Epic Wants

"What do you long for?" we were asked in church last weekend.
What is your epic want.  It is good to know, because uncovering this sort of longing within ourselves puts us in touch with our most intense form of hope.

I participated in the exercise.  I came up with this: my most intense longing is to repeat as often as possible those moments when I have felt the Spirit of God lift me to a place where joy seems almost tangible and time irrelevant.  But when the "thinking" time was finished, the pastor began listing sample answers, and I realized I'd gone a different direction than he intended.  He spoke of failing health, broken relationships, financial or professional issues.  Maybe it would involve an epic want for the sake of a loved one--one with failing health or addictions to battle.

So I went back to my thought on the epic want and began considering it in terms of others.  Use the word epic with me, and I'm going to engage.  I love the idea of the epic. Saint Peter lived epic.

Sept. 21, 2005
Thinking more on this idea of being "in the gap" as a prophet.  Reading about Peter's vision in which God proclaims clean what had been unclean since the days of Moses.
 

Peter Visits Cornelius Acts 10:9-15

9 The next day as Cornelius’s messengers were nearing the town, Peter went up on the flat roof to pray. It was about noon,and he was hungry. But while a meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw the sky open, and something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners. In the sheet were all sorts of animals, reptiles, and birds. Then a voice said to him, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat them.”

“No, Lord,” Peter declared. “I have never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have declared impure and unclean.”

But the voice spoke again: “Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.” The same vision was repeated three times. Then the sheet was suddenly pulled up to heaven.

Peter was very perplexed. What could the vision mean? Just then the men sent by Cornelius found Simon’s house. Standing outside the gate, they asked if a man named Simon Peter was staying there.

Meanwhile, as Peter was puzzling over the vision, the Holy Spirit said to him, “Three men have come looking for you. Get up, go downstairs, and go with them without hesitation. Don’t worry, for I have sent them.” So Peter went down and said, “I’m the man you are looking for. Why have you come?”

 

Two different things appear to be happening here. One being that God intends that all people have equal access to the effects of the sacrificial Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The other being that Peter is told he can eat unclean foods.  Had Peter gotten "stuck" thinking the vision was devoid of a larger symbolic meaning, he'd have missed that point entirely. 
But Peter understood. When he met with the Roman officer who sent for him on an angelic prompt, "...Peter told them, 'You know it is against our laws for a Jewish man to enter a Gentile home like this or to associate with you. But God has shown me that I should no longer think of anyone as impure or unclean. So I came without objection as soon as I was sent for. Now tell me why you sent for me.' (vs. 28-29) The symbol within the vision (eating what was unclean) was different from the reality of how Peter was to walk through its meaning (going into the home of a Roman officer.)  The symbol was personal (Peter was hungry when he went into the trance) but the reality was universal (all people can be made clean.) Peter's visionary "filter" was working well.

I have spent the years since writing that post in September of 2005 waiting for some of the things visionary to migrate from personal to universal. When a vision finds its reality as quickly as Peter's did, that's one thing...when it is years coming to any life-application it is more difficult to keep its image-potential real. Peter stood in a gap that involved perceived Hebrew law and the revelation of God.  His only defense for the inscrutable gap he was called to fill: "Who was I that I could withstand God?" (Acts 11:7)

The day after receiving the challenge to uncover my epic longing, I read the following in Forgotten Among the Lilies, by Rolheiser.  He based it on his reading of G.K. Chesterton.:

"A man who was entirely careless of spiritual things things died and went to hell.  And he was much missed on earth by his old friends.  His business agent went down to the gates of hell to see if there was any chance of bringing him back. But, though he pleaded for the gates to be opened, the iron bars never yielded.
His priest went also and argued: 'He was not really a bad fellow, let him out, please!'
The gates remained stubbornly shut against all their voices.
Finally, his mother came, she did not beg for his release. Quietly, and with a strange catch in her voice, she said to Satan, 'Let me in.'
Immediately, the great doors swung open upon their hinges. For love goes down through the gates of hell and there redeems the damned."

Christ "descended into hell," and I believe there are ways in this life we act in kind as His ambassadors.  And maybe we don't have any other "excuse" for what we're doing than Peter's: "who was I that I could withstand God?"
So with regards to other people, I found my epic want.
You've called me to be a Mother, God.
You reminded me that when Deborah, the prophetess was "recognized" in song, she was not described as one who arose a prophet, or even as one who arose a judge--though she was both. No, the song went like this:
"The peasantry ceased in Israel, they ceased until you arose, Deborah, arose as a mother in Israel..." (Judges 5:7)
And Deborah is my name, too.
So I agree.  I acknowledge my epic longing--to be such a "mother" sent after those You choose for me--though they be in their own personal hells.  I will go and ask for the gates to be opened that I may enter.

Don't Do Too Much Too Soon

‎"It's hard to beat a person who never gives up."--Babe Ruth.

"Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." (Romans 8:24-25)

But here's the rub: how do we "hope" for those things we feel God has given us that make no sense?  How do we "never give up" on what we don't even understand?  How do we hope for a landscape that defies everything we know?
At this point in my journal I perceived myself as actively engaged in dream-ministry, as  it is called by my friend who received the benefits of my "unwitting" middle-of-the-night dream-prayer over her heart troubles.  But dreams are often unfamiliar landscapes.  How does one attach faith to such a thing?  I began to explore that question through scripture and reflection.


Sept 21, 2005
Scripture study on these images: escaping, bread, communion-Sabbath
I the Lord have called you in righteousness, and will hold your hand..." (electricity in the hand that slices bread...)
Behold the former things have come to pass,
And new things I declare,
Before they spring forth I tell you of them.  --Isaiah 42:6-9
Holy bread--only Aaron and his sons are to eat it (Exodus 29:33) but years after Aaron lived, David and his men ate the showbread.  (I Samuel 21-22) Then Saul killed those who helped David, except the one who "escaped" and ran to tell David.  He took the ephod, the tool of inquiry, the thing worn by a high priest when he represented the people before God, took it to David.  David received this one who escaped and protected him. Here is both the one who escapes and bread together in a story...

All this comes around to Christ, because he refers to this particular story.  David ate the showbread. David was not a priest.  Many would say end of story.  David was wrong.  But Christ used the story as an example to help his accusers understand why they should not accuse him.  "If you had understood what this means, 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath." (Matt. 12:3-8) To this day, I've heard sermons that say, "the priest and David screwed up so all those people died," but I think that misses why the story is in the Bible, or at least why Christ thought it was there.

"In all I have said to you, be circumspect and make no mention of the name of other gods, nor let it be heard from your mouth." (Ex. 23:13) This comes right after the section about the law of the sabbath which Jesus references.  Circumspect in my dictionary is defined as "to look around, be cautious, careful to consider all circumstances and possible consequences.  Prudent."  I do feel the need to be circumspect.  I feel like I am in the position of slicing the showbread for serving.  Maybe even of being one with the bread.  That the bread may be sliced twice--one for the priest who has the "right" to it, but also for the priest to share to sustain the life of one God chooses, for a mercy.  That the mercy and not just the sacrifice might be the thing to give glory to God. 
Now, how?  How does all this apply? 



I studied this way through scripture and reflection, and I struggled--and still do--wrestling under the Spirit's ongoing lead--indeed like a sheep that could easily wander astray, not out of willfulness, not out of spite or disbelief; more out of the ignorance of simply being human.  As Peter said, "Who was I that I could understand God?" (Acts 11:7)
So the Spirit began to lead my understanding in things that required that high level of circumspection..  He drew me out to new places, new landscapes. He challenged my assumptions about right and wrong. He drew me sip by sip to the well that would eventually quench my thirst.  With little sparks that flared in the random things of life, He linked my most personal thoughts and dreams and wants and mysteries to a larger plane. 
For instance, I'd be reading C.S. Lewis' work, The Great Divorce, tootling along through it,  until I read the story of Sarah Smith, one of the "great ones" of heaven, As the narrator said, "ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things." I read her story impersonally as it was given, until I came to this part:  "It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further.  Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength.  But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe to life." (p.118-120) I stopped at those words and gasped, as I immediately thought of my dream of cutting bread, of power coursing through my little finger and up my arm.  A morsel of definition, but nothing more.

