

The silver moon
The shining sea
All for you

For you, the wind blows
For you, the river flows

And everything you dream about
Even the love you dream of, too,
Is all for you. (John Smith & Lisa Aschman, “All for You”)

I don’t think I could have finished this book if it weren’t for the walks I take each day in the woods. My soul is tired, bone tired. The battle has been long and hard. Last night it began to snow. It is still snowing now. It, too, is a gift to my heart.

(from Waking The Dead, 214, 215 )

 

An Enemy Among Us

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

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

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

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

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

Why is that?  What’s the story there?

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

And we are certainly familiar with busyness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

How Near is the Kingdom?

How much is God on our side?  How much can we trust Him, I mean, to be our comforter and provider?  I often think of it as our being on His side, not He on ours (He is, after all, God!), but when it comes to mercy, we need Him to come to us.  But how can He?  Are we not too ungodly for Him to come near?  And then we cannot receive Him when He does come, as the Savior and the Lover He’s promised to be for us.  But does He come near?  Is He really that accessible?

When Jesus showed up in the flesh, John the Baptist warned those who came to see him to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”  It was not, notice, “Repent so that the kingdom can come near,” for it — He — was already close by!  It was, rather, a warning to change their mind about things so that they could receive the kingdom.

I think this is where many Christians find themselves now.  The longer we wallow in the “Woe is me.  I cannot enjoy the life of God because I am unclean,” the longer we cannot, indeed, enjoy the life of God — not because we are unclean but rather because we are unbelieving.  For not only is the Lord God the Life we need (the justice and mercy, the love, the connection), He is also the Water to wash us clean, ther tears of mercy weeping to wash over us.  Woe is me, for sure, if I had only my means to reach the Lord God!

But He is more for us than we must think.  This is the secret depth of His great love shown for us at the cross, in the death of Jesus.  He stood in for us!  We repent when we simply embrace that so that we can embrace Him.  Then we begin living in this kingdom, in the reign of the King Jesus, with full and complete access into His presence.  That’s why we can come boldly into His throneroom, because our failure and shortcomings are no longer an issue between us and God — at all.  He has come, bringing the Kingdom of God along with Him in the train of His robe.

There is so much deep, bewildering, astounding truth here that to grasp it in its fullness could kill a man by the sheer ecstasy that would follow, by the  unspeakably beautiful grace.  It’s like Moses seeing the back side of God.  Any more revelation and he would die.

Perhaps that is why I am slow to grasp even the most elementary of God’s provisions for me.  Maybe I must go it slowly, with He controlling the locks of the dam of His greatness and glory.  I have asked many times — begging on my knees — that He would release His full revelation to me.  Perhaps it is mercy that stays the flood.  And, perhaps it is persistence that will find me in the deepest end of it, conquered and overtaken.

I think that would be a cool way to die.  Someone finds my bloated, drowned body.  They notice a curious and out-of-place smile frozen on my face, and my eyes are stuck wide-open.  “Poor fool” is repeated again and again by those attending the funeral service, by the same who did not understand when I was alive what it was I was running after.  More true than they realize would be their comment, “He fell of the deep end.”  The simple phrase on my tombstone would tell all: “He cried out for rain all his life.  In the end, he got what he wanted, for ‘what the righteous desire will be granted’ (Proverbs 10:24).”

Righteous, not by my own merit, but because I embraced what Jesus has done for me, and entered into the kingdom at hand.

 

A Principal Certainty

It was in 10th grade Chemistry class that I was first introduced to a not-well-understood phenomena that somehow captured my imagination. We were studying subatomic particles — you know, those electrons and protons and such — and we came upon a principle known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

This fella, Heisenberg, thought about what it would be like to “look” at an electron. Remember that to “look” at anything takes light. It takes a particle (or wave) of light bouncing off of an object and reaching your eyes in order to make out what that object’s shape, color, and texture is, as well as its movement and distance from you.

