"What God has cleansed you must not call common..." Acts 10:15.
The old journal is moving into another stave soon. A calling and a consecration are just around the corner. But first, an admission that I allowed calling and consecration to be sucked into a vacuum of the "commonplace" and am only now renewing my path...
September 25, 2005
If there is one thing I know, if I am to be like the Bread of the Presence, to use my dream interpreted with some Biblical language, then I now sit and wait to be taken up into service.
An image struck me yesterday. One of the problems in being "saintly" is that we run the race too well! Then when we come alongside someone else, rather than running in stride with each other, we end up tempted to stare at each other, admiring each other's endurance, form, even beauty as we move. Whatever the reason, turning our eyes toward each other involves taking them off the path. There may be a momentary glance, as in that of handing off a baton in a relay, but it is not for the sake of admiring the other runner. We notice each other for the sake of finishing the run well, and that is all! There is an un-selfconscious, un-otherconscious quality to it. Face the finish line! Keep moving!
"God has to take us into the valley and put us through the fires and floods to batter us into shape, until we get to the place where He can trust us with the veritable reality. Ever since we had the vision, God has been at work, getting us into the shape of the ideal, and over and over again we escape from His hand and try to batter ourselves into our own shape..."
--Oswald Chambers, July 6 entry, My Utmost for His Highest.
I've been in that valley for a long season. And the run has not had its consistent focus on the ribbon at the end of the race. I've been very involved in self-battering in Oswald's imager. Funny how risk-recognition works. I saw the risk of hyper-focus on another runner. What I did not see was the risk of other runners grabbing me by the sleeve and saying, "Look at me! Tell me I run well, too!" Easy in such times to lose sight of our own ever-present need for redemption. People don't say, "I expect perfection from you," but they certainly imply it by ever asking you to take their measure and find them pleasing. It feels like "service" to give them what they ask. But it is a snarly root that can trip you.
A friend recently put the word redemption in the center of my field of vision, and it has since enveloped me. I decided to make a word-study of it, as I sometimes feel led to do. And seeing Oswald featured here, I thought to pull the old devotional from the shelf. The index showed that the reading on my very birthday--January 31--hits the subject of redemption. Chambers is quite bold on the topic: "Reality is not human goodness, or holiness, or heaven, or hell--it is redemption...personal holiness is the effect of redemption, not the cause of it. If we place our faith in human goodness, we will go under when testing comes." And I must admit that although those words run easily across my tongue, I live my life as if I believe their opposite--at least until the endurance-test grows so strong that I must push on to my second wind, where I see that it is redemption-reality that sustains me, after all. But the test itself seems to be a thing that other runners would punish me for facing. So here comes redeption-reality knocking again.
And there's more from my birthday entryas well: "Christian workers fail because they place their desire for their own holiness above their desire to know God. 'Don't ask me to be confronted with the strong reality of redemption...what I want is anything God can do for me to make me more desirable in my own eyes.'...There is no reckless abandon to God in that. God cannot deliver me while my interest is merely in my own character."
And so God teaches me to look more analytically at the things that need to be redeemed within me. When I take pride in those areas where I see how others' need for redemption, I fail to see that these become the very blind spots to seeing my own needs for redemption.
I am undone.
A friend prays for my times of solitude, and tells me she heard the call to that prayer. And I cry out, "Yes, I DO need that!" In solitude, I meet Thee; but I know the boundaries around our sacred garden, Lord; the curtains round the Holy of Holies where we commune, Lord--they've taken such a beating over the last few years! And I ask myself, why am I so weary of repair-work on them? You called me to Breach Repair, among other things. Why am I surprised? But this work wearies me, and I begin to see why. I have left redemption in the tool shed, and so my work is slow and tedious and does not define the skill-potential of my soul very well, much like if I were using a shovel upside down, or an axe backward.
Even more, Lord, as You lead me back into fellowship with a faith community again, as redemption touches community now, I find this is my new, more humble prayer: Lead me to those who lovingly help me see the blind spots before my soul's eyes, lead me to those who inspire me to have the courage to look around them. Give me fellow race-runners who remind me that taking time to move around an obstacle is completely different from needing time due to poor running technique. For now, this is not a distinction I make well for myself. I feel like a good runner would know the treachery of the path even before ever running it. Silly of me, but true.
For a season, You told me to turn and look at those on the park benches near me, a season when I was at rest; but now I am up and running again. So these are the saints I need in my life: those who run shoulder to shoulder with me toward a common place, a place we all know is well-worth the cross-country trek.