But now, I re-read the full text about this lady as I look for the quote to put here, and I gasp yet again for much more of what Lewis wrote of her has become my story.  But there is a beautiful hope for a different ending in my own telling of the story, a shift concerning those who would inhabitant heaven and those who would choose hell for the sake of nursing self-pity over a perceived lack of her regard.  If I am her, the dwaves of life might still choose heaven.  There is far more hope for now in my life's telling of the tale.  A beautiful bend in the river the Spirit travels as He tells the story through me.  But on first reading 7 years ago, it was nothing more than a beautiful clue to solving a mystery of hope and redemption that required all this time in order to find its pertinence again.

So the first thing He shows me is the hardest to look at for it is what I see merely as myself, and what I see reminds me of my ignorance, my selfishness, my canality.  Only  courageous looking will do this. It is like hacking away with humility, beating through the thicket of sin and haunts from the past. But if I come out on the other side of first-sight, I find He breaks down my perspective and reshapes it such that I see something refreshingly different. I see something "truer" in its fitness for defining the "heavenly vision" as it was first given, truer than what my ferverishly cold and worldly eyes thought they were seeing. 

Over time, I learned this: Never give up on the vision, on the covenant that it is brought by the hand of God.  Let it be battered into proper shape, as Oswald Chambers says.  Finally, what shall we do when God chooses to use us as such an instrument of vision? We follow the advice David Kundtz received from his seventh grade teacher:  "Sit down, be still, and pay attention!"
Certainly regarding the things God says are His plans, we need to do exactly that.

On Receiving That Which Is Sacred

Ken Gire in his book The Weathering Grace of God, says "I have had moments when it seemed I was at the railing that separates heaven and earth, and there was offered as sacrament...whatever your moments have been, you sensed that something sacred was being offered you."

This next entry is that sort of thing.  Surely, the most poignant vision of sacrament I've ever know personally.

September 20
Last night, I dreamed I was slicing a loaf of bread.  It had been sliced once before, but I was cutting another slice.  And as my hand holding the knife reached the bottom of the loaf, an electric-like charge ran through my pinkie finger and up my arm.  I had thoughts of communion bread swell in me as this all happened.  What is this about, God?!? It "felt" a lot like the anointing vision I had about my husband.  And my mind heard Your words, "This is my body, broken for you."  If this is to be made real somehow, prepare me and those around me for it, Lord.  Is this part of that "going into the gap" idea?

My Bible reading today also hits brokenness in prophetic living.  Ezekiel's wife dies suddenly, and God directs Ezekiel to process the event as a prophet rather than just as a man.  What an incredible assignment!  How profoundly connected he must have been to God, with all people--even his wife--cast as but a shadow of a larger existence for him, a larger one that he was called to proclaim.  Then in chapter 24 of his book, it says "And you, son of man, will it not be in the day when I take from them their stronghold, their joy, their glory, the desire of their eyes, and that on which they set their minds, their sons and their daughters:  on that day one who escapes will come to you to let you hear it with your ears; on that day your mouth will be opened to him who has escaped; you shall speak and no longer be mute.  Thus you will be a sign to them, and they shall know that I am the Lord." 
Who or what is the stronghold You'll take away, O God?  The joy?  The glory?  The desire of their eyes and the one they think about?  Even as Ezekiel surely wanted to feel these things privately for his wife, suddenly lost to him, he instead would open his mouth, lose his muteness and become a sign to those who fell into a similar experience in their own way.  Who is Ezekiel's wife now, God?  Or what?

I think of something that happened in my homeroom this morning.  [I taught at a Christian school and had a junior high homeroom when this entry was written.]  The little gal who always volunteered to pray at the start of the day was pulled out of the school last Friday.  So when I asked for a prayer volunteer this time, it was to an open field.  And a little boy who had never before volunteered raised his hand and prayed.  The memory haunts me again as I see a real-world echo of this passage from the pages of prophetic history.  When the stronghold is removed, a formerly mute voice will rise.  When Ezekiel's wife was taken suddenly, it was a sign of how swiftly comes judgment and/or change. And it happened today, too.  And I think it will surely happen again.

Are You calling me into the gap only to swiftly remove me as a sign of how limited is the time left for revelation?  Maybe not, but maybe so; and if so, I ask that You make me strong enough to endure such a thing, as well as the Ezekiel who loves me.  I know You do not leave any to suffer any longer than is necessary to accomplish your larger purpose for good, if suffer they must. I do believe this.

I will study on these things.  I will study on anointing oil, sacramental bread, and the "one who escapes." I will see why You are showing me these things...

So much has passed since this early wash of visionary stuff.  So slow has been my learning curve in the most important part of it all. 
Chastity, in its larger definition.

Today in my prayer journal, I quoted from Rolheiser's Forgotten Among the Lilies:

 "To be chaste means to experience things, all things, respectfully and to drink them in only when we are ready for them.  We break chastity when we experience anything irreverently or prematurely.  This is what violates either another's or our own growth.  It is the lack of chastity in experiencing, irreverence and prematurity, that lobotomizes the soul.
"Experience can be good or bad...Travel, study, achievement, sex, exposure to newness, the breaking of taboos, all can be good if experienced reverently and at their proper time.
"Conversely, they can tear the soul apart (even when they are not wrong in themselves) when they are not drunk in chastely, namely at a pace that respects fully both others' and our own growth."

I went on to observe that this is the crux of my trouble the whole time I've walked a path of  receiving these things visionary.  They "feel" so deliciously alive with a life that is incredibly intoxicating, and even when they are inscrutable, they pull the soul into a state of heightened awareness that is in itself compelling.  I find myself wanting with urgency to both receive more of them and to see them manifested real-world.  I do not stop to consider that often times--because of their very nature as revelation of Your creative work--they appear to "breach taboos," as Rolheiser puts it, in ways I need to allow my heart and mind time to process.  I think both I and my spouse have struggled with the strain of waiting for You to "link learning to integration" within us, for we both have received inscrutable visions from Thee.
God help us understand how to walk in this prophetic-chastity better and how to honor You even in the context of Your profoundly good and life-giving messages! Help us to distinguish between what we are meant to see and what we are meant to do.  To let go of the desire to force things to happen according to our limited understanding of what You're saying.  We don't receive the visions for that reason.  Help us to keep our side of the balance between why You give the vision and why we receive it that we might keep the childlike faith!
And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:2-3)

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing...
--G.K. Chesterton in A Second Childhood

Another Instance of Vision Meeting Sacred Poetry...for My Husband

"Our culture's demand that everyone be like everyone else is not so much malicious as it is despairing.  The death of idealism is a child of despair, always."
and
Prophecy is seen as unrealistic, idealism as immature.  We are growing ever more dumb.  Hence our task today is to be leaven, to be idealistic and in that way to be prophetic..." 
Ronald Rolheiser in Forgotten Among the Lilies


September 18
Have I mentioned yet the vision I had of my husband?  I saw him being anointed with oil--a gleaming rivulet dripping and flowing over him like liquid silver spilling over his face and beard and shoulders.  He was in a dark place, but the oil lit him as it dripped over him for it carried an internal glow.
I had this picture come to me a while ago.  Now I come across this Psalm:

Behold how good and how pleasant it is
For brethren to dwell together in unity!
It is like the precious oil upon the head,
Running down the beard,
The beard of Aaron.
Running down on the edge of his garments.
It is like the dew of Hermon,
Descending upon the mountain of Zion;
For there the Lord commanded the blessing--
Life forevermore.
Psalm 133

In my continuing devotional study on the topic of visions, I see read the following:
Oswald Chambers in his March 10-11 entries in My Utmost...says "the natural heart will do any amount of serving, but it takes the heart broken by conviction of sin and baptized by the Holy Ghost and crumpled into the purpose of God before the life becomes the sacrament of its message...we cannot attain to a vision, we must live in the inspiration of it until it accomplishes itself...Watch God's cyclones.  The only way God sows His saints is by His whirlwind.  Are you going to prove an empty pod?  It will depend on whether or not you are actually living in the light of what you have seen.  Let God fling you out...If God sows you, you will bring forth fruit." 