So these electrons, these very small particles that orbit the nucleus of an atom, are tricky creatures. The thing about these little guys is that to look at them you have to bounce light off of them, right? For most objects in our everyday world, a few light packets (what scientists call “photons”) bouncing off of it has very little effect on the object itself. But for electrons, which are so small and of such low mass, bouncing light off of them results in moving them. And so you may be able to “see,” say, how fast the electron was moving, but now you don’t know where it’s at, because you moved it by looking at it. Or, maybe you found out where it was in space, but now you’ve changed how fast it is moving and so you cannot predict where it will be in the next bit of time. In short, you can either know how fast the electron is moving or where it is in space, its position, but you cannot know both at the same time with complete certainty. The Uncertainty Principle.

The implications of the principle are now so widespread even in contemporary culture as to have bent it largely to its relativistic sentiment. Society has latched onto the uncertainty idea and applied it to areas that it doesn’t belong, like ethics (how somebody is supposed to live), epistemology (genuine knowledge or truth), and theology (our understanding of God). We have decided to say that no one can know anything for certain, including the knowledge of God, and that in the end it doesn’t matter how someone lives their life.

But I digress. The most interesting thing about Heisenberg’s idea is that it does so aptly apply to everyday lives, to the way we understand spiritual truth. Which really is to say, the way we understand ourselves and our daily business of living. Or not living, in many cases. The thing is, we have things that we want to say, that we need to say, that must be spoken. There are elements of reality that must have light shone on them. The difficulty happens when we shine the light on them, because suddenly they are not there anymore. Or maybe we are not there anymore. It is difficult to say for certain where someone may be in their spiritual lives, in their walk with God, and even in their place in the world, because once we find that spot, they have moved from it. Their momentum has changed. Or maybe we find out the direction they are headed, but once we discover that we realize that it has shifted ever so slightly because the vision they hold, the gravity that pulls them in to orbit their God, has altered their course once again.

Yet these things must be spoken, these things, as Kushner says, that are just “between the noise and the silence,” things that ultimately cannot ever really be said.

That is why Jesus cannot be spoken of from a distance. He demands we face Him. He demands we hear Him. He demands we eat and drink of His body and blood (Matthew 26:26-28). This is why God demands us to be either in intimate and personal relationship with Him, or not in relationship at all (Luke 11:23).

Kushner continues, “That’s what seekers of truth do. You devotedly, stubbornly, compulsively return again and again to that line between noise and silence, hoping against hope to find a way to say what finally cannot be said. If it could be said straight out, you wouldn’t have to try and find a better way to say it. If you couldn’t speak it at all, then you’d have to resort to such nonverbal modes of communication as art, or dance, or music. The thing about spiritual truth is that it wants to be spoken. It is too important, too transforming to be left alone in silence…. the problem is that once you speak or show the words to someone else, then both of you are different…To say what is just at the the outermost edge of what can be spoken is to deal with words that are so primary and dazzling that they are infinitely personal and intimate.” – Kushner

With all that is said and all that ever will (and must) be said regarding our lives, in the end there will be only one thing left to hear, and when spoken, that one thing — intimate and personal beyond all imagining — will ring out for the rest of eternity. That is one thing we can be certain of.

 

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).

 

Revealed

Underrepresented. I had sat for some time to find the right word. Everyone else had answered, and so I offered mine last. Looks of confusion and “Hum”s went around the room. I felt it was right, though, and so I stuck with it. We could say nothing more about it. One word, and only one word, was what the leader had asked for.

It had been an interesting meeting, our first one together as a formal “group.” Awkward silence filled the room at the beginning, as the leader had told us that this was our group, and so we would set the pace and tone. We would own it as our own. Soon enough, though, we found ourselves offering stories and listening in on one another’s journeys that brought us to this room this very night.

I offered mine, or rather, as much of mine as felt appropriate without stealing the time away from the others. Inside, I felt like my bones burned with the immediacy of the adventure I have been on with God over the last several years. The new life I’ve found in Christ has been… what word do I use?… what word suffices? The agony and ecstasy are both too profound to speak of. The “me” that is realer and truer than the “me” that is projected… how do you get that to come across? How can I be authentic enough that my skin is transparent and my inner life is seen. Is it even supposed to be seen?

When I had finished, I felt… underrepresented. Like I had laid out an incomplete picture of myself for others, expecting that they use that to know me. It wasn’t that it was untrue. It just was incomplete. And I have come to see this as simply being misunderstood. And being misunderstood is the most painful of all human experiences.

