Monday, October 29, 2012

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!

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

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.

Monday, October 8, 2012

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.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

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.