Christ, himself, did not expect the seeds He sowed to sprout in half an hour. He shared vision, then lived it out in front of his followers. Even then, His disciples had trouble "getting it," but He knew the seed had "all the germinating power of God and would bring forth fruit after its kind when put in the right soil."

In Daily Thoughts for Disciples, Chambers again uses this imagery:  "Sow the word of God, and everyone who listens will get to God.  If you sow vows, aspirations, resolutions, emotions, you will reap nothing but exhaustion...but sow the word of God and as sure as God is God, it will bring forth fruit.  A person may not grasp all that is said, but something in one is intuitively held by it."   

Finally, he says this: "If an emotion be kindled by the Spirit of God and you do not let it have its right issue in your life, it will react on a lower level." Spur us on, O God, to giving a high enough level to the emotions You plant within us.

Visioning is not for the faint of heart, nor is being caught up in a prophet's vision  that is from God.  Easier to melt into obscurity than to become the stuff of a divine vision. 
Nevertheless, as DC Talk sings, "Even the deepest seed still finds the light of day,"  and when that prophetic seed meets daylight, it is a thing most glorious to behold.  Whether you're the seed, or the soil, or even the whirlwind, it is glorious if it is a thing of God. 
Never fear the vision; fear the lack of it.  Fear settling for the attainable second best. 
I love that the man I married is one who could live out such a vision as this one God sent for him, this of glowing anointing oil.  I love that he could carry it to its full fruition. 
I love that I am reminded of it right now.

Dreeams Defined

 "I saw a large circle of people, holding hands and murmuring prayers. Maybe 40-50 of them? Not sure. And there was a gap in the circle. I felt the question given to me, "Would you join us?" So I stepped into the circle and joined hands with them and began to pray. I felt a surge of power here, too, a wind in the circle, but it was not enough...not at all enough. Not against what was coming in that black sky. Against such an adversary, there was need for something so much stronger..."

I wrote those words in August 2005 and related them on a recent post.  This image became one of the first installments in a methodology God would use consistently with me to send "coded" messages, for lack of a better descriptor.  I began to break the code  for this one in the Sept. 17 entry:

Sept 17, 2005
I think I've gotten a Biblical message about the gapped-circle dream in which a circle of praying people,their hands clasped together, asked me to fill that gap.  In the book of Ezekiel, the prophet speaks to other "foolish" prophets, saying, "Woe to the foolish prophets, who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing!  O, Israel, your prophets are like foxes in the desert. You have not gone into the gaps to build a wall for the house of Israel to stand in battle on the day of the Lord."(Ezekiel 15:2-5.) Then again in chapter 22, starting at vs. 29:  "The people of the land have used oppressions, committed robbery and mistreated the poor and needy; and they wrongfully oppress the stranger.  So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall and stand in the gap before me on behalf of the land..." 

Lord, you have shown me that I am a prophet who does stand in the gap, showed me before I knew what such a "gap" even was, before my mind even understood the highly distilled imagery.  Thank You for that faithfulness! Show me now, how to be in that gap.  Make me understand how to do this for You!

St. Elizabeth Seton says: "These events are permitted and guided by Thy wisdom, which solely is light.  We are in darkness and must be thankful that our knowledge is not needed to perfect Thy work." 
Keep my heart strong for Your purposes!

This strange imagery took merely a month to start finding its "definition" in the language of God, but other enigmatic images have taken much longer.  I read once that in Biblical standards, the longer a covenant takes to find its fruition in the natural order, the larger a covenant it is.

Considering I still have some covenant images that remain inscrutable to this day, I expect they must be very large indeed!

Raw Faith

"His brain was going through one of those violent and perfectly calm moments in which revery is so profound that it absorbs reality...It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light of Paradise."
--Victor Hugo

What do we do with those moments of revery? How do we invite God into them, when we see Satan, even as the light of Paradise washes over us?

Max Lucado says, "Circumcision proclaimed that there is no part of our life too private or too personal for God...[it] symbolized the nearness God desires with His people.  God puts a knife to our self-sufficiency."  (p. 47, the Grip of Grace.) 

I wrote a letter back on Oct. 16 of 2005 to an acquaintance who was suffering profound rejection.  I knew him only slightly, so it was an absolute God-prompt letter, but his response was this:  "Your willingness to respond to a burden on your heart and contact me is a great example of sensitivity to the work of the Spirit." 
Here's the letter:


Dear ____,
I have seen God choose some people to be deep heart evangelists.  I think you are one of those people.  Many are good "head" evangelists who can explain theology, salvation, sanctification, God's historical relationship with His people etc.; but a few are called to be primarily channels of His wooing grace.  When we meet such a person, we see him or her as the sweetest wine of Christ communing with His saints.  Rarely do we realize that to become that communion wine, that inspiring person at some point had to go through the experience of becoming crushed grapes.  (Analogy credit to Oswald Chambers.)  God knows the wine He's making, but rarely does the person--or even those around him--really know what to do with that grape-crushing moment.  I wonder if you have had a grape-crushing moment?  If so, don't think it ends there.

I don't know the details about your experience with leaving this place, but I know this from my own experience and from that of others:  before God can pour that deep-heart evangelistic love through you, before you can really become a river of living water, He must first show you what would happen if you were to take any of that water for yourself, build a dam, create a pool, soak in it.  It seems like it would be so obvious not to do that...but the water He sends is so sweet. His love is described as an all-consuming fire; and it is a fire that you can go through safely, but it will burn you if you try to stop and hold it for yourself.  The ironic thing of it is, the better you perceive the glorious passion God holds for those he sends you "fishing" for, the more not less tempting it is to cling to such beautiful love and make it all for you.  (Another Oswald credit.)  So to protect you, He lets you have a taste of "what could come," a taste of the hell that this love wrongly managed affords a person.  In this allowance, He actually preserves you, giving you power to be more sensitive, more direct and less tempted to destroy yourself in the process of rescuing another. 

Whether you are actually clinging to something God's heart wants you to spend out for Him, or if you've suffered the pain of false accusation, either way the experience teaches a valuable lesson.  The potential for this temptation, this want to cling to God's rivers, it will always be there. It might very well even grow greater, but alongside it grows the perception that restraint must be companion to the holy-fire love of God.  In my opinion, this is a most supernatural definition of meekness.  If He allowed us to fully comprehend the depths of His love all at once, that glory would surely destroy us, as even Moses couldn't see the face of God and survive.  The face holds the eye, and the eye is the window to the soul, where love resides most potently.  In analogous terms, God was saying man could not survive such a view, though we are the apple of His eye on the flip side. 

Try to submit to His way of grooming you for this call.  You won't always be just "crushed grapes" before Him.  You won't tarry in suffering one moment longer than is necessary to accomplish God's highest purposes for you.
Keep the faith, Brother!  I am honored to pray for your ministry.


