I AM ILL

Three words. Six letters. Three syllables.

PAIN. NAUSEA. DIZZINESS. EXHAUSTION.

Chronic fatigue syndrome… Fibromyalgia… Or maybe... “?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!”

That (?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?) is the trouble. The lack of a definitive diagnosis... Fear and pain working together with anxiety to produce new levels of stress in the midst of illness… Could this be some as yet undiagnosed rare disease from the uncharted African jungle that will ever erode and continue to eat away at my health?

NO... The true difficulty is in the suffering itself. The unceasing-pain itself…

Broken glass in my neck, constantly grinding as I turn my head. Wet cotton filling the space where my brain used to be.

A pressure headache… Always… A pounding in my head like I used to get as a kid hanging upside down on the monkey bars, blood and pressure building inside my skull until I want to scream. My hands packed in steel wool, always tingling, feeling only ‘half-way hooked up’ to my wrists.

I always feel a ‘passing out’ sensation. A strange reeling as if at any moment I will simply keel right over in a faint. I always feel a sense of emptiness throughout my body. There is always a hollow feeling in my chest like something is constantly pressing on me, as if a huge boa constrictor were squeezing me. I get dry heaves two or three times a day, gagging like I am in the very moment of vomiting. There’s a constant pain underneath my ribcage on the right side where I’m told my liver is.

My muscles constantly ache like I always have the flu. There are little hard knots, fiery pressure points of pain pinpointed throughout my shoulders and neck muscles. Most nights I spend moaning in pain and nausea laying in bed, more exhausted than I can describe and CANNOT sleep… Most of my nights are so very long, so unbelievably dark. Somehow I always manage to arise in the morning and drag, drag, drag myself to work.

NINE YEARS NOW.

I have nothing to add to the theological debate on suffering. I can’t figure it out… This writing is not about finding the reason I’m hurting so much. I don’t want to struggle in that area any more... As the long slow nights have crawled past like a snail toiling across the Bonneville Salt Flats my mind has spun fruitlessly around and around that circle. You probably better go read C.S. Lewis if you’re looking for writing explaining or cataloguing the meaning of pain. I have no answers intellectually to offer. I am just treading water here.

I love Jesus more than I can possibly describe and have been a Christian for twenty-five years.

I graduated from San Jose Bible College with a Bachelors degree in Theology and have spent years in lay ministry... I don’t have any overwhelming, addicting sins in my life (other than the constant selfishness that makes itself known at every turn) and am completely dedicated to the authority of God’s word... I believe in the power of God to heal and believe and pray regularly for healing. Obviously, it hasn’t happened.

“So,” you ask, “Why are you writing this?”

I want to grapple with the problem of suffering from my own emotional and devotional standpoint. To write with, “My Quill dipped in my own blood.”

Like my Dad used to say... “Now they’re goring MY Ox!” Now it’s my own nerve endings that are screaming. It’s my own life that lies in ruins. It’s my turn... I’m at bat now… I’m in the arena facing the Lion.

I want to describe as emotionally and devotionally as possible how I’m coping in the midst of this furious fire.

I know that suffering is common, as common as heartbeats. And so I write, hoping that maybe you, groaning as you labor under your own burden of pain, wont feel so alone, and perhaps, somehow, to impart some of the hope and life that I’ve found and that JESUS in all of His Glory will arise in the ashes of your life.

I want to speak hope and life to the Chronic, Lifelong conditions of suffering that are permanent lifestyles for so many people. It is evident to me that these permanent conditions of suffering are relatively common and only those who are in such pain can speak to another poor soul about pain. Any other voice lacks credibility and tends to rely on platitudes and pabulum and doesn’t seem to reach me here in the fire.

I know, by the very nature of this approach, that I’ll be revealing extremely personal and intimate details, hopefully from my own soul. I realize that this writing will most likely seem self absorbed and terribly introspective, but this is unavoidable for Pain strikes internally, tearing down the walls of hope and joy and must be confronted internally, especially after all the medical options have been abandoned.

This is the condition of chronic suffering. Living in chains when nothing can be done but to simply grit your teeth and exist through each intolerable, uncomfortable, monotonous, horrible moment.

Oh to be out on the Ski slopes again, playing as free as a bird, dodging through the moguls and laughing with the exhilaration and risk of speed, wild on the snow. But here I sit depressed and feeling completely horrid, trying to put this present experience of life in the fire into words.

And so it begins.

My title is… “From Under The Lava In The Far North.”

As nearly as I can put into words this is where I’m living. As if I’m dwelling in a far northern wilderness alone, deep in a cave under old long cold lava fields with no companions. Living in a tiny subterranean ice cavern chained to a wall, shivering and groaning in pain without a shred of comfort or well-being.

I feel as if I’m suffering all alone with friends and family around calling encouragement, but nevertheless… All alone… Here in this dungeon I live now. Here on this rack, stretched out, twisted and broken.

Here I live…

There is no logical reason for me to think that after NINE YEARS of this, there should be any other place for me to live. That I will, in this life, ever be free from intense, physical suffering... So my title… ‘Under The Lava’ it is.

God Is With Us!!

The theme for this writing is and ever will be for my life, ‘God is with us.’ Jesus’ very name is IMMANUEL, which means… “God is with us.”

The single most precious truth in and throughout all of eternity is this.

God is with us.

He is with me.

Here, chained to my wall.

Here, in my personal hell of pain…

Here, in the middle of a life rendered useless and detestable to me.

Here, the Almighty Creator of billions of stars…

He is with me…

Not as a triumphant King riding high like a seven-forty-seven above the clouds…

Not like a moviegoer munching on popcorn, detached from the action watching a tragedy unfold on the screen before he leaves to have pie at Marie calendars after the show, but Here. With me. In me.

Here in the very midst of all the suffering he Himself has allowed in me and for me.

He himself has even chosen to identify himself entirely with my present pain…

Only a suffering God can help. He does not only “Walk beside me” or maybe, “Watch over me.” He lives with me in my heart.

He does not merely, act within me, taking a few moments a day to help me.

No. What He has done, the fathomless depths of His love poured out is revealed only in his incarnation IN me.

HE CHAINS HIMSELF to my situation.

I am not alone here in the cave under the earth.

Jesus is with me.

I feel as if I could turn my head here in the cavern and almost see Him chained beside me restrained by the same crippling bonds I am held fast in. I can almost see Him shivering and groaning as the whips and demands of my chronic pain cut deep into His spirit. I believe He chooses to allow my pain and the pain of my despair to dig more deeply into His spirit than my own as He loves me far more deeply than ever a mother loved her sick child.

He is not so far separate from me that He cannot relate. He is not so far away that He cannot feel my pain as His own.

It’s as if I, before He entered in was the color blue and He was yellow. Now there is no longer any difference in the colors. Don’t get me wrong, He is still ‘yellow’ but He has made me green, a brand new vibrantly living color. Green is the mixture of blue and yellow paint.

What a raw deal for God… He receives nothing from me but my sin, shame, and pain. I receive everything. I can keep nothing in this world. He keeps everything in eternity and I will receive everything there...

In heaven the streets of gold wait for my feet. Someday I will stand in ultimate awe on that mystical crystal sea described in the book of Revelation chapter twenty-two. But here and now, in this moment He does everything.

A few years ago someone asked me. “So, brother, What are you doing for God these days?” I had thrown up that very morning and was struck numb by the absurdity of the question. “Who, me? Do something for God? How can I possibly imagine that I can do anything for God?” There is no way. He does everything for me...

I can do nothing for Him…

How can my goldfish do anything for me? How can an infant do anything for his mother? How can a nail do anything for the carpenter? How can a lump of boring old clay do anything for the potter? How can anything finite do anything for the infinite?

It is first and foremost His life, acting upon me through my faith and defined by His presence, felt in the very center of my suffering that can make any kind of difference at all here under the lava.

Prayer is the key. Faith is the lock. Jesus is the door.

When I woke up this morning, my jailer ‘Pain Again’ was the first greeting of the morning like always.

In the first instant of waking the battle begins again. Every morning I wake with a start and a groan as pain takes me to itself one more time for the day.

I wish I could sleep all the time… I wish I could just go into a coma... A coma, a blissful state of unconsciousness during which the allotment of my days would pass and like a child sleeping through a long car trip, simply wake up and be at long last home in eternal painlessness...

Today the vice grip my head, neck, and shoulders are caught in is brutal, like always...

Oh there is the problem. Always… If only I could have a few moments of pain free living. Just a moment or two... Is it so much to ask for? Tevya, the hard working Farmer in the great old movie ‘The Fiddler On The Roof’ sang, “If I were a rich man… Would it harm some vast, eternal plan?” If… If.

All I want is comfort. To not be all tensed up against the pain. To not be always experiencing the violence of groaning, This pain so intense it isn’t even alleviated by tears. And yet tears are a daily... (Well, four out of five days anyway) occurrence.

I have perfected a practiced form of weeping that doesn’t even interfere with my work… A closed throat sort of sobbing, quiet and still, a pitiful catching, hitching of the breath that doesn’t use up any fading energy supplies... I spend a few minutes every hour or so cleaning the tear stains off of my sunglasses. Tears that trickle, and I, even sometimes when I’m not crying reach to wipe away… Even wiping tears has become an ingrained automatic mannerism now. Amazing the things human beings can bear and, in a sense, get used to.

People ask as a standard greeting, “How are you doing today?” This is one of the most common, yet loaded questions I can imagine. My standard reply is, “I’m living through it.” No one questions this reply. It is just vague enough, yet true enough to cover my answer without going into a long explanation of my suffering. They, (and I, for that matter,) don’t really want to know how I, (and or another) am doing.

We all have an incredible preoccupation with our selves that will not ever go away, a focus of the self, on the self, about the self. A total centrality of the self to itself, like a whirlpool sucking everything back in a circle and into itself. Myself to myself about myself that threatens to completely crowd out any other considerations.

When someone is speaking to me I am always looking for ways to divert the channel of conversation back into the rut I am in, to the dungeon I am in. I’m always thinking, “How can they be so obsessed with a new pair of pants or a basketball game? How can they be so obsessed with a 401K and the prospect of retirement?” (Or any other subject that is not about myself.) “I am on the very verge of an extremity of despair.” I want to shout, “Shut up and listen to MY complaint!!”(Which is the real reason I am writing all this.)

My Self demands to be understood… To be… Pitied… My inner suffering demands to be understood. (Oh aren’t I a pitiable man, suffering so deeply?)

A deeper hope that comes from the realm in my Spirit where HE lives, is that these writings, motivated and driven by Horrible suffering, can be used by His great and lovely Holy Spirit to bring hope in you...

HOPE

Hope.

Hope… In what…?

Apparently there is no hope.

There is no medical answer or understanding of this type of affliction. There are no medicines or even effective treatment available so how can I DARE even say the word hope?

The multitude of medical professionals I have seen scratch their heads and baffled, shuffle out of the room mumbling something about fibromyalgia as they go gratefully to the next patient. Maybe the next patient will have something treatable, something identifiable, something understandable.

How can I even entertain such an elusive quality as hope? This is a quality that can be grasped only if I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. A change. A summer day in my future that will find me outside, actually swimming, enjoying the feel of the water swirling around my body…

NINE YEARS…

Some of you may be saying.

“I’ve been at it for THIRTY YEARS…”

Chronic disease does its best to kill hope.

Hope is for the healthy…

Hope is for those who are aboveground, in the sunlight. Not for us troglodytes trapped under the lava.

Hope is for those who have a mind that can stay on task…

For those with a body that can be trusted to reward you with a deep feeling of relaxation after a deep breath of air, or a nights sleep… A body that can be trusted to relax and enjoy a vacation, a weekend, even a night at the movies. A body that does not constantly make its presence known through the stifling, choking sense of nausea and pain…

Like a Vampire, as the moments, THE MOMENTS themomentsthemomentsthemoments. (The only place we truly live is in this moment. The indefinable instant that while trying to grasp, is gone already) the moments pass into hours, into days, months, seasons, years… YEARS… And I remember last Christmas, hurting, watching my family laughing and enjoying the gifts and excitement of Christmas and I, like Marley’s ghost among them, trying not to ruin, by complaining of my pain, the memories and enjoyment of my family…

And the Christmas before that…

And the Christmas before that…

I have truly forgotten what it’s like to NOT be in pain… And so hope flies far away and I sit chained to my wall by the shortest, rustiest invisible chain.

However hopeless, however bleak, there is a basis for hope.

The basis of hope is always faith. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” The Greek word for hope in this passage means, “The confident expectation of future good.” Faith, based on God’s word, His inimitable promises of blessing and joy, is the only possible source of hope.

Many times the only thoughts that can make me smile, the only thing that can thrill my heart and lift my head is the eternal promise of heaven itself. ”The confident expectation…of future, (not necessarily present) GOOD.”

Writing again… Another day… Another burden of pain to bear. Another foggy, dizzy connection of moments to get through. Yet somewhere, deep in my Spirit I feel hope.

HOPE…

Hope...

Where does it come from? Certainly not from within my own being. I have no reason to hope in this flesh so uncomfortable yet I discover hope.

The bible says "Nothing can separate me from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus..." Romans chapter eight. When I first became ill I read that and said... "Why that's absolute baloney!!" I felt completely separated from God, completely separated from life in general.

Now I know that pain had only separated me from the athletic, fun loving practical joker that I was. I mistook this separation from who I thought I was in the glory and pink of life for separation from God. “After all.... God is there so that He can solve my problems and maximize my enjoyment. When I'm sick, He heals me, hungry, He feeds me, needy, He meets the need.”

Suddenly I was separated from all that. In a matter of a few months I was separated from everything that gave my life such meaning. I realize now that I used to find my meaning in life solely through personal pleasure and enjoyment. Then in the early days of illness, in a state of constant groaning, in this dungeon chained I found myself dwelling on feeling separated from the love of God.

Like a teenager on a date, “If you loved me you'd let me...” (Oh brother) I placed this condition on the love of God. “If you loved me, God, you’d heal me...”

He had other plans.

As a mountain climber I used to love testing my equipment. I'd get a new sleeping bag rated at twenty below zero. I had to go out and test it by sleeping on an icy lake in a snowstorm to make sure that it would really keep me warm at twenty below.

God wants me to know that my faith and hope is real. That they hold up under testing. Even though the years of pleasure and enjoyment are gone and life looks rather bleak from here, I know the sleeping bag of faith and hope will keep me warm.

Faith and hope… I can't imagine one without the other. Oh, love must fit in there or faith and hope become only mechanical theological abstractions... The bible says "Faith, hope and love."

Now I’m constantly amazed and comforted by the intimacy with God I have developed after I stopped putting conditions on my relationship with Him and began linking faith, hope and love.

This is a faith that I receive. A gift… In contrast to faith I somehow manufacture from within myself. This faith comes from God and is enough. It is more than enough. I am so excited about The Eternal God Himself helping me as I suffer.

This is the source of all of my hope and without hope there is nothing left. Nothing at all but suicide.

One of my favorite scriptures is in Isaiah chapter thirty vs. eighteen. “Therefore the Lord LONGS to be gracious to you. He WAITS on high to have compassion upon you. For the Lord is a God of justice. How blessed are those who yearn for Him.”

Think of this... The Lord, Creator of countless billions of living beings counting all the Angels and other possible beings we don't know about yet in other dimensions...

LONGS TO BE GRACIOUS TO...

YOU...

I know you are desperate. I know that if you are in chronic pain you are chafing against the pain that gnaws and eats away at everything in your life. Pain erodes even relationships, especially with people who have not suffered much and don’t know that when you say. “I must lay down now.” You REALLY MUST! People that say... “I’m tired too you know, you gotta snap out of it...” They don’t understand that there is such a qualitative difference between your suffering and theirs and they will never understand what it is to go through the trench, the rut, the ‘lava tube’ you are in.

There is a proverb that says, “Each soul knows it’s own bitterness.” You cannot be ‘known’ by another in this deepest sense.

The declaration of my entire being though is that God knows your bitterness and He Himself can be known. He can be loved. He can be trusted even in the midst of pain.

Faith hope and love are indestructible. I know that now. I know that there is nothing that can separate me from the love of God. This equipment LLLAAAASSSSTTTTSSSS... Psalm 119:140-143 says, “Your promises have been thoroughly tested; that is why I love them so much. I am insignificant and despised, but I don’t forget your commandments. Your justice is eternal, and your law is perfectly true. As pressure and stress bear down on me, I find joy in your commands.” (New living translation)

Some of you may not be Christians. I’m sorry if this seems ‘preachy’ to you but the deepest desire of my being is that you will seek Him. Not in the western hedonistic fashion that puts so much emphasis on what He can do for you, but in the simplicity of devotion.

Seek Him for what He alone is. He is the almighty lover of your soul.

Read the Romantic book Song of Solomon in the bible. See God speaking those murmurings, those ‘sweet nothings’ the Lovers share with each other on the intimacy of their bed. Listen to God speaking His word intimately and personally... To you…

Imagine the Almighty audibly whispering those mystical yearnings from His heart directly to you… “How beautiful you are my beloved... Your neck is like an Ivory tower... Your navel a goblet of wine… Let Him kiss me with the kisses of love... etc.” Don’t be embarrassed, this is God’s heart to you. Of course this isn’t meant in any erotic sense, it is only a metaphor for the intimacy He desires with us.

We are literally made to be filled with the love of God and sin has bent us so far away from Him that we cannot see him face to face and stay alive. We must at last be separated from our sinful natures through death in order to stand in His presence face to face again.

Until then this, ‘like smoke through a glass beholding Him darkly’ experience of God. Why won’t he just show Himself? Why the smoke and mirrors and faith? Why doesn’t He just write his name in the sky? I don’t know.

Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is within you.

Seek His Face. He will meet you. Now this won’t automatically heal you but I guarantee that if you persist in knowing Jesus He will respond and you will discover life flowing deeper and more still than you ever imagined... You WILL find hope in Him. As Jimmy Dean used to say, “Ah Garrentee it!”

I believe in the ultimate truth of God’s word. I believe that His promises are true, no matter what my experience is. I believe that those promises MUST at last come true in my life, in THIS life… I know that healing, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control are all possessions that I have now. Fruits of the spirit I already possess.

The problem then, has got to be in me... The problem must be in my expectations. What exactly are God’s responsibilities in regard to His word and promises in my life?

I think that I expect too much from God. That I truly believe He is a like gigantic jukebox or ‘genie’ who exists entirely for my own personal comfort. You know, I put my quarter in, say a few prayers, and out comes exactly what I want so that I can spend my life for my own personal pleasure...

Jesus said, “I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly.” There is not one thing about my life as I now experience it that I consider abundant… Except for an over abundance of pain.

Who is wrong then? Him or me? (What a colossally stupid question.)

This is Jesus. This is the man who raised Lazarus from the dead. The man who healed a man born blind by spitting, then making mud, irritating mud (you probably have had mud in your eyes, how do you like it?) and sending him on a long humiliating walk across town. (Close your eyes, see him walking with his hands outstretched in the habitual manner of the blind.) “Excuse me sir, or Ma’am, I am hurting and… No, Please don’t wash this mud out of my eyes I have to go to the pool of Siloam, please point me in that direction... What’s that? Oh, no sir I’m not losing my mind, Jesus told me to find Siloam and wash… What’s that? Yes sir this mud hurts like the dickens but where’s the pool of Siloam…? Please...? He says I will be able to see if I wash there…”

I imagine that that man, on the way to the pool of Siloam had some serious questions about Jesus word and some serious doubts about his own sanity. Did the crowds laugh at him for believing?

Imagine him walking with his eyes packed with mud, desperately seeking Siloam. His life probably didn’t seem very abundant at that point, except for the abundance of his own pain.

Now imagine the reality of wholeness that was waiting for him at the pool. It’s very likely that by the time he reached the pool of Siloam his own tears had washed the mud from his eyes and all that was left for him was obedience. “To wash.” He had been born blind… He had never seen… Anything…

Born blind.

Imagine that moment for him.

Imagine that one day you wake up and the pain… Is gone… You are completely healed and you have a brand new sense.

Like a bat you suddenly have sonar. You can perceive objects based on this sonar. You ‘see’ (hear?) shapes. You (Sense) or see leaves blowing in the wind. The tiny vibrations of mosquito’s wings echo back to your ears and if you wanted to you could close your eyes and unerringly catch one in your hand. Let’s say you could drive down the road in a blizzard at night with your lights off, calmly navigating without fear. You become world famous for your ability to hit Nolan Ryan’s fastball, every time, blindfolded.

Maybe something else, something so radically new that your mind can’t even conceive it. You wake up, and like Johnny Flame on the ‘fantastic four,’ (A comic book superhero for those of you over the age of eleven) suddenly you can burst into flames and fly. This is what sight must have been like for this ‘man born blind.’

What incredible joy must have filled Jesus soul as He watched this suffering man with his eyes packed with stinging mud embark on his journey to Siloam.

Foremost on Jesus mind was... The beggars humiliating journey through the streets of Jerusalem and pain?

No, of course not.

I believe Jesus was laughing with joy as He saw in His Spirit this man opening his eyes at the pool and for the first time seeing the incredible beauty of the blue sky he would one day be lifted up into. Jesus always sees the finished product, not just the present trouble.

What a future we all have. What sights and sounds, the multitude of brand new experiences and new senses in the Spirit we will have when at last we are awakened from our fevered sleep here in this sinful flesh and ‘called out’ to go to our eternal home.

What Joy must fill the heart of Jesus as He labors within us here in the midst of our ‘dimness’ and pain, striving mightily that His own blessed character be formed in each of us.

Romans chapter eight says that he is ALWAYS interceding for us before the Father. He always prays for us.

But still we must shoulder the burden.

Still we must grope blindly for our own personal ‘pool’s of Siloam where our healing waits.

Who knows why, but some of us must toil along bearing HUGE burdens. I must be faithful. I must hold on. Good good good good things are coming my way.

This path leads to Siloam.

My burden, calling, and task, is to live that journey from the moment of Jesus touch, and mud, (for the blind man the beginning of his pain,) to the pool, where he (and I,) at last will receive the fullness of the word of healing. For him it was his sight; the deepest desire of every blind man, and yet he, like a woman pregnant, carried within himself his healing every step of the way. Jesus Spirit, inhabiting and indwelling, the ‘spitty mud’ in his eyes was the word, His gritty saliva was the hidden promise, and the hope of sight itself.

The mud causing the pain was the embryo of his healing.

What if that errand had been a lifelong task for this man?

What if he had been told, “Go to the headwaters of the Amazon and wash.” An expedition on foot that would have taken him, blind and alone, the rest of his life. Imagine him stumbling and tapping with his cane, feeling his way into dead end canyons, retracing miles and days of the same ground, feeling absolutely foolish clinging to this word of hope. The mud in his eyes stinging, the pain continuing as the years pass and still no sight, still no sign of the mythical headwaters he seeks… Imagine the sense of despair… The hot sun beating down on his neck as he walked the featureless deserts... All places are featureless to a blind man, and yet he journeys on.

Such a single-minded devotion sounds incredibly romantic and epic to me, sitting here typing, knowing that eternal sight awaits him at the headwaters and yet what a weary journey it must have seemed to him.

Imagine the incredible opportunity for fear inherent in blindness. Not knowing if the next step will fling Him headlong off of a precipice or into a pit. Not knowing if the rustling in the grass over there is a Lion stalking or a harmless lamb tearing the grass as it feeds... He stops to rest a few moments, the sun like a weight on his head yet a shade tree not a stones throw away. At one moment he seems foolhardy taking incredible risks as he walks on the edge of cliffs, at another point groping and slowly feeling his way along on flat, safe ground.

This feels like, no, This IS my journey…

To travel on under such conditions clinging to Jesus’ words about wholeness, peace, living water and abundance… But oh how hard it is, oh how long how long how long must I travel?

What an awful path, what an awful calling and superhuman patience it takes. I am not made of titanium, I don’t think I can do it. I can’t imagine how I can walk on yet I know tomorrow will come whether I sleep tonight or not.

