Awaken My Soul

I’m ready, God, so ready,
ready from head to toe.
Ready to sing,
ready to raise a God-song:
“Wake up, soul! Wake, lute!
Wake up, you sleepyhead sun!”
-Psalm 108:1-2, The Message

“I will awaken the dawn.”
- Psalm 108:2, NASB

I am this morning journaling my soul awake. This is my song; my pen my bow, the empty page my instrument. I am ready, Lord, ready for the new day to rise in my heart.

I opened this morning to Psalm 108 as, I think now, a kind of call-to-arise, a summons and an invitation to awaken and see the Lord in His temple. I turned a page back, then, to read through Psalm 107, and found it to be an unpacking of Jeremiah 31:3 — “I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have drawn you with lovingkindness.” This Psalm shows us what that looks like. how does God draw through lovingkindness?

Here is some of the Psalm:

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
his love endures forever.

Let the redeemed of the LORD say this—
those he redeemed from the hand of the foe,

those he gathered from the lands,
from east and west, from north and south.

Some wandered in desert wastelands,
finding no way to a city where they could settle.

They were hungry and thirsty,
and their lives ebbed away.

Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.

He led them by a straight way
to a city where they could settle.

Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds for men,

for he satisfies the thirsty
and fills the hungry with good things.

It then goes on to use another metaphor, one of darkness and gloom:

Some sat in darkness and the deepest gloom,
prisoners suffering in iron chains,

for they had rebelled against the words of God
and despised the counsel of the Most High.

So he subjected them to bitter labor;
they stumbled, and there was no one to help.

Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he saved them from their distress.

He brought them out of darkness and the deepest gloom
and broke away their chains.

Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds for men,

for he breaks down gates of bronze
and cuts through bars of iron.

Some became fools through their rebellious ways
and suffered affliction because of their iniquities.

They loathed all food
and drew near the gates of death.

Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he saved them from their distress.

He sent forth his word and healed them;
he rescued them from the grave.

Let them give thanks to the LORD for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds for men.

Let them sacrifice thank offerings
and tell of his works with songs of joy.

It goes on from there to paint another metaphor, one of being on the sea in the midst of a life-and-death storm and God delivering those who cried out for Him. It is almost as if God drew them out on the seas just so that their strength would be melted away and they would cry out to Him. In each case, the people had run out of places to turn to. Their resources had been depleted, the edge of their courage abated.

What I’ve found in reading through the Psalm is that He is a fierce redeemer. He seems to need to take us to hunger and humility of heart in order for us to receive that redemption. Perhaps those are the only locales in which we will see things as they truly are and truly call out to Him for rescue. He will not go against His giving us volition and free choice. He will not break that underlying dignity of humanity; He will, though, arrange for things that help us volitionally cry out for help. He will humble us.

The Psalm seems to suggest that this is evidence of His lovingkindness. This is what it looks like. It is brutal… but it sometimes has to be. It is kind because there is only one way to live, only one way to have true life, and that is in relational communion with the Godhead. God knows this better than we do, and so He sets out to redeem us from our adversaries, be them external to us or the pride and self-sufficiency that rises within.

“Who is wise?” the psalmist asks. “Let him give heed to these things.” Why? Because God’s heart is revealed by them. Because reality is expressed by them. Because God intends life for us, and this is part of the process of walking out this journey in that direction.

The last line of the Psalm reads, “And consider the lovingkindness of the Lord.” Yes. This is what we need. The hard, fast reality of God’s heart is like smelling salts to our souls, or the faint sound of voices as you dream which only get louder and more and more real until you open your eyes and realize they were coming from the other room. You step out of bed and leave the dream world behind — life beckons.

Blessed and awesome Lord God, You are loving and kind in all Your ways, and Your lovingkindness leads me to repentance, to leaving behind all that I thought was real and redemptive but have, in truth, no more substance than a dream. Your love allows me to leave behind these things in exchange for that which is truly Real. And that is You.

Your heart is a world to explore, a wonder, a beauty. I want it. Let me know You today, my Lord, my Love. Draw me further into this Life. Open my eyes and ears to perceive it. Let me be humble to receive it. And let me have a contrite heart, strong and virile in Your love, to walk in it.