This is what Paul was talking about when he wrote to the church in Colosse that “your life is now hidden with Christ in God” (3:3). It is a life tied, bound, inextricably, to that of Christ’s, a life that is constantly “deepening and expanding” (Romans 10, The Message). And it is hidden not because it does not shine forth or appear even now glorious in the freedom and fullness in which you live it, but rather because it is too endless and infinite to be completely expressed in this life. The glory of a heart alive to God is blinding, and few in this world have the eyes that could bear it. It certainly is that way with the Lord God (see Mark 9:2-7 to see what I mean — even Jesus’s closest friends could not bear the glory of his life fully revealed). “The Kingdom of God,” writes Dallas Willard, “is in secret… in the presence of God’s secret seeing.” (Jesus mentions the “secret” and hidden way of the Kingdom four times in Matthew 6.)

But then Paul continues, and this is where it gets really good. He says, “When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you will also appear with him in glory.” (3:4). This is it. This is how we bear the pain of being misunderstood, the experience of just being missed in this life. Even in our most intimate moments with another, those say of sex where you feel so connected, there remains a pang of longing to be fully known. And Paul says that our real lives are still hidden with Christ just as He is “hidden” in the heart of his friends, not yet fully revealed to the world in his unveiled glory. Yet when He does return, we will be revealed as well. Think of it. The veil will be finally and forever lifted. Our fear of exposure will melt in exchange for the anticipation of being revealed, for we shall be like God. For those of us who belong to the Lord, we will be known, fully, to God as well as to one another, and we will be delighted in knowing one another that completely. It will not be our shame. It will be our glory.

Glory will be revealed in us (Romans 8:18) when we as sons and daughters of God are reavealed (v. 19). It will be a “glorious freedom” (v. 21) for which all of creation eagerly waits (v. 19).

Until then, the human heart longs and strives to make itself known to others, or else shrinks back in fear of that very thing and protects itself from it with performing and posturing. And it is usually a chaotic mixture of both. But as we are transformed more into the glorious image of Christ, with every increasing glory (2 Corinthians 3:18), we shall be growing constantly in our anticipation of finally and fully being known, our stories and our lives redeemed into something unapologetically and staggeringly beautiful. (It is helpful to remember, too, that even now we are known fully to God, 1 Corinthians 13:12.) Our greatest challenge becomes, then, the simple trust that the life we inhabit in Christ will, when He is ready, be revealed in all its splendor. We, as adopted sons through Christ (Hebrews 12:7). That adoption has not yet been fully realized. Our lives in God, full as they are, are only the firstfruits of His promised Spirit in us (Romans 8:23). Until then, we ache and groan along with the Spirit Himself for that day (2 Corinthians 5:1-5). The revelation of Jesus Christ will be the revelation of those of us who are His, as well, when we are released as grown sons and daughters in the great house of our Lord. We must allow our longing to turn to anticipation, as we wait for and put our hope in this (Romans 8:24-25, 1 Peter 1:13).

 

Too Close for Comfort

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

-Psalm 8:1, 3-4

Can you imagine what the enormous black sky, peppered with a million bursts of light, must have looked like to David as he peered into it? No other lights to compete with its glory. No light pollution to drown out its splendor. The only noises those of midnight bugs and bats and prairie animals. He is overcome as he beholds its magnificence. His heart explodes with wonder as he ponders it all. Its vastness. Its beauty. That God had time and creativity and enormity enough to create it all – not just once upon a time, but this night, right then where David was. Unique. Never again would he behold it exactly as it was then. Everything would move. All would be different the next evening as God set out again to lavish his universe with His creative passion, expressing Himself to his children, pursuing their hearts. David got it. In this moment, he was captured by this God-of-Love. He recognized God’s pursuit and wooing, and collapsed into it.

“What is man that you are mindful of him?” he asks as his jaw drops and his breath stops in his throat. “How could you even have time for man?” his heart wonders. And yet… And yet… God not only had time for David, but he did it all for him, to have his heart.

