Category Archives: transformation

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Dare to go deeper?

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It has been a strange experience. All through the book, I’ve not known how to answer the usual questions: What’s it about? Are you enjoying it? Who’s your favorite character? There have been times I couldn’t wait to read the next bit, and other times I’ve wished it would go away and leave me alone, stop rocking my world and making me squirm. But the book, or the One speaking through it, has refused to let go. He has kept drawing me back into the story. It has mirrored, become, part of my story. I haven’t been able to distance myself from it enough to analyze or judge it; I haven’t been reading the book so much as it, or it’s Ghost-Writer, has been reading me. Reading my heart and His. Aloud. Together. He’s been holding up a mirror where I’ve glimpsed myself in one character after another, seen the places I’ve received His grace and the places I’m still turning away.

I’m learning it all over again. His invitation is always the same: come closer. It’s always welcome and gentleness and perfect love. But when I’m running away, when my heart is closed and hiding and full of shame, the Voice echoes differently. It’s as George MacDonald says of the drunken cabby who had just beaten His wife:

“And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and [the little boy] Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman’s heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness.” (At the Back of the North Wind, p. 156)

I see again the picture he gave some weeks ago of Himself, head thrown back in gentle, inviting laughter, hand extended to take mine. “Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, and come with me.” What if the first place he wants to take me when I take his hand is deeper into me? What if he knows that for me to hear His voice truly, we have to go together into the deepest caverns, open them wide and clear out the junk that distorts the love-echoes of His voice?  Dare I go with Him even there?

I remember again the Song of Solomon, which by now is becoming familiar. It’s not all smooth sailing and passionate kisses. Though the story begins with the urgent desire of the beloved for her lover, it’s not long before she’s hiding from him, suggesting he go away until a more convenient time, then desperately longing and searching for the one she can no longer find. The larger movement into oneness is marked by the individual dance steps of push and pull, coming close and running away and coming close again.

I am so glad!

It comforts me when I face my messy heart once again. His love can handle this. No, more. His love is the reason I’m seeing the mess at all. It’s the being drawn closer that painfully stretches the cords which hold me back, away from Him. And where did I hear it said, that the closer one gets to the light, the sharper the shadows appear? Until, that is, the one approaching is so close to the light that the shadows disappear entirely in the consuming brilliance. The same love-light that reveals also heals, burning through cords and making pure. And though the process may be painful, it’s all part of entering – or being entered by – that great love that longs for union.

And yes, yes, I can trust this love.

Yes, Lord. Please take me deeper.

 

(By the way, that book I’ve been reading? It’s Sensible Shoes by Sharon Garlough Brown. Don’t bother if you want to stand back and solve someone else’s mystery or critique someone else’s romance. But if you dare to let God hold a mirror up to your soul? If you dare to take His hand and let Him lead you deeper? Then pick up a copy and a journal and a box of Kleenex and get ready to discover Love pursuing you right into the middle of your mess.)

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What He really wants us to know

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There are just two weeks left in this Easter season. Two weeks before Pentecost and the celebration of the Holy Spirit coming in power upon the first disciples.

In these first five weeks of Easter, where have you glimpsed the risen Christ?

I’ve heard him in the joyful laughter of my young friend staring death in the face and seeing right through it to the face of her beloved Jesus. I’ve felt him in the arms of my seventy-something friend who hugged me close after my talk. I’ve heard His voice in a conversation on the way to the bus, been fed chicken soup and spaghetti and salad prepared by Him through the hands of His people, seen His humility and passion, His love and gentleness and longing as I watched a group of leaders fight a love-battle for each other’s hearts and the hearts of those they lead.

The risen Jesus is in His people.

I know that.

That’s why my answer to the question, “Where have you been most surprised to glimpse the risen Jesus?” makes me laugh with amazement and joy.

I may get chills when I hear His words from the mouth of another, but I’m not surprised to hear Him there. Somehow I expect Him to be in them. But when, for a few days, He opens my eyes to see Him orchestrating conversation after conversation, putting His words in my mouth, hugging through my arms, Him in me, I stand in awe.