I hunger for You, my God. My soul thirsts for You in a dry and weary land where there is no water. Amen.

 

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.

 

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.

 

The God Who Speaks

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend of mine about the ways that God has been speaking to her lately. She said that she used to hear people talk about “God told me this” or “God told me that” and she always wondered, “How do you know that God said that?” or “How do you know that God said that?” She said she always believed in God — it was never that she doubting in His existence or even His benevolence toward her — but she never understood how God communicated with us, how He would connect with her in a personal way.

That’s been changing as of late. She’s gone through some tough times over the last few years, really tough. Her world has been turned upside down, and while she has some familial support around her, it’s not enough to sustain her heart through it all. She has had to turn to God in desperation to hold her up. (Literally.) In so doing, she has slowly grown to encounter a God that is not only benevolent, like a friendly old grandfather, but passionate, like a wild lover; a God that not only exists, in the same way that the religion exists or that democracy exists, but a God that is real and present, hot as fire, cold as ice, firm as rock and as close as the air in her lungs. She has met the Living God. And it is changing her in some pretty dramatic ways.

One of those ways is in her perception of Him. I don’t mean just what she thinks of Him, but how she perceives Him, with the sense organ (for that it is, among other things) of her heart. She is now able to hear Him speak to her intimately and personally, just to her — a word of encouragement, a nudge of direction, a whisper of instruction — about her and about her life. Once was through a fortune cookie, another through the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and another through the counsel of a friend.

It is not always that God is so direct; oftentimes He speaks indirectly, expecting that we engage not only with our eyes and ears but with our will, that we trust what we’ve heard before and remember it and walk in it, that we obey what we read in Scripture.  We must remember that the Spirit of Christ in us was given to us, among other reasons, to teach us, to comfort us, to speak to us.

I had that experience last night. I had a dream that I was driving in a car and needing to hear from God about something. I can’t think of what it was, but it seemed only important that I heard from Him. I looked up, and I saw written on a license plate in front of me “John 14:13-15.” I had no idea what that Scripture said, but I took it as from God, and that was all I needed.

Upon waking, I remembered the dream very clearly, which is not typical I might add. Another clue that this might be more than just about the bowl of Grape Nuts I had before I hit the hay last night. I picked up my Bible and headed for the Scripture. Yup. God coming through for me. It was exactly what I needed to remember: “Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it. If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”

It can be hard to hear God in our culture. We distract and divert ourselves to keep from sitting still, afraid that if we were to be quiet for a moment we’d hear nothing at all, and that scares us to death. That’s also a faithless act. We don’t expect God to be there at all. For my friend (and for me, sometime earlier in my journey), it took a dark turn in life to bring her to need God at all. But once she recognized that need and stopped to listen — in hope beyond hope — to see if God would be there, everything changed… forever. Life began, “the most intimate” part of life (Ephesians 4:30) came in to dwell.

 

On Assignment

One of the coolest things I’ve learned recently came from a group of friends who take seriously the call to follow Jesus in this world and into the heart of the arenas they work in, live in, and move about in. Whatever their profession, wherever they are living right now, whatever their family looks like, they see it all as an “assignment” from the Lord. This is where they are for now. Because they walk with Jesus, they know that this, whatever this is to them, is where they are called to be. Not always. Not forever. But for right now. Which gives them an immense amount of freedom to move about in their worlds with courage and hope. They know the time in their assignment will not last, and so difficult circumstances become easier and beautiful moments are treasured more deeply. And when their time is up with one assignment, they walk with Jesus into the next, keeping before them the constant undercurrent of reality, which is the Kingdom of God and our Father’s desire to see people come into it, walk in it, and live.

I’m on assignment right now doing something I thought I would never do, and something I’m not quite sure I was really prepared to enter into, and that is working with high school students. My job duties on any given day vary, but largely I consider myself a mentor to these teens, though sometimes my role is a disciplinarian, sometimes a teacher, sometimes a counselor… but really all of that I roll up into the title of “mentor.”