"What causes the head to move from a reliance on concepts to a reliance on faith?  Or the will to move from a reliance on possessions to a reliance on charity?  Or the personality to move from a reliance on security and control to trusting in hope?  We enter into the dark night of the spirit when we make the decision to live by raw faith...No longer able to derive any support from our natural faculties, we experience a horrible emptiness, a sense of weakness, a feeling of abandonment...the soul feels that God has rejected it and with an abhorrence of it casts it into darkness.  Still, deprived of their normal way of relating to the wold, our intellect, will and memory begin to rely on faith, hope and charity."  (Ronald Rolheiser in The Shattered Lantern.)

A season of pendulum swings between testing and revelation feel like they're swinging less wildly for me now, even as a new season hooks into this one that is finishing.  I'm still learning lessons about not "using" others to define myself, which was an essential part of what I was saying in this letter written years ago.  I'm also learning important things about not letting others use me to define themselves, a new threat to freedom and unique personhood in God that I'm only now beginning to see as significant.  I'm sure there maybe other layers to this onion as well, but for now this layer is plenty to keep me occupied.  It will need its fair share of time under the microscope before I reach for another slide.

Learning to Shift Gears

I learned to work a manual transmission when I was a young driver.  My father taught me on a straight-arrow gravel road that cut through corn fields and in a car that was exactly as old as I was. 
I'm not a young driver any more, but there are still many ways I'm only now learning how to smoothly shift gears.

September 17, 2005

So now I have started a study--or feel led to do one--about how to do life when revelations are a frequent occurrence.  Another quote from Oswald Chambers in his book, Daily Thoughts for Disciples (April 12) fits the topic:  "Those of us who have never had visions or ecstasies ought to be very thankful."  Ha! Indeed!  He says this because "visions" tend to be sensuous, in other words they touch the senses when they come.  I can certainly attest to that!  Both the good ones--like the one I had of the Bride--and the bad ones--like the dark, broken star approaching--were incredibly sensuous.  They can even come with a temptation attached, especially if they are intended to serve as intercessory for someone else. Reminds me of the verse that says beware when you reach out to help another in their weakness lest you fall into temptation yourself.

Chambers says, "The hindrance comes when we begin to keep sensuous images spiritually in our minds...Visions and any emotions at all are the greatest snare to a spiritual life, because when we get them we are apt to build them round our reasoning, our reasoning round them, and go no further."  This is where I have been.  This is where God is working on me.  Chambers notes that people who are stuck here are "still true to God, still true to their testimony of what God has done for them, but they have never exercised the great God-given reason that is in them and gotten beyond the images of their experience into the knowledge that 'God alone is life.'" 

It's time I learn to receive these visions with my spirit and not just my senses, lest I be ineffective! Make it so, Lord!  And, I still say, give me more!

Ten years later, and I am still being groomed on a level deeper than conscious reasoning on this one, I think.  For a long while--3 or 4 years, I was too physically weak and incapacitated to receive much of anything in a visionary sense.  Those years of living just below par physically and in something of a mental fog put all consideration of this sort of thing off  the table.  But within the last few months, health has returned.  Acuity, too; and along with them have come a slowly blooming passion for life, ambition to receive more from God, and a prompt to look back and see what was happening with me before the coma-like phase of my life began.  In fact, this post somewhat defines the theme of this whole blog.  To continue:

Another thing about revelations--Paul says that they were the reason he had to carry a thorn in the flesh around with him, so that self-exaltation would not tempt him. Knowing this makes God's response far more a gift than it would seem to be if we don't know the reason for the thorn.  "My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness," says God to Paul.  And when Paul understands the full scope of thorn to answer--understands with that "spiritual reasoning" that Chambers talks about, Paul says, "Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities for Christ's sake, for when I am weak, them I am strong."  He even says he boasts in that infirmity, that the power of Christ may rest upon him! 

Forgive me, Lord, I am not there yet.  The sense of my own weakness still brings me shame--which is a form of self-exaltation, I now realize.  I guess I still think I should be able to be "good" for you, but in myself.  So if you deem it fitting to sink a thorn into my flesh, may I walk in Paul's shadow faithfully, making Your strength my own, keeping me ever dependent on You and not myself alone.

This looks good in its pencil-to-paper format.  Far more difficult and far more a cause of consternation when God puts it all into practice in a life.  Working to take a breath-taking sensuous vision (or as I would experience later, one that presents itself with such mysterious symbolism as to defy any sort of reason at all) and carve it down to its "applicable" form...this takes supreme effort.  It is like the work of a sculptor who chisels a block of fine stone.  Even more daunting is doing this work of refining and recasting the vision while being gnawed by a thorn of in-sufficiency and utter dependence.  It is like doing that sculpting blind-folded.

And I, like Paul, still have to reach for that grace and sufficiency outside my own capacities every day. Sometimes I'd rather pose than sculpt.  Sometimes I want to peek out from under the blindfold.  It is a challenging discipline. 
But it continues to grow nonetheless.

Do Not Disturb...

... in the place where God is kicking up bright clouds.

"The most staggering thing about Jesus Christ is that He makes human destiny depend not on goodness or badness, not on things done or not done, but on who we say He is."  --Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts for Disciples, March 13.

And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.   Rev. 12:10-11

Sept 15, 2005
God has utterly broken me.  Indeed, He took me into excess of light even as He did the disciples at the Transfiguration.  And I, too, was afraid.  And I, too, found myself alone there, with only Christ. 
He showed me the beauty of His love, passion, vision, supernatural intervention in the life of another person, and I wanted to make that vision real for myself.  I wanted to BE Him making things turn as I saw with His eye they could be. Strange covetousness consumed me, and I became Satan Incarnate.  I wanted to own, to control the Beauty You allowed me to see...even though this belonged only to You.  But You did not leave me there.  No, YOu plunged me into the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the garden and allowed me full identification with the Fall.  I had no idea!  I had no idea it was THIS, God!  How could I know what it is to be the most dangerous thing to all mankind, to "feel" the fall?  How could I know what it is like to stand in the place of Peter, receiving a vision of the perfect way, and then beingcalled Satan, told to get behind the back of the very One who painted the picture.  Behind the back, because even though it is avision I'd like to make real for Your sake, I want to do it NOW, for my sake.
But to likewise touch redemption.  To see You approach, lift up, step into the circle of weakness and offer strength; to have You cover shame, complete what is unfinished, weather away selfishness and covetousness until all that remains is the beauty that ever shall be, the realization of the original vision, only now in its best realization, one that remains true to Your nature. 
Love springs eternal.  What a heart You have!  That You chose at all to return on the third day.  My Redeemer!  Give me such a strong heart, to rise from death and ashes to love again from first to last!

Oh, the timing of these visits to my old self.
Today, I find myself  standing on the other bank of this particular river-crossing, and needing to allow others to struggle across as I merely watch and encourage, but do not assist.  Today, I am not so much the butterfly fighting its way free of the cocoon, I am the hand that could ease another butterfly's escape, but in so doing ruin its chances to ever fly strong.  What if someone had "saved" me from my experience that September years ago?  Would I be where I am now, if I had been spared the experience of suffering through the more horrifying side of self-awareness?
Oswald Chambers speaks to me on this side of the river-crossing as well:

"One of the hardest lessons to learn comes from our stubborn refusal to refrain from interfering in other people's lives. It takes a long time to realize the danger of being an amateur providence, that is, interfering with God's plan for others. You see someone suffering, and say , 'He will not suffer, and I will make sure that he doesn't.' You put your hand right in front of God's permissive will to stop it, and then God says, 'What is that to you?' "--My Utmost for His Highest, November 15

So precept follows precept. 

