Six Months Later

Joplin just commemorated the six-month anniversary of the tornado that wiped out a third of our city on May 22nd.

We all have moments in our lives that we will remember forever, that are etched into our brains with the searing heat of the pain and fear of tragedy.  My parents know where they were the day Kennedy was assassinated.  I can remember, as we all can, the details of the morning of September 11, 2001 with crystal-clear clarity, as if it happened yesterday, as I watched with horror as people jumped from the top floors, trying to wrap my mind around the reality of these buildings caving in on thousands of people.

May 22nd is that kind of day for this community.  I’ve heard a hundred stories by now, many in first-person as a therapist trying to help make sense and work through the twist and wreckage of a day that was supposed to be a normal, average Sunday.  I remember my wife and I driving alongside the tornado, only missing driving through the heart of it by a simple prayer and God telling us to go a different way.  I remember seeing the transformers popping and watching as debris swirled within and around the enormous black monster, thinking at the time they must be small pieces of wood and whatnot, and only later learning that they were full-sized buildings, cars, people.

I’ve not been a citizen of this community all my life, but at various times I have called this place home.  My wife and I have been here this time around for six years.  We developed and opened our own counseling practice, which has deepened our roots, as our lives have become intertwined with the lives of others.  We’ve worked in this community and for it, being a part of small church groups and large business ones, staying when we have had offers to move elsewhere.  These were our homes, our churches, our businesses that were destroyed.  These were our families, our lives, our friends that were taken and whose lives were irrevocably shaken.

What has struck me again and again, beyond the grief that wells up at times unexpectedly when I drive past my old practice, now only a slab of concrete in an open field of concrete slabs lined up like gravemarkers, is the insistence that we come back, that our community thrive again.  The overwhelming response of volunteers and people across the country was more than we could take in in those first weeks.  We were, I think, only partially able to appreciate the kindness and selflessness.  The search and rescue crews, the work crews, the cleaning crews, the city managers and politicians who fought for this place, the folks who, bleeding and bruised and confused, stepped beyond themselves to cover a cold woman in a wheelchair or look for a man lost in a crumbled house, and the business owners who decided to rebuild.  I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but then there are times in life when you simply have to recognize the drama for what it is.  There are days when heroism trumps tragedy, when an epic story overwhelms a mundane account of despair.  I think to do less with this day and the days following would be dishonoring to those of us who witnessed these things, and denial of the weight of these past six months.

Six months.  In some ways it does feel like six days or six hours.  Pieces and piles of debris still remain.  Trees are still uprooted, twisted, gnarled.  Some buildings that stood remain standing still, ghosts over the landscape, large and looming memorials who seem to grieve in their darkness, their windows like our hearts still shattered and no longer guarding what is now an empty and broken space inside.  Other structures still lay, flattened and sprawled, where they were knocked and beaten.  The landscape is still at times unrecognizable.  Scarred.  The path cut by the storm undeniable, and still hits you between the eyes when you drive through the city.

So there are these times it seems like days ago, and and other times, it seems like years have gone by.  So much water has now passed under the bridge.  To see new buildings and businesses, some built right on top of the old, like Jerusalem after it would be sacked and destroyed.  Grasses replanted.  Sidewalks reconstructed.  New traffic lights and a few replanted trees.  Houses have begun to be rebuild, some standing in stark contrast to the ruined ones just a block away that haven’t yet been dealt with, standing as proud and defiant reminders of reconstruction.  The hard-won smiles and laughter coming from a man who lost his wife, a wife who lost her child, a family that lost their grandfather, a child that lost her legs, a nurse who still sees all too clearly when she closes her eyes at night the blood and cries and shock of a hospital overwhelmed, a couple that lost their confidence and security in a quiet midwestern city and who lost their American dreams.  New ones, better ones, slowly seep to the surface to take the place of the lesser ones that were blown about in the swirling debris of that fateful afternoon.

I’ve said before that there were 50,000 tornadoes that day.  What I hadn’t thought of is that there are 50,000 stories of change since.  Fifty thousand sets of eyes that see slow and steady growth as well as the sadness still and the brokenness that remains clinging like tentacles through the city and around the hearts of those of us affected.  Fifty thousand kinds of hope, fifty thousand opportunities to come under the shelter of a God who didn’t abandon us and who loves us into wholeness and healing.

Here’s to these last six months of hope, of a kind of demonstrable, tangible hope that I couldn’t have expected or planned for.  Here’s to six more, and may we in these next six months take hold of the kind of life that goes beyond and deeper than death, that brings life and freedom from the debris.

“And here, in dust and dirt, O here do the lilies of His love appear.”
-W.H. Auden

 

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.

 

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.

