The Soul’s Worth

I’m reading through a book by Gerald May called The Dark Night of the Soul.  Gerald May was a psychiatrist who, in his own words, became weary of the medical profession’s way of handling the soul of patients.  He eventually became a spiritual director and author of several works related to spiritual development.

In Dark Night of the Soul, May, exploring St. John of the Cross’s work by the same title, discusses the work of the Lord God deep within a person’s being as a mysterious and beautiful thing, an intimate work that is initiated in love and is designed to free us for love.  St. Teresa of Avila was a contemporary of John, and in fact, he counted her as one of his spiritual mentors and teachers.  Being contemplatives, both Teresa and John recognize the utter worth of the human soul, its beauty and goodness.  May quotes Teresa as saying, “I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul… we can hardly form any conception of the soul’s great dignity and beauty.”

Those words certainly sound mystical to our ears.  We rarely speak of the soul today, although it is gaining more attention in some circles, like  Christian psychotherapy.  John and Teresa recognized it as, next to God Himself, the most beautiful and worthy thing.  They loved it, adored it, respected it, because they began to see that God treated it with such dignity and love, that Jesus came for ransom of it and freedom for it.

There is a recent movement in Christendom to recognize what’s been called the “good heart.”  This “New Covenant” movement (as one author puts it), which I believe God is very much behind, seeks to bring to light the inherent goodness and strength of a heart given over to Christ, that it is no longer “deceitfully wicked” as the Scriptures say of a heart detached from Him (Jeremiah 17:9), but rather “good” and even “noble,” to quote Jesus (Luke 8:15).  This runs counter to much contemporary theology, which seems to see the heart as perpetually wicked, and which tries to operate a kind of “sin management,” in Dallas Willard’s words, to keep the believer from running amok doing all kinds of bad things.

The implication of the “good heart” theology is pretty radical.  It means that we can begin valuing the deep heart within once more, and recognize the awesome thing that it is.  It means we can work with one another to help set each other free, and that once we are disentangled from all the briars (what John of the Cross calls “attachments”), we can “run in the paths of [God's] commands” (Psalm 119:32) and walk in the “path of life” (Psalm 16:11) that God shows us.  We can drop the sin management stuff and bring dignity back into our ministry with folks.

What stands out to me in what Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross say is that recognizing that the heart is “good” isn’t enough.  They push the envelope even further.  They suggest that the heart (or “soul” in their vernacular) has “great beauty.”  John writes that once we enter fully enough into union with God, we will see ourselves aright.  ”The soul,” he says, will “see herself as a queen.”  This is far beyond merely being “good.”  This is a kind of glorious honor, an extravagant dignity.  The soul is ravishing.  Glorious.  Beautiful beyond compare, especially to the One who made her.

Could this be a part of the “secret wisdom” that has been “hidden” and that “God destined for our glory from before time began”? (1 Corinthians 2:7).

In our Christmas hymn, we sing of how “the soul felt its worth.”  But how often has that happened?  How many people do you know who can say, truly, “I have felt the weight of my soul’s worth, and it is beyond telling.”  Can you say that?  Can i?  What is that, the soul’s worth?  What could that be?

Sitting in my office meeting with people day after day struggling with life, what would it mean for me to recognize that, no matter how scarred and damaged and suffocated their souls may be, they are still beautiful and the reason for the Great Invasion brought by Christ?  I wonder, what would this mean to our ministries and our churches if we were to really believe it.  What would it do to our personal lives, our interactions with God and with one another.

 

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.

 

The Gift of Beauty

Fall has come to the Midwest. I mean Fall. The things we fondly think of when we dream of the hot, dry days of summer transitioning over to the cool, colorful, lively shorter days of autumn: holiday plans, folks carving pumpkins and making hot apple cider, talk of what the winter might hold (cold and wet or mild and dry?), and, more brilliant than anything else, the extravagant change of colors. I think we forget how often the bright high sun of summer can sometimes mute the spectrum around us. Sure, you may have your dark greens and earthy browns and sky blues, but that’s usually the extent of what we get to see. The Fall promises to bring back to our senses the wild range of hues: scenes of radiant reds and deep purples, bright yellows and rustic oranges. Pinks and violets and even shades of green we’d forgotten existed before.

This Fall hasn’t disappointed. The Maples are especially proud, displaying their dazzling array of colors like peacocks lining the streets. Reds with purple-tipped tops, like they were dipped upside down in the sunset sky. The Poplars with their golden yellows. The majestic oaks with their orange glows. Cherries and Walnuts and Sycamores. Even the Bradford Pears, the last of the troop this year to lose their greens, clinging onto them like camouflaged soldiers holding the final line of the summer march, have started to join the others – yellow-topped and transforming before our eyes.

My wife and I live just a couple of hours from the southwestern-most stretch of the Ozarks called the Boston Mountains. (They are humble mountains. Those of you in the West would call them molehills, but we’re fond here of making mountains out of them. We take what we can get.) The foliage found here is like none other. The Ozarks may not offer skiing or elk hunting, but the view in the Fall is unbeatable. Naturally, we wanted to take a peak.

We grabbed our camera, hopped in the car, and set off toward the Mountains. Along the way, we would point out the most colorful trees, pick them out like a lineup. (We really get into this.) But, the longer we drove, the more disappointed I became. The last couple of nights had been cold – near freezing temps – and it must have been enough for the trees to drop much of their leaves and for the ones left to brown quickly. There were very few of the colors we’d seen driving around town – the yellows and oranges and purples. The Ozarks are still beautiful, but, this day at least, not for the brilliant array of Fall colors.

