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.

 

Coming To a Close

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Apprentice Training

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A Daring Reach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the ways Jesus does this is by reaching.  When Jesus “reached out his hand and touched” the leper (Matthew 8:3) and “reached out his hand and caught” Peter (Matthew 14:31), he was both saving them (from death) and modeling for them the courageous act of reaching.  He reached the man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-15) and the woman at the well (John 4:1-26) in a similar way (just more indirect, though no less subtle).  The gospels are filled with stories of Jesus reaching out to us, of God stooping to face us and call us friends and bringing us up to His level.  My own life is filled with stories of the same.  So intent is He, in fact, to reach for and save the “original, shimmering self” that He obstinately refuses the false self, the coats and hats we wear.  And His refusal to acknowledge or be in relationship with the false self can often cause confusion over His intent and motive. (Consider how confusing it must have been for the Pharisees that Jesus chastized and offended.  In his offensive way with them, Jesus was still reaching for the buried self, even in refusing to address the pretense.  Whenever one of them responded to Jesus with authenticity, Jesus would address him in kind [see, for example, John 3:1-21]). His reaching is such that St. Theresa of Avila says He not only reaches by giving Himself for us, but He also gives Himself to us in a reach of rescue.

In reaching for and toward us (and how far He comes to do that!), Jesus invites us to reach back.  Even when we are living out of the cynicism and despair and unbelief we’ve learned in this world.  This was His approach to Thomas, who refused even to acknowledge Him at all.  Jesus simply offered, “Reach out your hand and put it to my side.  Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27).

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

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

 

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?

 

Toward the Deep

The fishermen know the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangerous sufficient reason to remain ashore.
-Vincent van Gogh

It is a part of my make-up that I am compelled toward the deeper places, to delve into the inner-world of things.  I was that way even as a kid.  While my brother was riding his skateboard and learning how to do grinds and kickflips, I was trying to figure out how the trusses worked.  I’d get spares and old broken ones and look them over.  I loved to take old telephones and radios completely apart and lay out all the pieces in front of me and marvel that in that condition, they were not much to look at — interesting but worthless pieces of plastic and metal, springs and screws and magnetic parts — but together they did some amazing things.  I say “old” electronic equipment, but it wouldn’t always be.  I would, in fact, take everything apart I could get my hands on, often at quite an expense for my parents when I couldn’t get them back together again.  My dad would work on engines in the garage, and I would love to imagine how the numerous pieces of metal parts scattered on the rags and towels in the floor would somehow fit together to make something happen.

One of my favorite play-things growing up (aside from my Micromachines collection) was a chemistry set I got when I was 10.  It was fascinating to me how by itself, the dry and dusty chemicals could be innocuous and boring, but put together with another element or compound, amazing things would happen.  Sometimes things so violent they were even explosive.  I loved that!… which is why when I graduated high school I left home to attend a university to study chemistry.

But through the course of my college years I would come to discover that my love wasn’t for chemistry, per se.  Nor was it for electronics or really anything material.  Oh, it was fascinating to me — and it still is — but not for its material properties or strange behaviors.  It was interesting because it represented some kind of operating principle inside me, a kind of passion or fascination for the reality of deep things, or things that operated behind the curtain, out of sight, back-stage, below the surface.  (The other thing I loved to do growing up was writing.  When I learned to write my name, I wrote it on everything — the walls, books, the floor.  I remember my mom once pointing to one of the signatures I wrote on the wall asking me if I did it.  I said no.  She didn’t buy it.  I guess I was more creative than I was shrewd.)

It was around this time that I began a long trek back home to the heart of God, a prodigal who had decided some time before that life would be better out there on my own.  It was not.  Anyway, the invitation I heard that started me on my journey of coming back home to Him was an invitation into the depths.  Funny enough, one of the books that had a huge impact on my life at the time was Calvin Miller’s Into the Depths of God.  For the first time ever in my life, I was invited to explore the deep — the endlessly deep and extravagantly beautiful and intricate — heart of God.

To this day, He remains way cooler than the guts of a telephone or radio.

But there is a price to entering into the depths of God.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote of the cost of discipleship in a book by that title.  “Costly grace,” he wrote, “is the gospel which must be sought again and again… It is costly because it costs a man his life.”  But he also knew the cost was worth it, for “it gives a man the only true life.”  Dallas Willard said someone should write a book called The Cost of Non-Discipleship, because he feels the cost is far greater.

Jesus’ invitation is often a painful one.  He will ask us to give up all that keeps us afloat and on the surface and risk plunging into the heart of the questions we dare not ask aloud, to enter into the deep wounds of our lives so as to know His healing, to explore the stretches of the gospel on earth, to know the rich expanses of His love and how far it will really reach.  This is indeed a frightful invitation.  It is a dangerous one.  You never know what you’ll end up discovering or leaving behind, or what He will ask of you, or what the journey will require.

I’ve discovered life there, though.  It really is to be found.  Like anyone who has really tasted God, who has really tried Him out and tried Him on (this He dares us to do — see Psalm 34:8), I’m wasted for anything less.  I’m not “there” yet, but I’ve found the journey one worth taking.  The sea is dangerous, but we are made for it.  As St. Augustine understood it, we will be restless until we finally allow our hearts to find rest in the Resistless One.

 

Repentance

It’s not a popular word, repentance, even in Christian circles.  All kinds of images come to mind when you think of it: a grown woman crawling on hands and knees on cold pavement for hundreds of yards as she approaches the steps of a Bolivian cathedral; loud and embarrassing wailing from overly-dramatic congregates during the invitational at a “Spirit-filled” church; guilt- and shame-ridden self-flagellation.  None of it sounds appealing, that’s for sure.