But for our modern, sophisticated, educated minds it is too much to think that God would create such a lavish universe just for us. Sadly, we come up with anything we can to distance ourselves from His passion: scientific reasoning to explain away His creations, stuffy academic postulations to push back His passion; equations and formulations to eradicate His desire. Explain it away. Keep our distance. We are “enlightened” to learn that the earth is not the center of the universe at all and translate it to mean that we are not the center of God’s heart or longing or the point of His creation. We become insignificant specks of particles on an insignificant planet held in place by the awesome force of gravitation (not the power of God Himself) in an insignificant corner of one of a limitless number of universes. To translate, it means that we have become not the center of a cosmic battle, an invasion, a rescue, a Redemption, but meaningless and pointless accidents in a sea of atoms and subatomic particles.

We come up with our scientific posits because the Reality is too much to bear, much like those in C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory who cannot bear to walk upon the grasses of heaven as they are because the blades are so substantive, and they only shadowy wraiths, that they puncture their feet and cause great pain. They are unwilling to grow in their soul-substance by standing in the blinding light of the unbearable glory. We rearrange the order of the Psalm to read not “what is man that God is mindful of him,” but “what is God that man is mindful of him?”

I understand. I do the same thing. I often wake and rush off to my checklist of things to do rather than stand or kneel in the Presence of the Creator. I dabble in distraction rather than confide or be confided in by this Friend (see Psalm 25:14), to know His deep heart. I work to secure my place in the world and with the people around me rather than revere the Lord God (revere = adore, applaud, treasure, worship, wonder at, fall for, cherish, embrace, cleave to, enjoy, desire, grab a hold of, run after). I suspect we all do this. The disciples did. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John witnessed the astounding glory of Jesus revealed. Jesus took off his veil, so-to-speak, and Moses and Elijah were there, too, in their full glory. Peter and the other two were terrified and fell face down on the ground. Peter told Jesus that they could erect three shelters, one each for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses (Matthew 17:4). Tents, in other words. Tabernacles. Something to hide their blinding glory from the three disciples. It was too much for them. God honored their fear and sent a cloud to veil the glory from them. He will, it seems, only give us as much of Himself as we can bear.

But what happens when we pause and really consider even the work of creation? Spend half an hour doing nothing at all except staring out into the starry night. Don’t try to discover the constellations or name the objects you see; just let yourself be pierced. What do we discover when we do? That God is glorious. Copernicus gave us the heliocentric model of the solar system, that is, that the sun is the center and we orbit around it. We took that to mean that we were not the center of anything at all. That is where we got it wrong. Deadly wrong.

We are the center of more than we think.

Why would the earth need to “tremble before Him” (Psalm 96:9)? Why would “the heavens rejoice” and the “fields be jubilant” and the “trees of the forest sing for joy” (v. 11 & 12, 1 Chronicles 16:33)? Because the Lord “comes to judge… the peoples in his truth.” Or, in the words of Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase, “He comes to set everything right on earth.” Because of His redemption and rescue of His people… because He has set His heart on bringing us home (see Isaiah 44:23). Everything that God does is to bring us back to Himself (see Ecclesiastes 3:14).

God has made us for Himself. Adam and Eve lived in glorious union with God. But God’s enemy and ours came and stole God’s love from Him. Adam and Even fell from grace – that is, they fell from God. And now, a cosmic battle has ensued in which God has come with fierce intention to free us back for Himself. We are the center of a great cosmic battle. All of the earth is to shout to God with joy, you see, because He is powerful enough to cause His enemies to “cringe before Him” (Psalm 66:3) and to win us back from them. He is not only a restless Lover in pursuit of the bride that His enemy took from Him (that’s us), but He is also a Warrior with enough courage and power and strength to win us back. He will find us. He will win us. He will have us. Jesus coming, dying, and rising again has proven that much.

What is man that God is mindful of Him? Man is in fact God’s whole desire. His whole heart is bent on us. On you and me. Intimacy and communion and the adventure of His love is the whole purpose of God for us. That is the purpose for which we have been called (Romans 8:28).

God will give us as much of Himself as we will allow. Jesus is the glory of God fully revealed to us (Colossians 1:15). Through Him we can approach even God’s throne with confidence and boldness, without fear or hesitation or reserve (Hebrews 4:16). We can come back to our Lover. We can come back home. This is the invitation of God to us through Jesus. This is our place. This is the beginning of our life — the adventure of walking with God.