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.

 

Return of the King’s

Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”
-Matthew 8:21-22 

Being in grad school can be pretty demanding, as can any number of things we engage in with our lives — marriage and kids, ministry, jobs, a crisis here or there, sickness, and a million other things.  The demands of life simply take their toll.

I’ve had some unexpected openings with my time recently.  I’m still in school, but my schedule has shifted a bit and freed me up a little bit through the day, creating some breathing room I haven’t had in quite awhile.  Not much, but enough that I’ve had time to slow down a bit.  There’s that, and there’s the space I’m beginning to make for my heart again, time to reconnect with the deeper places in me, and time to reconnect with God.

The trouble is, I’m so used to the whirlwind of busyness that when I try to slow down or when I have some down time, I can’t seem to sit still.  When I try to quiet my mind and heart, to try to listen to the voice of the Lord speaking to me, all I too often seem to get is the rising anxiety about what I should be doing, or the worry about tomorrow’s activities, or the unsettled restlessness of things in my life.  Me, me, me.  Though I’m involved in a lot of beautiful things that are bigger than me, when I slow down the vertigo-of-soul seems to indicate that in too many ways I’ve become the center of my own story.  I’ve become stuck in an orbit around myself.

I decided today that the only recourse I have is… well, is to realize I have no recourse.  I have no internal resources that can save me from this vortex of ontological lightness, as theologians call it.  If I am to follow Jesus again deeply, it must begin with Him coming into and speaking into this tornadic mess inside my heart.  Otherwise, I’m unsure where to go with my attention and energy.  My  mind only comes up with a few different places I could go — mostly either dead-end roads of boredom, distraction, or worry, as I’ve mentioned, or worse — dark corners and alleys that have crept into my heart as I’ve shied away from the Light of Life.

So, with no internal resources to rely on, I’m dropping it all and running to Jesus.  And this is what I pray:

Please meet me here, Lord God.  Spirit of the Living, God, I remember that You want to commune with me even more — far more — than I want to with You.  I don’t want distraction.  I don’t want the distance of worry and inattention.  I don’t want comfort.  And I must not wait to bury my father, to wait until all is fixed and well before taking off again with You into the deep.  I don’t want th eless wild offers of this world or of the Father of Lies.  I want You.  Jesus, I want you.  Everything else is dung compared with that — for you are the Pearl of Great Price.  I hunger for You.  My soul thirsts for the Living God.

Where may He be found?  Who can ascend His hill?  Praise be to my God, who has given us clean hands and pure hearts, that we might walk with the Living God, learn of His ways, be trained as master horseman with his steeds, be loved as a bride on the bed.  We are Yours, O Lover, we are Yours, for you have first loved us.  Jesus, you are our King and Suitor.  And I am your man.

 

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.

 

The Authority of a Child

I was driving on a windy road in a small residential area yesterday evening. Glancing in my rear view mirror, I noticed a line of cars. When the road straightened enough to get a god look, I counted maybe 10 or 12 trailing behind me. It’s a pretty road, with lots of old oaks and foliage overhanging the street and generous yards serving as buffers between the slow but constant traffic and the homes. The houses are a bit older, constructed I would guess back in the 40′s and 50′s.

Just a few blocks from my turn, two kids caught my eye. I could see them a block away. They came running from a house directly toward the road. They couldn’t have been older than 6 or 7. As I came near, I slowed to a near stop, not sure what they were going to do. The girl and boy came to the edge of the road, and the boy looked both ways with a kind of fearful panic on his face, as if all the warnings of his parents about the dangers of crossing the street came back to him. Not the girl. She stepped on the edge of the road, facing directly ahead — which was perpendicular to the flow of traffic — stood tall, held her chin high, and stretched both of her arms out straight and aimed her palms toward the line of cars. One hand faced me, the other the car coming the opposite direction. She could have been a traffic cop. She stood still for several seconds. She then looked at both lines of cars, first to her left, then to her right, then to her left, and back again. She stood perfectly still, with an air of dignified authority, until she was sure all the cars had stopped and it was safe to cross. Then, with just as much gusto as she had when she stepped up to the street, she and the boy took off running across and made it safely to the other side.

My general reaction to seeing young kids playing near the road like that without an adult in sight would have been one of disgust. “Where are the parents?” I would have scorned. Not this time. I was struck by the commanding presence of the little girl, the surety of her actions, the certitude and confidence in her demeanor. Her authority.