But the repentance I want to mention here is more of a fainting than anything else.  It’s a collapsing, a kind of falling down, under the weight of things.  But it’s falling down before the God who catches us.  It has to do with rest, with quietness, with trust (Isaiah 30:15), an coming-to-the-senses and embracing the reality that all these things we do apart from Christ, we really can’t do (John 15:4).  Even if they are good things for the Kingdom.

Over the last few months, I’ve been there, coming back to the heart of God and the salvation offered through Jesus.  (Once again, all kinds of things come to mind with the word salvation.  Here, I mean a rescue, a shouldering of burdens, a kind of brother-like sharing in the experience of living, and at the same time a restoration in the heart of reality — of my place with God and my role alongside Him.)  Back in April of this year, I wrote

Over the last couple of months, I have been in a journey of repentance, of returning back to the heart of God and His life in subtle ways, of re-orienting my heart back to Him. A re-consecration of my whole being to Him.

So, I guess it’s been more than just a couple of months that I’ve been on this journey back deeper into the heart of my Father.  And maybe it’s just an ongoing process.  Maybe our journey to God is better described as a constant return back to God.  I think this is how C.S. Lewis thought of it.

Lately, I have recognized areas where I have tried to go it on my own, resulting in three primary effects in my life: pride, unbelief, and idolatry.  Man, even laying them out there like that is painful.  It’s hard to see those thrown out there like that.  But there they are.

And here’s what I mean, in brief… When I am really burdened with something, I rarely go to God and lay down my burden fully and abandon it to Him and expecting in return for the exchange an increased intimacy with Him.  Instead, I hide from Him, and hide my burden from Him, ashamed that I am not strong enough to carry it… or, I will go to Him with my burden, pray about them, and then leave shouldering the same heavy loads (not having laid them down radically at his feet), still thinking I am supposed to be strong enough to shoulder them on my own:

Pride.

I am fearful that Jesus will not meet me where I am and bring me into intimacy with Himself, will not bring me to life:

Unbelief.

And so I choose instead to find some sense of strength in something else, typically for me a false idea that I am more spiritual than I really am.  And I have to portray that to others because instead of being able to find my identity and sense of validity in Jesus’ present and immediate love for me, I have to find it in what others think of me:

Idolatry.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  -Matthew 11:28-30

This is what I’m returning back to.  I’ve come to think that the invitation Jesus offers is radically different than what we often do.  It’s not enough for us to come to Him, hold up our weakness and weariness, and ask for Him to help us with it.  He’s asking more of that.  He’s asking that we completely abandon it, lay it down totally, so that we are free to enter into discipleship with Him (take His yoke).   We can’t demand that God do something about your burden.  We can’t even fret about it at all anymore, even to look at it.  We must instead fix your eyes on Him.  This is the command of Scripture, repeatedly (Hebrews 12:2, 12:3; Philippians 4:8; Psalm 34:5; Colossians 3:1; 1 Chronicles 16:11; Psalm 105:4; Psalm 123:2; Matthew 6:33; Psalm 37:4).  Only then will we understand that the truer story of our lives was never really about the burden to begin with, but rather about the intimate relationship between God and us.

Michael Warden, in The Transformed Heart, has written about this process.  We abandon our heart to His strength and to His life.  That’s repentance.  That’s rest.  That’s trust.  And in that act is our salvation.  It’s not about doing more; it’s not about doing at all.  It’s about collapsing into the strength and love of Christ.  Once we are free to join with Jesus in who He is and what He is about (taking His yoke, becoming His disciple), He will teach us not how to shoulder the burdens better (remember, we have completely forgotten about them), but rather He will teach us about Himself, and about where real life is found — the life we have been looking for all our lives and only mistakenly thought was somehow tied to our shouldering the weight of the world.

None of this is easy.  Man, I know that full well.  That’s why it’s taken me some time for God to pierce through my fear and defenses to bring me into this journey.  Like everyone, I have a host of burdens — hopes and dreams that I still strive for, pains and hurts I still run and hide from, a life I worry will collapse around me, day-to-day details I fear won’t go well, and the list goes on.  How is it that Jesus could possibly ask of me to abandon these things to Him?!  Abandon them?! Meaning, no longer even think of them?  Yet this is what Jesus is talking about when He says that if we seek to save our lives, we will lose them, but if we lose them for His sake, we will find them (Matthew 10:39).

And I think it’s a harder thing for many of us Christians who have been walking with God for some time, not because we don’t have experiences where He has come through on His word and shown Himself good — for certainly He has — but because we think we are supposed to be doing all this good stuff we have going on and that surely God has expected that we shoulder it.  I mean, He has given us all kinds of opportunities and ministries and we see all kinds of needs, so surely we are meant to carry it.

But to take His yoke upon ourselves is to enter into the kind of life Jesus lives and live it the way He lives it.  It’s to come alongside of Him and walk in step with Him in the same direction as Him.  And He is always about intimacy with the Father and the ransom of our hearts back to His.  Always, every time.  That’s His singular stance.

There’s been a shift in my own heart through the course of even the last few days.  Even the way I’m seeing things has changed.  I’d say things feel lighter, and that my orbit is changing a bit as I am gravitating back to Jesus as the source of my strength and joy.  I’m learning again to seek Him first and to delight in Him — meaning that all my attention and affection that would have otherwise been spent securing what I need to continue on is now spent on Him.  It’s only in that place of truly abiding in Him will we have life.  Only.  He says that, very explicitly.

for more, see The 12 Most Profound Ideas I Ever Had, George MacDonald’s Self Denial , and the last paragraph of Mere Christianity.