As a mentor, and especially through the summer months when I work daily with the students, I encounter situations that are brand new to me. I find myself needing to deal with one issue or another — whether it is a serious disturbance at home, relational struggles, or the typical difficulties that come as a by-product of their stage in life — that I am completely unprepared to handle. And when I say “unprepared” I do not mean that things are not handled well. In fact, that is one of the joys of working where I do and in the capacity I do, which is that my coworkers are incredibly competent and adept and dealing with these kinds of situations. What I mean in saying “unprepared” is just that I have never had explicit training or experience in handling this particular kind of issue, whatever this may be.

And this is where it gets really cool. This is where the Kingdom (“the reign of the King”) comes into play. I once worked (on a different kind of assignment) with a missionary in Colombia, South America. He had been kidnapped some years ago by a rebel faction at gunpoint. His current assignment, to continue to borrow that term, is to bring the gospel to the paramilitary groups in Colombia. It’s an incredibly dangerous mission, one in which is “unprepared” to do, in the traditional meaning of that word. (How could you possibly prepare for that?) I sat one evening at a hotel in Bogotá while he regaled us with stories of his near-death experiences of bringing books and Bibles into remote jungle, rebel-controlled regions of the country and of the way Christ would lead him in very specific ways to do very specific things and the countless times when he would have a half-dozen AK-47′s pointed at his head with weary and suspicious fingers shaking on the triggers. “At times like those,” he told us, “You do not have time to consult your Bible or call your church elders to pray for you or call a time-out so that you can go to your prayer closet for a few days, come back, and decide what to do or say in the situation. Whatever you have in your heart, that’s what you got to go on in those next split-second decisions.” Meaning, it was the Spirit of Christ that would lead him in words and sometimes action, sometimes inaction, to bring peace to a very tense situation. Always, every time, guns would drop, fingers would relax from the triggers, and God would soften hearts to hear the gospel.

And he has been on this assignment for something close to 25 years now.

Something about what he said that night stuck with me. I realized that often we are in similar circumstances, times and places when what flows out of our hearts right then at that moment determines an entire series of outcomes. It may be a word properly –or improperly– spoken. A gesture. A seemingly small decision. Or an enormous one, like in the missionary’s case. Certainly in my job now, I have to earn the trust of my students (earn is the only word here, and it is not done easily for a generation suspicious and wounded) while simultaneously treating the issue at hand with wisdom, discernment, and timeliness. It all can be a difficult balance, with a lot hanging in the balance, including issues of faith, hope, and love centered in relationships that need the healing ministry of Christ. Including the relationship with Christ.

Which is the similarity in the two assignments. My mission here is not so different from my friend’s mission in Colombia. Each of us, in our own way, are bringing the gospel, bringing in the Kingdom, by the fierce intention of first and foremost remaining intimately connected with Jesus. That’s the source. All else — every on-the-spot decision — is fruit of that relationship.

My friends that I spoke of earlier, my wife, the beloved of God all over the world — all of us are “on assignment,” “in the world but not of it.” It is an astounding and freeing thing to remember that the relative successes of those missions depend not on our own wisdom or charm, mood or even awareness, but rather by our connection to Jesus. Our intention to love Him, to follow Him, to be obedient. And to listen, which is a tough thing to do in our culture. But it pays off. It is intimacy for intimacy’s sake, but it also results in a transformation of character that enables to live from the new nature that the world needs to see and needs to have.

And so, what better preparation can there be? I could not possibly know everything I need to know about every situation that arises. They are all different, every time, as different from one to another as people are one to another. But I have at my access a resource to draw from — God Himself! — who knows everything there is to know about the deepest heart, the most complex problem. We need the intimate acquaintance of Jesus in each circumstance (2 Peter 1:3). And then we have all (1 Corinthians 3:21).

I can’t say for sure what my next mission will look like, but I can say that it will involve a deepening intimacy with the Lord God and a growth more into His likeness. That is the one commonality among us all, no matter what assignment we’re on.