 

Dealing with Death

Many of my favorite authors say that they write what they need to read. Philip Yancey is especially fond of talking of his writing as a wandering journey of faith, where he is wrestling with and trying to hammer out his understanding of some aspect of life. He deals with grace and disappointment and longing for the Kingdom, those sorts of things. A lot of the stories I post here are things I need to read. Some time back, I told a friend that the only reason I post these things to the internet on a blog instead of keep them in my private journals is that it’s nice to have access to them anytime, anywhere. It sounds to me a bit ego-centric, but it’s a help for me to be able to access these stories and reread them at various times. I don’t have to go digging through my journals trying to find something. That’s especially true as I process through something someone smarter than me has said or realized. I work their insight into my soul like kneading yeast into bread. This blog is my work surface, the words my rolling pin.

This morning, I found myself re-reading the About the Invitation portion of this blog. I say there that “these pages..are the blood-and-guts expression of a man’s journey of passionate and at times faltering faith through this world…” I often write about the beauty or adventure or desirous seeking after God. My posts are most often expressions of hunger and reaching toward Christ. But, in the spirit of the About page, I realize I need to feel free, too, to write about “times of faltering faith.” I’ve got them. God knows I do.

So here it is, my first truly “faltering faith” post. I have no idea where it is going to end up, but this is where I need to start: a dream…

I’m standing in an overgrown field. It’s been neglected for quite a few years now. The barn is dilapidated. Where cows and horses once grazed, only weeds remain. The sounds of children running and playing have been washed out by the hollow drag of air across the fallen timbers. The sky, a bright blue in my memory, is now a pale grey, as if it is sick with mourning. No one lives here anymore. The life that once filled this place has vanished.

Another scene: I’m sitting with a man who has come to the end of his days, at least he wishes it were so. For as long as he can remember, though the days have been filled with activity, it has been activity for activity’s sake, and they have felt only empty, and he feels emptier having lived them. He knows nothing, and everything he once knew seems as dust. He has nothing to stand on. Life for him has been one long, unblinking daze.

Yet another scene: A woman sits across from me. She is broken, damaged by years upon years of neglect and abuse. Something deep within her was stolen as a little girl, and she has lived a desperate life trying to get it back. Nothing has worked, and in fact has only led her to darker and scarier places where she has had to bargain her way back again. She now exists with even less of herself than she had when she left her painful youth. She is alone, holding only tattered fragments of herself.

The stories continue. One after another after another. To say that “something” has been stolen, that “something” has been lost, is perhaps the greatest understatement of all time. To say that “things are not what they should be” is terribly, tragically, true. So much so that to look at life square in the face hurts deep within and freezes the soul like stone. Only the bravest can do such a thing, or those leaning on the crutches of addictions. And yet, this is the first place we are asked to go. This is the first thing we need to do, to see the desperation of our situation. We are utterly, totally, completely lost. We are barely alive, alive only enough to know we are not alive and the life we dreamed of has alluded us.

Don’t get me wrong. I have sit through hundreds of evangelical presentations and sermons to reach out to the lost with something of the hope of the gospel. They are (mostly) very good, and very true, and very needed. But they also often skip over the painful truth that we are not the people we should be. It’s often as if the presenter or preacher is also too afraid to look square at life and say, “We are a dead people. We have lost everything.” Yet, that’s where so many are. I know that to be true. My days are spent walking among the dead-at-heart and lost-of-soul.

Before the gospel, the good news, can mean anything, we must take a hard look at the life we have in our hands. Small. Silly, really, in the way we cling to such small things. Fragile. A shred of something, but we don’t really know what the original was. We hold a piece of a mosaic but cannot see the picture. Only shades of color, and even that is fading.

There is a hope. It is a great hope. The news is a great news — that we get to have life — LIFE. We get to breathe in gulps of life-giving oxygen again. Our blood gets to run warm through our veins again. Somehow, to our amazement, the broken fragments can come back together. The empty spaces filled. We can have again what we are made for. But it does not happen apart from taking a hard look at what we get and realizing, oh, finally realizing, we cannot get there on our own. We are dead. Only a life-giving Spirit can bring us back.

The promise of Jeremiah 31:13, that “maidens will dance and be glad, young men and old as well. I will turn their mourning into gladness; I will give them comfort and joy instead of sorrow” only happens as we are first familiar with our sorrow. Looking around at the brokenness around us, what other choice have we got? “Because of this,” wrote the prophet Micah, “I will weep and wail… I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl” (1:8) This is the only way to make sense of James’ command to “grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom” (4:9). Jesus promises us that He will turn our grief into joy again. Why? Because He will be all that we lost, and we will see Him. Our life. Our everything.

Maybe this isn’t so much faltering faith as it is a burdened heart. What is the only other appropriate response to suffering but to weep with those who weep for their loss.

 

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.

 

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.