Maybe it’s because I know my inner landscape all too well. Who would have expected to meet Him here? But He has chosen, and He has come, and this is where He wants to meet me. Not just out there. In here.

I find myself identifying with the disciples’ wonder as they discovered the authority given to them. They remind me of growing-up children discovering that the matches they’ve been given really light, the microscope really works, the gun they’ve been given is loaded and live and intended to be used to fight for the freedom of hearts. “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” (Luke 10:17) They’re surprised. Rejoicing. Perhaps still a little unsure what to make of all this. Who are they, really, and how do they live this new life?

Jesus reassures them. He has been watching the whole process. “I saw Satan fall like lightening.” (v. 18) The Greek verb means “to observe something with sustained attention.” (BDAG) I think He was watching with pleasure, delighting to see His beloved ones come to life, begin to discover who they were and where they fit in the structure of the universe.

He wanted them to know that, standing in His strength, they had nothing to fear from the enemy. “I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.” (v. 19) In Greek, the verse begins with the command, “Look! Pay attention!” “Look! I have given you authority. . . You do not need to live in fear of the enemy!” (cf. 1 John 4:4; Col 2:15; Eph 1:19-23) He wanted them (wants us!) to know this.

But then he turns their attention. “Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (v. 20)

Don’t delight in being powerful, but in being loved.

Don’t focus on what you can do, but on who you are. Beloved. Sought. Chosen.

Don’t think your security is in your ability to defend yourself and others from the enemy, though I want you to have and use that authority. Your safety is in the eternal hand that holds you and will never let go, that loves and pursues and writes your name in indelible red ink in the Lamb’s book of life.

Isn’t it wonderful? The One who passionately pursues us isn’t willing that anything – even doing His work – should distract us from pressing in close to Him, living the intimate wonder that we are loved.

Go in peace, dear friend. You are loved.

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How to live the Resurrection now

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This beautiful 31-year-old is teaching me how stunningly beautiful the resurrection life of Jesus can be in us. Even (especially?) in the valley of the shadow of death.

For six years now she has been living the reality of brain cancer. Three surgeries, chemo, radiation, a marriage, a baby boy born six weeks early so she could have her third brain surgery, and through it all, fear giving way in the presence of God to faith and courage, joy and peace and beauty.

And March 30, the day before Easter, this facebook message from Christina:

“Well, I am very peaceful. I’m thankful for the beautiful sunny day and I love my pain patch. Everyone should get one. So…early Wednesday morning, I had a grand mal seizure in my sleep, and Doug woke up and cared for me and called 911. My parents arrived—I woke up in the hospital to a paramedic (good friend) telling me what had happened. I had an MRI which showed a brain full of tumor lesions. This explains a lot of my struggle with pain and energy. I am at the end of my treatment and starting hospice care. I am at home and loving it. I feel better than I’ve felt in months. (Good drugs☺) AND I have a GREAT GOD! A most kind, heavenly Father. Please pray for peace for my friends and family and to be able to use time with people to its fullest. And pray that I stay in a really intimate place with the LORD.”

I read the words and my heart fills. . . with sadness for baby Isaiah who will grow up without his mother. . . with gratefulness and awe at the beauty of Jesus, palpably present even on the other end of Facebook. . . with longing for Christ’s life to be so visible in me. And, if I’m honest, with inadequacy: with this life lived so brightly among them, what does my story have to add when I go down to share in two weeks?

I sit down to pray. My hands want to do something. I reach for clay, find myself forming one after another tiny person, Christina, Doug, Isaiah, JoDee, and others in their life and mine, a brother, a friend, a mentee. I hold each in my hand, pray for the one imaged, and place each back into the Hand that never lets go, hugging them to Jesus. There’s a tiny figure for me too, reminding me that we’re all together in this place before the Father, all small, all vulnerable, all treasured.

Each tiny figure is just an inch long, lacking arms and legs because my skill with clay is elementary. The lack of limbs makes the tiny persons look more like embryos than adults, and God reminds me that we’re all as helpless as embryos when it comes to making anything significant happen in or around us. Oh, we can wiggle and squirm and move a lot, but the actual growth? Everything that really matters? It’s His work. All we can – and need – to do is to stay connected to that Other who nourishes and cleanses and gives life.