I get so angry I want to beat my head against the wall. I have, unlike Job cursed God and tried to die but my rebellious heart is more faithful to Him than I am and it refuses to stop… My ticker just keeps on beating, keeps on holding my feet to the flame. My heart keeps on thumping along and after a few weeks I’m back on my knees again, praying and worshipping.

I can’t stop my heart from loving Him any more than I can stop it from beating. This is, after all, He who died for me…

This is the ONE… The STILL POINT around which all that is or ever will be revolves.

T.S. Elliott wrote this poem. “Without the point, without the still point there is no dance, and there is only the dance.”

He is the Hinge.

The Foundation.

The Rock.

The Beginning and The End.

He who created all and in whose heart I have been invited to dwell…

He who has, “Qualified me to share in the inheritance with the saints in light.” As unlikely and impossible as that sounds.

How can I ever forsake Him? How can I ever throw away all that He is just because I have not yet become all that I wish to be?

After all, the book of James says that this very process of tribulation IS the very means by which I become all I am meant to be.

“Consider it ALL JOY, when you encounter various trials, for the testing of your faith produces… (PRODUCES….) Patience. Patience has its perfect result that you may be complete, lacking nothing.” ‘LACKING NOTHING…’ Isn’t this the desire of every parent for a child?

This is an eternal cornerstone truth for existence as an eternal Spirit in a temporary, sinful state so why am I afraid? Why am I resentful? Why am I so convinced at times that He has forgotten me? (Or worse yet, that He has turned His hand against me?)

It is morning now. I Woke up last night and spent an hour or four laying in exhaustion and pain staring at the ceiling…

DARKNESS… Another unnatural state to be endured.

DARKNESS… A purely temporary condition of this world.

DARKNESS… When all the whispering fears and doubts slither out from under all the sinful rocks and holes of my subconscious and begin speaking, whining, complaining.

DARKNESS… When Jesus seems like a myth unreachable as Xanadu, as untouchable as the moon itself, but even more remote because I cannot see him.

DARKNESS… When nothing but faith alone in the middle of suffering pushes on…

Faith doesn’t even become real true faith, until all props to faith are removed.

Faith like a Cathedral, free from all scaffolds and supports, standing impossibly tall and fragile looking in the middle of a hurricane. All other houses, trees, rocks, the very grass itself snatched out of the ground and scattered by the fury of the wind yet Faith, the Cathedral, stands trembling but sure.

The Bible says all things that can be shaken WILL be shaken… my faith CAN be shaken but Faith, (the gift from God) is an unbreakable weapon, fortress, shield, and strength. It CANNOT be shattered or fail under any possible circumstance in Heaven or Earth. Even if all the forces of Hell itself were gathered together against faith, bringing every weapon in its arsenal to bear, the Cathedral would stand.

Faith is an eternal quality, kept for me in God by God’s infinite love. Yet here I am squarely in the Now, facing the end of a weekend, having done nothing but lay around groaning. Beginning another workweek convinced of the utter impossibility of making it through this week… My weekends though, are not much better.

I Went to Church today and sang on the worship team up front, reeling with pain, wondering if it showed very much on my face. I wept a few tears in longing for eternity.

E T E R N I T Y

”The twelve gates of the city were twelve pearls; each gate was one pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass… And He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the Throne of God and the Lamb. In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations… And there shall no longer be any curse, but the Throne of God and the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him… They shall see his face… God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. THERE SHALL BE NO MORE PAIN. For the former things have passed away… Behold, I make ALL things new.” Revelation Chapter twenty-one and twenty-two, selected verses.

How can I grasp such Glory?

Oh to plunge into that river and dive to the bottom in a body that doesn’t need to breathe…

To rest on the sparkling bed of those crystal clear waters and behold the Being at the very center of the universe… He in whom all my wildest hopes come true…

To come to the surface of that “River that flows from underneath His throne,” Whatever that means, perhaps this river is the outpouring of His ever generate life Eternally welling up out of His inner being.

This is the only possible source of that river that wells up within us. Jesus said, “He who believes in me, out of his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.” How can a river (or anything else) be alive unless it contains the life of a living being? This living water that sustains and lifts me up in the midst of this present fire comes directly from under His throne. What a joy it will be to eat the leaves from the trees on the bank of that river, “For the healing of the nations.”

To worship Him there in ultimate, Everlasting peace and comfort and Everlastingly come to know him in an exponentially increasing revelation of His Glory.

Like a rose that continuously blooms will be His revelation to us in that brilliant, Eternal day. Layer upon layer, depth upon depth, like ‘spelunkers’ we will delve into the everlasting branches of His inner being. The myriad aspects of His own character will keep us more than occupied throughout the endless aeons to come. I think we will ‘bump’ into each other as we explore the depths of His wonder and say, “Hey Charlie! You should check out this aspect of God, it’s over there.” Pointing to an unbelievable gem of glory we have just unearthed. Charlie will say, “Oh boy… Ok… I will if you promise me you will tunnel through this portion of God’s nature, No one has ever been in there yet!!!” It is amazing!

The other night I had a dream about heaven that was so fantastic I Had to write it down. The most wonderfully vivid dream I have ever had. I ‘saw’ colors and ‘heard’ sounds. ‘Felt’ the wind and smelled the flowers. For a few minutes I really thought that I was actually there, in reality.

I dreamt I was in heaven.

I remember feeling as if I had been there for many centuries already and all the grief and fear and pain of this dark world was long gone. I could remember this reality but it was only as a nightmare barely recalled in the light of high noon after the fever has broken.

I was given an assignment by an Angelic figure. A challenging job teaching some youngsters to fly. It was then that I noticed something new about myself. I had wings. Beautiful soft wings attached to my spine. I could even ‘feel’ the wings quivering as they lay flat and unfolded against the skin on my back and suddenly I was filled with a great joy as I realized that I knew how to use these wings. I knew how to fly. Just as I now know here how to walk without thinking about it flight was the same elemental knowing. A true part of this new reality that went almost unquestioned the knowing was so deep.

My wings folded unobtrusively into a tiny pack lying against my back, completely unnoticed under the garment I was wearing. This garment had holes in the sides for my wings to unfold and stretch out unencumbered.

I stretched out my wings and saw them. They were pure white with slight variations in color, lined with shining gold at the very tips. I felt the muscles flowing throughout my wings. Flowing power from my spine near my waist up through my shoulders and into the wings themselves out to the tips where the fine control edges were. I knew the feathers at the tips as intimately as I know my own fingertips here. I knew I could catch a breath of wind and soar gaining altitude or turn in great banking sweeps using these wings. In fact, I knew that I had flown many thousands of times before.

I was standing on a cliff overlooking a great spread of Emerald Ocean.

From a distance I could see my ‘pupils’ coming toward me. Even though I call them ‘youngsters’ I knew that each of them had lived many years on earth and were freshly resurrected from the dark vale of death, still newcomers to the glories of heaven and were shocked and delighted by the eternal burning joy without pain, grief, fear, guilt and selfishness to drown their soul’s hopes. Each of them had eaten of the tree of life and stood transfixed before the throne of God’s glory for many months until they finally were able to move to some of the other infinite delights heaven holds. They were running and laughing as they made their comical way towards me.

Each of them had discovered their own wings recently and had at last been allowed the chance to ‘learn’ to fly. But for now they stumbled and leaped flapping their wings and arms, (a common mistake for beginners) flapping over shorter trees and bushes only to come laughing and shouting down as they overbalanced one way, then the other in their ignorance of the basics of flight. One of them, no doubt a ridiculous ‘wag’ in the dark world was using his wings to cartwheel launching himself fifteen feet in the air at a time. Without the possibility of injury all fear was long gone and I think that they would have been happy to perform these ridiculous loops and hops for hours on end. I knew that they would never be complete without the release of true flight though.

With great joy I waited, savoring the moment as I prepared to do one of the essential acts I had been created for; teaching flight to ‘newbies.’

“Teaching” in this world was nothing more or less than encouraging more letting go. I knew that their wings and spirits already knew the essence of flight and all they really needed was for me to help them visualize what was already within their souls.

With a single bound and a swoop of my own expert wings I sailed over to them. Their eyes shown with longing and desire to fly as I had just demonstrated, effortlessly and truly.

I introduced myself and began to teach them of the air. To tell them of the currents and eddies of the sky. “Air is like a river,” I said, “with the same flow patterns and properties, the same ability to support bodies made for it. Just like fish hang in the water your new bodies were made to hang in the air and glide effortlessly through the slipstreams and channels in the sky. You only need me to help you to become aware of what you already have written into the fabric of your own souls.”

As I taught them it was clear to me I had done this many times before. That this speech was the same pep talk I’d given hundreds, maybe thousands of times before. I spoke of the sky. Of the solitude and grandeur of worship that comes over me every time I fly. My students became very still and I could tell each of them were giving up the foolish notions of cartwheels and frog hops they were experimenting with earlier.

Each of them grew a burning desire to fly higher than an eagle as I spoke.

I think this is the essence of my teaching really, to instill in them the desire for altitude, for heights, for worship on the wing. Back in the darkness of earth they shed tears as I spoke of these things. Here they became more still, and solemn, and reverent and somehow merry as elves all at once.

Just as I began to tell them to stretch out their wings, only this time with attention focused on complete awareness of all the edges and feathers, to feel for the wind, the lift and substance of the air they would soon walk on an Angel fell like a lightning bolt from the sky. Swooping down to the cliff almost too brilliant to look at he landed near our little group and nodded to me. I instructed my class to focus on the wind and their wingtips and went to the Angel.

He gave me a message from God. I was supposed to pray for someone in the darkness of earth. Someone somewhere needed my heavenly prayers. It was kind of strange because I didn’t know whom or why, I just knew I had to pray.

Now in this world prayer for me is always accompanied by a weight on my heart and a sigh. A settling in and pulling sensation that grounds me to God’s presence by faith alone. In short, prayer here is work. In that place, in that time and in that dream prayer was only one thing. It was just one essence and reality. An outpouring of spirit that was both an incoming and an outgoing.

I told my class to wait and not try and leap off the cliff yet, just feel the wings and the air I would be back soon, then I launched myself up into the sky with the Angel flying right beside me.

Remember I felt as if I was really there, that all this was really happening. For the first time I felt not just the memory of flight but flight itself. I felt the muscles in my wings contracting and my feathers vibrating in the wind. I saw the Ocean from high above and smelled the fragrance of roses on the air.

Then I began to pray and sing as I flew. Never have I felt the presence of God as I did in that dream. Even as I type this I am shivering with the faint memory left me.

I cannot describe that joy anymore than I can paint the grace of a single wave sweeping onto the sand. It was freedom. A complete connection with God. A complete immersion into His life and joy and strength and wholeness. I flew and prayed but it wasn’t a prayer like any I’ve ever prayed here in my life. It was a wordless glowing and smoking of my heart that simply burned. That shone like a candle. A fire that burned but did not consume or use any part of me. All the while I felt the air and ‘walked’ it’s paths with my wings.

I remember feeling my arms stretched out in front of me like Superman even as my wings swept the air. I put my arms at my sides and this felt more natural somehow. This wasn’t about the strength of my hands anymore at all. As if anything is ever about the strength of my own arms. I wished for my saxophone so I could play and worship in flight and decided that the next time I would bring it with me to play in the air.

I cannot emphasize enough that this moment in this dream has been the most profoundly free and moving spiritual moment of my entire life up until now. I am quite sure however that God has an entirely different opinion about which moment has been the best in my life though. All I am saying is that it felt to me, to be the deepest and widest moment in God I’ve ever experienced.

After a while, maybe fifteen minutes, maybe two years, I became aware of my class waiting for me, their eyes following the Angel and I in our flight. I was aware that the Angel was not protecting me or helping me, he just wanted to be with me as I worshipped and prayed. I felt the pull of my class and descended to the cliff.

Then I woke up. I wasn’t sad at waking from such burning joy. I didn’t weep for what was and what just may be waiting for me in heaven. I only felt a pure and deepening peace. I became aware of the pains in my body and for once didn’t heave a sigh as I accepted the burden of broken-ness. Smiling and praising God for such a rare and wonderful gift I simply loved him with everything that I am and savored the dream like a fine wine on my tongue. Hoping to regain the dream I went back to sleep and remembered nothing more of my dreams that night.

The next day was one of lasting peace and quiet of mind as the pain of life and the stress of work tormented me. I kept remembering the feeling of flight. And more powerful than the flight was the remembrance of the love and joy of God as I flew there in the dreamland of heaven.

Now… Was I actually there? In the spirit… In heaven? I don’t think so. Do I believe we will be able to fly with wings like eagles in heaven? I honestly don’t know. The bible doesn’t say we will… But it doesn’t say we wont either. What I do know is that the bible says that “eye has not seen, nor ear has heard, nor has it entered into the mind of a man what God has prepared for those who love him.” The bible says that we will be in Everlasting Joy!

No matter what else is true about my dream that night I do know this one thing, it has brought my heart one step closer to Jesus and THAT is a gift beyond compare, more valuable than millions of dollars.

He has more and more and more for all of us. Remember the first miracle Jesus did. The master of the feast said to the steward. (My paraphrase) “Most men serve the best wine first and then when everyone is too smashed to taste the difference bring out the rot-gut but you have served the best wine at the last.”

The best is yet to come.

Heaven…

But first the Thousand year Millennial Rule and Reign of Christ.

I've spent alot of time thinking about justice. There seems to be little or no justice on earth. The Bible talks about the coming millennium rule of Christ on the Earth before we all go to be at home forever in Heaven itself. Justice will be restored to us all at this time.

When I think about the length of people’s lives before the flood it boggles my mind. Back when there was a great body of water surrounding the earth in the upper atmosphere. “God opened the floodgates of heaven.” It says before Noah’s flood. Look at the story of the creation in Genesis closely. You will see it. A vast watery covering blocking out the ultraviolet rays that age us so fast, probably in the very outer layer of the Earth's upper atmosphere. Maybe God used a meteor to release this atmospheric covering upon the earth at the time of Noah’s flood.

People lived to be almost one thousand years old. All them old people... Methuselah. Nine-hundred-and-sixty-nine-years-old. It makes me tired just typing all of those years. Take a look at the genealogies in Genesis, there are a lot of other weird named dudes who made it into their nine hundreds.

It’s possible that one of the reasons why our lives are so short now is that this heavenly shield, this huge airborne Ocean was poured out upon the Earth during Noah’s flood and we are now exposed to the sun’s harshest rays. The wonderful greenhouse this world once was... Is gone.

Yet... The Millennial promise... One thousand years on this earth to pursue our created abilities before the eternity in the throne room. The bible says the throne room of God will descend upon Mt. Zion. The dwelling place of God will be among men. That sixteen hundred-mile cube of glory. Height Width and Breadth! The perfect square of glory. (See Rev 21-22.)

In this new perfect world all the golfers will get to perfect their game. The musicians will jam. The cyclists cycle. All those kids in the Sudan who died of malnutrition will stuff themselves with the most elegant foods...

My brother Bud, who loves cycling will race in the Tour De France and be able to sacrifice himself drafting out in front of the peleton so that his teammate can win like he always dreams of. Joni Aereckson Tada, A famous Christian quadriplegic will hike the peaks of the world. Or maybe she will be the teammate Bud helps win the tour.

I will put my hand in everywhere. Skiing the slopes of Everest and exploring the reaches of the Congo... My pain free hand...

Justice will be returned to us. We will all find that ‘One Thing...’ that elusive yearning for purpose... That deep secret of our souls, the longing for fulfillment in the things of this creation, and we will be able to choose the trip to Jerusalem to worship at His throne. I imagine a steady stream of pilgrims coming and going into God’s mighty presence.

We will still be Christians, for all eternity we will be Christians. When he said, “I will NEVER leave you nor forsake you.” He meant never. Even there He will be Immanuel, God with us.

His Holy Spirit will be with us in a far more audible and present fashion and if we like we can spend the entire One Thousand Years in the throne room itself.

I dream of people perfecting their art and writing symphonies like no one ever dreamed of. A person who spent their life as an Autistic because of an alcoholic mother will be an artist who makes Michelangelo look like a dauber of mud.

When I was at the Chicago institute of Art looking at all those wonderful masterpieces I began to feel this. That is such a beautiful building. I remember wandering through that museum with such a sense of longing. Looking at all the sculpture and classic paintings by the great Masters, Monet and Manet, Van Gogh and quite a few Rembrandts. Those paintings have such power, such presence up close.

My mansion in Heaven will be even more beautiful than this. God’s word says, “Eye has not seen, nor ear has heard what God is preparing for those who love him.” How could the creator of beauty build a mansion for me that is less than beautiful? Everything He does in nature is marvelously beautiful. From the patterns of swirling water in a stream all the way down to the reflected shimmer of a golden sunset on the same water.

Many of the people who through grace I have touched and helped, or who I have given a cup of cold water to in the name of the Lord will present me with masterpieces they have painted to hang on my walls there.

I tell you my friends, once I begin to dream of this destination my heart takes over and my hopes soar like an eagle. I long to scuba dive among the colors and rich life of the Great Barrier Reef. I hear it's almost dead now because of pollution. I will dive in the next life. My brother Bud and I, and thousands of other musicians will sing and make music for days on end, swept up and away in worship...

Oh I tell you the tears are rolling as I write this.

THIS WILL BE A GIFT FAR BEYOND JUSTICE.

There is nothing unfair about our lives here in the interval even though pain makes it seem unfair at the moment.

We are like athletes at a track meet between the first bang and the second after the false start to the race as the runners run out the nervous energy and return to the starting blocks.

The second bang will be the trumpet of Gabriel that sounds the true start, the unstoppable start, the final and irrevocable beginning that will signal the reign of EVERLASTING JOY!

Then comes heaven itself as we go on to a reality beyond this Earth that we cannot even begin to dream of.

So be patient my brothers and sisters.

When we get to heaven, The True Deep Heaven after the millennial reign our adventure will be a continuously exciting and ever new journey as we simply sit before His throne and gaze upon His face. His face! Moses’ face shown for years with a fading glory that terrified the Israelites and all that he was allowed to see was the back of God on Mount Sinai.

And so our adventure in heaven will be a continuously exciting and ever new journey as we simply sit before His throne and gaze upon His face. The old ‘mystics’ called this “The Beatific vision….”

To simply gaze upon God. We will not be interested in golf, or skiing, or fly-fishing. I believe that all of these things, though so compelling and enjoyable now will fade into complete insignificance before the wonder of His glory.

The unfolding of His inner being will be a constant source of Everlasting Joy and Glory to us. We will never become ‘bored.’ Remember the scripture say’s “Eye has not seen, nor ear has heard, nor has it ever entered into the mind of a man, what God has prepared for the hearts of those who love Him.”

Oh how I thirst, Oh how I long for that day…

To be let out of this concentration camp world of futility and groaning, to finally be done. Finished. Complete.

Romans chapter eight says, “The whole of creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly awaiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.”

Groaning, therefore is a normal part of living in this abnormal world subject to the ravages of sin.

At last to be truly free, freedom from pain being high, high, high on my list but perhaps more importantly, free from the futility of sin.

Think of it… To be free from even the slightest hint of accusation from within, and without.

To be free from temptations constant barrage... To be free from every attack of the enemy, free from regret and every form of fear… It is beyond imagining. And yet this is the inevitable destination of every soul that loves God. It is the destiny that is set before me, a destiny more sure and true than anything on Earth. This destiny was the original intention for all of creation.

Luke chapter one says, “Because of the tender mercy of our God, with which the sunrise from on high shall visit us, To shine upon those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace...”

Darkness and the shadow of death…

These are the conditions we labor under. Things were not meant to be this way. The ‘shadow of death’ is unnatural, repulsive, and alien to our entire beings. We were meant to exist in these bodies, on this earth, forever, ‘walking with God in the cool of the evening’ like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. But… The wages of sin is death…

We should be living forever with no fear and absolutely no questions at all in our minds about whether or not God is a good God based upon the present reality of pain, death and grief.

I heard an illustration in a sermon when I was a kid that has always stuck with me.

“Imagine a Titanium steel ball the size of the earth hanging stationary in space. It lies in a complete vacuum, no meteorites, no atmosphere to oxidize and corrode it, no force of any kind that ‘wears it out,’ except for one event. An eagle in solitude flies a long slow orbit around this ball and once every one hundred years the eagle’s wing, for the briefest instant, sweeps the surface of this case hardened Titanium sphere. A few dozen molecules or so of Titanium are buffed off with each pass. This is the only corrosive ‘wearing out force’ brought to bear, once, every century. When that colossal ball is worn down to the size of a BB, Eternity will still be in the beginning stages.

Adam and Eve are still meant to be here.

Death is a shadow we live under. Death casts a pall, a dark sense of fear and uncertainty that clouds every aspect of our lives. We live in ‘the shadow of death.’ Think about a shadow. To live in a shadow means that there is a light, and something is blocking the light, casting a shadow upon you. The warmth and sight that results from living in the light are lost.

“Dead man walking!” Is the cry of the prison guard as a man on death row begins that long dreadful walk down the ‘green mile’ corridor to the electric chair. “Dead man walking” ought to be the cry of the doctor in the delivery room every time a baby is born.

It’s exciting to me that this situation is just as intolerable to God as it is to me. ‘Those who were living under the shadow of death have seen a great light.’ It is the Lord who has changed positions. He has moved the light now.

Between God and me, the ‘sight experience’ of my physical eyes there still looms the shadow of death.

However, in the ancient land of Galilee, two thousand years ago He… MOVED. He took up residence as a man on earth. That blazing eternal light of quenchless life, for the briefest thirty-three years, became a lateral light. It shone at this new angle from the face of Jesus and the fortunate souls who beheld His Glory and saw His grace and truth knew freedom from deaths pall. The shadow of death was conquered, eclipsed, shoved aside in importance as the most compelling, horrible reality of life in favor of the ‘shine’ that Jesus exuded, the perfume that drew everyone to Him like moths to my back porch light. Even those who opposed and shrank in fear from His light were drawn to Him.

The most wondrous aspect of all of this is that after His resurrection the light shifted again.

Now it is an internal light. His light shines and lives unconquerable in the souls of His children. In our faith experience, internally, we rejoice and bathe in this Glorious, unstained original light.

This mountain of salvation truly does come to Muhammad.

Isaiah twenty-five verses six through eight says, “And the Lord of hosts will prepare a lavish banquet for all peoples on this mountain. A banquet of aged wine, choice pieces with marrow, and refined, aged wine. And on this mountain He will swallow up the covering which is over all peoples, even the veil which is stretched over all nations. He will swallow up death for all time, and the Lord will wipe tears away from all faces, and He will remove the reproach of His people from all the earth.”

He will remove this ‘shadow,’ this death that looms between God and us and blocks our experience of God. I can hardly wait.

We are truly ‘flying through space’ in our journey here in these mortal bodies.

Henry Nouwen, a great French theologian and devotional writer found an illustration of this at the circus of all places. He became fascinated with the trapeze act and returned time and again to watch these death-defying daredevils. He followed the troupe to their local hangout and introduced himself. They became great friends.

One night after their act without the safety net in place he asked the ‘flyer’ how it felt to risk his life and rely solely on his own hands to connect up with the ‘catcher.’ (Their conversation was like this… This is not a direct quote.)

The ‘flyer’ responded quickly. “You don’t understand. I… Do… Nothing… If I try and keep track of where the ‘catcher’ is I lose track of where I am at in space and will come out of my tuck at the wrong instant… Disaster… If I try and grab for the ‘catchers’ hands I risk breaking both of our wrists and miss the catch completely… Disaster… Instead I focus on awareness alone. My position in space alone… The ‘catch’ is entirely up to the ‘catcher.’ Nouwen asked the ‘catcher’ about his role in the act. The ‘catcher’ said, “I focus absolutely on the ‘flyer.’ When he flies, nothing else exists for me. He belongs to me. He is mine and the catch becomes easy, like an extension of my own body.” The ‘flyer’ interrupted the ‘catcher’ at this point and spoke enthusiastically of the incredible sense of freedom, the exhilaration of flight. The thrill of risk and sense of security combined as he flew believing with all of his heart that he would be ‘caught’ yet without seeing the ‘catcher.’ He felt all alone as he spun yet knew the ‘catcher’ was there.

