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.