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.



Feel the Grass

"Jesus said to her, 'Did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?' "
(John 11:40)

Being reminded of the power of believing, now after a long season of letting a promise go dry and shrivel up.  Living long as one resigned to hunger during a seemingly endless famine.  What a strange thing it is, to lift the face to rain again and know that the ground will surely yield in response to it.

August 7

Continuing in John, and taking another look at the feeding of the 5000 in chapter 6.

When Jesus sees the multitude coming, He asks, "Where shall we buy bread, that these may eat?" 
The question is a test. 
He knows what He can do.
Their responses run the same spectrum ours do:  one disciple says, "We have no resources."  Another, "This lad here has 5 barley loaves  (the food of the poor) and 2 small fish, but what are they among so many?" 
And Jesus answers, "Make the people sit down."

Faith only finds its definition, its substance in your trusting something "else" more than you trust your common sense. More than you trust your current field of vision.  More than you trust your capabilities.  More than you trust the things that seem permanently insurmountable.  Not surprising that He wondered if He'd find "faith" when He returns.  I wonder that He'd find it even now among those who profess to be His followers.  Not faith by this definition anyway.

And then there's the "sitting down" of covenant, the tarrying that adds depth and dimension to the faith--dimension of perseverance, of patience.  If we have the faith to believe that He can make something out of almost nothing, do we have the further faith to allow the work to happen around us while we simply sit n the grass and receive its over-abundance?  Or do we rather say, "Yes!  I can believe what You promise.  I can believe for the nourishment.  I can believe for the end of the terrible hunger.  So, I will make it happen!" No.  Not in this instance.  You sit down and feel the fullness of the grass.
Faith following through until the loaves and fish are in the hand.

Dreams Not Made for the Faint of Heart..

...often they bring the seeds of mysterious witness.  And I don't mean the little "handing out tracts on a street corner" type of bearing witness.  I mean reaching in your gut, dragging your naked soul out and allowing someone else to affect it.  I mean being a light-bearer in a dark places, and the first thing the light does is illuminate you as a target for trouble.  I mean shedding prayer-tears on behalf of someone on suicide watch--or even really knowing a person in that much anguish.
I mean that.

August 5

Wow!  I woke up praying for P. in a dream. In the dream-prayer, I was recounting the reality that nothing is particularly harder or easier for God.  He's God!  It is all do-able to Him.  So we can freely and faithfully bring what would seem hard (to us) as smoothly and confidently before Him as we would bring what seems easy to solve. 
R. and I were in prayer for her, and P. was in anguish.

On my reading, I'm beginning the Gospel of John, and seeing in the footnotes the literal meaning of the name, John.  "God has been gracious..." and the name used for God in that meaning is the most personal, intimate one He assigned to Himself.  In the description of John the Baptist and his witness are these words:  "This man came for a witness of the Light, that all through him might believe."  And he, too, like the Gospel-writer wore the imprint of God's most intimate name, and he pressed people into the water of life.  Yet, "He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light."  Do we have any idea the incredible balance he had to maintain? the spiritual tension involved in living such a calling?

Powerful witness.  Powerful submission. Mystery.  Reflections on all these washed over me like tidal waves responding to a distant moon.

A few days later, I whimsically emailed P. about the strange little dream I had about her.  She emailed me back.  That very night of my dream, she'd been in the ER, serious problems with her heart.  She was fine in the end.  Came out of the whole episode with a treatment plan for the healing of her heart.
But from that day forward she considered me as one who has what she called a dream ministry.
Other dreams like that one did sporadically follow.
But why I'd be called to it, I had no idea at the time.

Why Men Go to Brothels

Timing.
Such a crucial element.
This entry is for me now.

August 6
"Satan's seduction of our heart always comes in the form of a story that offers us greater control through knowing good and evil rather than the unknowns of relationship." --The Sacred Romance  Wow!