Nouwen sat back and marveled at this obvious correlation between our positions as ‘flyers’ of faith, unsupported and spinning freely without a safety net through this world between the cradle and the grave. The almighty catcher is hidden beyond the realm of our perceptions yet we have a calling to ‘let go’ and fly by faith. An ironclad necessity to NOT try and grasp for God’s hands. He is the catcher. Our job is simply awareness alone. We are called to recklessly Simple trust as we spin and live here in the air.

We are the ghosts not He. We are the insubstantial transparent spirits, so transparent our bodies can be cut, burned, shot or physically crushed, wounded by all sorts of sharp objects.

We look at the Spirit world as an ethereal place. As if those who have passed on are like a mist or will of the wisps wandering in the dark. We think it is they, who would pass through us, as if it is us that have the material reality and they who are, “Like smoke in a glass…”

The true reality is exactly opposite from this. Our eyes are too weak to see their substantiality. Our bodies would pass through theirs. We are the failing flesh, we are the mists…

Isaiah says, “All flesh is like grass… The grass withers, the flower fades. The people are grass…” Fading in the sun… Withering in the frost… Standing lifeless through the winters of our lives... Grass... The weakness and futility are all ours… The pain and suffering… Ours…

The saddest reality of all is that many people will die in their sins and face the horrid destination Jesus says waits for them. Hell itself… In the face of this truth I truly am horrified… “Oh please just let Lazarus dip the tip of his little finger in water to bring me some relief here.” begs the rich man in Jesus parable.

To those who are in THAT place nothing can be said…

There can be no hope there… No room to breathe there... No relationships there… No beauty or truth… Nothing at all but agonizing time going nowhere, coming from nowhere, leading nowhere.

I at least, can experience, at least for three to five hours a day, the bliss of sleep. There is nothing for them there but ‘gnashing of teeth’ and ultimate despair. If there were one single doctrine I could remove from the bible it would be this one. But if I’m ‘in for a penny, I’m in for a pound’ and I know God’s truth and justice demands Hell.

In the light of this, and many other afflictions and diseases people are going through all over the world, I am truly blessed. I have many things to be thankful for.

I am far, far, far from the hopeless ‘Heironymous Bosch’ state of the truly, for all eternity, LOST. Heironymous Bosch was a painter in the middle ages who painted the most gruesome scenes of Hell. Demons eating lost souls… People burning in flames, etc. etc. truly excruciating art.

In the long, long, nights of nausea I listen to my dear, sweet, lovely, faithful hearted wife sleeping and I realize a blessing few have. A growing, thriving marriage based on the certainty of a lifelong commitment before God. Much of societies problems turn on the epidemic of broken marriages and broken family relationships…

I have NO broken, or even bent relationships in my family. My children are all well behaved and are all happy and healthy.

I have no heartbreaking addictions to fight with... Or rather, lose to, as is the case with addiction. On a purely psychological-personal level I am blessed tremendously.

I have literally dozens of supporting relationships at Church and feel tremendously loved by many people. Frequently people I don’t even know tell me they are praying for me because, ”So and so told me you are having trouble.” I play the saxophone in song service and feel a wonderful release and anointing of the Holy Spirit during worship. The creative process of making music is an endlessly satisfying pleasure…

BUT… This agony…

Many people have been telling me over the last nine years that I ought to be keeping a journal as I go through this trial. Until now I have not felt as if I have anything to say, but now through the leading of the Holy Spirit… Or perhaps I have become so full that I must write or burst. I must write.

Whether I now actually have anything meaningful to say I leave entirely in God’s hands. If anyone is still reading this be patient with me please... I am not a writer and I am not organizing my thoughts at all but just slamming the keys, trying to sort out some rather raw feelings... Desperately trying to cope… To find some place to stand, some living, breathing room here among the noxious fumes of chronic pain and suffering.

I’ve gone through many different reactions, emotions, depressions, and despair. . I’ve had moments of the bleakest hopelessness…

Last summer my middle son Travis wanted to go camping with a friend of his and their family. I decided to come along for a night. It was an hour and a half drive to the lake and I was following their car with Travis and his friend Zachary in my car.

I began feeling so dizzy and ill, sssooo much pain and exhaustion, I thought I might literally drive off the road. One of the more difficult symptoms is hard to describe. My eyesight goes kind of ‘wacko’ on me. Everything appears to sort of, blend in or wash out. It all becomes kind of two-dimensional looking and spatial distortion sets in. When this gets really severe I begin to think I might really be going insane…

Anyway, I realized the camping trip was not going to happen for me so I flashed my headlights until I got Zach’s Parents to pull over. I sent my son on with them, then stopped and rested. I Waited a while hoping that my eyesight would return to normal.

After thirty minutes or so I felt a tiny bit better so I began driving home. Literally crying aloud with pain, muscles all over my body screaming, so dizzy yet I pushed on, hoping I could stay on the road.

It was a beautiful summer day in July. I was driving along the Santiam River, an unspoiled trout stream dancing in the sun. People everywhere were driving with convertible tops down, boats behind campers, cyclists and fisherman enjoying the day and I, like the plague among them grimly clinging to the steering wheel in tears and praying, “God, please help, keep me on the road please.”

In years lllooonnnggg gone past I have spent many hours on this river swimming, fishing and rafting so I know a few secluded places. I pulled my car over and plodded down a logging road to one of the more “secret spots.” I was thinking, “Might as well do a little fly fishing while I’m up here.” Fly fishing used to be a pastime almost approaching a passion for me. “Maybe in the process, the Chess game of fishing, the concentration and the art of the cast I can forget some of the pain...”

No such luck...

Down there on the sparkling water I caught some nice trout. But there was no relief, no enjoyment, and no peace… Just more groaning, more burdens and nausea…

Life was detestable to me... Life was an unbearable trial and I truly, at that moment, did not want to go on. With such longing I looked at the swiftly flowing water and thought of drowning, of suicide… Of just… Letting go… Slipping into the water and forcing myself to breathe in…

To truly take on the wings of an eagle and end this captivity…

To finally…

Be at rest…

I swear I’ve never wanted anything in my entire life more than I wanted to cease to exist at that moment... A kind of lust for death began to steal upon me… I allowed my mind to fantasize about what it would be like. To just lie down in the water and let the current have it’s way.

TO........ JUST.......... LIE.......... DOWN.......... To lie down and slip away from all the pain.

Oh how I wanted that, and oh, how frustrating it was to turn away from that temptation... How incredibly disappointed I felt as I chose to live... How betrayed, and ill treated… HOW HUGELY UNFAIR LIFE WAS TREATING ME!

How cruel and hardhearted God must be to look upon such immense suffering and do nothing…

How bleak the rest of my life looked from that standpoint. It was as if I was standing on a high mountain and seeing the path before me. The horrid trail my feet, bare, must walk… A vast hot desert covered in broken glass and I in the middle, not an ounce of water in sight... Glass behind… Glass ahead... And the only way out was up. The only way out the ultimate out. To finally and at last go the way of all flesh and step through that mysterious door… Slip into the current. My only other choice the one I detest the most… To walk on through the glass...

So I wrapped my arms around a fallen tree there by the riverside and just wept and wept. Holding on to that log like it was life itself… An hour or two passed as I, completely desolate and broken, at rock bottom, wept pouring my heart out like water before the Lord, begging, pleading for His intervention.

The worst part about it is, knowing that that experience of rock bottom is going to be, and Is, the very condition of my life from now on... To finally give in to the fact of my disability as a PERMANENT condition and realize that rock bottom is where I’ll dwell from now on.

I know that the condition of feeling rock bottom comes to everyone from time to time, but the unfairness of it all is that permanence, the unchanging nature of chronic suffering... A healthy person hits bottom, within six months things are looking up. The financial crisis passes… The problem with this or that fades away… Things have a way of changing.

But for me... Here… In the middle of this lifelong desert... Things will not change.

I live here now, in the far north, my voice insulting the airy regions where healthy people actually experience the sensation of “Enjoyment,” and “Fun.”

From Under The Lava I speak.

From Under The Lava I live now… Static and stale... Raw and hurting, yet still here...

Out of the reach of men. Out of the understanding of anyone but those who are traveling trapped in the same prison I am in but not by any means out of the reach of God’s wonderful hand…

He dwells with me…

My voice is detestable to me and if I could, I would flee from my own self but I am stuck with me... Trapped with me... The Lord Almighty though… He loves me even so… He is here with me even so… He weeps with me and carries me even so… I can never be detestable to Him. I can never be beyond the reach of his love. And for this reason and no other I choose life. The love of God.

“To be or not to be… Is it nobler in the mind to suffer the pangs of outrageous fortune…?” Etc. To be is the only real choice a Christian has. I’ve been bought with a price and my life is not my own to throw away because things are tough.

I have been dreaming constantly of heaven. I am always trying to picture what it will be like to stand without pain on that crystal sea and worship God… Pain free… It’s become an obsession.

Every day for several weeks as I pray my way through my day. (I really never stop praying these days…) I have been begging God to let me come home to heaven. Asking Him to kill me.

Last Sunday the dizziness and pain was so intense that I knew if I went to Church that I wouldn’t be able to hear two words of the sermon because of this distraction so I stayed home while my wife took the kids to Church. Some example huh? So much for Roy ‘The Promise keeper…’ Anyway after they all left I just wept and wept uncontrollably asking, begging, pleading with God to kill me…

I received no answer, no comfort, and no sense of His presence… I heard nothing but silence and my own inevitable agony. Monday I went to work and dragged myself around in tears most of the day, hiding behind my sunglasses so no one would know. “Hey, is the sun out?” Everyone asked me. This is Oregon… Constant clouds you see…

I spent most of my prayer life Monday begging God to grant me my wish and take me home to everlasting joy. Nothing… Just silence… I had no sense of His presence or voice at all.

Monday night in a hot bath I read James. “You who lack wisdom ask of God and he will answer…” So… I begged the Lord for wisdom, to speak to me. Nothing…

Tuesday once more I went to work. If I had to go to a torture chamber every day and let someone rip out my fingernails in slow motion these are the feelings I have about work. How I dread it, How it increases my pain but my bills wont wait for me to be well and I love my family more than life itself so I go… Once again I was asking for death and God began to spank me in that still small voice. “Do you really want wisdom Roy?”

I speak God’s voice out loud to myself, then answer with my voice all the time. I know some of you think this makes me a maniac but I don’t care, pain and suffering wipe such considerations aside.

“Do you really want my wisdom Roy?” “Yes Lord.” I replied aloud, “I can’t go on another step without your wisdom.”

“Ok Roy, you asked for it… I am the God of life Roy. What you are asking of me I cannot answer. Death is not within me. Death is my enemy. The only thing that flows forth from my being is life. This prayer is not even directed at me. Roy you have been in an idolatrous relationship with death. Embracing death like a healthy man embraces a harlot. When you pray for death you are actually praying TO death. Communing with death. Your back is to me and your face is toward my enemy. I cannot give you peace when you are in this posture. I cannot give you life or health when you are taking this stand. Give up the hope of death Roy, it is not my hope or will for you. Death is the wages of sin and will come to you only once. When you live your life in the presence of death it is as if a heavy, cold, greasy, foul, wet blanket is shrouding your spirit and my breath cannot penetrate it. When you are in this posture I must take a stand just behind you and sustain your life with mine and wait for you to repent and come back to me. I love you so much and can’t abide this adulterous relationship with death anymore. You must choose this day. Me…Or It.”

Such hard words from my Father. I began to tremble as this Revelation filled my soul. The very thing I want more than anything on Earth, Heaven, is to be denied to me now by my Father. That is, the immediate hope of Heaven. Yet unless I give up this pipe dream of a quick end by heart attack or car accident, or brain aneurysm, etc. etc. etc. I will experience God’s life less and less until at last all I will have is death shrouding my Spirit and filling my body and crushing my soul. I will almost literally be a Zombie if I allow this to happen.

So in deep bitterness of soul I began praying through my tears. “I repent dear Lord. You know my heart and though Jesus seems hidden in my life and not many people can see him shining through as I grimace and frown, fiercely fighting just to remain functional, Who wants to be like me now? No one… I still love you and I want more than anything to be at rest, to be at peace with you.”

Then the Lord again, “Roy, do you love me for who I am, or do you love me because you think that someday in heaven you will once more be at rest, happy and healthy and whole? I want to be loved just for love itself. I want you to choose me just because. The choice Job made is the choice I am calling you to. To love me just because I AM. You can only make this choice from the depths of pain. Every other choice in pleasure is determined to some extent by the pleasure itself. How can I know your true heart apart from this test?”

I hate-love it when God speaks like this to me.

Truth is so harsh and strict sometimes.

So now I have been pulling my heart back like a jockey yanks the head of his horse away from a trod and known path. Every five minutes or so I feel my mind and hope turning to death and I must yank my mind around and back into the presence of life.

Even knowing full well that as I do I am actually lengthening my life span and guaranteeing that the length of the pain I feel on Earth will be longer still. But I must do the will of my Father in heaven. I must connect up with and dwell in His ever-outpouring life.

Maybe some of you will relate to this. Hopefully no one has plumbed the depths of this particular despair as I have. Somehow though we will limp through and find the source of all joy.

Oh the path is long…

So long indeed…

The only point that I can see to it all… The only purpose and meaning that I can discover can be found and seen only by God Himself. It means absolutely nothing to me. It is like rotten eggs to me but to Him, from His perspective, has tremendous meaning and significance. I only see the desert, the dungeon, and nothing else...

He however, from the highest standpoint, the Lord of time itself observing my beginning and end, observing even now the eternal Joy that I will someday rejoice in imparts meaning to my life. And by faith alone I must accept this... Or give up...

Like a painter working on a masterpiece He paints me. He molds and moves me. This truth though a comfort, is not actual bread to me though. To know that, like George Bailey from the famous film, ‘It’s a wonderful life,’ my life is helping others and that the world is a better place because I live and suffer, does not give me life in this moment.

Again I turn to my main theme…

“HE IS WITH ME HE IS WITH ME HE IS WITH ME.”

This is bread, this is hope, and this is life indeed.

Pain... Futility... Purpose... Truth…

The way I see it these questions would not even come up in my life if it weren't for pain... My illness tends to be the focal point I can't get away from... I cannot simply... Move forward...

Like an ant scurrying around under a magnifying glass on a hot sidewalk I am under it’s focus. The light is harsh and bright here and the Lord pursues me constantly as I run.

So... The choice... The only choice I have in the light of this focus is to swing the bright hot point of light blazing down from the glass to the left, dark side of anger, or the right side of acceptance.

I can become a bitter hardened cynical old man... Or a ‘Christian Mystic’ and allow the focus of my inner life to fall on the word that God is implanting in my soul and truly become Christlike through this enforced and unwanted prison.

Lukewarm mediocrity and complacency just are not options here. I will become awful and hateful... Or incredibly focused and Godly...

I don’t like the radical extremity of these two choices. But they are the only ones on my plate; they are the only food offered me.

I want to deal with life and God on my own terms... You know, yield to Him what I want to... Use Him when it suits me to... The middle path of complacency so appeals to my flesh and deep down I would love to just ‘go on vacation’ from God for awhile... Honestly…

No matter which way I choose the focus is inevitable... Choosing anger or acceptance tears and suffering are inevitable... Either way as long as pain grips me this groaning is inevitable... Tears and suffering are inevitable…

The exciting thing I am discovering anew is the transforming power of the Word of God... I've been eating it up… Hungering for it... Dwelling in it and letting it change my mind... I can actually feel the deep healing in my soul. The inner man that scrambles in fear and scratches and screams silently under the load of pain is beginning to settle down and be quiet.

I'm becoming quiet in my belly... Peace is growing there even as the violence and groaning grip my neck and shoulders.

So again I want to encourage you. Even though ‘Seinfeld’ is a very entertaining TV show. (I really do like it.) Turn it off for awhile. Come to the word without any agenda at all other than the desire to simply think God’s thoughts for a while instead of your own...

If you haven’t done this much, and in our consumer society (don’t feel condemned, most people haven’t) I want to really encourage you to persist. Based on my own experience you probably wont feel instant peace. You might not even feel the presence of God right away. Remember Proverbs 4:18… “But the path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining brighter and brighter until the full light of day.” So stick with it. Even if all seems dark as you seek His face, continue to wait before Him in your prayers and devotions. Just as dawn is a slow but sure process of increasing light, your awareness and progression in Jesus will be a slow, seemingly imperceptible process of growth.

God guarantees it will begin to heal that ‘anxiety freaky spot’ in the inner person... Jesus promised that “The truth will set you free” and, “He who seeks will find.”

God’s word will heal that desperate place that thinks about suicide. That ‘hunted feeling’ you get as despair and fear, anxiety and pain makes you panic and fret until you spin wildly in circles vainly looking for the ‘bogeyman’ of fear and trouble to attack.

Just let the spinning stop as you let God’s thoughts fill your mind... If you don't... Well... Isaiah chapter 30:15 says, “Thus says the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel. In repentance and rest you shall be saved. In quietness and confidence shall be your strength. But you would not, and you said, ‘No, for we will flee on horses.’ Therefore you shall flee! You said, ‘We shall ride on swift horses.’ Therefore those who pursue you will be swift! One thousand shall flee at the threat of one, At the threat of five you shall all flee until you are left as a pole on top of a mountain, and as a banner alone on a hill.”

Remember again and again... Say this to yourself over and over as the waves rise around your shoulders and neck, as it seems you are about to drown...

“He is with me He is with me He is with me.”

We cannot be separated from this truth. Romans chapter eight says, (You ought to memorize Romans eight by the way, at least dwell there for awhile.) “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord…” And again, “The Spirit helps us in our weaknesses. For we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.”

His Spirit in us…

Now to attempt to express the inexpressible... To try and put into words this sense of dwelling, this nearness of God to my soul, this place, deep in my being, where He has made a place for himself.

How can I bring it up? How can I possibly define or describe it?

I’ve tried to imagine describing the color blue to a blind man… What would I say?

“It looks like... What’s that…? Describe ‘look…?’ Ok... To look is to sense a shape at a distance… I’m sorry, a ‘shape’ is the outline of an object… Now, blue is a... Cool color... It’s like a cold drink on a hot day… It looks almost exactly like Miles Davis sounds on trumpet… No, that’s not it… Blue looks like silk feels… No… The smell of grass and the sound of robins in the spring…” Etc.

It can’t be done, yet in all this writing this is what I want to do more than anything else. I want to truly encourage anyone reading this to delve deeply into His heart.

I am beginning to walk, crawl, and come limping into a new reality of experiencing Jesus as the very essence of my being.

It isn't any easier though. Funny how I always expect spiritual growth to at last lead me into the Hawaiian islands where I’ll surf and relax on a beach for the rest of my life.

In Revelation chapter twelve when the dragon was thwarted in his attempt to kill the Messiah he declared war on Mary's offspring, “Those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus.” Now I'm not catholic and don’t feel any special reverence for Mary but that’s what we are called in revelation. Her offspring…

The dragon determined to make war against us for all time. So war is what this walk here in the shadow-lands is all about. Warriors are what we are.

However, Christ longs to become the very essence of our beings. We have salvation in our spirits already but we don’t automatically become all that God wants us to be when we raise our hands and walk that aisle for the first time. When we die we automatically discover this reality of Jesus as our essence but what God wants to show his children and is finally showing me is that in experience we can come into that reality now. “I’ve been crucified with Christ therefore I no longer live, Jesus Christ now lives in me.”

I got a tatoo a few months ago... The “White family tattoo” Its kind of gruesome. A heart, anotomically correct, not a Valentines day symbol but the Organ itself skewered like a piece of meat on a shishkabob by an old graarly cross... We call it 'The Crucified Heart'. I'm pretty sure thats gonna be my one and only. In the place I live I'm way past the addicted to pain stage. I didn't enjoy the process a bit! That vibrating needle boring in. I got into a cold sweat and just toughed it out. Luckily it only took about 45 minutes since its only about 6 inches or so. My Eldest Son Kyle designed it after going through a summer from hell. Long story that is being resolved by his repentance and entrance into the air Force. Represents to me personally my participation in Christs death on the cross.. Not that i contribute to what he did but that I myself, my sinful nature must die daily being nailed to the cross so that when something happens and my natural reaction in my sinful wicked self is to lash back with malicious gossip or anger or justify my own judgements and so on, my lusts and all that lives deeply hidden in the basement of my heart out of sight mostly, HAS TO BE CRUCIFIED where it then still slightly alive like the thief, condemned to hang with him in the spirit realm where it can't interfere and inflict its sinful proud vanity on others. Then Jesus in all his love and patience is free to live in me, through me, put my heart on like a glove and ACT through me and then miracle of miracles, others can be blessed through HIM moving in me! How exciting that is to me, that a dead man like I, dead in my sins can through him alone like a dead twig grafted onto a new living vine, begin to produce fruit that is wonderfully good. I love Jesus so much for not witholding this awesome and precious gift from me. But it does involve my heart being crucified and so the tattoo means this to me. Plus the solidarity of all my boys getting it seals the deal for me.
The only way I will ever get another is if it involves another spiritual issue and if I feel God leading me to get it like I think he was leading me to get this one. I love it because of what it means to me and my family.
Galatians 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.

This has absolutely zippo to do with how I feel. It has everything to do with how I believe and as I am discovering How I believe changes how I feel. How I, (and you) love God and walk being faithful to the trail he has chosen for me.

He will take the trial and the trail He gives you and change the despair and haze of pain into something else, some strange and wonderful alchemy of Glory.

This rising, this morning light in my spirit is something that I want to express and share more than anything else on earth yet it is just out of the reach of words.

I know that I really don’t have any help to offer you with this. I know that when a person is in severe suffering they have passed totally beyond the help of man and are dwelling completely in God’s hands. The place inside where He dwells…

It’s as if you are stuck out on a rock in the middle of a swift river beyond anyone’s reach. Right on the very brink of a waterfall... No one can reach you or touch you in that place but God. No one can stand with you or understand but God. No one can give you the strength and grace to face each day but God.

It encourages me that even St. Augustine nearing the end of his life said this as he was thinking about the magnificence of God and his own attempts to describe the presence of Jesus. “I can write no more, for all I have written is straw.”

The real book, the real epistles of God are us. Written in our hearts is the word of God. When Jesus becomes our lives we become the books of God.

Those are some stories that I am going to love to read in the library in heaven. Think of it. How many books are in that library?

But back to my thought about describing the reality of Jesus taking over for me and becoming my life. Like a zombie already dead I must choose to suffer in order to stay out of His way. I must choose to remain on the cross, just as He chose to remain on the cross.

At any moment during the crucifixion He could have called it off. Millions of Angels were massed; just waiting for the Word to speak and put an end to what, to them must have seemed the most insane action God has ever taken. Yet He chose the cross. So it is with me as I try to walk in the spirit reality of Galatians 2:20.

To choose to suffer releases the controls from me and allows me to cheer Him on from the cross of denying myself the right to anything at all. We must deny ourselves the ‘right’ to sin, to be irritated with our families, to live within our own wills at all.

I’m not saying this right at all...

Well it is a new height on the mountain for me and I am just now beginning to explore what it looks like.

A few weeks ago we got a new fish tank. A nice big twenty-nine gallon tank with a filter and nice plastic plants. Rocks and decorations, it has all the works for the fish. We set it up and filled it with water, arranged the plants and then tried to dump the fish from the little one gallon bowl we had into their new home.

They wouldn’t go. They resisted and swam against the current pouring out into their new healthy huge environment. Almost all the water was out of the old bowl pouring into the new and still they flopped around trying to stay in the known place, the place they were used to, the ‘safe’ place.

They were probably freaking out thinking we were killing them.

