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.