Questions to pose and consider from my John Eldredge reading:
 
Are you finished trying to arrange for a safe life? 
Can you give up your resignation to life as it stands to embrace something larger, more elusive, more unpredictable but infinately more hopeful?
Will you step into a relationship with me that could be dangerous because it is relationship delivered by the hands of the Wildest of Lovers--God Himself?
If we risk spiritual communion now, could we learn even here, in this life span, how we are "in His image" not simply as islands alone, but as part of a Triune God? 

"I will go before you and level the mountains;
I will break down gates of bronze
and cut through bars of iron.
I will give you the treasures of darkness,
riches stored in secret places,
so that you may know that I am the Lord,
the God of Israel, who summons you by name."  --Isaiah 45

And this was spoken by God, not to a holy man, but to a powerful man. 
A man who was not following God...said to draw him.  So this is a journey of the heart, after all.  Not simply a line to walk between good and evil,sifting everything with politics and doctrine and calling that holy work.  Instead, God is calling us to walk away from "less-wild lovers that have become part of our identity, embrace our nakedness, and trust in his goodness."  --Sacred Romance

But the risk of looking for the treasure in the darkness, the riches stored in secret places:  getting lost again in that dark in the form of addiction to those things that give immediate relief, a taste of transcendence so close, yet not to be touched, because it is not in itself the treasure. 

How do you prescribe thirst for yourself, standing beside a less-than-eternal well, yet still a well--and not drink? 
Can you accept a season that is designed to simply make you acquainted with thirst?
Such is the beauty, the nobility of the fast.
The Christ said his disciples did not fast because he was with them, but that they would fast...when longing for him was a part of their lives.  Does anyone long for Christ anymore?  Do they fast for that reason?

But why must it be so, that the "less-than-eternal well be attached to our desire for eternal intimate communion with God and each other in the midst of Paradise?"  Risky, God, to make it so...

But if we stand at that well together, even gaze into its waters, and yet accept thirst willingly, we are on a most intimate thread of the image of God.  WE are become the society who tastes God's deepest longing for a Bride that he is unwilling to force to anything until she begs it, for love does not force, nor is it self-indulgent.

G.K. Chesterton says, "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God."

I turn my heart off and get busy.
You turn to your addiction and get busy.
We can not by sheer willpower do anything else.
But if we hold fast to the "aching abyss" of our hearts in a dance together, then real transcedence may even yet come.
Will we "hold our hearts out hopefully in partial emptiness in a way that allows desire to be rekindled?"
As we blaze a trail along the "road less traveled" between discipline and desire can we find that "treasure of finally ceasing from being half-hearted creatures?"
Only there can we begin to receive the mystery of "ecstasies yet to come" as we embrace the mystery of being the Beloved.
Is it time for this? 
Are our hearts weary of the familiar and indulgent?
Christ stands and invites, but it is strange language to us.
It sounds too much like words that have used us and consumed us in the past, left us alone and exposed. 
So we mortgage our hearts to less wild lovers.

Dear God.
Seven years ago I wrote these words.  They merely piqued my interest then. 
It was not time for them yet.
But seven years allows a lot of burrowing deep.
And now I feel life's circumstances opening holes in the atmosphere of my soul, and I look up at them.  And they are awash with the ache of "yet to come's."
Nevertheless, I do not turn my face away.  And I do not fear.
Alongside Saint John at the close of his vision of the apocalypse, I say:
 "Even so, Lord Jesus...Come."

Dark Visions

Beautiful scenes. 
That's what my spirit's eye had seen up to the time when July rolled into August back in 2005.  But reality is:  not everything is beautiful.

August 1, 2005
We went camping for the first time this summer and Saturday night around midnight, I had a very strong feeling of disquiet--anguish, but detached from anything, free-floating.That's when the vision began.
I wonder now if I saw Lucifer approaching. In any case, this entity looked like an intricate crystal at his core, only covered in crystal spikes, like a gumball fallen from a tree, except the crystal was not round.  More like two pyramids stacked base to base.  A brownness--like dead-leaf paste--covered this core.  Still, I could tell that once--when it had been clear--light did surely flow through it making an incredible prismatic effect.  Shooting rainbows for miles in every direction.  From either side of this core, two huge arcs extended--like wings, like broken glass balls, only so broken that they simply looked like steel cord.  Whether there had once been more to them or not, I couldn't say, but I had the feeling they'd been spheres, swirling the rainbow colors, diffusing light. 