I looked at those idiot fish and I said, “There I am!” That’s me, resisting every new reality God brings into my life!

I wish I was a better writer and could really share my devotional life with the world in a deeper way… Well, with the few who would listen anyway. I don’t have any real heavy revelations or anything new from God, I’m just discovering truth, not creating it. I only have this sense of nearness from Jesus as I realize more and more what it means that He has become the essence of my soul.

He is both the rock and the waterfall below the rock in the river. There is just so much more of His glory and life to be appropriated by us in this life now.

This and this alone is so much more compelling than anything else this world has to offer us. I know that the only way to truly avoid sin is to be so filled up with the word and presence of the Lord that there will be no hunger left for anything else.

It’s almost humorous. The in-flowing and in-dwelling of Jesus is like a great flood that as He fills me He also scrapes out and away more of the loose sand and mud in my spirit and I find myself more empty and more broken and ‘ruined’ more and more each day.

Each day I long for more of His love and as the filling happens my hunger and thirst for righteousness also grows in exact proportion. I myself get bigger and more able to hold more of Him but this increases my longing and discomfort because then I recognize my emptiness is greater. (I told you it’s funny.)

Yet how I want to be bigger and emptier because I know that His waterfall is able to fill my emptiness no matter how great my need is... (Whew, Follow me there.)

I guess pain and longing and filling and emptiness are all part of the process of the cross. I long to see His face... To… Even if it means my death I yearn to see His face...

It would be worth it if at the moment of my death I would at last see His face and be consumed by His beauty. That then His beauty would become my beauty and I could cast down my crown of beauty before him and be completely emptied that out of His being would flow more of life everlasting to bless and lift me up that I might lay it down again in an ever expiring and living act of sacrifice.

Everything depends on heaven. And it’s all by faith.

God’s inner voice spoke this to me the other day.

“The thing that thrills me the most is faith Roy. Just pure faith. This is why I don’t let people see Angels very often. This is why so many answers to prayers so often look like coincidences. And, in your case, this is why some days I sit back and withhold the feeling of my presence from you. You have accepted pain as a way of life where so many will not. When you love me even in the midst of pain this is faith so pure that I must respond with my presence. But at times for my own glory and pleasure, since your faith is my highest pleasure while you are in this life, I do sit back and let you walk alone with nothing but faith. How it thrills my soul to see you moving in faith when all else is crumbling around and within you. That you love me even then is such pleasure to me and your reward will be more than anything you can imagine when you get to heaven.”

So... Pain… Really… So What?

It’s just pain… But God’s favor, His pleasure, His approval... There is nothing higher on earth. There is nothing greater than to have no ambition. To have no goals. To have nothing else on earth that ties me down to earth and to seek his face all day long and accept him on His terms alone. To just sit back and rest in the middle of battle.

Faith…

This is how God feels about me, “My son if your heart is wise My own heart also will be glad and my inmost being will rejoice when your lips speak what is right.” Proverbs 23:15. His heart is glad and rejoices! All I really have to do is just sit back and rest in faith.

It is impossible to imagine that He is too good. My dreams of His grace are too shallow… The place that He dwells in me is way deeper than my emotions… Way deeper than my feelings of depression and resentment… This is a place way deeper than any pain or any trial. Even attempting in attempting to describe the ‘dwelling-ness’ of God within me I miss the mark and fumble around like a toddler getting completely lost in my own writing.

About fifteen years ago I was home from college for the summer visiting my parents and we went to the Grand Canyon for vacation. We walked to the bottom of the canyon and camped out down there. A feat that, if my life depended on it now I simply, physically could not do.

The day after that hike my parents were absolutely exhausted and slept almost the whole day in their motor home at the campground, leaving me with the day to myself. I spent the time on the rim of the canyon just looking… Look for forty-five minutes, walk a few hundred yards then stop and look again.

A great sense of Awe settled in on me. There is an almost audible music in the silence there. As if there is a great ‘Basso-Profundo’ chord playing as all those billions of tons of rock crush the Earth’s crust. I began to feel so small… To feel that I was less than an insect compared to the sheer size before me. Yet this vast canyon that at some places is over five miles across was a mere dust mote in comparison with the Creator. Yet somehow I also felt high and exalted. That the vast spiritual space within me that He inhabits in my soul is even greater yet than the canyon. After all Jesus didn’t die for that canyon, He died for you and I.

As the day wore on the rocks took on different colors and different shapes were emphasized by the changing shadows. A deep feeling of peace settled in on me… (Remember this was pre-illness.)

I was stunned by the reactions of most of the people riding the tour bus on the rim road. A bus comes by every ten minutes giving people an opportunity to ride to the next “Vista spot.” After a while I began watching the people as they got off the bus. Typically people walk up to this immensity and look for about thirty five to sixty five seconds. Then they turn around and face their wives, husbands or friends holding cameras, (the self must rule, must be seen to be present at all times) pose for a snapshot, then sit down on the handy bench nearby (as often as not, not even looking at the canyon,) and wait for the next bus to move them two or three hundred yards up the road to the next “Vista…” After all... “I’VE SEEN THE CANYON FROM THIS SPOT.”

The inner reign of the self turning inward back unto itself absorbs only as much of the beauty as there is room for and then must turn away from such an example of Lordship… The natural inclination of the self spurns such an example of an overwhelming, totally dwarfing experience before God.

The most powerful kingdom and force on Earth is the realm of the Self. The rule of the Self…

I was the perfect example of this at the Canyon, wandering, loitering, and I’ll admit feeling smugly superior to these “tourists” who were missing the point here! My Self asserting it’s ‘Self-ship,’ it’s superiority over these others again (oftentimes I do this completely at their expense and they must pay for my pride) nevertheless waiting with my feet hanging over the Cliffside and allowing the canyon to have its way in me…

Seeking to be changed, seeking to somehow partake in the stillness and grandeur, drinking in the beauty, storing it up to be remembered later… (Sorry folks, the video camera can’t capture this awesome feeling.) When I finally returned to the motor home after watching the sun go down in flames my inner being was larger, more able to hold God’s presence, more like Him…

I’ve failed again. In trying to describe what Jesus is like in me I resort to describing the Grand Canyon and how it affected me.

How can I describe Him? I barely know Him. How can I bottle Him up and speak him, or type Him…? He will not be described, contained, or boxed.

He Himself forbade His ancient people in the Old Testament to even shape the stones on the Altars where the animals were offered as a sacrifice because His shape cannot even be imagined by our puny minds… His purposes are vast and beyond my reach.

His name even, is shrouded in mystery. “Who are you?” said Moses trembling in fear in front of the burning bush. “Tell them ‘I AM’ has sent you.” Who now am I that I should attempt to describe the temple where He lives within me…?

In my weakness I resort to lame comparisons to the Grand Canyon and find that that which is within me surpasses the beauty, stillness and glory I experienced there. Yet the weight of Glory that lives in my inner being is heavier than all those miles and megatons of rock. The gospel will outlast every single molecule in that entire canyon and I will be alive when it all is eroded down to fine sand on the ocean side.

This is the wonder and hope of life.

The vast sense of silence, stillness and the vague hint of music that lives in that canyon is comparable but falls short of the vast sense of His presence living liquid within me.

I think of the movie “Titanic.’ The actors searching for the ‘heart of the Ocean,’ that priceless diamond that went under with the ship years before and is now hidden in the depths over twelve thousand feet down.

They persist in their search during the storms and waves at the surface sending down specially made submersible remote controlled submarines dragging up safes and cabinets looking for the gem only to fail again and again. The entire time the ‘heart of the ocean’ was being held by an old woman from small town America already on board their ship.

And so it is with God’s loving presence, active and vital in the plain lives of imperfect people like you and I, yet still indescribable by us who hold the ‘heart of the Universe,’ Christ Himself hidden within our own suffering souls.

I nearly become inarticulate as I attempt to describe the blazing glory of God’s presence tucked safely away at the root of my being.

I’m so glad the tabernacle in the desert during the forty-year wanderings of the children of Israel was completely draped in goatskins, then rams skins dyed red, then porpoise skins covering everything. (See Exodus chapters 25 through 28)

I Think the drab gray porpoise skins symbolize our flesh, our outward appearance. Our skin. The goatskins symbolic of our sinful natures. Then the red rams skins symbolizing the blood of Jesus cleansing our inner beings covering over the rooms overlain with solid gold symbolizing the life of God hidden deep inside where no one can see.

Try to imagine all that blazing glory of gold and silver, the entire tabernacle in some rooms completely covered on the inside with beaten gold molded over the walls and doors. An entire room paneled with pure gold, worth millions upon millions of dollars, and more beautiful than anything anyone now alive has ever seen… Completely covered by smelly old goatskins.

The beauty and riches and glory of gold all hidden on the inside of the tabernacle just as Christ is invisibly hidden in our hearts.

But still I haven’t described that place within.

It’s a place brimming over with laughter and light. A place from which flows all patience and hope. It is the place in me from which the river of love that flows from under His throne is available for me to draw on at any moment.

A place where, most importantly, a PERSON lives... Never forget this. God Is A Person! Not a human, heavens no! A Person… We are persons only because we are made in His image. He is the first person(ality) and the last.

I’ve still failed to convey the joy of knowing Him and in a way I’m glad. If I could fully explain Him it would bring Him down to the level I am and there would be nothing left to explore. No more adventure or wonder to look forward to.

To even attempt to describe this ‘Temple of the Soul’ is foolish. It is beyond words, completely beyond my ability to paint.

A Catholic ‘mystic’ named Meister Eckhart who lived in the thirteen hundreds put it this way.

“I have often said before that there is an agent in the soul, untouched by time and flesh, which proceeds out of the Spirit and which remains forever in the Spirit and is completely Spiritual. In this agent God is perpetually verdant and flowering with all the joy and Glory that is in Him. Here is joy so hearty, such inconceivably great joy that no one can ever fully tell it, for in this agent the Eternal Father is ceaselessly begetting His Eternal Son and the agent is parturient (Great old word, Who knows what it means.) with God’s offspring and is itself the Son, by the Fathers unique power. For this reason, if a person had a whole Kingdom or all this world’s goods and left it all solely for God’s sake, to become the poorest man who ever lived on earth, and then if God gave him as much to suffer as He ever gave any man, and if this person suffered it out until he was dead, and if then, even for the space of a moment, God let him see what he was in this agent of the soul, all his suffering and poverty would seem like a very little thing beside the joy of it, so great in that moment.”

This is true reason to hope.

In another passage Eckhart says, “I have said that there is one agent in the soul that is free. Sometimes I have called it the Tabernacle of the Spirit. Other times I have called it the Light of the Spirit and again, a spark. Now I say that it is neither this nor that. It is something higher than this or that, as the sky is higher than the earth and I shall call it by a more aristocratic name than I have ever used before, even though it disowns my adulation and my name, being far beyond both. It is free of all names and unconscious of any kind of forms. It is at once pure and free, as God himself is, and like Him is perfect unity and uniformity, so that there is no possible way to spy it out. God blossoms and is verdant in this agent of which I speak, with all the Godhead and Spirit of God and there He begets His only begotten Son as truly as if it were in Himself. For He lives really in this agent, the Spirit together with the Father giving birth to the Son and in that light, He is the Son and the Truth….” (He ends this mystic discourse by saying) “If you can only see with my heart, you may well understand what I am saying, for it is true and the truth bespeaks my word.”

Maybe Meister Eckhart just spent too much time alone in his monastery; this must be taken with a grain of salt... I don’t know but there is something in his words, something in my Spirit that responds to this description of the Eternal dimension that is within me. Perhaps it will strum the chords of your soul as well.

God Himself puts it this way in the book of Ephesians. “I bow my knees... that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in His love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height... to know the love of Christ which passes all knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God...” It’s late now… I’ve got to try and sleep.

Another day… I went to work... Dragged around feeling as if I have sunburn on the inside of my skin. I made it through…

The other day I did the math and figured, as a worse case scenario. “If I live to be one hundred years old, I have only about Twenty-Two-Thousand-Nine-Hundred-And-Some-Odd-Days-To-Go.

Well, I’ll never… Ever… have to live this one again. January-Nineteenth-Nineteen-Ninety-Nine-Is-Nearly-Over… And I made it… Thank you Lord… Another seemingly impossible task accomplished, another day behind me, just twenty two thousand plus sunrises to go. And here I am again traveling, journeying through the wasteland with my eyes packed with mud. His mud, following without need of an oasis for HE is the living water!

A few weeks ago I had a disturbing dream.

I was walking in a desert carrying a Luke Skywalker light-saber. There was no greenery anywhere. Nothing… Just rocks, heat and sand glaring in the sunlight.

I was frantically running and running, sweating in fear, trembling in terror desperately seeking a hiding place. A cave… A shelter, an oasis, anything. Just somewhere to cower and hide because I knew something was chasing me… Some... Thing… Me running, weeping in fear.

Finally through sheer exhaustion I fell to the ground and totally frustrated pulled into a fetal ball. The ‘Thing,’ the creature, like a wolf boldly came close and began licking with a slimy repulsive tongue the sweat off my hands while I lay frozen in fear... As it licked I could feel something flowing from me... It was feeding on me. With a yell and a jerk I came awake. “Oh great, just a nightmare.”

The Holy Spirit immediately began showing me the meaning of this dream. I have rarely before felt God speaking to me in or through a dream. I am not a big vision or dream guy. But I felt God speak in my heart, “The desert is your illness. The wolf is the Spirit of fear from the enemy and the light-saber is My Word. I want you to quit running. Quit seeking a place to hide or a way out of the desert and STAND…! LIVE…! Don’t be afraid and panic anymore in the desert. Plant your sword deep in the sand and lean fully on it with all of your weight... Lean completely on My Word. I want you to stand unshielded from the sun and wait. Wait for your enemy Fear, to come for you then face Him... Pull your sword from the sand and strike when He comes up close. Do not submit to his lies. Do not allow him to lick your hands, for he comes only to drain your faith. The slime on his tongue that he leaves on your hands is despair. Take up your weapons and fight for I will be your shelter and your shield. Trust only Me. Pay attention only to Me.”

This was a truly life-changing dream for me. Now I just stand. Completely weary and defeated, now I journey on only by standing still. Standing and singing His praise with the tears running down inside my collar.

Just waiting…

I wait for my enemy standing on God’s word... Leaning on His promises. But far more importantly, I wait for his mighty ever present Spirit to stir within me and oh how He stirs. I can hear the rustling in the mulberry bush and oh how His love is beating and shining down here in the darkest recesses of my being. Oh how I know that no matter what else happens to me or what depths of suffering I descend into… He is deeper yet… He is true though all men are liars… He is faithful yet.

WORSHIP

What does it truly mean to worship? To sing cum-ba-ya and feel a shiver? To “Really!” have a worship service defined by emotionalism so extreme that people are dancing in the aisle’s and being “Slain In The Spirit? To have four part harmonies and tambourines, multiple instrumentation, and grace notes thrown in? Is it worship to be reduced only to silence and tears in His presence? Tears…?

What is true worship? Am I cut off from the true expression of worship because in the extremity of my pain all I can do is weep…?

Not a chance…

Worship. I believe that this is what I was truly made for. This is the highest expression of my being and the most completely fulfilling occupation of my life.

In the past I thought worship was best only when the sun was out and I was in the mountains, the feel of the wind on my skin. Or to worship as I descended on my bicycle after a long hard climb up Summit Loop road…

To worship in the woods or the sanctuary comfortable and centered in my body, feeling the goodness of God released in my life simply by the blessing and joy of being alive and healthy.

I am dead now to this sort of worship. This ‘touchy-feely’ depend-on-self type worship. Those are all easy roads of worship and in the past, worshipping in the mountains or the Church, feeling good physically I’ve worshipped with much joy.

Now…

Now when the pain becomes so severe that I can’t even clap my hands together I just sort of touch them together in time to the music. Now when the big giant “WHY ME?” question leaps to mind in the middle of a song, and tears of the deepest bitter pain flow and all I can do is sing with a quaking voice, worship is nothing but a ton of work. And yet worship is one of my only true places of refuge.

Worship… When His presence descends like a cloak around me and I know that my life, health, and entire being is in His hands and all is ultimately well. Worship, when nothing and no one else matters.

Worship… When His mighty dynamite blows off the ‘roof’ of my Spirit and my heart is wide open and alive before my maker. Worship… When I shut my eyes and imagine heaven and my heart and minds eye looks directly at the Throne of God. I want to look not at the Throne but God Himself.

It’s much easier to imagine His Throne than it is to imagine God Himself. How can I imagine a being of infinite power?

It is so difficult to write tonight, my head is pounding away and I’m writing about something so intangible. Even so, I worship and now choose to always choose to worship Him.

I can’t help myself. My entire being thirsts for His Presence, for His Touch, His Approval, His Help. Just to love Him more, to know Him more, and to be conformed to the image of Jesus more.

I went to church the other day and received something really encouraging about worship.

I’ll try and write it out.

I have been really feeling the truth of Psalm eighty-eight lately.

Go read it now so that you know what I mean... Are you done reading it? I bet you didn’t really read it... Go on... I'm waiting... Ok...

Pretty bleak stuff huh? “My soul has had enough troubles, and my life has drawn near to Sheol… I have become like a man without strength forsaken among the dead… Thou hast put me in the lowest pit, in dark places, in the depths… Thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves… I am shut up and can’t go out… O Lord why dost thou reject my soul…? I suffer thy terrors; I am overcome… There isn’t any light in this Psalm. None…

I’ve been feeling the length of my life here and how discouraging and horrible fifty more possible years of illness will be.

So Sunday in Church during worship before the sermon I was singing and felt overwhelmed by trouble so I knelt down in my place by the chair and just began waiting with bowed head. Tears yes, not weeping terribly, just waiting… As I waited, abandoned to the Lord, feeling as low as Psalm eighty-eight describes so vividly I began to have a vision.

I saw a mountain. I knew it was Mt. St. Helens. If you don’t live in the Pacific Northwest you might not remember St. Helens. It’s the mountain just north of Portland that blew up over twenty years ago. The mountain simply exploded and the entire top half disappeared. When it erupted a huge plume of smoke went spewing up out the crater that was left. Ash billowing and huge, ascending like a mountain of smoke in the sky over five miles high. Literally millions of tons of ash came raining down for days blanketing the entire area, in some places over a foot deep. All the area airports were closed because of this. It was a Major catastrophe.

In my mind during this vision I ‘saw’ this mountain erupting huge billows of smoke, the ashes ascending in a giant mushroom cloud into the atmosphere and then God began to speak to me about my own heart. About the condition of my heart that He desires the most. The posture of my life He likes the most.

The quality He rejoices in and loves the best is the smoke. The passionate outpouring of worship and longing and love that flows out of His own heart first, then through mine, and at last ascends high and like a gigantic volcano of fragrant incense finds it’s final resting place in heaven.

Revelation chapter eight say’s, “And another Angel came and stood at the altar, holding a golden censure; and much incense was given to him, that he might add it to the prayers of the saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, went up before God out of the angels hand.”

Think of this, our prayers are preserved throughout all eternity in a golden censure. God Himself inhales the smoke and the ash of my life, worship, and prayers and rejoices in it. He lets none of it go to waste but inhales every single molecule of my worship and prayer as a sweet aroma. That this is His treasure that only He can see and enjoy. That this is the one single treasure that He can’t simply… Create… My heart smoking and erupting with prayer and worship and love is fundamentally my choice and it is of my making even though He fills me and enables me and helps me accomplish all of this.

Then I ‘saw’ the mountain as it was before the eruption. A perfect cone calm and serene, standing whole and beautiful in the sun, so proud of itself. And producing NO Smoke, no ash, no billowing flag of eruption. God showed me that in order for my life to be boiling up with smoke, in order for me to exist as I do as a volcanic passionate worshipper I must be blown up and broken like this mountain.

It is for this reason that I suffer as I do. So that my broken-ness will produce an outpouring of worship from my life ever yielded in trouble and trial, for His glory alone.

Lukewarm living… There are so many of us who are petulant and selfish and He is so tired of our half-hearted lives lived in such complacency and selfishness. He showed me that when I am smoking and erupting I am refreshing to Him because of this. That in my pain and broken-ness I do not stand complacent in the sun like an undamaged mountain but that my permanent broken-ness will always allow the smoke of my heart to arise unto His throne to be captured forever as a fragrant aroma of incense gathered up in that golden censure.

If he put the top back on and restored me to perfect health then my heart would be covered up and my hearts praise and eruption would be capped and covered by my own physical wholeness like a champagne bottle with the cork on. Now broken as I am and with my heart singing and weeping and erupting because it’s so close to the fire, He sees me from miles and miles and miles away as a ‘mountain erupting’ because my passion and worship of Him is so intense and total and absorbing to Himself first, then to me.

I am like that mountain to Him, invisible to the rest of the world but burning and fragrant to Him. He wants to draw me nearer and nearer to the cross and nearer and nearer to the ideal of worship He has for me. I don’t know how much of this will make sense to anyone. It sounds so topsy-turvy. So paradoxical… “He who would find his life must lose it first….”

Then the sermon was all about passion in worship and in relationship with God. I learned that morning that the Greek word for passion is pathos. Which literally means. ‘To suffer…’ Interesting…

So let your heart burn and burn because the only thing fire cannot burn is fire. And the lesser fire must always give way to the greater fire. Just as the lesser fire that was only burning wood surrounding Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego gave way to the greater fire of the presence of Jesus (“Hey!” said King Nebuchadnezzer, I see FOUR men in there! Didn’t we only throw in three?”) So the fire of your suffering must yield only to the greater fire of God’s presence and love poured out as your smoke and ash the passion of your love for Jesus ascends before Him.

He always sees your altar of praise.

Then God showed me the broken mountain without the smoke. It was just a vast broken desert of light gray ash like the surface of the moon. A ragged looking crater with no plants or trees, no green anywhere, nothing alive there, just dead and cold.

He showed me that even though my life is broken because of illness, even though I am broken like this mountain and cannot stand serene and confident in my flesh like the mountain (and I) used to stand, that now when my ash flume of prayer doesn’t flow all I have is death and emptiness.

He showed me that IT IS NOT AUTOMATIC THAT WORSHIP FLOWS FROM ME. IT IS ALWAYS MY CHOICE... And that the only way I can exercise that choice was the way Samson was supposed to but failed to do.

Samson was a Nazarite. The Nazarites were originally supposed to keep their hair long and be pure in a whole bunch of ways, then cut it all off and offer it up as a burnt sacrifice and the bible says God would smell it and He would enjoy it.

This applies to me. That I need to cut my hair off, to shave off my ‘spiritual hair’ of pride and religiosity, my constant obsession with pain and illness, and choose humility and contrition of heart. Just as a Nazarites hair is a symbol of repentance, I need to cast the hair of my flesh before Him and lay it on the altar of my heart. When I do this, laying down all my pride and pain and good works, then the gigantic smoke fumes flow again out of the emptiness and He again savors the essence of my life.

Jesus is formed in me only as the ash plume smokes heavenward. Anyway it was very helpful to me.

It was and is bread and manna for the day.

Worship from the ashes.

There is a Man in our fellowship named Ken who comes to church every Sunday in a wheelchair.

Before the accident Ken was an excellent architect headed for the big time. His High School drafting teacher said that Ken was the most talented student He had ever seen. Ken was normal, a popular student, he had girlfriends, played sports, the whole works…

A car accident…

I’m a little hazy on the details but after it was all over Ken was barely alive. There was massive nerve damage. Now Ken, about forty years old, lives with His parents... He has a fine brain but talks with much, much difficulty. A conversation with Ken is a long drawn out affair requiring patience. With a twisted mouth and his head permanently bent over, sitting in a wheelchair with hands drawn into involuntary hooks he lives.

He has a heart of solid gold.

Every Sunday Ken comes to Church. He helps out in the kids Church during first service, then sits in the same place in the sanctuary second service. I watch Ken during worship service sometimes. I feel a deep affinity with him. I am blessed tremendously more than he is with my wife and kids, still able to function on the job and meet my responsibilities (barely) yet my soul from its own dungeon recognizes him roll-marching forward with his own broken sword in hand.