A Matter of Shifting Perspective

Walking today, I felt a call to make a shift, a shift of longing, of expectation.
Ever since I started the journal that is chronicled here, I've had one dream.  I've dreamed that someday, someone would come alongside me.  Stand shoulder to shoulder with me, look at the same "out there" and converse with me on the view we shared.
It has happened only rarely.  Only a time or two.  Mostly when I'm not expecting it.  And only briefly. Not enough to feel like my "dream" has come to fruition.
It has been a disappointment, but it has remained a hope.
Today, however, I felt  the nudge to abandon that hope, that dream for this particular sort of human communion.  I should let it blow away like a fallen leaf.   

 

 



 

In its place I received a new assignment. 
Allow myself to sit and face my companions, eye to eye rather than ear to ear.  See each other rather than see distant things together.  It has been a long time coming, this realization that the old longing I felt was a form of temptation. 

Oswald Chambers says, of this sort of thing, "He [Satan] does not come to us on the premise of tempting us to sin, but on the premise of shifting our point of view...He tempts us to make us lose what God has put into us through regeneration, namely, the possibility of being of value to God...and only the Spirit of God can detect this as a temptation of the devil."

--My Utmost for His Highest, Sept. 18 entry.

I understand why I wanted that shoulder to shoulder visionary beside me:  human validation.  Interestingly, the planted seeds for that longing are the topic of today's old-journal review:

 

August 9

Larry Crabb says, "Reconnecting a detached soul to the life blood of community requires power that only a few people seem to possess.  Powerful people accept the challenge to identify, nourish, and release the life of Christ in others by connecting with them."  So I try doing this.  I look at a fisherman and say, "Hey, Peter!  You're going to be a powerful leader, and the wind of Pentecost will blow through the building and put tongues of fire over EVERY head where you'll be preaching.  I know you're just fishing now, but I can see it!"  When I try to share what You've given me to "see" for  these others' futures, I get a lukewarm reception, or a perplexed look at best.  So I come back to You, and I say, "What's the deal?  They think I'm an idiot!"  And then I roll on the floor laughing, because this is not how the stories of prophets run at all!

 

But I think about the Christ as He is in John 6.  The sign-seekers fall away when He refuses to give any sign but His own flesh and blood, which they do not understand as a sign at all. The relationship of indwelling is the offer, and they shrug.  All but a few walk away.  Do You still take us into relationship with people sometimes where there is no commitment, no obligation, no ties and no easily-perceived pay-off?  Loving, connecting from such a posture is awfully vulnerable--for if there is rejection, then the blame for it rests squarely on our naked selves, on who we are either to ourselves or to each other.  And for this we have no recourse but to bring it back to You for the comforting or else drift into bitterness.

 

"...the word of the Lord was rare in those days, there was no wide-spread revelation." --I Samuel 3:1 

This is the world Samuel was born into, while the sons of Eli had reign over the "church" of the Hebrews.  Side-by-side viewing of the things of God wasn't happening there. 
But this is also the same Samuel who later anointed David king.

And now it is apparently time for me, too, to turn my view and really see who sits on the facing bench.  And it will be a good thing.



Feel the Grass

"Jesus said to her, 'Did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?' "
(John 11:40)

Being reminded of the power of believing, now after a long season of letting a promise go dry and shrivel up.  Living long as one resigned to hunger during a seemingly endless famine.  What a strange thing it is, to lift the face to rain again and know that the ground will surely yield in response to it.

August 7

Continuing in John, and taking another look at the feeding of the 5000 in chapter 6.

When Jesus sees the multitude coming, He asks, "Where shall we buy bread, that these may eat?" 
The question is a test. 
He knows what He can do.
Their responses run the same spectrum ours do:  one disciple says, "We have no resources."  Another, "This lad here has 5 barley loaves  (the food of the poor) and 2 small fish, but what are they among so many?" 
And Jesus answers, "Make the people sit down."

Faith only finds its definition, its substance in your trusting something "else" more than you trust your common sense. More than you trust your current field of vision.  More than you trust your capabilities.  More than you trust the things that seem permanently insurmountable.  Not surprising that He wondered if He'd find "faith" when He returns.  I wonder that He'd find it even now among those who profess to be His followers.  Not faith by this definition anyway.

And then there's the "sitting down" of covenant, the tarrying that adds depth and dimension to the faith--dimension of perseverance, of patience.  If we have the faith to believe that He can make something out of almost nothing, do we have the further faith to allow the work to happen around us while we simply sit n the grass and receive its over-abundance?  Or do we rather say, "Yes!  I can believe what You promise.  I can believe for the nourishment.  I can believe for the end of the terrible hunger.  So, I will make it happen!" No.  Not in this instance.  You sit down and feel the fullness of the grass.
Faith following through until the loaves and fish are in the hand.

Dreams Not Made for the Faint of Heart..

...often they bring the seeds of mysterious witness.  And I don't mean the little "handing out tracts on a street corner" type of bearing witness.  I mean reaching in your gut, dragging your naked soul out and allowing someone else to affect it.  I mean being a light-bearer in a dark places, and the first thing the light does is illuminate you as a target for trouble.  I mean shedding prayer-tears on behalf of someone on suicide watch--or even really knowing a person in that much anguish.
I mean that.

August 5

Wow!  I woke up praying for P. in a dream. In the dream-prayer, I was recounting the reality that nothing is particularly harder or easier for God.  He's God!  It is all do-able to Him.  So we can freely and faithfully bring what would seem hard (to us) as smoothly and confidently before Him as we would bring what seems easy to solve. 
R. and I were in prayer for her, and P. was in anguish.

On my reading, I'm beginning the Gospel of John, and seeing in the footnotes the literal meaning of the name, John.  "God has been gracious..." and the name used for God in that meaning is the most personal, intimate one He assigned to Himself.  In the description of John the Baptist and his witness are these words:  "This man came for a witness of the Light, that all through him might believe."  And he, too, like the Gospel-writer wore the imprint of God's most intimate name, and he pressed people into the water of life.  Yet, "He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light."  Do we have any idea the incredible balance he had to maintain? the spiritual tension involved in living such a calling?

Powerful witness.  Powerful submission. Mystery.  Reflections on all these washed over me like tidal waves responding to a distant moon.

A few days later, I whimsically emailed P. about the strange little dream I had about her.  She emailed me back.  That very night of my dream, she'd been in the ER, serious problems with her heart.  She was fine in the end.  Came out of the whole episode with a treatment plan for the healing of her heart.
But from that day forward she considered me as one who has what she called a dream ministry.
Other dreams like that one did sporadically follow.
But why I'd be called to it, I had no idea at the time.

Why Men Go to Brothels

Timing.
Such a crucial element.
This entry is for me now.

August 6
"Satan's seduction of our heart always comes in the form of a story that offers us greater control through knowing good and evil rather than the unknowns of relationship." --The Sacred Romance  Wow!

Questions to pose and consider from my John Eldredge reading:
 
Are you finished trying to arrange for a safe life? 
Can you give up your resignation to life as it stands to embrace something larger, more elusive, more unpredictable but infinately more hopeful?
Will you step into a relationship with me that could be dangerous because it is relationship delivered by the hands of the Wildest of Lovers--God Himself?
If we risk spiritual communion now, could we learn even here, in this life span, how we are "in His image" not simply as islands alone, but as part of a Triune God? 

"I will go before you and level the mountains;
I will break down gates of bronze
and cut through bars of iron.
I will give you the treasures of darkness,
riches stored in secret places,
so that you may know that I am the Lord,
the God of Israel, who summons you by name."  --Isaiah 45

And this was spoken by God, not to a holy man, but to a powerful man. 
A man who was not following God...said to draw him.  So this is a journey of the heart, after all.  Not simply a line to walk between good and evil,sifting everything with politics and doctrine and calling that holy work.  Instead, God is calling us to walk away from "less-wild lovers that have become part of our identity, embrace our nakedness, and trust in his goodness."  --Sacred Romance

But the risk of looking for the treasure in the darkness, the riches stored in secret places:  getting lost again in that dark in the form of addiction to those things that give immediate relief, a taste of transcendence so close, yet not to be touched, because it is not in itself the treasure. 

