Digging for Buried Treasure in the Prison Floor

You come through thick stone walls, armed guards and bars: you bring me a starry night and ask about this and that.  You are the Redeemer.  I recognize you.  You are my way, my truth, and my life.  Even my cellar blooms with stars and peace and light pour forth.  You sprinkle beautiful words on me like flowers:  "Son, what are you afraid of?  I am with you!" --Viktoras Petkus, Lithuania from The Lion Book of Family Prayers.

While this person's imprisonment was literal, the perception of imprisonment can be a common feature all through life with bars of limitation forged from many different elements.  Fear of the unknown, fear of the self, fear of a wrong choice that reaches grasping fingers into the future.  These are a strong-barred prison indeed.

April 17, 2005
Strange.  Almost a year ago, I very much feared coming to live in this little townhouse community.  Now I fear leaving it!  Well, not fear really, but I pause and consider deeply the choice before us.  What a change the move here has wrought in me! 

But I am learning that this is the way God so often teaches a lesson.  It's prelude feels like fear.  I read in My Utmost for His Highest by Chambers today the following from the April 29 entry: "Certainty is the mark of the common sense life; gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life." 
He refers to I John 3:2 "It does not appear yet what we shall be..."

I think about how God taught us the Big Lesson, the one about unconditional love--what an imprisonment that felt like!  Imprisonment in poverty, in a place where a gracious God seemed untrustworthy. 
We expected Him to teach us about unconditional love by showing us how unconditional His love was for us--and in a way He did, but mostly what He did was show us how unconditional our love was for Him. 

Now I can see this was the best way because we were such babies, so limited by love-trust problems that we would have had a hard time realizing He felt such love for us.  If the front door is barred, He'll find a way in through a side door:  He'd show us that He'd already planted that love in us toward Him.  We knew His love because we realized our own capacity, and He was within us.  If we as creatures could refuse to reject God despite His seeming to abandon us in such harsh need, well then surely we bore unconditional love within our breasts; and surely He carried that same thing--only to a much larger degree--within His own!  The wonder of the way Your hand touches our need is astounding!
 
Right now, I struggle with thoughts of moving.  And, I look to the resolution of that distress from this new position of feeling strongly loved.  We found a duplex that would serve our needs well, and my oldest son would have a whole basement to use for his percussion equipment.  But...I also sense that here in this apartment complex we can do a great good as well.  Things happen here that don't happen in a wealthy but private neighborhood, and by that I don't mean shooting and looting!  I mean the needs and dependencies on the goodness and care of neighbors are shared openly here.  So what would you have us do, God?

I read: "Practical work may be a competitor against abandonment to God, because practical work is based on the argument-Remember how useful you are here--" But on the other hand, am I justifying the wrong thing when I say I am putting service beneath abandonment? 
What do I apply here, God?  You know I'm willing to do either.  In one case, I'm spending myself mostly for my son; in the other, mostly for my community.  Which one, Lord?  We have a week to decide.

 In these days I was faced with my next big unknown...the first one since that deluge of unknowns that brought the epiphany about God's love along in its wake.  This was my first brush with the tension of believing myself a partner in something larger than my own little life.  We did end up moving; and no great work attached itself particularly to the change, although my oldest son did benefit and ended up majoring in music, marching in drum corps, etc because of his enhanced opportunities in music.  I learned that not every decision is climactic; that some spin out  their results gradually rather than dumping their load.  I learned that wherever you go, there You are. 

I was, however, being prepared to learn a deeper truth about the more challenging reaches of faith.  In reflecting on the story of Peter walking on the water, when Peter began to sink he cried, "Save me, Lord."  Christ, after lifting him back above the waves, chided his lack of faith. 

Always before, I thought that slippage of faith occurred right when fear of the waves came, and that fear was what caused Peter to sink and to be chided for it; but I now think the breach of faith that Christ addressed was larger than that alone.
If Christ could defy nature such that He could take a man walking safely across the surface, then why couldn't He just as easily have taken that same man walking safely along the bottom?  Peter could believe as long as he was following what he'd seen Jesus do, as long as the conditions for his life were not compromised, a miracle that only brushed his actions. But he could not envision that he could survive just as well beneath the waves as walking across them.  He was not yet ready to live out the "greater things than these shall ye do"  concept.  This I think was also behind Christ's words when He asked, "Why didst thou doubt?"

I was, that April, just beginning to allow for the possibility that sinking beneath the waves might hold its own miracle, too.