During song service Ken regularly struggles up from his wheelchair and kneels down. He lifts his hands high in surrender, arms unable to straighten out all the way, pain, grief, and struggle evident in every aspect of his life, yet He kneels... He kneels… He Worships…

He Worships…

The other day I heard one of the finest sermons I’ve ever heard.

Ken preached it.

The pastor of our Church invited members in the congregation to share the most comforting aspects of God’s grace in their lives. People began to say things like “He is my provider, my shepherd, my healer, His love endures forever.” That sort of thing. Then Ken slowly and painfully stood up from out of his chair, leaning onto the armrests for support. “He is just WITH us.” Ken said, then sat down. It was like an electric shock to me. I was, and am, floored. Coming from that context.

Here is a man who will never drive a car. Never type with any dexterity. He’ll never play a musical instrument with any skill. Never even be able to take a walk, no matter how painfully. He probably wont ever have a family of his own. Never be able to hold down a job. Never do any one of a thousand things that I do without thinking of them, and yet there he was, trembling in his eagerness, not content to merely sit and speak. He was so zealous in his desire to share the truth that has freed him he must stand and proclaim the glory and hope, the sustaining life and reason to live on that he has found.

“HE IS JUST WITH US.”

Now, that is worship. Now that is the reason I go on. That is why I continue to look forward to life.

Because Jesus is with me there is no telling what it is that I can become. There’s no telling what vistas of change in my inner being await. I cannot know what ministry will be loosed through me, what anointing and inner life that I can experience.

He is just with me.

ME!

HE IS WITH YOU TOO…

When I think about how unbelievably difficult and dark this pathway to Glory has been, how I grope in total darkness sometimes, not knowing even what direction to grope for just to touch Jesus’ hand, I wonder how anyone, ever, gets to know Him.

There are enemies both within and without. Many obstacles of the mind and the flesh, physical pain and emotional pain, grief and disappointment on all sides. In this “vale of tears” I stand, head bowed in resignation and in worship at the same time, and I wonder, “how in the world can my unbelieving friend Dan ever come to the true knowledge of Christ...?” How is it possible for anyone to come to know God?

The necessary transformation is a huge paradigm shift that is completely impossible… PERIOD… Impossible... Yet I see (in my own inner being, and obvious outward signs in the lives of others) this dynamite going off all the time. Jesus reveals Himself in some mysterious fashion. These things are out of my hands and beyond anything I can know and I can write nothing about this area of His working in the soul.

The growing of the knowledge of God within a soul is entirely God’s work... I don’t know what motive power causes a seed to grow and it is beyond me to know how Jesus grows in a heart. Paul says, “I planted, Apollo’s watered, but God gave the increase. So then, neither the one who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.” 1 Corinthians 3: 6-7. Because it is His work God is to have the pre-emanate glory in all things.

The Virgin Mary had not the slightest clue how Jesus was conceived within her. Neither do any of the greatest theological minds throughout all of history, and there have been some ‘heavies’ wrestling with THAT question for two thousand years. The Bible simply says, “She was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.” This is all that can be said by us about this now. And furthermore, We also are ‘found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.’

Somehow, in our spirits, through His Spirit, beyond all of our knowledge, Jesus is born within us. Somehow, through much tribulation and suffering He grows within us.

I don’t think that it’s possible to grow in Christ (at least for such a rebellious and hard heart like mine) without suffering.

Does that sound like an outlandish statement? Consider this… “For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that You should follow HIS steps. Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in His mouth; Who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed himself to Him who judges righteously.” 1 Peter 2: 21-23.

The book of James in chapter five says, “Is anyone among you suffering? Let Him Pray.”

Pray…

Pray for what? For physical healing…?

I have prayed fervently for healing for nine, 9, NINE, years. YEARS… Long, agonizing, believing prayer times (many hours of doubts too) begging, weeping, arguing my case like a trial lawyer, listing all the obvious, good reasons why I should be healed. “My kids need me… Haven’t you called me to support my family… Can’t you see that I can serve you better if I’m not sick, perhaps by working with the youth group at Church…?” Etc. Etc. Etc. Real good reasons…

Excellent reasons… Then sitting completely desolate and empty before the Lord, completely bewildered by His silence in this area, by His refusal to heal me. Sometimes when I go to Church and listen to someone stand up and gush, ‘I had a cold this morning and I prayed and God healed me, He is so good!’ Or this, ‘I prayed for a parking place and got one right in front of the store!’ (As if God doesn’t want them to walk over fifty feet after they get out of their car.) I feel beaten down even more by these workings of God’s apparently fickle nature. Does He heal those around me of these tiny little problems they have just to torment my mind even more? Just to, like a power mad dictator, lift up the curtain and show a starving man a steak and lobster dinner, only to laugh and slam the door in his face?

PRAYER…

“Is anyone among you suffering? Let Him Pray.” And yet at times prayer seems like the very last thing that I want to do. Why should I pray? Why should I serve Him? He does nothing for me. He does not step in to help. With the smallest gesture of His mind He could bring health to me.

An omnipotent God does not have, ‘a limited supply’ of power. It would cost Him nothing to heal me. I am the smallest of all problems before Him. My illness is not a mystery to the ‘Great Physician.’ And yet My Judge stands looking on, watching with inner help only, waiting to see if I will stand or fall.

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” So now I never try to pray ‘upwardly’ to the Father. I find the door to my own heart and discover that this is the door to the kingdom of Heaven. It is on the inside of my being that I discover His presence...

It is forever true that He sits High and Enthroned far above my reach on His throne in heaven. He is the Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the end... John chapter one says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory full of grace and truth.”

Jesus the almighty God has his own way with this world, twirling the world on His mighty finger like a basketball, yet He dwells deep in your soul far beyond your minds reach.

To connect with him takes tremendous patience and faith. Every day I FEEL as if my faith is draining out of me. As if I have a huge rent in my soul and like a lake tearing though a ruined dam my faith just rushes out and rushes out and rushes out. I deal with a fairly constant fear that one day I will be all dried up like a wineskin in the smoke. Shriveled and weary... Done... Finished... No more faith left and all that will be left for me is bitterness, faithlessness, and anger over my suffering.

Yet every day for ten years I've experienced the miracle of more faith, more water flowing through the unhealed pain and sorrow in my life.

AND I KNOW THAT THIS FLOOD OF LIFE FROM GOD WILL NEVER STOP!

The book of Acts says, “Through many tribulations we must enter into the kingdom of God.” These pangs of childbirth you and I feel are normal and an every day occurrence for God's people.

Don’t be afraid. Don't be dismayed. He will never dry up. God will never stop supplying us with the glory of His own self... The infinite Jesus, whom the book of Colossians says “By him all things were created, whether thrones or dominions or principalities and powers... He is before all things and in him all things consist...” What a mighty Savior He is! I give him Glory! Will certainly supply you with a faith so you can conquer... Even if it doesn't feel like it…

My pain is huge...

It's as simple as that.... I so want to be done, to be hatched, to be drawn from the stove a baked gingerbread man so I can run, run as fast as I can. I’m only half-baked still. Yet, ‘to live is Christ’ and so I go on bending all the way to the ground in worship like a tree before a hurricane... If the wind continues to rip the leaves of comfort and pleasure from the branches of my life, still I know those torn leaves will dance wildly in the sky, whirling, circling in the storm to praise Him. The leaves may be gone but I will remain bowed and bare but still loving Him with all that I am.

My existence after all is an option for God. I truly am superfluous. I am His poem, His optional Poem. Ephesians chapter two says, “We are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works.” A literal translation of the original Greek word for workmanship literally means “poema…” Poem. And if He stops speaking the Poem that is me even for a microsecond I will simply cease to be.

Somehow through it all I’ve discovered a place, a lonely solid rock deep in my heart that Jesus keeps above the waves... Standing on this rock however doesn't take a single ‘ouch’ away from my experience of pain...

I’d give everything I own to be out of this...

But through the word of God I have been discovering that my mind can be healed from panic and fear and despair... And I’ll tell you... I've had my share of hopelessness... Believe me... I know many of you have too and my heart goes out to you as you suffer... I feel the spirit of intercession landing on me for you.

‘Oh precious Jesus reveal your face to anyone reading this in their desperation and fear and agony. Let your life and glory rise up within them in order to staunch the hopelessness and despair... Let them catch a glimpse of the sufficiency of your word to heal their minds and then give them the tenacity and faith to steep their minds in your word like a tea bag left in the cup for hours until the water of their heart’s are the very color of the heart of Jesus...’ Oh I am sighing in my soul for you now.

I believe that in this pathway there are only two choices. Only two possible outcomes... Bitterness and despair leading to near or true insanity... Or... A deep Christian connection with Jesus that will release One-ness with God... And this One-ness will release amazing ministry in the lives of others.

I was praying today and God’s Holy Spirit, the wonderful third person of that inscrutable trinity began showing me how much He loves me... "If you love me so much," I replied in my spirit and in the bitterness of pain, "Why wont you heal me?" Gently in my inner being He replied... “It is because I love so many others so much and I want to reveal my heart to them like I have done in you... I want them to learn from your journey with me so that they can connect with me in their hearts. I'm waiting deep within them, waiting for them to descend into their own inner beings so that they can receive much needed rest for their minds and souls... I do not break the bent reed... I do not snuff out the smoking wick...”

I think that much of what I suffer is for your sake and for others like you. I believe God put in my heart the desire to write this “book” for you. Maybe He is speaking through me, maybe not. I do know beyond the last shadow of my being that if you go ahead and weep... Let your attention drift away from the walls, away from ‘above’ in the sense of over your head... Like God lives somewhere in a corner of your ceiling… Don’t try to pray to heaven anymore. It is too far away... Too alien and different to our understanding... Again... Don't get me wrong I'm not getting into new age self help. It’s because I am so certain that He resides in all of His kids that I emphasize the inner seeking for God...

Let your spirit settle into itself and you will find Him... I’ve been strangled by suffering for almost ten years now... Every day the monotony of pain... Yet pain never really is monotonous is it? That’s just the trouble. I don’t think I’d mind pain at all if it didn’t hurt so much. It always engages my attention completely.

Give it time... I don’t mean to come off like I have arrived. Like I am a guru on a mountaintop dispensing gems of wisdom... I’m just a desperate beggar trying to point the way to others whose hungry cry I feel all the way through my bones in empathetic shared suffering. It’s true I don’t know you, but in a far more sincere and true way than former President Bill Clinton ever knew, “I feel your pain.” I really do.

My one desire is to point to the meat that will sustain you until you finally arrive in the glory of light and receive that new body, that TEMPLE! Those glorious resurrected bodies that I imagine if we jump off of a Cliff, the rocks will be smashed pieces leaving the bodies completely unharmed. Those brick houses instead of these failing tents we live in now... alas... alas ... alas...

So prayer… I have discovered that the reason He calls us to pray, is for the prayer itself. Prayerful devotion not so much for the content, not focused on the need of the awful moment but for the privilege and rare joining of my soul and His in joy and Son-ship and the outpouring of incense.

TEMPTATION

Just like a catalyst after added to the test tube supercharges the reaction producing heat and firing an otherwise inert chemical into a dynamic compound; temptation enters imperiously into the equation.

Temptation calls to me in this fashion. “He is treating you so badly, you have given Him the best years of your life and He, in return brings torture to your plate. Why not find a little pleasure? He certainly doesn’t care enough about you to heal you, why should you live righteously? Why should you keep your hands and mind pure? You know that drunkenness would give you a few hours relief from pain. You just know that pornography (I admit with shame that I like to watch, though I do NOT! watch) would give you a fleeting pleasure here chained to your wall. Why shouldn’t you indulge? How can it possibly matter? How can you, as insignificant as you are, by a few moments of self-inflicted relief, hurt or matter at all to God? When a person gets injured and goes to the emergency room, the very first action, the ‘Humane’ thing the doctors do is administer a painkiller. Why then, is it a ‘sin’ for you to serve a painkiller to yourself in your agony? Why should you continue to struggle, why go to work when each day is the most difficult, painful ordeal imaginable? Why not just quit? Let your wife find another job besides her home business? Then you can lie up in bed all day and rest… Etc. Etc. Etc.”

To these slimy whisperings I can only groan some more as they seem to make a kind of sense, and simply refuse.

To stand against temptation in the face of intense suffering. How can it be done?

First Peter says, “He suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow in His steps.” and again, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” (1 Corinthians 10:13)

And finally the book of Hebrews, “Seeing then that we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and grace to help in time of need.”

Jesus was fully tempted.

C.S. Lewis once said that only those who have withstood temptation know how strong temptation really is. The man who simply gives in to sin in the first few seconds of temptation can’t know how strong that temptation would have become in ten minutes, or an hour, a year. Yet Jesus never sinned.

He knows what it is to feel abandoned by God, and the mystery is, He was God himself in the flesh.

He knows what it is to be in desperate straits, looking despair face on, bearing the most intense physical pain and then suffer apparent defeat.

The most chilling cry of pain ever uttered in the history of mankind was by Him, on the cross, dying. “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani.” “My God, My God, WHY hast thou forsaken Me?”

The creator of ALL things, the second person of the mysterious Trinity was completely abandoned. At that moment He was alone in a far more profound and terrifying sense than I will ever be.

Somehow He went even further into mystery and “Became sin!!!” And then the wrath of God was poured out upon Him!!! His Father turned his back and the terror and fear of complete!!! Alone-ness overtook His inner being. He was Alone.

I sit here with His promise layered throughout all the scripture and inherent in the very name of, ‘IMMANUEL,’ God with us. Jesus was always going around saying things like, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Or, “I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you.” And, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Yet there He hung, nearly naked, nailed down, paying for our sin. No, not just paying but the Bible says that “He Himself ‘bore our sins in His body’ on the cross, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.” (First Peter 2:24)

In some cosmic fashion, the wrath of God was poured out upon HIM……………………………………………………………….. For Me……………….. You………………………………… Hitler……………………………………………………………….. For US…………………………………

In considering His Life, not just His death, there is only one recorded account of Him being tempted. The longer I look at this the more I see an incredible amount of suffering coming along with the temptation. The temptation in the desert.

I’ve always thought of Jesus as Superman, a monk, an ascetic holy man that could easily fast and wander the harsh environment of the desert without much trouble, but my own personal suffering has forced me to reconsider His humanity. He was a man with a body just like mine, with the same needs as mine. Think about it… Try and put yourself into His shoes.

What if God called you as He did Jesus, into the desert? “Follow me” You go as He did, not knowing what God has planned. For forty days the Holy Spirit compels you to stay, not eating… Anything… You wander aimlessly, completely lost, praying and seeking God’s face.

Medical expert’s say that a person can fast about forty to fifty days, then everything shuts down pretty quick. Death comes… The human body adjusts very well to a fast shorter than forty days. There is a chemical metabolic shift and the body begins burning fat supplies, then muscles, then… The rest… Essential stuff…

After four or five days of fasting, hunger pangs disappear, leaving the body weak but functioning, the mind clear and rational. At this point, there is very little physical suffering. Who knows what Jesus did, or thought during this period? All there was for Him was prayer.

The Bible says that after forty days, He became hungry. This is consistent with a normal human body. In actuality, He was dying. He was in the last stages of starvation.

At this point all the fatty tissues are gone. All the extraneous muscle tissue is gone. The body is forced to ‘choose’ which internal organs will have to shut down. The stomach is shrunken, the heart begins to beat erratically and the only sensation a person at this stage of starvation is aware of is hunger… Hunger… HUNGER!!

The entire body cries out for food. Hunger becomes a gnawing, terrible, ever-present pain that crowds out all other considerations. Men at this stage of starvation will do anything for food and throughout the ages Murder and cannibalism have been the desperate acts of dying men. The ‘Donner party’ and that infamous airplane crash in the Andes when those poor soccer players were forced into eating their dead are gruesome examples of this.

“Jesus became hungry” His fleshly hunger represented all the temptations of the flesh. Lust, greed, envy, all of it stripped down to the lowest common denominator, starving to death… The flesh that wants what it wants when it wants it. The flesh so unwilling to wait until marriage before… The flesh that returns again and again to alcohol and drugs, cigarettes and gluttony, hating the addiction, yet craving what it wants. To be satisfied, to be satiated, bloated.

SO… Here is Jesus in this extremity of need. Of Pain… He had to have had a complete preoccupation with food... NOW! I MUST… EAT… NOW… OR DIE…

I’m sure that food was a major part of His prayer life there in the desert. I imagine Him praying, “Father, I need food... please… Now would be a good time... I must live so I can save them on the cross...” It’s really hard to imagine Jesus at His prayers. I’m sure I have it all wrong somehow. At any rate my feeling is that the heavens were silent. That Jesus received no answer. That God just sat back, (as He is doing in my life in this area of intense physical need and perhaps your life as well) and waited, and watched… And conquered… A much higher plan was unfolding before all of Heaven and Earth.

Here comes Satan, bloated and obese with all of the wickedness and lust mankind had been feeding him with for centuries… Satan scoffing, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” (Jesus’ human stomach growling and rolling at the very sound of the word bread.)

I think, ‘Where is the sin in that?’ In fact, not a few weeks later he changed hundreds of gallons of water into wine. Months later He multiplied a few loaves and fed five thousand people. What and how could this be a sin? This would obviously be such a good thing and would relieve His suffering, even save His life. I don’t get it. And in our lives, laboring under our burdens... How could a ‘sin’ like drunkenness, or some good old fun casual consenting adultery in order to medicate the pain, be sin?

I believe the test and the sin, is discovered by understanding that our lives are found in God, move in God, and are for God… The bile says, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” That our lives outside of His heart are nothing but vessels of emptiness, and sin removes us from His heart.

For Jesus to have taken the enemy’s advice and turn the stone into good old bread would have been for Him to once and for all take a position based on the flesh, not faith.

Either God is God, and is good, He is really, genuinely there and is taking care of us, or He is not.

He either counts the hairs on our heads and knows when the sparrow falls, or He’s completely out of touch. He is either a ‘watchmaker God’ who made, then left creation to wind down on its own until it finally stops ticking or a loving Father who is aware of all things and moves, albeit inscrutably at times, in every situation.

For Jesus, in the midst of His pain and starvation, to act independently of God would have broken the basic thread of His Life, complete unity with God.

So he chose suffering instead…

He turned His back on His own life, turned His back on His own comfort, turned His back on His own mission and ministry and terrible purpose waiting for Him at the cross and chose God. He picked up the sword of His Father’s word and used it. “It is written, a man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”

With this simple statement Jesus demonstrated his willingness to die rather than sin. This was a precursory little death before the cross. He showed that He was willing to be obedient unto death even though it meant that salvation would then therefore come to no one. The only deliverance He would accept was God’s deliverance, not His own.

In this hardship the entire longing of my flesh is for comfort. Climbing mountains and skiing aside, to just be able to sit on the bleachers at my Son’s basketball game and cheer him on without groaning… To simply sit on my front porch with a cup of tea on an early, frosty, winter morning and breathe the fresh air. Yet this is not God’s will for my life in this moment.

Just as it was God’s will for Jesus to be hungry in the desert, it is obviously God’s will for me to be uncomfortable in this time. (And for the past nine years and who knows how long to come.)

“Man shall not live by bread alone,” (bread must be a synonym for ‘Everything of the flesh that brings comfort’) “but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

I always and only sin because it’s fun. Because I like it… Because it brings me pleasure and momentary satisfaction. I sin because I have, or think I have, an aching need that God is ignoring. Because I think I need bread. So, I meet my own needs. I, instead of waiting in the dark for His light to come, instead of quoting the word of God, “He will supply all my needs according to the riches of Christ Jesus.” I simply… Sin…

Jesus demonstrated a completely different attitude. He walked the highest road. He never, not even once, took any action in order to meet His own needs. He consistently, every time, laid Himself out as a sacrifice before God alone. His own pain, sin, hunger, exhaustion, He always turned away from and turned to God. His own ‘issues…’ How frequently I hear (and use) that word, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that right now, I’ve got too many ‘issues’ to work out first. He completely ignored.

His mission was to die.

In the long night before His own death He ignored His own needs.

He truly was like a sheep, silent before His accusers. When He was beaten in the face with closed fists while blindfolded, the soldiers mocked Him saying, “Prophecy fool, Who just hit you?” He took no action to heal His own wounds. Only a few short hours before the cross, he reached out and healed a servants ear after Peter hacked it off with a sword. Why did He not heal Himself? I understand that His face was set like flint to die on the cross but why did He submit to the wounds…?

His precious face bruised beyond recognition. The hard as iron thorns digging deep into his scalp. If only I had that sort of power I would heal myself before I even finished typing this sentence. Yet He did nothing for Himself. His was a life perfectly yielded to His father’s will…

Mine, is a life chronically un-yielded.

Today is an awful day. I am so dizzy I can barely stand still. So much nausea I feel as if I’m going to throw up right here on the keyboard. Retching every twenty minutes or so. The knives sticking in my neck. The sense of grinding when I turn my head. The muscles in my shoulders feel like dried rawhide that wont stretch anymore. The sensation of pain and pressure in my ears leaves me yawning, trying to ‘pop’ my eardrums. I do this from five to eight times a minute… The sense of dislocation I feel from my hands... The dull, constant aching in ALL my muscles... How can my face muscles feel exhausted? And yet they do… And this is ‘normal…?’

Day in, day out, it goes on, and on, and on. O when, when, when will it stop? Why must I live on like this?

Is it idolatry for me to want comfort at any cost including death itself? Don’t get me wrong I am not suicidal but many times I read the obituary columns in the newspaper and feel as if I am looking at vacation brochures from the Cayman Islands. (“That lucky bum” I sometimes think. Oh to be released to heaven…)

But…It goes on… And on… And on… And on…

The days keep running into nights back into days. Pain as consistent and constant as my breathing. Suffering and the why’s, how’s and where-to-fore’s of suffering constantly running, running, running like a squirrel frantic in a cage on a wheel, going nowhere in my mind. Covering no new ground. And I am so tired of it. How can I go on…?

You, dear reader, if anyone is still with me might be thinking, “Man this dude is a religious maniac. He is so obsessed with God.”

I never wanted to be like this. I never wanted to get to know God this well… I never wanted to become some deep ‘mystic’ in the faith. I never really even wanted to have anything to do with God other than an assurance that when I die, (unthinkable thought to the healthy) I get to go to heaven. But here, in this place filled with the noxious, choking fumes of suffering, I cannot see anything but God… For me, it’s either God… Or despair…

Before I began suffering, complacency was such a natural state. If I ever became bored, I had a perfect solution... TA DAAA!!!! Entertainment…

I’d go climb a mountain. Go for a five-mile run. Go skiing... Learn to draw... Go fishing or hunting, skydiving or backpacking. I once spent most of a summer walking over three hundred miles on the John Muir trail through the incomparable Sierra Nevada Mountain range. I’d learn to scuba dive…

You name it, I was ‘into’ it. I was the perfect solution to my own problems. I came ‘fully equipped’ to overcome trouble. (I thought…)

I had no patience with the depressed, no compassion for the truly hurting… “Oh, that’s too bad you are hurting. I’ll say a prayer for you when I’m on the Ski lift at Mt. Bachelor this weekend.” And mumble a little, “God bless them,” then almost instantly forget about it.

But now, here, with my ‘Ox so severely gored’ that I can see nothing left, now with my life so thoroughly ruined that I enjoy nothing, want nothing, (but health) and frequently feel as if I have nothing, I Find Only God.

Only God can be companion to me in this. Only God can bring strength to me during these dark, dark years.

Only God, with His tremendous and amazing promises and Grace can understand what I am going through and based on Jesus’ experience on the cross, completely identify with me. Only He can completely live in me, completely wrap His wonderful, everlasting arms around me as I weep, and even now as I type I weep, He is SO precious to me.