Here we are, 10 or 12 cars strong, moving at 25 or 30 miles an hour, in both directions on the street. That’s 20 tons or so, times two. And here is this little girl, all of 70 pounds, who stands at the edge of the street with her hands up and knows that she will stop the traffic. It is apparent that she has done this before, and it has worked. She has not the power or the will to stop these vehicles on her own, of course. Not at all. Yet she does it. How? In other words, from where is her authority?

You could say that it is in the kindness of the drivers. After all, no one would have had to have stopped. She wouldn’t have been hit from where she was standing, though it would have been too close for comfort. Maybe the young girl appealed to the drivers’ protective instincts. I wondered later if the traffic would have stopped if that had been a teenager or even a grown man or woman. Certainly it would have had it been a uniformed officer. But this is a little girl!

But ultimately, the authority the girl invoked was that of the law. At bottom, I knew I had to stop for the fearless child because I did not want to run the risk of hitting her or the boy with her. But it was not only because of the law. It was also because of her command of it. Though I doubt she understood traffic laws, the girl knew that if she approached the busy street close enough and put her palms up toward the cars, they would stop.

I tell that story because it is so instructive for our place of authority in the Kingdom. When we ask “in the name of Jesus” (John 16:23), we receive not because God is obligated or because we in ourselves have the power to get things done, but because we operate under the covering and in the authority of the Lord of lords. When we rebuke demons “in His name” (Luke 10:17), they submit not because they fear us, but because they are defeated by the work of the Cross on our behalf. We invoke an authority that we may not fully understand — we are, after all, children in our Father’s house — but it is an authority just the same, not too much different from the little girl stopping 40 tons of steel and rubber and glass by the gesture of her hands. We do not have to understand it all; we simply trust the One in whose name we operate.

Driving by once the kids had crossed the street, I glanced over to see what they were after on the other side. Why did they cross the road? A playground. Seriously. That was what it was all about for them. They had their eye on the prize. We are not to rejoice in the authority we have in Christ, but rather that, like the children, we are on a journey, headed somewhere, and walk in the spirit of “power, love, and sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7) that God has given us so that we can get there.

Would that we would become like these little children!

Just because we may not fully understand our role in the Kingdom does not give us an excuse to not seek understanding or to disbelieve. Walking in Christ’s authority is crucial, but so is a sincere belief and mindful approach to our walk with God. I love Annie Dillard’s take on this. In Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, she writes,

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.

We in Christ live in a very real and very present Kingdom that requires at the same time a childlike trust in our Father’s goodness toward us and the way He said things work as well as a full-grown (or growing), mature (or maturing), wisdom-seeking devotion to God.

 

A Surprising Encounter

I’m big on journaling. It’s a discipline I discovered some years back that helps me process through what God is showing me, that helps me express desires or fears that may be buried beneath the busyness of the day, that helps me engage in prayer with the Lord when the noise outside is too loud.

Lately He is leading me into a more profound and disciplined experience of the Kingdom through a more intense and intentional style of journaling. I’m reading through Leanne Payne’s Listening Prayer, in which the author describes a system of keeping hold of the things God reveals and ways of exploring the depths of His word.

It’s not tips or techniques that I am after; it is a broader experience of the life of God through the spiritual disciplines. I’ve become rutted a bit as of late, and I sense Christ leading me into more.

Take this morning’s prayer time, for example…

I usually make the most of my 40-minute commute to work in the morning by praying. My sort of “first prayer” or “waking prayer” of my day is fairly liturgical; I have a list of what I know I need to bring to God, including myself and my family and then friends, coworkers, and my students, in consecration, petition, intercession, resistance against the Evil One, and the like. It’s critical for me to come to Christ this way as early in my morning as possible and receive His counsel for what He will lead me into through the day. As important as it is, it has lately become a bit… stagnant. It’s routine, which doesn’t necessarily in itself mean dry, except that it is beginning to feel pretty stuffy. It’s not very enlivening or surprising or even conversational anymore, at least not this first prayer of the day.

I’ve been trying to figure out lately what to do about this. There are things on my heart I know I need to pray through. Not knowing what needed to change, I’ve continued in the routine but hoping for something fresh, like working through a hot day waiting for a cloud or a cool breeze.

This morning the Lord God brought me something different, something more beautiful than I could have expected, and something I could not have planned for. It was all His initiative. It came by way of a song.