Christina lives this. Part of the beauty of Christ in Christina is her willingness to share not only the victories but the struggles, the deep, intimate places where Christ meets her. The resurrection life of Jesus has been just as present, just as visible, in those moments of fear and insecurity when she chose to let him into the struggle as in these more recent moments when His life has flooded in with a settled joy and a peace beyond understanding. And these later moments could not have happened without the earlier moments of struggle which made space to learn to trust.

That’s the point of resurrection life. It’s new-creation life. And that means (at least) three things.

1) The way for new-creation life is always paved by some kind of death. Someday it will be that death when we leave behind these crumpled caterpillar bodies. Until then, it’s each little death, each moment of facing into the fear of our vulnerability and opening hands clenched around control. We enter life only by embracing Christ in death.

2) We can’t make life happen. All we can do is open to it, receive it by receiving the One who lives it in and with us.

3) This new-creation life is being slowly, perfectly formed in each of us who are hidden in Him. We live now in a thirty or seventy or one hundred year gestation, cushioned in the love which protects us in this vulnerable time of formation until we are born into face-to-face living, seeing the One who has borne us. Then, for the first time, looking into His face, we will truly see. Him. And ourselves.

“Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)

Christina – Thank you for living so open to Jesus. Thank you for letting us see His beauty in the hard places of life. When you see Jesus, give Him a hug from me and tell Him I’m so looking forward to being born into His face-to-face presence too. And in the meantime, we’ll keep hugging your family to Jesus. Love you!

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Fifty days of surprise: An invitation to see

There’s been a tree out the back of my new place, a gnarled, moss-covered tree, looking half-dead. It has had its own beauty, I suppose, but I’ve never paid much attention except to wonder, once, what kind of tree it was.

Then one recent morning I walked out the back, and overwhelming, full-to-bursting, can’t-be-contained bright white life had pushed its way out through those seeming-dead twigs, right out through the trunk itself, and there’s no wondering now what kind of tree this is.

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It’s not for nothing that He’s called a shoot from the stump of Jesse, this One who had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him but startled even His closest friends when He burst forth with surprisingly uncontainable life.

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It’s the first year I’ve heard it, that in the church calendar Easter’s not just a day, but fifty days; not a single Sunday of joy, but a whole seven weeks of wonder, of watching, of learning to live.

I’d missed them, somehow, those words that span the time from the first few days of new life to the moment that Jesus ascended to heaven:

“He appeared to them over a period of forty days. . .” (Acts 1:3)

The words whisper three things:

1) The power and the promise of the resurrection is for now, not merely for the future hope that we will be raised.

2) The full-of-life Jesus wants to be known by His followers in His life-flowing-over state. (Of course! He’s still the same God who has wanted to be known since before time’s beginning. . .)

3) And Jesus knows that the transformation of His followers isn’t automatic. Jesus was alive and Mary was still weeping sad tears, the disciples had locked themselves out of public sight because of fear, Thomas was in a prison of hopeless doubt, and the travelers were putting their heads together trying to figure out where it had all gone so badly wrong.

Jesus knows better than we: It is not the fact of the resurrection that changes us; it is encounter with the living Jesus. And so He invites us to stick around.

Only encounter, repeated and real, can overcome our inability to recognize Him. And this, for most of us, is the real struggle:

 “She did not realize that it was Jesus” (Jn 20:14).

“They were kept from recognizing him” (Luke 24:16).

“They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost” (Luke 24:37).

It’s almost always why I fear: I fail to see that in every new situation stands Jesus offering Himself to me in a new form.

“[After He appeared to Mary who thought He was the gardener], Jesus appeared in a different form to two of them while they were walking. . .” (Mark 16:12)

In a different form.

I wonder about this.

Maybe the life in Him is so vibrant, uncontainable, alive, that a single form can’t contain it all. Perhaps, then, He shows Himself to us in different forms to let us glimpse a little more of the fullness of who He is.

Maybe, sometimes, He conceals himself for a time so He can heal us in ways otherwise impossible.

Other times He comes in the way He knows we will most easily be able to receive Him.