Only God and His constantly, loving and faithful presence can bring any kind of semblance of life as I ‘hurt-hurt hurt-hurt hurt-hurt,’ instead of ‘lub-dub’ my heart says, ‘hurt-hurt.’

As I contemplate twenty two thousand nine hundred and sixty odd more days of the same thing I can only do one thing.

I stand up right now, with my friend Ken in his wheelchair…

HE IS JUST WITH ME.”

And so I am, now, ‘Obsessed with God.’ I guess you could say that a man climbing Mt. Everest, way up there in “The death zone,” (so named because without supplementary oxygen most people get altitude sickness and die,) is ‘Obsessed’ with oxygen. I need God more than anything else on Earth now. If He doesn’t walk with me every moment, I will sink like a rock in deep, black water.

It is in His presence that I live on.

His presence that gives me hope.

His presence that keeps me sane.

His presence that makes all the difference.

His presence that I am addicted to…

From Under The Lava…

Oh light of dead, and of dying days

Oh life in thy glory go

In a rosy mist, in a moonless maze

over the pathless peaks of snow

And what is left, for the cold gray soul

that moans like wounded dove

one wine is left

in the broken bowl

only

To Love and Love and Love

It’s better to sit

at the fountains birth

than a sea of waves to win

to live in the Love that floweth forth

than the Love that cometh in

Be thou my soul

a spring of Love faithful and free and sure

for a cistern of Love

though undefiled

keeps not thy Spirit pure

By George Macdonald

LOVE

Do You Love?

Many years ago, perhaps two or three hundred, I went on a long distance backpacking trip with my friend Dale Adams. Dale served as best man in my wedding and I miss Him dearly now.

We walked about three hundred and twenty miles on a section of the Pacific Crest trail.

The P.C.T. is a continuous wilderness path that begins at the American border in Canada and ends at the southern border in Mexico. Whenever the builders of this trail had a choice between the high country above timberline, or a nice stroll through an adjacent valley, they chose the high country.

We walked the highest section of the P.C.T. called ‘The John Muir Trail.’

The John Muir trail officially begins on top of the highest mountain in the continental U.S., Mt. Whitney. The trail clings to the highest ridges and passes along the backbone of the Sierra’s all the way north until it ends in Yosemite Valley. Almost the entire trail is way above Timberline. Exposed up in the alpine high country where the tiniest, most delicate wild flowers grow, shyly peeping up out of the melting snow.

Mt. Whitney is 14,490 and some spare change feet up. Way up where the atmosphere starts to thin. The majority of the trail is above 10,000 feet with many passes at 12,000 to 13,000 feet. At altitudes that high there are many year round Glaciers and ice fields that never melt.

We started our walk on the California side of the Sierra’s just west of Bakersfield at Mineral King valley. I could rhapsodize on and on about this trip and the beauty and stillness of nature, but there are only one or two aspects of this trip that applies to my chronic state of suffering.

The first came very early on in our trip, on the very top of Mt. Whitney. After two days of walking, then one extremely difficult day climbing Whitney, with eighty-pound packs on, you just put you’re head down like a dog and plod, we made camp at the beginning of the trail, the tiptop of Whitney and nursed our blisters.

We found a crevice and set up our bivouac bags and MSR stoves and called it home for the evening. We were extremely lucky, well, blessed, because on that night there was absolutely NO wind. A Ranger later told us this only happens once or twice a year. That high up in the atmosphere the wind blows free from obstructions, and most of the time a jet stream of over fifty miles and hour blasts away at the mountain. The ‘wind chill factor’ can be below zero sometimes and drives away most people that try to camp on the pinnacle.

We were burning candles un-flickering in the dark…. The stars..................................... Oh the stars blazing away unobstructed by city lights or smog… We saw stars that looked as if they were actually below us on the lower horizon of the desert to the east.

In the morning we ate breakfast, then turned our eyes north, in the direction we were going to walk. We dug the maps and compasses out of our packs and tried to, ‘see our way through.’

To the north all we could see was a terribly intimidating wasteland of jagged mountains. Harsh peaks and ridges cloaked in snow. We looked at the mountains, then at the map and compass, back at the mountains, and immediately began arguing about where the path was. “OK” I’d say, “The trail goes between those two peaks, then along that ridge, over that mountain there by the ravine…” “No.” My friend would disagree, “it goes here and there...” Pointing to this feature and that. Remember that we were on the highest peak in America, it was a crystal cloudless day, there was no smog, and we could see for two or three hundred miles in every direction.

To be candid, I became very depressed by the view…

It was absolutely inspiringly beautiful, yet it looked completely impossible. A more hostile, alien, harsh and demanding environment is difficult to imagine. We both thought. “Please, give me a break, we are going through ... THAT??!?!?!?!?!?…”

All we could see from that remote mountaintop was snow and ice. Just bare sheer rock walls and unconquerable peaks standing inaccessible and proud in the sun. It was like looking at a picture of the surface of the moon. There is nothing green there above Timberline. There is nothing living and lush in sight. Not even the slightest sign of life as I knew it.

What I really wanted to do, mixed in with the desire to fulfill a lifelong dream to walk the John Muir Trail, was quit. To not even attempt such an obviously, absurdly impossible Trek.

“What can be out there?” Whispered all the natural, craven fears that live within me. “Just use your brain and look at it. Don’t do it. It’s not too late. Turn back now while you still can. You certainly will get hurt, maybe even die attempting this insanity. Just look at it. It can’t be done.”

Fear almost completely moved in on me.

This fear was compounded by the fact that it was early summer after the heaviest snowfall the Sierra Nevada’s had had in ten years. All of the Rangers we met on the trail had warned us that the trail wasn’t passable yet, the spring snowmelt was too severe and the rivers were impassable… They all counseled us to wait at least another month before we began our trip.

The only refuge for my mind to go against the fear was the map and the fact, THE FACT that many, many people had walked this way before. “But what if the trail is hidden under the snow?” Which, as it turned out, it frequently was. “We have the compass… Trust in the compass… It doesn’t lie…”

These days when I try to look at the entire trip I have left the view can overwhelm me. Sometimes the thought of decades and decades of unrelenting pain ahead of me on the trail fills me with a terrible fear that there is no way I can navigate these mountains. Yet just as Dale and I pressed on by the map and the compass, taking one step at a time and made it through so it will be for me now.

Dale and I decided to press on…

My journal of this trip is filled with worry about the high water from snowmelt, swelling all the creeks and rivers. The ‘thirty foot cornice’ (a phrase that haunted our dreams until we finally crossed it) the occasional Ranger said was blocking Mather pass. The washed out bridge over woods creek, the danger of losing the trail, possible avalanche dangers, hungry bears, Etc.

I remember one pass in particular. ‘Forrester pass…’ This is one of the highest passes on the entire trail at over thirteen thousand feet.

We approached the pass on deep packed snow at twelve thousand five hundred feet or so, no trail or trail markers in sight, the path hidden under the snow. Our only guides were the map and the compass, and we were still arguing over how to read both of these. (City boys!)

The ‘trail’ (we hoped we were really on it) led us along a high plateau encircled by sheer cliffs straight toward another vertical wall ahead of us. All around were rugged rock walls with no trees or bushes of any kind clinging to their stark faces.

These granite bulkheads were at least one thousand feet higher than us on all three sides of this box canyon. There was no trail in sight. No topsoil or earth. No plants or animals. No ‘life smells. No running water or sounds of any kind. No tracks, no mice or bugs… There was nothing way up there but ancient Rock and blindingly white snow.

SILENCE… Silence…

Complete quiet completely reigns and rules up there. Like nothing I had ever ‘not heard before,’ it presses in and haunts, all noises absorbed by the snow… It is a holy feeling, like praying in an empty cathedral… A silence that feels like a presence, it is so strong and permanent. We began whistling and chattering just to keep ourselves company in this wasteland, our voices sounding thin and high in the knifelike wind.

As we looked ahead of us at the ‘box canyon’ cliffs, walking by ‘faith in the map and compass,’ I was certain we were lost. That somehow we had strayed from the path. It seemed there was NO WAY that we were going up that wall ahead of us. Everything ahead was literally straight up for a thousand feet. It seemed impossible that any trail could go up that immense vertical monolith.

We had full topographical maps and by looking at the lines on paper representing elevation crowd together into a solid line (indicating vertical terrain) then looking at the red dotted line representing the trail bisect this thousand foot cliff it seemed evident that the map was insisting we were REALLY going up there.

We camped on the snow that night about a quarter mile from the wall, still having no idea how we would climb ‘that wall’ the next morning. Anxiety faded out of me as I sat on a boulder in camp that evening letting the silence soak into me, eating freeze dried food, (yuck) and chatting with Dale about the trip. We decided we would simply do what must be done the next day. Go on, or turn back…

In the morning we geared up and moved out. As we got closer to the cliff, the trail sheltered from the weather here by the wall suddenly showed up out from under the snow. “Wow, what a relief,” we said, “we really are in the right ‘box’ canyon!!” Right straight at the insurmountable it led. It wasn’t until we were right up under the cliff that the secret was revealed…

Dynamite…

In the nineteen thirties the Forest service was not quite as picky about ‘defacing nature’ as they are now. When they made this trail they simply blasted the trail out of the face of the cliff. They just drilled and blasted through the solid rock… Back and forth on the vertical wall the trial ran in gentle switchbacks. They must have used a ton of dynamite and just… BLASTED...

I could have kicked myself over the wasted worry. The visions I had had of us on the vertical cliff, far from the real trail attempting to free climb and falling. We waltzed up that cliff on an absolutely ruler smooth trail nearly six feet wide.

Worry. It is always wasted.

Worry. It is always unnecessary.

Worry. It is never God’s will for us. It is never helpful, or productive. Worry…

The Bible constantly, consistently carries this message. Is. 43: 1,2. “FEAR NOT, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; you are Mine. When you pass through the waters, I WILL BE WITH YOU; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, nor shall the flame scorch you.”

Worry is only ‘de-masked’ or bereft of its power, when it’s revealed as the waste that it is.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Shouted the kindhearted charlatan ‘wizard’ in the movie, The Wizard of Oz. God is always attempting to send his servant word ‘Toto’s to faithfully lift the curtain and unmask the Wizard setting us free from worry.

When we can at last look from the nostalgic point of the present back into the past, observing our memories here from the luxury of a crisis long over and safely walked through, that worry is revealed as the waste that it was and is.

In the present trouble of the moment, worry always seems like a reasonable and logical reaction, a healthy reaction. A reaction to trouble that will result in the trouble disappearing. “After all, How will I pay my bills unless I think about the problem all the time, dwell on the problem and after worrying through to a solution, solve the problem…?” Only to find that the problem itself really wasn’t that big of a deal and the solution taken care of by our Father in one way or another. How fruitless yet seemingly inescapable is worry.

We are all held and kept in God’s wonderfully safe hands.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Life is safe at all... There are disasters and diseases, pain and disappointments, accidents and the like lurking around every corner.

What I know to be true though, is that we are safe. In a far more important Eternal sense we are safe.

Who could be safer than a man on the way to the guillotine, his soul and mind completely at peace with God, sure and certain of His place in heaven?

How can anything truly harm our indestructible, incorruptible, disease and death free souls?

Why then, do I still insist on worry as a way of life?

“Do Not Fear, for I am With you… The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want… The name of the Lord is a strong tower, the righteous run into Him and are safe…” The bible is literally packed with words like these yet still I fret.

Even in this failing of mine His grace covers my weakness. Second Timothy 2:13 says, “Though we are faithless He remains faithful for He cannot deny himself.”

There is always a path for me through the mountains. When all I see is darkness and there is no way I can see to go on He always has a road laid out for me. There is always a way through.

The other lesson learned on the John Muir backpack trip has been extremely helpful in the midst of this present suffering. I call this lesson “The wonderful snowcups of slavery.”

Snowcups, or ‘suncups’…

Snowcups form on deep snow when the sun shines hot all day then the temperature drops below freezing again at night. Snow does not melt evenly under these conditions. What actually happens is another curse from the fall in the Garden of Eden. “You shall toil all day long.” Huge ‘cups’ form in the snow. Large egg-crate shaped holes. These are anywhere from two to three feet deep and two to three feet apart… Everywhere….

When the sun cooks the surface during the hot afternoons the top ‘ridges’ on snowcups soften up and anyone attempting to walk on the ‘ridges’ breaks through as far as mid-thigh or so. Especially anyone wearing an eighty-pound pack.

The German people call these conditions ‘Buirserchnee,’ a literal translation of the German is, ‘Penitent snow.’

The snowcups were King and Queen on John Muir pass. This is a pass that lives forever in my memory…

John Muir Pass. Over thirteen thousand feet high, and approximately five to six miles across.

Under ordinary conditions a pleasant walk that takes only a few hours… It took us two days. Two days… Two awful, heartbreaking, frustrating days…

Snowcups, snowcups, and more Snowcups until you want to puke. As far as you can see… Snowcups… Dale and I struggling like ants spending ten minutes going twenty yards… We would step, step, then breakthrough… Drag leg out, get on our knees and stand up again… Step, step, step (Great, I got three steps this time…) Breakthrough… Drag leg out… Crawl for awhile until our shins freeze…You get the picture. AAAALLLLL DDDAAAYYY LOOONNGG… Penitent snow… Try walking on the ‘valleys’ between the ‘ridges.’ No good… Breakthrough…

Try balancing on the ‘ridges.’ Breakthrough…

Try just sitting still and not struggling any more, still the snowcups are before me and I MUST walk through them…

Stand… Struggle… Breakthrough… Crawl…

The hours crawling past, frustration reducing us to a steady stream of cursing under our breath. But we Must walk on… Quitting was not an option… Quitting not possible in that wasteland…

As the frustration mounted and my anger at these “#$@%$&*@#!!!” Snowcups grew and grew, I finally resorted to living only in the immediate moment. Taking a step, then another only to fall through, then saying, “OK. I will never, as long as I live, have to take that particular step again. That particular step is now officially behind me. There are hours and hours of snowcups before us, and hours behind, but THIS step and this step only is my concern.”

My frustration turned into an enduring sense of resignation and pretty soon it didn’t even seem to matter if I fell through or not.

Just the moment…

Endurance alone…

In the middle of this pass near the summit, there is a hut coincidentally named ‘John Muir Hut.’ A beehive shaped stone hut about twenty feet tall built during the depression by the CCC. Like a gigantic pottery kiln in the wilderness it stands slightly elevated on a huge slab of stone, just above the snowcups.

Just after sunset, about nine in the evening in early June 1983, after two endlessly frustrating days in snowcups we finally reached this hut. This hut standing firm in the middle of a foundation-less land. Like a battleship it stands there in the middle of the encroaching ocean of snowcups…

With incredible relief we set foot on solid ground for the first time in two days.

Oh what a pleasure to step and not fall through… Both Dale and I began bounding about on the rock. “Watch this!” We’d say, then take huge firm steps without falling through… No Snowcups… What an amazingly peaceful feeling it was to simply stop struggling…

What a relief to live on solid ground… To lay down and rest on something, anything other than the cold, betraying, penetrating, uneven ‘snowcups of slavery.’

We both knew that the next day we had about a mile of snowcups to toil through before we descended into a valley and that tomorrow would bring more suffering in the snow but that night, in that quiet, quiet hut we didn’t care. The main thing was the resting… It had been over a week since we had seen anything other than rock and snow. At least two weeks since we had spent any time at all ‘indoors.’

At last shelter… At last stillness… At last rest… That night we shut out the snow and the exposure to icy winds and rested in the warmth of the hut, silent, safe and at peace.

In retrospect that stone shelter has become for me a parable or type of Jesus himself. A true refuge… A true… No… The only true ‘indoors’ in all of existence.

How I toil now in these snowcups… How I chafe against the ever present nausea, frustration and pain.

How I long for relief, for peace, for REST and find none.

Yet deep in my Spirit I live in that hut. “His banner over me is love… The name of the Lord is a strong tower, the righteous run into him and are safe.”

I understand now that just as when I was lost in toil in that snowfield, completely miserable and cold, pounding out and falling through on every other step, grimly mumbling, “I’ll never have to do that one again.” I am now, in this moment, for the past nine years and for who knows how many agonizing years in the future…

I am in the snowcups…

They will end… They will be over and done with someday…

I WILL WIN…

Snowcups… Penitent snow…

There wasn’t anything else out there in those mountains that would have caused me to appreciate that stone hut. If the trail had been clear and smooth Dale and I would have walked right past that hut without a passing look and moved down into the valley one more mile up the trail, to camp in a green meadow alongside of a crystal stream.

Snowcups… What a wonderfully horrible blessing they were…

In that stone hut, completely isolated from the warm meadow by the toil and agony of days of snowcups, was such rest… Such peace… Such stillness…We experienced such a sense of reward after long meaningless labor…

I’m forced to recognize in my own life the incredible, horrible value of these ‘snowcups’ I now walk, struggle and crawl through.

In my ‘pre-illness’ existence I just cruised. It is hard to remember those days but I vaguely recall a lighthearted indifference to all things eternal. I had a lighthearted indifference to all things deep in the mysteries of the Spirit. Continuously I just cruised past the stone hut of Jesus presence on my way down to the comfortable lowlands.

Much is made in the scriptures of the omnipresence of God’s spirit. The fact that He is everywhere. Yet the one and only place that He has chosen to meet with me in person, the only place that I can experience his life and peace is in this ‘stone hut’ within my soul.

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” The only true rest and peace in all of our labors is within us. Within, as we live in unity with His Spirit.

Frequently I heard Him calling me to spend the night in the hut with him. To come and sup… To commune with Him… In my successful pursuit of pleasure I just walked right by. By His grace I was saved, and He had a small measure of my heart’s attention but there was little knowledge of His presence. Almost no knowledge of His being…

Worship was an experience I knew almost nothing about. I’d go to church, sing a few songs, hear a sermon, during the sermon plan where I was going to ride my motorcycle that afternoon… To the beach… Well, to ‘that’ beach… thinking guiltily of bikini’s… Almost completely missing His touch… His comfort… The wonderful glory of knowing Him in the Shepherd, Sheep relationship. You know… relationship, I talk to you, and then you talk to me.

I had a constant flirtation with the world, with Mammon, with sin. (Now it is only a little less than frequent flirtation…)

I remember going to a Men’s retreat and… retreating from the men there… There would be a sense of brotherhood flowing, men worshipping, hugging one another and sharing God’s intimate love and I was in the back row analyzing, leaving early, stepping back, retreating from God and His children.

How I enjoyed being alive…

The world and its pleasures had a complete hold on my life. Climbing Mt. Shasta… Pumping weights in the gym. Going for night bicycle rides in the fresh snow in January. Smoking a pipe out on the river landing a steelhead. Going to Bruce Springsteen concerts and surfing at Santa Cruz. Etc. Etc. Etc. I have always had an incredible zest for life... Well, a zest for enjoying life, for squeezing every experience and fun out of life. (Who doesn’t?)

Yet I can still remember the emptiness of my Spirit. Always wondering… “Am I really a Christian…? My reactions to church, fellowship, and worship are so different than the reactions of my fellow church go-ers. They say things I can’t relate to… They all are either playing a game and pretending they are something they are not in relation to God, or I am missing out on some essential part of God’s plan.”

Into this disturbed yet undisturbed life, (I should say unformed life) God’s Spirit then had to move.

I can almost hear the conversation in heaven… God to Jesus, “Now, how about Roy? He just will not listen to my call and come and commune with me in the stone hut within his heart. He is missing out on the very best life there is on earth and my heart is breaking for him. I love him so and he won’t come very close to me.” Jesus answers, “Yes, I think it is time for the snowcups.” God shakes his head sadly in agreement and says, “Oh how I wish I didn’t have to use that particular blessing on him, he will suffer so much… he will be in such pain for so long, but I have no other choice. There is no other tool available to me. I am jealous for his soul to be blessed.” Jesus says, “As always, I will be the one suffering within him. I will be the one carrying him through… I will be the one to meet with him in the stone hut deep in his soul in his despair in the middle of the pass.” God replies…

“MAKE IT SO”

“PENITENT SNOW”

Inexorably, Immediately, like a Giant tank bulldozing sandcastles the suffering begins.

Immediately I flip all the way out.

Immediately Jesus calls from…

The Stone hut…

The Portal of grace…

The Gate…

The Path and Still Point…

The Place of Prayer…

The Temple within my own soul…

“Come to me Roy, Come, and I will help you.”

“Seek Me.”

“I have always been seeking you. Up until now you have only gathered my manna from the ground outside of the camp. Now you must come into the temple. Come into the Holy of Holies where I dwell. Come to the altar that I have built within you. Come to the stone hut that stands alone above the troubles and sorrows far above the snowcups of trouble… Above the storms and pain that is flooding your life… Come into the Holy of Holies and partake of the shewbread, the bread of My presence. The bread that has been reserved for my priests for that is what you are and you will never experience true life apart from that bread for I am the bread of life… Come and eat, and be satisfied.”

My ability to hear and actually respond to this call at that point was exactly zero. At first I didn’t want to come, didn’t want to stop in that isolated hut. I had no interest whatsoever in ‘the inner life’ and in fact wasn’t even sure that it really existed. The longing of my flesh was for the lush valley, the pleasures and ‘fun’ of outer life and so the years began to pass.

Me blaming God…

Me questioning and pleading…

Me turning to medicating sin to try and escape the pain…

Me flipping out thinking life was over…

Jesus just waited, patiently cooling his heels in the hut, plain and unadorned in my spirit, all the same with me and carrying me through.

His promise, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” is not just for the ‘deep mystics’ of the faith. He is faithful to never leave each and every single one of His bedraggled sheep including this backward, fainting, suffering heart of mine. HALLELUJAH!!!!

At length with nowhere else to go I began listening at the door to this hut. It is an inner door within all men and women, a door deep in the soul… This is the door that the bible refers to in the book of Revelation, Jesus word to the Church in Philadelphia. “See I have placed before you an open door, and no one can shut it; for you have a little strength…”

Weeping I listened and curious, began to draw near.

As the seasons have changed over the past nine years I have been passing slowly through this door. I’ve found that the door within me is the temple itself. And the temple itself is formed, maintained, and sustained by His Spirit.

In this hut within, this hut that goes where I go, I have at long last found what I have been looking for. This hut that never leaves me but that I can leave…

Inside my own being I’ve found both that which repels me, and that which draws me on.

The repelling element is my continual discovery of the sinful selfishness of my self. The constant realization that I am only interested in myself… That I live only for myself… It seems that I simply cannot move away from my unworthiness and sin. A few years ago I wrote a poem about this.

The walls stifle, the walls so straight, so brazen, so unmoved. Inside I creep, at myself. Accusedly the walls move closer, threateningly lean… With a ridiculously flimsy bamboo pole I prop them back up.

It holds.

With pathetic, pathetic aching need I grasp so falteringly at the light.

The truth is slippery.

Like a man on a tightrope I walk the far-reaching heights of wild places trembling rabbit like.

A whirlpool sucks me under, a kind whale spits me out. A man in a leaky boat rescues me as sharks circle ravenously. Five guys with knives circle. My poverty protects me a little. A deep, deep pool of hidden quicksand sucks down all things into it’s own vortex.

Invisible, inexorable, electric-live love waits patiently until all in me is worn down before it sweeps triumphantly in.

A man at the coffins side is amazed at the smile the glad soul left behind as it departed, the bereaved feels with careful tongue the hole left inside a once full heart.

Hope beckons almost mockingly, almost fiercely, almost always. My bible lays serenely on it’s back blue-ly accusing me of neglect.

A little forlorn boy peers out desperately from thirty-nine year old eyes and wonders if he’ll ever grow up impervious ‘like adults are.’

My body itself threatens to twist until I’m the shape of a question mark. My tongue threatens to break free from its moorings and become a vigilante killer stalking through old dictionaries and encyclopaedias tracking the criminal who murdered communication.

It’s difficult to face this ‘inner wolf,’ this part of me that gets irritated at trifles and strikes out loved ones for no other reason than spite alone. It’s even harder to write about it and ‘expose’ it for anyone else to see but… it’s there, here, in my inner being.