“Be Thou My Vision” is my favorite hymn, and in fact may well be my favorite piece of literature and liturgy ever written. I used to hold it close and pray it often, but somehow the words got lost in the shuffle of my life. A contemporary artist a few years back released an album containing this song, complete with contemplative music accompanying the lyrics. I can’t say what brought me to listen to it, but I found it on my iPod and started listening.

By the time I left for work, I knew that I needed to begin praying through my day, but something kept drawing me back to the song. It felt like the tug of a little child on your shirt asking for your attention. I couldn’t step away from it. I replayed it. Again. Then again. When I started feeling the pressure to turn it off, I heard the voice of the Spirit in my heart say, “No, listen to it. Play it again. This will serve as your prayer to me this morning. Sing along with the full expression of passion within you.”

On the same album, I found a rendition of the Keith Green song, “Lord You’re Beautiful,” and echoed with the words praise to God. For forty minutes I let these two songs carry me into a worship and prayer with this Lover and Life-giver that blew the dust off of my morning liturgies and opened me up again to beauty and the joy of surprise and delight I find in expressing myself to the Lord, and of hearing Him respond.

I pulled up to work, parked the truck, and sang aloud, “Lord You’re beautiful, Your face is all I seek, for when Your eyes are on this child, Your grace abounds to me…” Shutting the truck off, I looked up and noticed the car parked across from had written on the windshield in white shoepolish the words, “You’re beautiful.” Yeah! I was singing this to God and here even inanimate objects were joining with me! And immediately then I recognized that this was God speaking back to me. I heard, “You are beautiful, my son. Nothing is more compelling than your delight in me. You conquer me with your love.”

I could not have made all of this happen. I can’t even say for sure why now. I mean, why was it this morning that I was able to have such an intimate time with the Lord when weeks have gone where our interactions have felt stifled? Perhaps I was desperate enough to hear Him. Maybe I was just quiet enough to hear Him, “my house now being still” and all of that. Or, maybe He was just ready to speak, to bring something new and fresh to me.

Whatever the reason, it was beautiful, and I am taken all over again by this brush with the Living One. He disciplines us, and we take our place in the relationship by offering Him our hearts and minds and lives as timber, but it is the Presence we must encounter if we are to have the Fire. This is His part, His promise, to “be with us” (John 14:16, Romans 16:20, 2 Corinthians 3:11, 2 Thessalonians 3:18, Hebrews 13:25). I am getting the feeling that when Jesus says He will be with us, He really means to be with us, in ways that newlyweds on their wedding night are “with” one another, only moreso. He means to have us.

 

The Voice

One of my favorite places to go when I want to study is a coffee shop in a local town. It’s all about the atmosphere for me. First off, there are a host of large benches, where I can spread out my books and still have room for my laptop. And there are corner benches, so that I am isolated enough with my back to a wall that I can get work done, but still some part of the calm activity going on around me. I like it because I turn on my iPod and focus intently on what I want to learn or pray or write, yet distractions abound when I want them. There are interesting people to watch and conversations to overhear and pastries to sample. There is life going on around me, yet often faded and overshadowed by the life I find through the conversation with God that companionship with Him offers and that I usually enter into when I’m in this cafe.

I am here now, by the way, but today things are a bit different. I found a bench. My Bible and journal and computer are spread around on the table before me. I’ve entered into some good dialogue already with the Lord God. But, for some reason, this place is hopping today. People are flooding into it; the line at the registers have, at times, nearly gone out the door. And the group of ladies behind me are pretty excitable and definitely chatty in their enthusiasm. It’s as if there is a family reunion going on in the two sets of seats behind me. I’ve had to turn up the volume on my music so as to not feel like I’m eavesdropping, and so that I can concentrate on the book I’m reading. In short, there are too many distractions around me.

In all of this, I find the perfectly fitting analogy of our life with God. In fact, this is exactly what I am reading about, listening to the “still small voice” of God, and I wonder if He is not illustrating it the conflict between the inner hunger of my heart for communion with Him and the hustle and bustle around me. There is a still and quiet motion in the midst of the activity. A center point around which everything seems to be revolving and next to all else seems to be out of focus. Jeffrey Satinover describes this well, in speaking of the still small voice of God:

“I have often wondered why the voice of God is so quiet and so still. Perhaps He is trying to train us to listen. Just as by his very quiet the gentleman in a room of shouting oafs eventually compels attention, perhaps God draws us to His voice not by out-shouting our inner babble, but by the whispered truths that reveal His character.”