How do you prescribe thirst for yourself, standing beside a less-than-eternal well, yet still a well--and not drink? 
Can you accept a season that is designed to simply make you acquainted with thirst?
Such is the beauty, the nobility of the fast.
The Christ said his disciples did not fast because he was with them, but that they would fast...when longing for him was a part of their lives.  Does anyone long for Christ anymore?  Do they fast for that reason?

But why must it be so, that the "less-than-eternal well be attached to our desire for eternal intimate communion with God and each other in the midst of Paradise?"  Risky, God, to make it so...

But if we stand at that well together, even gaze into its waters, and yet accept thirst willingly, we are on a most intimate thread of the image of God.  WE are become the society who tastes God's deepest longing for a Bride that he is unwilling to force to anything until she begs it, for love does not force, nor is it self-indulgent.

G.K. Chesterton says, "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God."

I turn my heart off and get busy.
You turn to your addiction and get busy.
We can not by sheer willpower do anything else.
But if we hold fast to the "aching abyss" of our hearts in a dance together, then real transcedence may even yet come.
Will we "hold our hearts out hopefully in partial emptiness in a way that allows desire to be rekindled?"
As we blaze a trail along the "road less traveled" between discipline and desire can we find that "treasure of finally ceasing from being half-hearted creatures?"
Only there can we begin to receive the mystery of "ecstasies yet to come" as we embrace the mystery of being the Beloved.
Is it time for this? 
Are our hearts weary of the familiar and indulgent?
Christ stands and invites, but it is strange language to us.
It sounds too much like words that have used us and consumed us in the past, left us alone and exposed. 
So we mortgage our hearts to less wild lovers.

Dear God.
Seven years ago I wrote these words.  They merely piqued my interest then. 
It was not time for them yet.
But seven years allows a lot of burrowing deep.
And now I feel life's circumstances opening holes in the atmosphere of my soul, and I look up at them.  And they are awash with the ache of "yet to come's."
Nevertheless, I do not turn my face away.  And I do not fear.
Alongside Saint John at the close of his vision of the apocalypse, I say:
 "Even so, Lord Jesus...Come."

Dark Visions

Beautiful scenes. 
That's what my spirit's eye had seen up to the time when July rolled into August back in 2005.  But reality is:  not everything is beautiful.

August 1, 2005
We went camping for the first time this summer and Saturday night around midnight, I had a very strong feeling of disquiet--anguish, but detached from anything, free-floating.That's when the vision began.
I wonder now if I saw Lucifer approaching. In any case, this entity looked like an intricate crystal at his core, only covered in crystal spikes, like a gumball fallen from a tree, except the crystal was not round.  More like two pyramids stacked base to base.  A brownness--like dead-leaf paste--covered this core.  Still, I could tell that once--when it had been clear--light did surely flow through it making an incredible prismatic effect.  Shooting rainbows for miles in every direction.  From either side of this core, two huge arcs extended--like wings, like broken glass balls, only so broken that they simply looked like steel cord.  Whether there had once been more to them or not, I couldn't say, but I had the feeling they'd been spheres, swirling the rainbow colors, diffusing light. 

I asked God to allow me to see this creature's former state, to confirm or correct my assumptions, but He said no.  "You would long for the return of that former state for him.  You would feel compassion over the ugliness, the lonely hulk that remains; and now is not the time to feel compassion for him."

I know as I saw him float in a sea of utter black sky (no stars) I sensed coldness. Loneliness.  Insanely deep loneliness.  And there was massive power--so much power that I understood how people could wonder if this might actually be God instead, for the power overwhelmed any perception of good or bad.  Were it not for the underlying lack of joy, and for the "decay" that wrapped his core I myself might not have been sure how to receive what I saw.  I considered him.  Such coldness.  Such a fight to deny the self-awareness of lost beauty.  Reaching out to tempt Christ, to "gain" Him by offering the only substitute he has to offer for intimacy:  power.  His display of power was indeed terrible and awesome.  It has become his only solace, though small solace it is.  Underneath, unfortunately, he is brilliant.  Too brilliant not to know that power can only ever be a second best.  Yet he can't release pride and mistrust, and so power becomes the nearest he knows to an intimate companion.

Then, the vision changed.  I saw a large circle of people, holding hands and murmuring prayers.  Maybe 40-50 of them?  Not sure.  And there was a gap in the circle.  I felt the question given to me, "Would you join us?"  So I stepped into the circle and joined hands with them and began to pray.  I felt a surge of power here, too, a wind in the circle, but it was not enough...not at all enough.  Not against what was coming in that black sky.  Against such an adversary, there was need for something so much stronger. 

This particular vision lingered as a heaviness, even as the lightness of the vision of the bride had stayed with me.  I began to wonder whether I really wanted a life of visions, after all.  I did discover that the name Lucifer translates "Day Star" and so I wondered again if I really had seen the dead version of that name's earlier, implied glory. 

Other dreams followed that added to the story of this strange apparition.
Years if them.

A Joy in the Hand Is Worth...

Cupped hands of alabaster stone, cupped as if they held water, but instead they hold a votive candle, and light glows throughout and billows from the palms.  My friend has this little statue near the entryway to her kitchen.  The first time I saw it, I caught my breath.  I knew an ancient vision (on my timeline anyway) was soon to come true.  But how does one gain a light-scarred hand?  And how does one turn such a thing into an offering, pools of light to a dark soul even as pools of water are given to a thirsty one?

Ann VosKamp crooked a finger.   Helped me see a direction to explore:

Joy is a flame that glimmers only in the palm of the open and humble hand.  In an open and humble palm, released and surrendered to receive, light dances, flickers happy.  The moment the hand is clenched tight, fingers all pointing toward self and rights and demands, joy is snuffed out.  Anger is the lid that suffocates joy until she lies limp and lifeless.  And for me, it's a cosmic-numbing notion that far eclipses this domestic moment.  It speaks to the whole of my life and the vision brands me: The demanding of my own will is the singular force that smothers out joy--nothing else. --1000 Gifts

        

What do I want from this life?  What do I think I deserve?  Ann quotes Henry Ward Beecher to say, "A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves."  And this is simple, but it can stretch to a strain easily.  When the view expands to include shadows of things dancing beyond the grace of this life, beyond the grave of this life.  When the view says "only in death shall you truly possess me, if you can leave me alone until then and only observe and consider and anticipate, like a betrothed."  Then pride and joy and faith endure a different sort of smelting. 

"God does not give rights but imparts responsibilities
--response-abilities-- 
inviting us to respond to His love-gifts." 
So Ann says. 

That branding light in the hand was spoken over me.  So I dreamed the cross as a dance.  I dream the resurrection as an offering.
I choose to respond in this life according to the shadows dancing there--beyond the grave--though they resonate down into this life with a clutch-me-now winsomeness.
Because I really do believe all this.

Stigmata

The light. 
I let it pierce my hand this morning.
It was my choice.  I could have refused the dance, but no.
I let it pierce my hand, and this is what I listened to as it happened...

Crossroads

Then said he unto them, Therefore every scribe [which is] instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man [that is] an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure [things] new and old. Matthew 13:52

Things old and new.
The old thing--a dream of a dance.  I danced with Christ, and as we danced--formally, something like a waltz--light pierced the scar on his hand, penetrated it.  Then, like a laser, pierced my own as it was clasped in his and the light continued beyond us.  Locked us together.
The new thing--the redundant image of being at a crossroads.  A place of deciding on a course to take.  Changes of direction both obvious and with long-range implications.