My primary ‘sin nature’ that plagues me and creates a stink around me wherever I go.

This discovery is an inevitable result of the inward journey through the soul to find Jesus birthed inside and by no means is meant to disqualify us from His love and communion. I understand now that when the Bible says, “No one can call Jesus Lord unless by the spirit.” It means just that. The soul is always Lord to itself. We all consider ourselves omnipotent and will never bow down to Him. This is why it takes such an act of His Spirit to bring about His Lordship in our lives.

Jesus said, “You are the SALT of the earth.”

It is a great comfort to me to know that salt is actually a homogenous mixture of two very separate elements, sodium and chloride. Chloride in the wrong mixtures and amounts is a toxic chemical. If you breathe Chlorine Gas, you’re a dead duck. However Chlorine mixed with sodium is a substance without which any life on this planet would be impossible.

I am, deep in my sin, at the root… Chloride… A poisonous mixture of lust and self-centeredness that blesses no one and is unable to be or do anything good at all. But here in the stillness and communion with my dear Lord I become a new creation. When Jesus told Nichodemus that we must be born again this is what He meant. The Spiritual mix of my soul and his produces… SALT… New, Brand New Life… “Behold, I have made you a NEW CREATION!” Declares the Lord in the last chapters of Revelation.

Now for that which draws me on…

And on…

Oh, my soul says ‘Yes, Yes, Yes!’ to He that draws me on. Yes to Jesus who calls me ever deeper into the door.

When we pass away from this life we at last will be finished with the door and can check out the mansion itself. But now we travel through the door, in the door, and with the door. Jesus said, “I AM the door, all that pass through me will be saved.”

The one treasure that I have found, the single most important discovery I’ve made that has literally taken possession of my life is His Love. The bible says, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning, great is you’re faithfulness Oh Lord.”

The prophet Jeremiah wrote this from exile in Babylon after the children of Israel were captured and taken into slavery. Just a few verses before this song of praise he wrote this, “I am the man who has seen affliction because of the rod of His wrath… He has caused the flesh of my skin to waste away… He has besieged me and encompassed me with bitterness and hardship, in dark places He has made me dwell… He has walled me in… He has made my chain heavy… He has torn me to pieces like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in secret places… I have forgotten happiness. My strength has perished and so has my hope from the Lord.” Then in triumphant contrast to his incredible suffering he writes, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning, great is you’re faithfulness Oh Lord.” My agony does not and can never separate me from His love.

His is an active Love that is always interacting with my soul.

His is a faithful love that always helps, always blesses, and always speaks, though not always in words.

His is a love that will never fail, never stop, and never, ever give up.

His is an Eternal Love that will always be pouring out of His inner being, flowing out of Him that it might well up within mine.

For this love I can stand any pain, pay any price, bear any burden, and follow him into and through any icy or fiery snowcups He leads me through.

Again I return to my theme. HE is with me.

Really, it’s His own everlasting theme wafting like incense from every page of the bible. Consider one of the great scriptures… “The Lord is My Shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside still waters, He restores my soul.” These are all actions of a present, diligently attentive shepherd always caring for His flock and I am more than content to be his loved sheep.

Has it been worth it? Am I glad that He forced me, (And is still forcing me) to toil in the snowcups? ........................................................................................................

The answer must be, and is, yes.

My soul says “Yes Lord. You know what is best for me and this is certainly the shining narrow path, no doubt the only path by which I can find Jesus. My flesh now is in agony but my soul is fat…”

With my soul brother Job I must say, “Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know… I have heard you by the hearing of the ear, (in my case still only the ears of my heart) but now my eyes, (of my heart) see you. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Job 42: 3-6.

No doubt Job’s sufferings were far more extreme than my own but the problem with my suffering is… It’s Really Mine. I’m really in it. But Jesus is really with me.

I love allegory’s Pilgrims progress and books and stories of that sort. I wrote an allegorical short story trying to define what it is to suffer in the midst of the journey, yet carry on toward the higher goal of heaven. Here it is.

[I am a Ships Captain…

Sailing through the salty bitter waters of an Inland Passage through the icy treacherous ‘Straights of pain.’

My ship is sinking. At least it feels that way to my seaman's eye. The hull is leaking and sprung in many places. The masts are twisted and splintered and the rigging is rotting and stiff.

It seems it’s always stormy in these waters. I look at the waves towering over my ship and at times completely covering it, engulfing it in an avalanche of foam and fury.

Sometimes huge Sea's rise up and down it goes, completely underwater, only like a whale to breach again and shrug off the water through the scuppers, continuing bravely along the narrow way just inches from the jagged rocks on each side.

The salty foam blown from the tops of the waves sting my eyes and the wheel I stand behind is loose and feels like it is coming off its stanchion but somehow my ship holds together through it all.

I only have one real sail left… A Top sail. A tiny canvas that I thought was peripheral when I first began the journey in the calm tropical islands years ago.

The Master shipbuilder who gave me this boat set a mast way out on the prow of my ship. A skinny little sapling of a thing, completely out of character with the rest of the noble lines and styling of my racer.

He climbed that narrow tree himself and said these cryptic words as he strung it way up where I can’t possibly reach. “Aye Matey, Listen sharp now. This one must be left alone now boy. This one knows its own business... This one will not fail ye.”

At the time I snorted secretly in derision at the plain little sail among all the beautiful canvas I had displayed above me, proud and gleaming in the sun. It just didn't seem to match. Like a peasant girl in an apron at a gala ball it was an eyesore among Swans.

Now all that glory of canvas leaping in the wind is tattered rags and the little sail stands out straining in the storm, filled to its limit and doing all the work of those lost acres of sheets. How it takes the strain, I don't know.

The rocks lining the channel are like torn metal, hungrily waiting to shred my little ship.

There are mermaids languishing on the rocks, calling and calling my name to... “Jump overboard... Swim to me... Give up your quest...You will find rest in my arms...” I never go though... The Master who gave me this boat and who strung my faithful little ‘topsle’ forbids me to go.

So I sail and weep as the salt crusts up on my beard and clothes.

There is a room in the hold. A room plain and unadorned. Just a simple table with only one chair and a bunk small and cramped. The Master who gave me the ship told me that it was my home, mine to keep and live in. He said this room was his home also. That He would always live there and wait for me there. At the time I did not understand what He meant.

When I began my journey I hardly ever went there. It is small, sort of drab, and unattractive.

It is not like the place where I used to bunk. That was something else. A real pleasure to behold. I built that one myself. A majestic cabin on deck with luxurious and soft beds. It was like a mansion. An elegant stateroom with large windows exposed to the wind and a beautiful skylight to watch the stars by night.

That Stateroom is gone now. A furious Storm sheared right through the brass rivets holding it to the deck and swept it all overboard.

Now I dwell in the tiny room in the hold.

Every time I go there my thoughts are focused on the Master ship builder. He had such kind eyes yet such a gruff voice. At times I feel as if I can almost see Him His presence is so palpable.

When the fear and the trouble and the labors of the journey, constantly keeping watch on deck, gazing anxiously at the little straining sail wondering if it will hold together in the hurricane winds get too wearisome I go there.

There is always a table set in there. There is ALWAYS bread and wine on the table. There is always a brightly lit candle and a book laying there waiting for me.

I eat, drink, and read.

The book… Oh the book... It is the Master's book. The strangest and most wonderful logbook I ever saw. It doesn't have any maps of the terrible watery road I tread. It doesn’t give any strategies to gun down the enemies that taunt me and shoot their horrid fiery arrows from the banks. It only promises that I can stand. It has all these wonderful descriptions of the destination I seek, and one single sentence among all the thousands written there means so much to me. “Trust the Master’s sail and rudder. His unseen hand is always on them both.”

Ah! That’s another thing. The rudder… There is a true mystery now! It seems to have a mind all of its own. It constantly moves this way and that and I’ve learned that I must allow it to have its way. I have resisted through sheer force of arms the turns it takes at times but EVERY SINGLE TIME THAT I DO I SCRAPE AND GRIND AGAINST THE SHALLOW ROCKS THAT THREATEN MY SHIP.

So many times during a storm I have been certain that my journey was over and that I was truly headed for the bottom of the sea. So many times I’ve been sure I was sinking. So many times I’ve simply fled the deck and left the wheel and the sail and the rudder to the merciless winds and currents while I simply hide in the small room with the bread and the wine and the book and the presence of the Master.

Like now... A horrendous gale is blowing topside. I must be insane to just leave my post now but I am just too exhausted by struggle to fight the freezing rain and waves.

So I am in retreat.

In the yellow glow of this warm candlelight I can hear the boat squealing and shuddering as it is tossed in the darkness. Somehow it always finds its way as I read the wonderful book and allow the peace of the bread and my constant dreaming of the destination overtake my soul.

What a strange journey this is!

The book says that in order to arrive at my destination I will eventually have to sail my ship right over the edge of the world itself!

Right off the globe I must go!

The Master’s book says that there is a great waterfall at the edge of the world. A vast cataract of rushing Seawater that just pours and pours over the edge endlessly into space. The book says that when I careen madly over this terrible abyss my boat will turn into a chariot of the air and I will fly like an Albatross to my Masters castle in the sky.

What a wild tale!

I wonder about my master sometimes but His sail and His rudder work so well. I know that I can and must trust Him in this also.

Well… I must stop writing by the glow of this candle now. Strange how it never burns down or out. It’s the smallest candle I have but I found it among the many plain but useful treasures in the master’s sea chest after all my fancy lamps had gotten soaked and ruined by sea mold and rot.

I will put this message in a bottle and throw it into the sea now.

Maybe the waves will wash it aboard the deck of someone else traveling this passage. Maybe someone will read this and sigh and pray for me…

Oh.... You know what the best part of this journey is? The book says that the shipmaster is waiting for me on that far distant shore and that all these mysterious movings of the sail and of the helm and rudder are actually Him.

He His own-self, invisible... HERE! Actually onboard my ship...

Somehow His Spirit is permeating my boat. He is really here… He is really with me on this fools voyage.

I love Him so much…

OH! WHAT WAS THAT? That loud bang and crash just now in the storm... Has that center focs’le crossbeam on that old useless but proud mainmast fallen? Maybe the tangled rigging has broken loose in the wind again and is pounding against the useless old wood.

Thank the master for the mast my plain sail is mounted on... That skinny tree at the very front of my ship.

It just bends and sways in the wind, flexing but never even splintering. I can't believe I once thought that THAT mast was useless...

Well… I must stop scribbling and go on up and try and clean up that mess on deck now.

If you do read this missive and if you see an old rag-tag ship forlornly limping along in the bitter water near you, please hail me. I would speak to you of the Master Shipbuilder.

My thoughts are always on Him now.

Who is He really?

I want to find out.

I must find out.

I must find out.]

Reader…? Are you still there…?

The end of a weekend again…

A friend just left, it’s nine o’clock now. I’m in my sinking, bobbing coracle in the storm, bailing like mad. Groaning and trying to survive this moment.

He came in the house, sat down and stretched (such a pleasure I’m denied, the simple pleasure of stretching, yawning, and feeling ‘that’ feeling of lifting) and said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day out today?” Me, surprised, “I don’t know, I haven’t noticed.” I just don’t have it within me, focusing on the fight, to notice something so inconsequential as the weather.

I spent most of the day with a heating pad on my neck and shoulders, squeezing the sides of my head trying vainly to relieve any pain. I just cannot find a comfortable position. I used to squirm around in bed but hours of squirming and searching for a painless position has convinced me there isn’t one.

So now I just lay there.

I just sit here under the lash like a man soaked and shivering in the rain. At last he finally stops hunching his shoulders and lets the rain completely have its way. Resigned and defeated by the fight, wet to the bone, pain reaches every aspect of my being, clouds every part of my life. Pain throws a wet, cold blanket on every emotion and relationship around me.

PAIN… Well… What can I say...?

I wish I could write something. Something so good that it would catch a hold somehow in my flesh and like a spiritual dentist, rip out the rotten tooth that is causing all this.

I wish I had ‘The Midas Touch.’ To simply walk up to my friend Ken and touch him, and he leaps out of his wheelchair, completely restored.

I wish… Oh… Well… If wishes were horses…

I just read most of what I have written up to this point, and it doesn’t seem to help me much. I can’t find any ‘answers’ in all these words.

Words, Words and more Words…

If all the words expressing all the anguishing questions about chronic, severe pain were lifted off of all the pages they have ever been printed on and dumped into a riverbed, there would be a flood of alphabet soup dwarfing the Amazon River. And I hear that the Amazon is over five miles wide where it enters the ocean. But!! No matter how many millions or billions there will always be only a finite number of words of pain.

The encouraging and loving words of Jesus are infinite. The last verse in the book of John says, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not be able to contain the books which were written.” Hopefully one or two of those words are finding their way into this poor offering of mine.

I am trying to write with you, a reader in agony in mind. What can I say that will lead you to your own inner temple? What can I say that will help you to choose hope and somehow to live when the pain is making you wish you were dead?

I wish I could truly connect my own inner awareness of God’s constant beautiful presence and like a transfusion, inject it into your life.

I tell you dear precious soul. I EMPATHIZE… I KNOW… I’m still chained to that icy wall under the lava… I’m still hurting…

If life has no meaning then we are truly, already in Hell...

I knew a couple in college. The husband had cerebral palsy and he was married to a woman who loved him deeply. They both were constantly frustrated about his condition but they both carried within themselves a tremendous compassion for others. They were always helping, blessing and counseling others.

They felt God’s love by EXERCISING THAT LOVE.

There is a ‘Tongan’ prayer… well, a demonic incantation anyway... Goes something like... The words of an evil demon... “Sleep my lovely... You are so beautiful while you are asleep... So go ahead and sleep. I am right above your eyes.” Chilling...

Most people sleep through these agonizing questions. Those who stay awake and grapple with these things are destined of the Lord to be filled with His active love.

We need to stop trying so hard. The bible says. “The obedience of faith.” Faith is not a feeling, not a spiritual ‘woo woo chill.’ Faith IS obedience.

We were created for worship. To behold God’s face every day like Adam and Eve in the garden. Because of sin we do not. This is the true source of all of our agony. Romans chapter eight says “All of creation groans in the pangs of childbirth... Even we ourselves groan, waiting for the redemption of our bodies.”

Does God seem far away to you? Maybe you don’t ‘feel’ Him very much anymore?

I think sometimes God steps away from us emotionally because He is calling us to become like Him, to follow Him out into the lives of others. Jesus said, “Whoever gives a cup of cold water will not loose his reward... When did we feed you? Visit you? Clothe you...? Whoever did this to the least, ministered unto me...”

He is standing in the world, maybe at an old folk’s home in the lives of lonely old people dragging through the last few years of their sojourn here in this world... WAITING FOR US TO VISIT HIM! He actually desires that we be filled with the rare blessing of the highest form of God's love, foot-washing.

The only thing left for us to do is to take action. “Little children, let us LOVE ONE ANOTHER. Not in word only but in word and deed.” This is how I’ve stayed alive and been victorious here in the crushing burden of constant pain. At Christmas and Easter I go to the prisons and play my saxophone.

I FEEL THE LOVE OF GOD ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY AND ONLY NOW WHEN I ALLOW IT TO FLOW THROUGH ME TO OTHERS.

This isn’t a faith of the head, this is a passionate affair of the heart.

To purposely find those unfortunate souls who because of sin are in agony of mind, soul, or body, and DO THINGS To care for them. We are made for God’s pleasure, not He for ours. We are the servants of the almighty and He chooses our tasks for us.

I feel His love right now only because I got up in the middle of the night, to write this increasing… INCREASING my own pain, sleep when I can get it is the only time I am truly pain free.

Find your destiny of service. It very well may increase... Oh I’ll just say it... It WILL increase your pain in the flesh; it is so uncomfortable, so hard to serve, especially under the burden of chronic pain.

Remember the Tongan demonic incantation... “Sleep my beautiful one, you’re so beautiful when you sleep...” It’s time to wake up and groan as you look at the alarm clock. It’s time for you to begin allowing God’s love to flow.

Look at Mother Theresa’s life. She was in her forties. A Nun burning out. She took a trip to India and saw the people dying in the streets. No one was loving these dying people in extreme pain, apparently not even God. So she began by loving a child dying in a gutter.

Can you say that WASN’T God loving all of the babies that have died in her arms over the years?

Don’t you know that she felt God’s love flow through the pipeline of her soul as she labored in poverty, even in the midst of the increased mental and spiritual anguish her ministry itself must have caused her. I imagine she may have felt that God had abandoned the sick and dying many times in her ministry to the sick and dying in Calcutta yet these huge issues are God’s issues and not ours.

Ours is to love and love and love. It really doesn’t matter that you and I may or may not feel the love of God as we suffer. Our created purpose is to love. To take action... To give…

When I was in college I met a family in the inner city. A single mother, a foolish woman who in her pursuit of love allowed a procession of men to use her body. She had thirteen children. Different fathers all. I met one of the kids at an inner city mission outreach. He was in old clothes and looked hungry. I gave him a ride home and conditions there were grim indeed. I had a few hundred bucks in a checking account... My wife and I went to the store and spent all of it on food for this family.

WE FELT THE LOVE OF GOD ZOOMING THROUGH OUR SPIRITS!

I have never had so much fun at the grocery store. We were laughing and extravagantly buying steak and ice cream for them. When we delivered the food God was so present in our hearts.

We increased our own discomfort by choosing to not go to the movies or out to dinner so we could help this family. We ate Top Ramen for a while… Such love filled our hearts.

I don’t have the intellectual answers to the problem of pain but I do know this works. This is why God rebuked Job. Because he attempted to figure things out… Not as if He were sinning because Job tried to use his brain, not at all. He was rebuked of the Lord because he (and us) have a brain the size of a long necked razor clam and we attempt to grasp complex problems that take an IQ of six million to understand.

God is ‘playing’ an incredibly complex chess game.

The interconnectedness of the pieces in the battle is way beyond our ability to see.

Job’s friends helped Job only when they came and sat with him for seven days and nights without saying a word.

Find someone... Someone needy and begin to love them in deed. I KNOW YOU WILL FIND GOD’S LOVE AGAIN. I also know that your intellectual questions will actually increase as you wash those feet, but you WILL EXPERIENCE HIS LOVE AGAIN. THIS IS THE TRUE DESIRE AND NEED OF YOUR HEART. Your head will follow and only be at peace in anywhere from twenty to sixty years depending on your age at this time.

You will be received into heaven someday. No matter if you love others here or not. By grace we are saved.

St. Francis of Assisi tossed off his clothes and suffered exposure to the elements when he chose the path of servant-hood. Read his writings about the experience of the love of God he felt when he began to minister to the poor. Tremendous stuff… This will work for you too.

Here is the answer you seek. Look around. Opportunity is everywhere. Your prayers will come alive again as you pray for others. Your Worship of the Father will be transformed as you weep for someone in pain and bandage his or her wounds.

I implore you. Try it.

About a month ago a co-worker friend died of cancer, John Johns, at age forty-four. He was a very happy go lucky type. About a year before the cancer came he turned his life completely over to Jesus. There was a true change and he began to grow as a Christian. He constantly sported a ‘What would Jesus Do’ bracelet and began witnessing to his friends.

About eight months before his death he collapsed out of the blue in his van on the way to the coast. His entire left side went numb. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital. An MRI revealed brain cancer. The initial surgery relieved the partial paralysis but there were more tumors deep in the brain that were inaccessible. The doctors gave him from three to four months to live. I visited with him several times during the next eight months. He had a shine to his life. He knew exactly where he was going and was unafraid. In fact He was eager for the destination ahead of him. “I’ve got a one way ticket home!” He would grimace and grin; telling everyone that visited him in his extremity.

He asked many of the ‘Why?‘ questions and suffered tremendous pain during these months, yet the joy and peace radiating from his being profoundly affected everyone who visited him. He had had a good life but was only forty-four years old. Why had this happened? (The only question worth asking in his situation.)

He asked me to sing and play my saxophone at his funeral. The funeral was a hard, yet joyful occasion. There is no doubt as to where he is now dancing and shouting in the ‘verdant fields of glory’ far from pain. All of us at the funeral, in our own limited imaginations, ‘saw’ him in heaven. Most of his family members are believers and as such faced the overwhelming grief with hope and faith…

One day a few months before his death I visited him. That particular day his pain was tremendous. In deep agitation he spoke, stopping in the middle of words to catch his breath. He was exhausted, his face completely haggard, his shoulders sharp, thin arms, slate gray face.

He shared with me the moment of his salvation. As a nominal Catholic, his wife had dragged him to mass one day. He was sitting there thinking of the football game after church when a woman got up to sing a ‘special music’ song. Thoughts of God and eternity were a million miles away; the ethereal beauty of her voice and guitar nonetheless caught his attention.

Without conscious thought he began to enjoy the peace and the anointing of the Lord upon her music. It was a very simple acoustic song. These are some of the words. “Holy Spirit come to me, open my heart to you… That I may know Jesus and I seek His face… That I may hear His voice, when He calls out my name… Holy Spirit, breathe in me open my life to you… Oh my Jesus, live in me, I give my life to you…”

He told me that somewhere in the middle of this beautiful song a great longing seized him and without struggle or reserve he simply asked Jesus to come in. And here in his narrative his face lit up with a great smile peeping out of the lines of pain etched on his face.

“And He did… He filled me… He just… Just… Came in…”

He was fumbling for words to express this wonderful invasion of God. Remember this salvation experience was when He was in the pink, when life was a million years long for him healthy at forty-three… Eight months before the collapse when cancer was just a rare, bad rumor that only happens to ‘someone else.’

And now, telling me this story under the crushing weight of a certain, terminal illness, death practically a guest in the house, the joy and the peace of that moment returned.

He insisted I get the CD so I could hear the song. As the song played He sank back on his couch and surrendered himself to its beauty. I listened to the song with tears, watching him commune with God in a place far from that living room of agony.

All through this I was dealing with my own constant nausea and pain but firmly and irrevocably separate from his position hurtling headlong into the grave in the next what…? Weeks…? Days…? Hours…?

I felt as if I was in the room with a Giant. Or an Angel... I knew I was in a room with a hero… And in that moment, in the midst of the pathos I felt a great envy. “If only I had a terminal illness…” I thought secretly, “If only I could follow him now… It’s not fair… He gets the privilege (after a horrid but short trial) of checking into the most wonderful vacation destination in the Universe. He will soon see his Lord face to face while I still peer vainly through the ‘dark glass’ and suffer on and on and on and on and…”

In all of this writing, and in all of this suffering I am searching… Constantly searching for a way to live. A way to enjoy… A way to win through to health. I keep looking for meaning and abundance and find only rumors of glory. Now I’m weeping again as I write.

For me, and I presume for anyone dealing with a constant permanent physical condition of pain it seems that heaven has got to be one of the, if not the only main stream of hope.

Years ago in Church we sang the song, “I’ll fly away… Just a few more weary days and then, I’ll fly away.” A very precious brother in the church was leading song service and He said, “We ought to change the words to that song from just a few more weary days, to just a few more wonderful days. Serving Jesus isn’t weary, isn’t a drag.”

Yet here I sit, more burdened than a draft horse. Crushed and broken, tears running down my cheeks, neck encased in a ‘whiplash soft cervical collar’ in an attempt to support the weak, knotted muscles in my neck. In college I could bench-press three hundred and fifteen pounds and now…

I know it’s a sin… I know it’s wrong to long for my eternal body so much but I just can’t help it. It’s so compelling…

My heart is like a compass seeking north, pointing towards home. Yearning towards that place where all is well.

I need help…

I’ve got to find some land… I can’t tread water much longer. I’m afraid of losing my mind.

How much can I stand? Finally the man put one more straw on the load and the camels’ back broke. What if I break? What if one day I just can’t carry it anymore? What if the pain becomes even more severe yet? When I was lifting weights in college there was always a limit. There was always a weight too heavy. Now it seems there is no limit. It seems that my burden just keeps getting heavier and heavier and I just get more muscle bound to carry on.