I found this quote in the book I came here to read, and it is dead-on in illustrating the struggle. I picture being in a bar (why a bar, I’m not sure, but that’s what came to mind), and there’s a lot of activity going on around me: conversations and a game of darts and spilled beer and the juke box playing a loud rendition of Garth Brook’s “Friends in Low Places” while a half dozen sing karaoke-style off key. In walks this Gentleman, this Character, this Person, and few recognize Him. Maybe no one does — no one pays attention. But my eyes catch Him. Somehow, He demands attention by His easy movements, by the way in which He seems to move in a different speed than the rest, as if He doesn’t quite belong in the same timeframe as the rest, or maybe the rest doesn’t belong with Him. His motions are intentional, and His eyes lock on mine the moment He enters the door. He whispers something, and I know it is meant for my ears. I am compelled to draw nearer Him so as to hear better. This Voice is that of my God’s, and I recognize it immediately, because I have heard it before. All the other distractions of my heart quiet down, fade, even disappear, and I am left with only this One before me. Now I can hear and even participate in this conversation, where I am instructed in truth and life.

This is the experience of all who want to hear the voice of God. “This,” says Leanne Payne, “is what we understand as we reason together with God: ‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord’ (Isaiah 1:18, KJV).”

Looking up, the lines have dwindled. The ladies behind me finished their coffee and boisterous conversation. The song through my mp3 player has shifted to a soft and poignant symphony from the soundtrack to “August Rush.”  And my heart is resting a bit more.  I’m entering into that place of centered, practical fellowship with the Creator of the universe that is both my birthright and the source of my life (John 17:3).  This is the place in which I am to abide throughout the day, a continual dialogue of praise, petition, intercession, healing, listening, reasoning, rest, intimacy… of union (1 Thess. 5:17).

As Thomas A. Smail has said, “The central secret of the Christian life is that we are adopted into this relationship as children of this Father.”  We are made for this kind of communal life with God.

 

Conversatio Morum

NEWS?

originally uploaded by holgarolga

All of us have hang-ups when it comes to praying. Sometimes we get tripped up and stumble around for awhile trying to figure out how to pray. Some of us at various times wonder if we should pray. At other times, we know we can, we know we should, and we even know how, but we simply do not have the desire to pray. Some of us have been stuck in dry, empty routine for some time. Others have completely given up on the hope to really connect with their Creator in any meaningful way.

Books have been written on this subject for hundreds of years. And a few that I’ve read are very good! (Wow, what an arrogant statement.) I have neither the calling nor the wisdom to offer more now on the subject, except for a bit of personal experience that I bet most of us can relate to.

Looking back over the last few months, I’ve discovered a certain theme in regard to the ways I’m approaching God through prayer. I rarely begin where I am. Rather, I always feel like I have to crawl to some certain place to where God is before I can set out to really share my heart with the Lord or hear from Him. Like I have to ascend a mountain or climb to some spiritual level to reach Him. It’s not penance. I don’t mean that I feel like I have committed a certain sin that keeps me from His presence. I mean, rather, that I feel as though I have to earn His ear, like I have to clamor for His attention. Do something fantastic, even if it’s reaching some level of humility so that I can come before Him (forgetting that I immediately become proud of my humble attainment anyway).

The feeling, if I were to put it into words, goes something like this: “I am not worthy of God. He’s really busy. He’s not that interested in me or my life. So I’ll just be really cautious in the way I approach Him.” Translation: “I am not worth anything to God. He is limited in power and limited in love. I will be faithless and godless and only pretend to be holy so that I can feel better about myself.”

My devotions have become routine. Communion with God has been replaced with assumptions (“I think this is what God thinks about this or that”). Obedience has become guesswork (“I guess God would want me to do this or that”). And the zeal and zest for life, that expectancy that Paul spoke of when he said he approaches God with an anticipation of “What’s next, Papa?” has been usurped with dull and drab predictability. “I wonder what’s next” is spoken aloud to no one in particular.

It’s all certainly a step away from “fearlessly and confidently and boldly draw near to the throne of grace” found in Hebrews.