I asked God to allow me to see this creature's former state, to confirm or correct my assumptions, but He said no.  "You would long for the return of that former state for him.  You would feel compassion over the ugliness, the lonely hulk that remains; and now is not the time to feel compassion for him."

I know as I saw him float in a sea of utter black sky (no stars) I sensed coldness. Loneliness.  Insanely deep loneliness.  And there was massive power--so much power that I understood how people could wonder if this might actually be God instead, for the power overwhelmed any perception of good or bad.  Were it not for the underlying lack of joy, and for the "decay" that wrapped his core I myself might not have been sure how to receive what I saw.  I considered him.  Such coldness.  Such a fight to deny the self-awareness of lost beauty.  Reaching out to tempt Christ, to "gain" Him by offering the only substitute he has to offer for intimacy:  power.  His display of power was indeed terrible and awesome.  It has become his only solace, though small solace it is.  Underneath, unfortunately, he is brilliant.  Too brilliant not to know that power can only ever be a second best.  Yet he can't release pride and mistrust, and so power becomes the nearest he knows to an intimate companion.

Then, the vision changed.  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. 

This particular vision lingered as a heaviness, even as the lightness of the vision of the bride had stayed with me.  I began to wonder whether I really wanted a life of visions, after all.  I did discover that the name Lucifer translates "Day Star" and so I wondered again if I really had seen the dead version of that name's earlier, implied glory. 

Other dreams followed that added to the story of this strange apparition.
Years if them.

A Joy in the Hand Is Worth...

Cupped hands of alabaster stone, cupped as if they held water, but instead they hold a votive candle, and light glows throughout and billows from the palms.  My friend has this little statue near the entryway to her kitchen.  The first time I saw it, I caught my breath.  I knew an ancient vision (on my timeline anyway) was soon to come true.  But how does one gain a light-scarred hand?  And how does one turn such a thing into an offering, pools of light to a dark soul even as pools of water are given to a thirsty one?

Ann VosKamp crooked a finger.   Helped me see a direction to explore:

Joy is a flame that glimmers only in the palm of the open and humble hand.  In an open and humble palm, released and surrendered to receive, light dances, flickers happy.  The moment the hand is clenched tight, fingers all pointing toward self and rights and demands, joy is snuffed out.  Anger is the lid that suffocates joy until she lies limp and lifeless.  And for me, it's a cosmic-numbing notion that far eclipses this domestic moment.  It speaks to the whole of my life and the vision brands me: The demanding of my own will is the singular force that smothers out joy--nothing else. --1000 Gifts

        

What do I want from this life?  What do I think I deserve?  Ann quotes Henry Ward Beecher to say, "A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves."  And this is simple, but it can stretch to a strain easily.  When the view expands to include shadows of things dancing beyond the grace of this life, beyond the grave of this life.  When the view says "only in death shall you truly possess me, if you can leave me alone until then and only observe and consider and anticipate, like a betrothed."  Then pride and joy and faith endure a different sort of smelting. 

"God does not give rights but imparts responsibilities
--response-abilities-- 
inviting us to respond to His love-gifts." 
So Ann says. 

That branding light in the hand was spoken over me.  So I dreamed the cross as a dance.  I dream the resurrection as an offering.
I choose to respond in this life according to the shadows dancing there--beyond the grave--though they resonate down into this life with a clutch-me-now winsomeness.
Because I really do believe all this.

Stigmata

The light. 
I let it pierce my hand this morning.
It was my choice.  I could have refused the dance, but no.
I let it pierce my hand, and this is what I listened to as it happened...