Both have come to me repeatedly the last few months--starting almost simultaneously.  Like a tide coming into shore.  Waves of reminders. 

A photo of a statue.  A little sculpture in a friend's house--light in the palm of a hand.  A scene in a movie--a couple sharing a mark in the palm of the hand.  Words spoken to inspire volunteers as they head out to serve.  Unrelated to any but the eye that is willing to watch for such things.  To that eye--secret reminders. A hedging.  A guard rail.  Too personal, too topical, too specific to be anything less than a reaching in from a place beyond.
While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen [are] temporal; but the things which are not seen [are] eternal.
2 Cor 4:18

And now, the things which are seen make their response.
Even as the moon waxes and wanes--now nearer, now more distant--and the earth can not help but respond, so is the way of such revelation and its path of leading.  It is the way of things, that gravity should have such a power. 
I have no specific old journal entry to add to this one.  It is a post that looks forward with only a background wash from the past.  There are times when looking both toward the past and toward the future give only a rugged landscape for the view. 
There are times when the oasis of things eternal becomes more than an easy platitude to say we embrace.  Times when God asks Satan, "Have you considered my servant, Job?"  And Satan complains that we haven't been tested so of course we serve God; and so God risks His reputation on us and allows temporal things to swell large and things eternal to seem distant.  God allows us to see how much we strive to be satisfied with paltry here and nows, and mostly we can until something concrete reminds that the ache will not end--not really--this side of the grave.  That true and abiding satisfaction, that a sense of fullness and completeness is a thing of eternity, and by faith we ache toward the climax of death.  God allows us to ask ourselves, do we really believe that?

So many changes.  So much inconsistency in life.  Age doesn't assure against it.  Financial security.  Owned property.  A happy family.  Echos on the sonar of what should be out there, in the forever places, but who has actually seen and come back to tell? 

Love brought One back.  Back to tell. 
It is easy to see why she clutched at his feet...

Party Time!

Chastening.  It never exists in the vacuum where we often meet its counterfeit.  If it is of Godly origins, it is to prepare its "victim" for something fabulous, something that would destroy if the chastening hadn't done its surgical work.  I was ready for that "next thing" after the hard lessons...

July 20
Where are you sending me out on my next campaign, God?
I'm reading a book about someone who had a very successful campaign in evangelizing the hippies in the 70's.  They were the "lepers" of their day's society.  But who are today's lepers?
Thirty years ago, the lepers were the lost thinkers.  But today, lost warriors seem to be the ones to call.  The thinkers were weary and disillusioned and needed rest.  Folk music and beach baptisms were their point of access.
But today's lost are more dead inside, I fear.  Their lost-ness is not just of the mind, but of the heart, the very life-blood's flow.
I'm reading about the parable in which Jesus invites the distinguished, but they are too busy to attend his party; so he invites beggars.  And they might very well come merely out of desperation or curiosity--and this is good enough for the arriving.  Once there, they'd better be dressed for a wedding, or the consequences are severe.  But the initial open door is pretty forgiving. 
And I wonder.  Are we still inviting the desperate ones today?  Is their desperation alone sufficient cause for us to be glad to invite them into the celebration?
Or, are we still trying to track down the last few of yesterday's desperate because after all, their sort are familiar to us, and we know we've hit a level of acceptance from their type in the past?  Are we missing anyone?  A lot of ones?

As for me, I feel drawn to the group I'd call the "divided hearts" out there.  The ones who serve both God and Baal, who still need to learn that Baal and mammon have no ultimate power to satisfy a thirsty soul.  I fear prosperity-preaching, in many of its facets, is like wrapping wool around a wolf.  The idea of "counting the cost" winds up a foundation-less structure in that world of preaching.  Like sand that's been wet, it seems firm and well-shaped until the storm comes--but then it breaks down, making the house collapse anyway.  I think of Luke 15.  The parable for the lost sheep--the one who HAD been in the fold, for the finding of the lost coin that HAD been the woman's and then the great apex: the prodigal who HAD a home and considers returning to it. 

Indeed, if you merely lay out your blessings as your testimony to others, as opposed to laying Jesus Christ before them, then even if you give God the credit, you're still inviting them into a room cramped with piles of covetousness. Can you blame them when they grow bitter at your message?  When they don't see the forest of blessings surrounding them because you're continually directing them to look at your historic blessing tree, one that you've planted right in front of them?  Help them see their OWN trees!  Become less, that He may be more.  Why is this such a hard concept?

It has taken some years for God to groom me in this ministry, and some suffering, too.  I still find He chisels away at my pipes in order to pour Himself through me to  better bless others.  Divided hearts--if you would minister to them at all--require rugged, authentic, vulnerable availability.  Not surprisingly, they require that you be the model of your message--that you not have your own personal, barely-hidden agenda or ulterior motives attached to their being "found" again.  And so you spend a while standing as if naked in a strong, cold wind, saying, "This is great!" while they eye you like you're missing something.  And at best, sometimes all you accomplish is to make them curious. 
But you walk in splendor, nonetheless.  Even if they never really understand what you're doing.

Telling Stories, part 2

Yesterday, I copied these words:
"What shall we do that the people's perception of God not be so much less than God himself? Make something more of our preaching. Allow the preaching itself a human--and then a divine--wholeness: that the whole of the preacher be presently active in proclamation, the whole of the hearer invited to attend, and God will be seen as God of the Whole."  (Preaching, by Walter Wangerin, Jr.)

July 2005.  I'd come to a place where I was subconsciously convinced that I was above most temptations.  I'd read authors speak of getting "behind the temptations of Christ," and that sounded all abstract and hardly an issue to concern me. I would learn differently.

July 19, 2005
The Bride vision and the swelling, swirling bubbles on the gown she wore.  I'm thinking of these lately.  I've been reading about them, too.  "The righteous acts of the saints" is how Saint John describes them in the book of Revelation.  As I saw them, each "bubble" flashed different colors. Was it maybe that each swirl of color was a different person on that particular "wheel" or bubble of righteousness?  I know each life is designed to be part of God's handiwork, a different part of the story of righteousness overall.  I wonder if God the Father constructs the bubbles--the delineation of each righteous bubble, but might God the Spirit orchestrate the colors that swirl across them.  And all this to adorn the one who will "wed" God the Son?  Fanciful thoughts, but anyway the picture is beautiful because it shows how a timeless being could be "active" without being time-locked.  Each life is intended to be a re-expression of spiritual truth about Him, i.e. formed "in His image."
When the age of the Bride "making herself ready" is finished, I wonder how we will go about expressing His image then?  How will we be "in His image" after the wedding feast of the Lamb?

One particular life right now leads my thinking on these things.  His life is an easy-to-realize microcosm of that "in His image" quality, easy to see because of its very comprehensiveness.  Born as if one abandoned, impoverished, taken in by others and raised in a tiny, out-of-the way borough, this person nevertheless grew to become a man of means, a man of influence on multiple continents, a man of wealth.  In many ways, his life represents the full breadth-- the range from end to end--that all men are intended to walk as the point of their existence. God draws Man, woos him from the depths of death and degradation--the tragedy of Man's nature from his very birth--to the royal wealth of joint-heirship with Christ.  Prophets speak of that range: from orphans left to die in their birth-blood,taken up by the very hand of God to a place of mansions.  Here prophecy is replete with language of crowns and of glory, talk that is so different from the talk revolving around Man's infancy. And this one life has that full "story" attached to it.  The entire gamut built into his days.  Only one way is it incomplete.  He does not have the "story" of that far-reaching change playing itself out yet in the arena of love.  He should work for completeness there--though it may not be romantic love, it should be some sort of love--as an act of reverence to God.  If he does not see the "realization of unbelievable potential in all Mankind" as his prophetic life script, then his striving will equal empty vanity, no matter what his level of worldly success.  I speak of its resonance beyond this world.

