"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.
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