We made the most of our day, but I couldn’t shake my disappointment. It may sound a bit melodramatic, but I had been excited about the drive. It’s not just about trees. It’s about beauty and it’s about the adventure of sharing in it with my wife.

There’s something within the human soul that has a profound longing for beauty. Not only to see it, but to be enshrouded by it, to be enveloped in grandeur and majesty. I have often sensed that, when I am surrounded by the awe of something beautiful, my heart has room to unfold itself, even as it drinks everything in. I was excited that DeAnn and I would have this chance together to behold this dramatic transition from summer, as if God were giving us one last dose of this beauty before the long, muffled months of winter dulled the complexion of landscape in its brown and white shade and long shadows. (Winter has a beauty of its own, but it is a beauty of hope, that things will one day change and come back to life. Fall’s beauty is a last explosion of color, like the best firework that’s held for the last during a Fourth of July celebration.)

I think this is one of the ways to know more of God – to see His handiwork. It may be in fall foliage, or it may be in the splendor of a life transformed. It can come in the simplicity of a smile from someone you adore or in the innocent play of children. Maybe it’s the beauty of a job well-done, a construction job completed at last or a paper that came together just right. Or the way sometimes we have an incredible grace to persist through tough times and discover that our character has grown some through it and even by way of the suffering.

The most dazzling of all beauty is the Source of it Himself. “One thing I ask,” wrote the Psalmist, no doubt hungry for this Fount of all beauty, “that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.” (Psalm 27:4) All the days of his life. It must be an endless supply.

 

How Near is the Kingdom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A 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 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.

 

Very Present Help

Something has been on my mind lately, but at the back of it, sticking me like a splinter in my brain. It wasn’t until I started praying this morning that I realized what it was.

I had planned on praying in the truck on the way to work, and so I spent some time before leaving playing with our dogs — which for me involves getting on my hands and knees and wrestling with them, throwing their toys, talking excitedly to them, loving them, laughing about it all. After that, I left.

It was then that I suddenly got really serious and somber and began, “Dear Lord God of my heart and life, King and Companion…” My voice was in such stark contrast to its previous light-hearted laughter and joy that I immediately took notice. “What’s up with this?” I asked myself. Why wasn’t my time with God as joyous and playful as it was with my own dogs? My affection for them caused me to smile and spontaneously burst with laughter, and I would have gladly stayed longer to play with them had I the time, such was the fun it was. In contrast, my approach with God felt dutiful, urgent, dry. Not enjoyable. Not as it should be toward and endlessly affectionate (and playful*) Father.

Maybe it’s because there is business to attend to. Maybe because there is some freedom to fight for, and He is my Commander on the field, and the field is my own heart.

The last week and a half, I’ve pulled away from God somewhat in my heart, hidden from Him. Why? Deception from the Evil One concerning God’s heart and intentions? Or, because He wants to address something painful or something I fear, even if irrationally, like lancing a wound so that it can be healed? Does He want to exorcise that splinter in my brain?

Whatever may be going on — and I need the Lord God to reveal to me what it is and what my role is to be in all of it — surely it is the affectionate embrace and intimate communion with Him that I need in context of all of it, as a backdrop, as a promise, as a rescue. For surely He is my “very present help,” as He promises to be (Psalm 46:1).

I did a quick search for “help” in the Scriptures, and it turned up, among many helpful verses throughout the Psalms, the following from Isaiah 41 (verses 8-13). I sense it to be words the Lord God for me especially this morning, words of affirmation, affection, and promise:

I took you from the ends of the earth,
from its farthest corners I called you.
I said, ‘You are my servant’;
I have chosen you and have not rejected you.

So do not fear, for I am with you;
do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you;
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

“All who rage against you
will surely be ashamed and disgraced;
those who oppose you
will be as nothing and perish.

Though you search for your enemies,
you will not find them.
Those who wage war against you
will be as nothing at all.

For I am the LORD, your God,
who takes hold of your right hand
and says to you, Do not fear;
I will help you.

*On the issue of the playfulness of God’s character, no one has written more directly and colorfully than Mike Yaconelli in Dangerous Wonder. He writes, “Jesus Christ knew how to play as well as pray; how to laugh as well as cry; how to be serious about life but not take Himself too seriously. Jesus Christ came to save us from our sin and to save us from becoming severe, unyielding, harsh, and terminally serious…Jesus’ words were not somber, oppressive, smothering, and threatening; they were lively, full of colorful images and earthy characters — fun stories that left His listeners wanting more… Jesus understood He could protect the seriousness of the gospel by interspersing His life and message with a sense of playfulness.” Could it be that Jesus is inviting us to be more playful with Him and with our work to advance the Kingdom? “Play,” Yaconelli continues, “is an expression of God’s presence in the world; one clear sign of God’s absence in society is the absence of playfulness and laughter. Play is not an escape; it is the way to release the life-smothering grip of busyness, stress, and anxiety. (Playfulness is a modern expression of hope, a celebration of the flickering light of the gospel that plays with the dark by pouncing on the surrounding darkness like a cat toying with a mouse.)” He completes his thought with the flat-out pronouncement that “God does play with our souls. He hides and He seeks and His laughter heals our hearts.” Doesn’t it follow, after all, that a good Father would play with His kids with at least as much gusto as we may play with ours or even with our pets? Perhaps that splinter He wants to dislodge is the mark of a mind and heart far too serious, a soul who needs to re-learn the art of a playful intimacy with a God who is passionately intense enough to runs screaming to His neighbors and friends over a lost coin found, who literally sings over me with intense delight, whose Christ, in the words of Abraham Heschel, “plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not His, to the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Maybe I simply need the grace of childlike wonder and joy as He shares with me all the business of the Kingdom. (John 15:15).