It was so for me at yesterday’s end. I sat aching for Him as I had ached all week, sad that even this day of rest was now over and I still hadn’t soaked long in the Presence I longed for. I wondered how it’s possible to ache so for Him and still run from Him. But as I sat, He quieted me with the whisper that I hadn’t run. He had been with me all day, giving Himself to me in the scent of the Balm of Gilead trees, in the soft breath of the baby asleep in my arms, in the giving and receiving in loving conversation with others. He had offered Himself to me in the tangible, edible bread and wine, offered Himself freely, His fullness into my emptiness. And as I had savored and rocked, eaten and listened, I had welcomed Him in the ways He chose to offer Himself to me in that day. And I received Him again as I welcomed His gracious Presence in the quietness of the evening.

His Life is so large, so vibrant, so surprisingly tender that it encompasses all that we, in our limitedness, think opposites, meeting us in fear and faith, thirst and fullness, guiding sorrow toward fullest joy. Everywhere, in everything, He offers Himself to us.

This, I think, is the invitation of these fifty days of Easter: to see and welcome the full-of-life Jesus in whatever form He chooses to come to us.

Watch with me, will you?

Jesus, we can’t see you unless you open our eyes. Please do it.  Show us in what form, today, You are offering Yourself to us, and free us to receive You without hesitation or fear.

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Edges and centers: what it means to be human

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In the daily details of my humanness, it’s easy to feel like the biggest implication of my creatureliness is limitation. But that’s only skirting the edges of reality. At its core, what does it mean to be human?

I watch Jesus walk among pressing crowds, weep in a lonely garden, sleep through a raging storm. He knew pain of all sorts, grief, early death. But if we had asked Jesus the biggest implication of his creatureliness, I think he would have pointed not to his limitation and emptiness, but to the nature of his fullness. The emptiness made the fullness possible, the limits bounding the place where the fullness chose to dwell.

“I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself.” (John 5:19; see also 5:30; 8:28)

“Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and that the Father is in me?  The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.” (John 14:10)

He didn’t hesitate to make similar statements of us:

“. . . apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

“Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit. . .” (John 15:5)

“Anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12)

At the core of being a human creature lies this truth: We are made to house God, God’s own life lived in our bodies.

“On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (John 14:20)

Gerard Manley Hopkins would agree. In the first half of his poem, As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame, he describes how all of creation does the same single thing: expresses that essence that dwells inside it. But unlike the rest of creation, which displays its nature faithfully in what it does, humans can choose whether or not to live according to our created purpose. Since the essence of being human is being home to God in the world, we only become fully ourselves when we receive the grace that allows Christ to breathe and love and play in all our words and actions. Then a person can begin to

“. . .[Act] in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—

Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

A human life fully lived consists in this one thing: opening ourselves for Christ to “play” in and through us, expressing His own beauty through us for His Father’s delight.

We do not need to fear losing our identity by letting Christ play in us. Like a master musician, his playing brings out the unique tone and personality of each instrument: one bright, one deep, one playful. We enter a dual miracle of grace, first that Christ comes to live His own life in us at all, and, second, that in so doing, He does not decrease our uniqueness but makes us more fully ourselves than we could ever be on our own. Such love this is that asks us to offer our bodies as a sacrifice to him not to annihilate or replace or diminish us, but to make us our most complete and beautiful selves!

“The central verb [in Hopkin’s poem], ‘play,’ catches the exuberance and freedom that mark life when it is lived beyond necessity, beyond mere survival. ‘Play’ also suggests words and sounds and actions that are ‘played’ for another, intentional and meaningful renderings of beauty or truth or goodness. Hopkins incorporates this sense of play with God as the ultimate ‘other’ (‘to the Father’) – which is to say that all life is, or can be, worship.” (Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: a conversation in spiritual theology, p.3)

How would your life change if you believed that your only call (your only responsibility, the only true expression of your humanness) was to open yourself for Christ to “play” in you for the delight of the Father who loves you?

 

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Might I whisper once more? If we’re made to be filled with God’s life, the only rational way to live is to give ourselves fully to Him. Will you join us in discovering who this One is who asks us to give ourselves to Him? Download your free copy of Rational Worship: Offering ourselves to the God of mercy here.