 

Taking Up My Cross

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

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

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

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

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

The “In-Tension” of Love

I have tried to be faithful to what the Lord has spoken to my heart, and to act toward him in authentic love — love that calls him out to become the man he was born to be, while embracing in felt affection the man he sees each day in the mirror. But these two actions feel almost contradictory to each other. Paradoxes of love. I’ve heard that God “loves us where we are but loves us too much to keep us there.” How? I know that to be true, and yet to live in the tension of that love is to expose your heart to forces fierce enough to break it. If Jesus goes there, I want to as well, whatever the consequences, for this is true life. There is life to be found in following Him — even in this — and nowhere else. Like Thomas when Jesus announced He was going back to Judea (straight into the den of lions, so-to-speak) out of this love for His friend Lazarus, and chose to go with Jesus even if it meant his death (John 11:7-16), so I too choose to go with Him here in the Way of Love for my friend. (Jesus’ love of Lazarus was a similar kind of tension. Lazarus was dead, and Jesus came to him and wept for the loss. Yet He didn’t leave Lazarus there. His love for him brought him out of the tomb.)

So, where now, my King and Commander? Where now do we place our feet? In which direction are You walking? How — how, Jesus — How do I love [my friend] in this as You do? And how do I love him as You have called me to?

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

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

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

Amen.

 

The Lover Known as God

Seeking God is such a curious thing. In a very real sense, I cannot seek God without His grace to find me first. Many of us are familiar with John’s refrain that we love Him only because He loved us first (1 John 4:19). But it’s this thing called love that’s got me in such a quandry.

It’s all about my response.

Last night my wife and I pulled up to our house and turned off the car and finished listening to a song from one of our favorites last night. It was Rich Mullins’ “Elijah.” His words shoot straight from his heart and brought me to tears. The song is a prayer, asking God to let him “go out like Elijah.” “So Lord I’m begging for one last favor from you. Here’s my heart, take it where You will.” He sings about leaving this life, crossing the Jordan and hearing God’s music again. He knows he can take nothing with him, so he asks only that God will take him home in a whirlwind.

The reason my heart was so stirred is that if I were God listening to that, how could I not give him what he requested? How could my heart not be captured by his desire and sincere belief that God would be able to do this, and would do this, that His heart would be good enough to respond to Rich’s hope?

And that’s it. God’s love for us, we’ve heard many times — or some of us have, and some of us have not, and both groups need to hear it more — is not dependent upon our actions or inactions. And that is true. His grace receives us, “just as we are.” Nothing we could do could earn His favor any more than anything we could do could dissolve it. What wonderful news.

But there is a certain response that God longs for from us. He wants lovers. He wants a lover’s response to Him. “God waits to be wanted,” as someone said (was it St. Augustine?). And what is the response of a lover?

It’s this, this that Rich sang. It’s the soulful cry of a heart abandoned, desirous, longing, believing. (See Matthew 21:22; Mark 11:24; James 1:6.)

Somehow we must rouse within ourselves a trust that is childlike and loverlike at the same time. And yet,”rouse within ourselves” isn’t quite right, is it? We don’t pull ourselves up in our life with God by our own bootstraps. Maybe a better way of saying it is that we must let ourselves be affected by God, by Love Himself. Then this certain lover’s passion will be poured into our hearts from above, this definitive and peculiar love that allows us the gift of becoming lovers of God in response to Him. (Romans 5:5)

This grace is given. This grace is received. Yet do we play a role in becoming enraptured in, and by, this grace to the One who gives it? God has become our Lover simply by being Himself; is there something we do to become His? Is “My lover is mine” perhaps a bit easier than “I am his” (Song of Solomon 2:16)? Or do I have that backward? Is it the same?

God is fantastically romantic, and passionate, and insistent, and desirous. How do we become that in return? Speaking of God, Kiekegaard said that “He does not want a cringing subject. He wants a lover, an equal.” An equal? We’re speaking of God here. Really?

Well, think of it. How can a lover not be an equal? You can’t have a subject and be a master and expect them to be a friend. God stoops down to wear skin so that we can relate to Him on our level. And yet, He also picks us up and seats us with Him in His realm (Ephesians 2:6). So that we can relate to Him as a lover.

What does all this mean, practically speaking? What does it mean for me in a day to relate to God in this unbelievably, profoundly intimate and expressive way? He knows me. He fills me. He chooses me to be His. And He makes Himself known to me, waiting and longing for me to seek out His heart, too.

Anyone who does not tremble at the reality and weight of those words is either dead or deaf and has never heard the really good… and frightening… news of our role with this Lover-God.

I am rambling, babbling like a poet before the sea or a bride to her maids on her big day. Before this great reality, I have no other words to offer.