I’ve noticed this for a few weeks now. I’ve been paying attention to the way in which I approach God, or don’t. And why. I had conversation with a friend and afterwards wondered why I wasn’t asking Jesus in that moment how to encourage him or what I was to take from our time. I have decisions to make at work. Have I consulted God about them? There are hundreds of men gathered on a mountain right now to meet God, and I have been called in to intercede for their time. Am I asking Jesus how to do so? What of my own heart? Am I coming to Him with the ache and confusion and hope — eyes wet with tears or fists raised to the sky, whatever the moment calls for — or am I biting my lip and putting on a smile and faking my way through?

How I’ve gotten here isn’t so important as the question of what I am to do with this reality. What do you do with that? It can be a bit despairing, actually. Okay, so I’m blowing it in a big way. Great. Whew, that’s a relief. Glad to hear it.

The options are pretty few, actually. As I see it, I can either 1) continue with what I’m doing now, or 2) recognize what I see as less than what I want and move toward change. Given those two choices, I’d think the second is the most appealing. The problem is, though, I’ve tried this. I’ve tried to get up earlier to pray more. I’ve tried to read more Scripture. I’ve opened a couple of those books I mentioned on prayer. Nothing seemed to make any lasting change, though.

The reason none of them worked is because in doing them, I’m still living in the first option. It’s the same thing. I’m not going to God. I’m trying to get myself together, get to a better place of prayer, but I’m not actually praying at all. I’m doing it on my own. Which was the source of the problem to begin with. So this is what I finally decided to do. A few days ago, I asked Jesus something very simple, “Stir in me the desire to seek You.” That’s it. Nothing profound. I can’t even say it was particularly heartfelt. I didn’t wait until it “felt” good at all, or until I “felt” passionate desire for it. I’d wait forever and never approach Him if that were the case.

And then yesterday a friend shared his story of having conversation with God. It was over something really simple, something so small, in fact, that I thought, “You can’t do that. Can you? I mean, God doesn’t care about something like that. Does He?” Turns out, God did care. And He showed my friend that He cared. And He honored my friend by his coming to God about it in prayer. He met him, right where he was. This friend of mine was the first to admit that it wasn’t a particularly nice place he was in. He was irritated and selfish. But he came to God anyway. And God honored him for it with friendship.

Well, this story pierced me. And anytime something pierces me I always assume that it’s God’s doing. Most of the time, anyway. Certainly this time I felt it was, since I just asked God for help. Then there were two more things that happened. First, after I heard that I asked Jesus if there was anything that was keeping me from hearing His voice. (In John 10, Jesus promises that we would hear His voice.) I listened, and I heard His reply. He said, “only you.” In other words, only my refusal to come “boldly” into His presence. That’s it. Not my sinfulness, not my selfishness, not my irritability, not my weariness, not my insolence. It’s not a matter of time or attention or spiritual warfare. It’s a matter of trust. Do I believe Him when He says that I really can have intimacy with Him, that I can commune with Him on matters of the heart?

The second thing that happened is that I read somewhere that all the things that keep us from praying are not important. “Never mind them,” the author said, and I received it as confirmation for what Jesus told me. Nothing can keep us from Him.

And so, there’s this subtle change that is taking place in my heart. It is a shift of orientation. (“Orientation,” by the way, comes from the word “orient,” which means “to face toward the east.”) It’s a small shift, but the effects of it are great. Therapists call this change “generative,” meaning a small change on one level has momentous effects on another. Thinkers and writers of old had a phrase for this kind of change — conversatio morum. Death to the status quo. Richard Foster explains its meaning as “constant change, constant conversion, constant openness to the movings of the Spirit.”

I’m re-opening myself to these “movings of the Spirit.” It’s been a combination of my desire to be done with the status quo and the Lord’s kindness that has led me back into His presence. It’s a cliché to say this, I know, but the truth of it is so profound: God is always present. He is here and available to us now. “The sheep listen to his voice and heed it; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them.” This is the promise of Scripture.

We must begin here, with simply coming to our Shepherd as sheep in need. Maybe again and again. Everyday, maybe. Or maybe just for the first few seconds of prayer, a kind of recognition that we come into the throne room of grace by grace. Not because we’ve ascended to where it is, but because God has condescended to us in Jesus. Anything else would be unbelief, a refusal to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. And from that place, from a conversation already happening, then we can grow in intimacy with our Lord. But it must begin with recognizing that He’s come to us. I can’t remember who said it, but I remember hearing once that every other religion is man’s attempt to get to God. Only in Christianity has God come all the way to man. All the way. We start there. The easy fellowship and light burden of walking with God must begin with our response to His invitation to draw near now.