This life was the first one that God allowed me to see with its glory shining full-bright.   

C.S. Lewis describes human lives this way:  as repositories of glory beyond our wildest imaginings most of the time. 

As he puts it in his sermon, The Weight of Glory:

It may be possible

for each to think too much of his own
potential glory hereafter; it is hardly
possible for him to think too often or too
deeply about that of his neighbour. The
load, or weight, or burden of my
neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on
my back, a load so heavy that only
humility can carry it, and the backs of the
proud will be broken. It is a serious thing
to live in a society of possible gods and
goddesses, to remember that the dullest
and most uninteresting person you talk to
may one day be a creature which, if you
saw it now, you would be strongly tempted

to worship, or else a horror and a

corruption such as you now meet, if at all,
only in a nightmare. All day long we are,
in some degree, helping each other to one
or other of these destinations. It is in the
light of these overwhelming possibilities, it
is with the awe and the circumspection
proper to them, that we should conduct all
our dealings with one another, all
friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no

ordinary people. You have

never talked to a mere mortal...
...

Next to the Blessed Sacrament

itself, your neighbour is the holiest object
presented to your senses. If he is your
Christian neighbour he is holy in almost
the same way, for in him also Christ

vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified,

Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

At the time, I had no idea what this glory laid bare to my spirit's eye would do to me.  That temptation to worship C.S. Lewis mentions:  it is very real.  I fell prey to it.  One life.  I was allowed to see one life this way--this eternal scripting of His-image glory running its course of expression over time in one life, and I was knocked flat on my back by it.  I was not the only one to suffer as I wrestled with comprehension, with soberness, with a willingness to hold loosely what was never meant to be clutched.  I still find those days difficult to describe, but they taught me important lessons:  I was not above the temptation to idolize, merely above the temptation to idolize the inglorious.  I was not above trying to cram things eternal into the parameters of a single day. Finally, I was not to elevate various expressions of Glory Retold to the same level as the Glory Original.  To ask even extra-ordinary people to carry such a burden is terribly unfair. 
So I learned the humility and the seriousness of which Lewis spoke with regards to the "capital N" Nobility of Man.
Since then, I've seen others in this glorified way, but I have been safe in the seeing.  And not only have I seen individuals; I've seen groups, whole congregations even.  They, too, swirl on bubbles first delineated through the stories told in Hebrew scripture.  The Bible-people are the prototypes, but the stories never end.  They never stop being re-told.  Now I see them safely, for that original temptation has never returned--and that mainly because God carefully chose the person who would be the first for me to really "see." He was kindly sovereign though specifically stern with me through that time, chastening me in an area that could have carried great risk, but instead opened great vision.  I remain attentive now.  I no longer "presume" I am above reproach, and in many areas. 
So there you have it:  my wholeness.
Now I see a bit of what is behind Christ's abstract temptations:  I see the easy draw of short-cuts to things eternal.  I see unholy invitations, unholy in that they beg you to grasp at things that can only be held (in this age) by the hands of faith, no matter how strongly--how realistically--those after-time things resonate into the march of days.
Ultimately, I am grateful for learning what I now know about that weight of glory as it spills into our world. 
And I hope to be able to bear its continual display, as long as mankind is able to offer it. 

Telling Stories

Oswald Chambers says "Suffering burns up a great deal of shallowness, but it does not always make a person better.  Suffering either gives me myself or it destroys my self...The way to find yourself is in the fires of sorrow...if you receive yourself in the fires of sorrow, God will make you nourishment for other people."  (My Utmost for His Highest, June 25th entry.)

Here begins my hardest series of  posts because here the telling begins to reveal past weakness, loss of easy honor and innocence for the sake of heightened purity, a necessary tapping heavily of  the grace and mercy of God. 

I chatted with a friend about Christian literature this morning.  She asked, "Have you ever been in a season where you just wanted to be a sponge and soak in as much as you could, but you didn't want to waste it on anything shallow? And you didn't want to soak it in just for the sake of being a heavy wet sponge?"  What followed that comment for me was a newly congealed idea, one that beautifully complemented something I'd been reading.  My response to her was: "The more I read, and the further I go in my walk with God, the more I require a certain spirit to be in the text. Even more than the actual information being conveyed, I need to absorb the spirit."

That observation made me think of Christ's sermons.  So often laced with parables that even his close, traveling companions didn't understand them--stories he would clarify privately later, how did these sermons nevertheless have the power to captivate crowds?  If the information wasn't meticulously laid out in topic and sub-topic format, in three-point presentation with introduction and thorough recap, followed by appropriately-related closing prayer, then how did it draw so many common people to sit and listen--people who would even go hungry so as not to miss a single word?  Was it merely the miracles? 
I don't think so--or at least, not just the miracles.  A spirit surely thrummed over every  word He spoke, and that spirit touched people on another level entirely, one that was more than just a brushing of their intellects. 
So now, more than usual, more than even yesterday--these words of Christ have a nuance, a richer shading than they carried before:  It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life.  (John 6:63.)

Likewise, the words of the very author my friend and I were discussing this morning, his words begin to gong loudly in my ears, playing the same song:

We, the professional faithful, the preachers so earnest for our responsibilities, have measured the arena of God's activity by our own; and the people, glad to be led in definitions, have allowed us to noose the mighty God and to remand him to a tiny space.  To a tiny space, a discrete time, and a handful of particular, prescribed exercises...Moreover...our preaching is largely teaching, explaining and instructing, so the people may assume that God is a matter of the mind (or the heart in more emotional deliveries), but not of the whole human in all its parts.  We say, of a text, "This is what it means."  And we imply that God comes present in the understanding of meanings, even though these meanings be pointing to events!  Our manner communicates more than the matter we deliver, because it is subliminal and qualifies every word we say...

Abstraction, the removing of God from experiential life and permitting him truly to dwell in the analysis alone, is a present-day problem...We pretend God's presence in the whole of our lives, and we believe the pretence, though in fact we honor understanding...the shape of preaching most shapes our God.  And what is the shape of so much preaching today?  Why, it is the shape of the classroom:  teaching.  And teaching is always (in our consideration) one step removed from experience and from the "real."  It is an activity of the mind.  It prepares for what will be; or it interprets what has been; it is separated from both.  The God who is met in doctrines, who is apprehended in the catechises, who is true so long as our statements ABOUT him are truly stated, who is communicated  in propositions, premise-premise-conclusion, who leaps not from the streets, nor even from scriptural texts, but from the interpretation of the scriptural texts--that God is an abstraction, has been abstracted from the Christian's experience.

O Priests, by the will of the people!

O Preachers, by the patterns of this age!

O Teachers, by thine own choosing--you have severely belittled the Deity!  Though your intent was kind and holy, your manner was mousy. Though you brought extraordinary intelligence, a fine education, and assiduous study to your office, you reduced that office to intelligence, its training and its application alone, and this you made the temple of the Lord.

But the providence of God is all creation, all space and time, all things and all events, all the actions of humankind, and all the whole human himself!

What shall we do that the people's perception of God not be so much less than God himself?  Make something more of our preaching.  Allow the preaching itself a human--and then a divine--wholeness: that the whole of the preacher be presently active in proclamation, the whole of the hearer invited to attend, and God will be seen as God of the Whole.

Or, to rush the point:  tell stories.
--Preaching, by Walter Wangerin, from Ragman and Other Cries of Faith (pp.72-76)

But this is easier said than done.  It sounds good, when it's someone else's wholeness that is laid bare.  Much harder when it is your own.  But that is where the authenticity serves, foundational to anything of value that might climb above it , after all.
So I shall try...