Ironically I still look great. No one knows how bad it is by looking at me. They must think I am just a ‘grump.’

Sometimes I wish I were in a wheelchair. At least then I could rest. I saw a show on the tube a while back. A bunch of paraplegic athletes in wheelchairs doing a ‘five K’ race. These guys were pumping away like mad cruising down the road, felling great and ‘overcoming’ their disability. Now I’m not by any means trying to belittle or diminish their suffering but I found myself envying them. I would gladly trade the use of my legs for physical painlessness.

I’ve allowed myself to indulge in a great deal of self-pity in the last few paragraphs for a reason. In the light of my feelings about my friend who died of cancer and my envying of his state in heaven, how can I (and you) live now? Is it worth it to live denying myself the few sinful dissipating addictions that would medicate my pain? I haven’t tried it but I’ll bet marijuana would whisk me off into comfort. I’m sure heroin would from what I’ve heard.

Once more I am driven back to my only refuge. He is with me. How can I give Him up? I would be a moron to grasp a few moments of medicated stupor in these lies and lose the closest sense of His presence. To risk ultimately losing my soul itself. I would certainly lose my family and ruin God’s plans for me.

There was a man in the Bible named Esau who did exactly what I was suggesting a few sentences ago. He is out hunting and comes back empty-handed and empty-stomached. Chances are that he wasn’t starving to death but he thought he was, or more to the point, felt he was. The bible says, “Esau came in from the field, and he was weary… Sell me some of that stew… Look, I am about to die…” Jacob responds, “Sell me your birthright… Swear to me.” Esau, in an extreme agony of hunger says, “I swear…” One of the saddest sentences in scripture comes next. “He ate, and drank, and thus he despised His birthright.” His agony drove him to it.

He lost everything. He became the wanderer, the leader of men in the desert. Raiders… HE… WAS… NOT… STARVING TO DEATH… But He thought he was.

I… AM… NOT… GOING CRAZY… And I am not going to sell my birthright. It’s all I have.

It’s all you have too.

Hold on.

I love that even in the midst of all of this agony God still speaks hope and life and encouragement to me in so many ways. He reveals Himself in so many unique and creative ways. It’s such a privilege being a Christian.

A few weeks ago in church I was thinking about the Christmas story during worship and I got a very quick impression of what it might have been like for the Shepherds on the hillside the night Jesus was born. The men the Angels proclaimed the gospel to with a song that lit up the night. I whipped out my pen and tuned out the Pastor, (Sorry Jim, I love your preaching!) and wrote this.

I am a shepherd.

A lonely man…

No one welcomes a shepherd. All I have is my time for sale. Smelly and dirty I watch rich men’s sheep on the hill overlooking Bethlehem.

Last night I was in the fields watching the sheep doze in the grass with a few of my Shepherd buddies. I like to tip a few now and again and at times get a little soused but last night we had nothing to drink. There was no cheer for us in the fields while the rich were snug in their warm beds.

Suddenly the skies lit up… We heard the most wonderful sounds…Voices… Singing… It was if all of the earth itself was singing. Our hearts leapt in fear and wonder. What was happening? There was a vast sound of singing praising the God of David. I turned to the other shepherds and from the looks of awe and trembling I could tell they heard it too. ”GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST. PEACE AND GOODWILL ON THE EARTH.”

Now I’m not a religious man. Who has the time for the scriptures? The Pharisees and their long faces have never been for the likes of me. No. Not me… Give me a warm fire and a good flagon of wine any day but this… This was something different. Something new. This sound never fasted, never wept, and never stoned anyone. This was nothing less than a choir of absolute joy.

A great light fell from above and rested on a stable behind the inn in the valley below. For one unforgettable moment the stable blazed in the night like a crystal swan in a sky of suns. We fell to the earth and knew no more.

When I awoke I was alone. God alone knew where my friends were. The night was silent again as if nothing had happened at all. The skies were dark. A dog barked twice in the distance, maybe dreaming of rabbits in his sleep.

Drawn irresistibly to the place where the light fell, in fear and trembling, stinking of sheep and dirt, feeling less than nothing having been sharing coarse stories and jokes with my friends in the field. Still I felt compelled to go there. To that place, that cave in the bank, that stable where the light had burned brighter than the heart of the blacksmiths fire when he makes a sword.

There wasn’t even a door, just a saddle blanket hastily nailed over the entrance of the barn. The blanket didn’t even reach to the ground. ‘This door is open to all,’ I thought as I nervously cleared my throat and peeking in at a corner said, “Uh… Is anyone there? Can I…? May I come in…? Please…? Is anyone there…?”

A young man with tired yet excited eyes pulled aside the blanket. “What do you want?” He said. I wasn’t too sure what I wanted so I fumbled out, “I just came to see… To… I heard singing and saw a light… I… I feel torn in half inside, what’s happening? I saw a light then fell…” I stuttered and stammered, trying to put my feelings into words.

The young man nodded, then said, “Yes… I understand. Please come in.”

Stepping inside I saw darkness and dirt, animals quietly shifting in their stalls and the musty smell of feed and manure everywhere. I felt right at home, this stuff I knew very well. I live with the sheep.

There was a flickering candle in a stall in the corner. In that pitch dark cave the tiny yellow light drew me like a moth. There was an exhausted looking young girl and a… tiny little child. A brand new baby lying pink and still in a manger.

He was in the manger! A manger, the feeding trough so rough and splintered, chewed into a fuzz by the animals as they feed.

The young man said to me, “Here… This is my wife Mary and this…” Gesturing with obvious pride toward the manger, “This is our firstborn Son Jesus. You are the first to see him, we honor you.”

My eyes were riveted on this child. He saw me and smiled at me. “Hey” Said Joseph, “I think he likes you. My name is Joseph. We’re here for the census. We really do have a house in Nazareth. I’m a carpenter. Our house isn’t much bigger than this stable, but I built it myself.

There was no room at the inn, I hate that my son must be born in this place but when the Romans whistle we Jews must come running.”

I mumbled something in return, I don’t know what. I was completely transfixed by the baby’s smile. I’d never really looked at a baby before, preferring to leave child rearing to the woman and only speaking to children after the bar mitzvah when they become men but something was different about this baby.

Joseph stood beside me trying to split the seams of his robe with pride. “Would you like to hold him?” He asked suddenly. Mary started in alarm at this but Joseph gently touched her cheek, “It’s all right sweetie, It will be Ok. I like this Shepherd.”

Joseph took his son and placed him in my arms, my rough chapped hands on that perfect new skin. From the crook of my elbow, (as I stood there praying I wouldn’t drop him) he gazed straight into my eyes and smiled his delightful toothless smile again.

Something awoke within me and I shifted my rigid arms finding a comfortable ‘spot’ for the babe close to my heart. “Kootchy Kootchy Koo.” I said thoughtlessly like I had seen my sister say to her own children at her breast.

The infant began to laugh, a musical, formless, wordless laugh. Incredibly encouraged I began to make faces at the boy. Inspired I stuck my tongue out at him and crossed my eyes and he went off in a wild peal of glee. I felt as if he were actually entering into my eyes with his laughter.

Mary visibly relaxed and said, “Wow… Little Jesus really likes you, look at him!” His eyes were totally focused on me as I stood there foolishly grimacing and grinning, laughing as I shared this boy’s newborn joy.

Suddenly I began to dream while awake. I can’t explain it any other way. I was still in the stable yet, the waking dream… The baby seemed to remain in my arms like a chalice or clear glass of light and laughter, his peals sounding continuously laughing at me now as if I were the most absurd, friendly clown in the world.

The chalice of life began to leak, or overflow as it erupted in laughter and joy and out of the ‘cup?’ liquid joy spilled onto the floor.

Even as the laughter in my arms near my heart continued a shape began to arise out of the ‘pool?’ of ‘being?’ on the floor. A mighty shape began to arise. A young Grandfather with feet like solid gold. He wasn’t laughing but his eyes were as merry as the child filled with light still laughing in my arms.

This figure grew and grew until His arms spanned the entire valley, the limits of my life, as I am not a traveled man. Still He grew and I saw HIM step off of the Earth itself and hang among the heavenly lights, His great hand around the world itself. Still He grew and began to juggle the moon and the planets.

Still He grew! He swallowed the Sun itself as a joke. I was not afraid, and the baby was still laughing uncontrollably in my arms.

Very quickly the great Grandfather became much too large for my eyes to see and all I was left with was the baby in my arms who was still maintaining eye contact and enjoying my funny face, the absurdity that is me. Somehow I knew that this baby and the great mystical cosmic Father were somehow the same, somehow linked.

The little boy’s joy grew and grew until He was not able to contain it and he began to dissolve, to turn into a mist or smoke, his laughter and joy permeating all. This mist or smoke seemed to pass through my body and enter into me. Right through my skin it/He entered.

Then I felt it. Joy.

I began to laugh also. “GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST” I shouted in triumph.

I felt a strong hand touch my arm then. I realized my eyes were closed and I had been dreaming while awake. When I opened my eyes I found I was gently rocking the baby in my arms as He continued to explode with that infectious laughter. By this time all of us were laughing so hard we could barely catch our breath. Reluctantly I handed the precious child back to His Daddy.

Joseph laid the boy back in the manger and we wiped the tears from our eyes. Joseph warmly embraced me. “You…” He said, catching his breath, “You are welcome in our house anytime my friend… Anytime.”

I will never be the same again.

THE MASTERPIECE.

I find that I am not very interested in becoming...

God’s Masterpiece… And yet that is exactly what is going on here under the lava. Ephesians chapter two says, “We are HIS workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Workmanship… I’ve been told that in the Greek this word, at its root, is Poema. Poem…

We are God’s poems… His… Art…

There once was a city slicker driving through the countryside. He drove by an old farmer standing on a ladder, almost hidden in the branches of an apple tree. Thinking He might buy some apples He stopped his car. He saw that the farmer wasn’t picking apples at all. The farmer was holding a pig in his arms, and the pig was contentedly munching the apples right off of the branches of the tree. Dumfounded by this incomprehensible act the city slicker said, “Hey up there, What in the world are you doing?” The farmer looked down his nose at the man and drawled, “Wa’al, this is my favorite pig. I’m feedin’ him some apples.” Flabbergasted the city man said, “But man… don’t that take a lot of time?” The farmer squinted at the man. “Shoot boy, What’s time to a pig?”

What is time to a pig…? What else do I have but time? This joke illustrates by absurdity the truth that God’s attention is upon us, and a much higher truth about human beings as His artwork. Why does He take such pains with us, carefully shading all of our lives to turn out art? Holding us in His arms to eat when He could more easily toss our slop casually over the side of the sty? What is time to a pig?

If He liked, our Omnipotent God could do anything. Pursue any interest… Create anything… The most wondrous lengths of space and time itself are His. How is it that I, and you too, merit such attention? Why has He brought to bear upon planet earth such a single hearted focus? He even became a pig Himself. He incarnated Himself into our air and subjected Himself to ‘rooting in the mud’ with us. And now He beholds and judges our lives.

He does All for the sake of His poems… He works on us that we would change shape and become.

We are His art.

About four or five years ago, after I had been under the lava for nearly four years, I finally began to seek other interests. Finally began to lift my head from the obsession of depression of constant pain and the emptiness of my self and began to commune with God. I began to seek him and want him, rather than blame him.

I have avoided talking much about the turning process itself, from resentment to worship. Some things are too difficult to even attempt writing out… Maybe someday I’ll try and tackle that particular 300-pound fullback. Suffice to say that it was difficult and it still is a daily choice.

With the realization that rough and tumble athletic activities were no longer an option (but I still must take some kind of action, a man can’t just lie there) I became interested in the art of Bonsai, the ancient Japanese technique of miniaturizing trees.

I became a Bonsai enthusiast. There are clubs and conventions, magazines and web-sites devoted to this art. I checked a ton of books out of the library and started reading.

Bonsai is not a tree, nor a specific type of tree but a process. Bon… (Tree) sai… (Pot, or tray…) In English I guess this hobby would be called ‘treepot.’ (‘Treetray?’)

I went to the local nursery and bought a few small shrubs and trees to “Bonsai.”

I made a lot of mistakes and killed most of my first attempts but finally began to understand the basic physiology of trees and learned how and when to take action. If you prune in the wrong season those sensitive little trees lay down and cry, then die. If you root prune too much… Water too much, or too little... Let them grow too much in the flush of growth in the spring… You must pinch the new shoots back etc. etc. etc. You must fertilize and apply pesticide in the right amounts at the right times… It is an involved and time-consuming hobby. Hey, What’s time to a pig?

One day I went to the nursery and brought home a ‘Ficus Benjamina’ (see how much I know? Latin…) and began work. It was a ‘whip.’ About as big around as a pencil, a young tree standing thin and supple, as straight as a ruler without any character, value, or beauty. There wasn’t anything at all remarkable or unique about it. In short, completely common. ‘Ficus’ is a tropical ‘indoor’ tree that does very well as a houseplant.

The goal in Bonsai is to impose my ideas and will upon this tree. Shaping it to create beauty and value using every means possible and at the same time maintaining and accommodating its life. Protecting and nurturing its life. HHHMMMM. Sounds familiar somehow...

I decided to contort this tree into an interesting but tightly coiled and twisted form. There are specific techniques used to accomplish this. Heavy thick constricting wire being the first and foremost. Before the wire can be applied it is necessary to first, ‘test’ the tree to make sure it won’t snap in the final shape. So, very carefully, holding my breath hoping it wouldn’t just break in two pieces, I bent and twisted this young straight ‘whip’ into place.

As I stressed the little tree the outer ‘cambia’ layer of the bark, the layer that conveys the sap to the leaves began to ‘bleed.’ No worries, all part of the process...

I bent it this way, then now that, looking for the ‘perfect position.’ The tree, now partially broken was becoming a little more compliant to my will.

When I was satisfied with the basic shape I let go and reached for the wire. Instantly the tree whipped back into its natural, upright position. “Not so fast little one.” I murmured as I began to twist the heavy wire around the trunk.

With one end thrust deep into the roots I wrapped the tree tightly all the way up. The tree encased in wire. Repeating the process of twisting and bending, from the roots up through brute force I returned the tree to it’s unnatural but interesting contorted shape. This time the harsh, unyielding wire holding, forcing the tree into the new, unnatural shape. The roots at this point remain undisturbed in order to give it the best possible chance of surviving the stress.

Throughout this entire process I was groaning under my own pain and suffering. Wishing that I were out cross-country skiing instead of messing around with this tree. (Just as I still wish that I were out skiing in this moment instead of writing this.)

When I finally finished and pruned off a few branches I sat back and looked at the tree. It looked the very picture of misery. The white sap (this species has sap like milkweed) running and drying on the lumpy, constricting wire. Many of the leaves were upside down now; giving it an even more pitiful look, yet it stood there imprisoned by the wire. Thin… Spindly… Unattractive…

At this point God’s Spirit began to stir in my heart. “Look Roy,” Whispered His still small voice. “ Look long and hard at what you have done, I am doing the same thing in you.”

I looked… In the next few minutes the obvious correlation between the Bonsai techniques and God’s work through suffering in my life began to crash in like a tsunami (might as well keep my metaphors Japanese here) against the shoreline. I looked at that tree and through tears again saw the wire in a new light. The constricting power of the wire of suffering to bend me away from my natural patterns of growth and living only for pleasure. The inevitable power of pain to cause me to bow down, to change shape, to so humble myself before God that I finally give in to His true lordship.

“Think of the picture,” He whispered to my spirit, “ The vision you have in your mind for the future of this tree. A future in which after a season or two, the wire will be removed, the trunk will heal with much character from its scars, new branches, shaped branches will sprout from the old wood. Trust me… I am doing a work that is like, yet SO much greater than this little work of art that you are attempting.”

Then the waiting…

Oh the waiting.

The art of Bonsai requires much, much patience. The trees must be inspected for pests and mold, root rot and watered daily, yet rarely is anything ‘done’ or anything happening. Just the waiting…

Months go by, and no apparent change occurs to the daily eye. “What an incredibly boring hobby!” I would exclaim in frustration at the waiting, yet ‘activity’ is denied me so I continue to hang in there with my trees.

Two years later the tree was completely recovered. I was able to take off the wire and the tree held its subordinated twisted position. New branches and fresh shoots had grown. The leaves were green and shiny. It was a very healthy little Bonsai.

I was far from done with it though. I wanted it to be ‘root over rock style.’ Root over Rock is a classical Japanese bonsai technique imitating a full-grown tree with most of the topsoil washed away from its roots. It stands perched on a rock, the ancient roots clinging to the crevasses in the rock, grasping the rock, and traveling some distance to find good nourishing earth. The rock itself then becomes the trees anchor and foundation. Over the years the roots become thicker and develop protective bark, they become more ‘trunk-like,’ thick and rough. This conveys a strong sense of ‘rooted-ness,’ an impression of vitality and strength.

This operation is probably even more stressful and dangerous to the health and life of a tree than the shaping with the wire. A tree usually has one large ‘main’ or taproot through which it derives its life. There are peripheral roots around this source root but they are not very necessary or useful to the tree. In order to accomplish ‘root over rock’ this main taproot must be removed completely. The side, superfluous roots then must be stimulated to take up the job of ‘feeding’ the tree.

After an investment of two years into this tree I was very hesitant to go through with this operation... “What if I kill it? It’s ‘good enough’ now… I’ll wait another year…” etc.

At last I did it. I washed all of the dirt off the roots and untangled them. I got my rock ready and then cut the trees ‘throat.’ Hacked off the taproot. Of necessity there must be an equal reduction in the ‘canopy’ or the foliage on the tree so I had to completely remove several good, attractive and healthy branches because the reduced roots were not able to feed them anymore. These ‘peripheral roots,’ really just fine feeder roots not being used to being the main support and providers of life needed help. I applied rooting hormone and watered them heavily to give them the best chance of ‘rising to the stress.’

Most of the remaining leaves I cut in half to reduce water uptake increasing the chance that the roots wouldn’t dry out and wither away. Finally, with more wire over moss holding the roots tightly to the rock, and a few tongue depressors tied to the tree and pot with twine in order to anchor the tree from movement that would damage and destroy the sensitive, feeding follicles in the root ball, I covered the entire tree ‘up to it’s chin’ in dirt and called it good. I even wrapped some duct tape around it as homage to my Dad and his solution to all of his home ‘fix-it’ projects.

The waiting began again.

The ugly little thing just sat there, doing nothing…

At first I didn’t think it would live. All the leaves wilted and many dropped off. As time went by (the bleak winter months from late October until spring) I began to hope it would live.

The rock the roots were wrapped around at this point was completely hidden under potting soil and moss. Most of the twisted trunk was also hidden underneath the twine and tongue depressors ‘jury-rigged’ all over it. My wife was patient with this ugly little ‘thing’ sitting on the windowsill. In spring the tree put forth new growth which had to be mostly pinched off to avoid over-stressing the roots. The main concern at this stage was the roots. I knew that the operation was a success.

Today this same tree is thriving. I’m looking at it right now. The rock is at last exposed and the roots thickening more every year. I’ve had to lightly wire a few branches and pinch out new growth but the tree is basically ‘done.’

I know this has been slightly technical and more than you ever really wanted to know about bonsai but I described it in such detail for one reason… PROCESS…

A work of art, and more so, a work of God, is always a process.

Think about that taproot. That taproot as a parable… As a type of where I was deriving my life. From the flesh… From the world… Such a strong root… ‘Always look eye Daniel-San...’ (Remember Karate Kid?) There was no real room for the ROCK. The taproot was occupying space that the Rock needed to be in. It had to go.

There is no chance that I, a straight, uninteresting ‘whip,’ with a strong, well-developed taproot of the flesh could ever really be planted on the rock. Not much chance without major spiritual surgery through physical means, that I would ever wrap my roots around that Rock, Jesus.

Why should I when my own roots gave me such a pleasant, enjoyable life?

No…

In the administration of His art that basic, self-sufficient root had to go. No matter how I felt about it.

Imagine what that little tree would have said, and felt, if it were a Sentient being. I uproot it, cut off most of its good branches, remove half of its leaves, wash all the comforting dirt protecting and feeding its roots, then with one last pitiless cut, remove its main and very source of life.

That tree would have certainly thought that I was ‘out to get it.’ The temptation would be for it to think that I actually hated it. That I was in fact against it and trying to destroy it…

How could I ever convince the little thing that I in fact was very fond of it and was doing all this for the sole reason of beautifying it? That I was bringing torture and torment to its life so that it would be an attractive and valuable bonsai in the years to come.

All the other Bonsai’s will look up to it and admire it. “Oh,” They would say, “Look how much the master loves that one, Look at the masters touch, look, you can even see the masters very own rock, His very own character revealed. How I wish He would transform me...”

But oh, what a price to pay. So it is with you. And me… The essential root of our flesh must go. It must be removed at any cost to me. It had to be done To me. Not in a million years would I ever abandon the root and fun of the flesh. Never… Even now, recognizing the necessity and glory of it all, would I agree to such a cost. But He unflinching, like a surgeon removing a gangrenous limb to save a life, like a ‘Bonsai-man’ sculpting a valueless tree, did it. And is doing it still…

Now, desperately, those until now unnoticed side Spiritual roots are growing and thickening, adhering ever tighter to the Rock of His Love. Penetrating deeper and deeper into the knowledge of His character. Becoming anchors of my soul and strengths that encourage and draw me forever on.

These roots, most exciting thought of all, are delivering to my Spirit HIS very own life. That is what roots do, they deliver life to the organism. Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches, He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without me you can do nothing.”

Wood and leaves… Amidst ancient stone… Tortured by wind-blown snow stands a lone, wise tree… Gnarled… Twisted… Knobbly… Desperate roots trying to tear and shatter impervious… Confident… Granite… The yearning roots at last find chocolate earth. The growing life takes up life and reveals its nature… Apples…

I do not, by any means in this writing want to give the impression that I am ‘overcoming,’ that I’m some ‘stiff upper lipped He-dog,’ like an inspirational story in Readers Digest, the conquering hero under the strain.

You know the stories, the hero hits the wall of adversity, and he ‘discovers’ a deep source of strength within himself that he didn’t know he had, then applies that force to annihilate the problem… No… I am not ‘overcoming.’ I am not ‘beating this thing.’ (It’s beating me.) I don’t have this ‘deep well’ of strength within my own being. I only find weakness, and despair, and longing inside of my own being.

I’m looking for weapons. For some…Thing… For some psychological, Spiritual trick that will beat the pain off me but there is none. THERE IS NONE… (At least not within me... I think that after nine years I would have found it by now.) There is only this waiting for me now.

Today is horrid…

Horrid…

I only slept an hour or two last night… I kept coming awake with a jerk and a cry because of pain. Then lay there groaning.

Finally Oregon cold gray morning…

Dragged off to work.

On the way to work I drive past a prison. Groaning I glanced over and thought, “How incredibly fortunate those prisoners are, sitting comfortable in their bodies there, able to rest, to read, sleep, etc. I wish I were in such an easy cell.”

Somehow a miracle happened today and I made it through the day…

Weeping frequently in pain and despair I ‘went through the motions.’

I feel as if some essential part of my Spirit is being ground away today. As if all these notions of ‘growing closer to God through suffering’ are just hogwash… That none of this really means anything and I truly am suffering so much in vain.

I’m so exhausted. So completely ruined. Why are you still reading this? Isn’t this depressing you? If I were feeling healthy I certainly wouldn’t be reading this long, drawn out sob.

But it is my life…

It is my reality in spite of all my hours of long, believing prayer for healing…

I must live it twenty-four hours a day and so I write, trying to make a connection.

Maybe you are suffering. Maybe you are empathizing with me, weeping along with me as you read and recognizing some of your own struggle. Maybe you too have CFS, or Fibromyalgia, or Multiple Sclerosis (fill in the blank with your affliction here) and are just as confused and hurting as I am. If you are, know you are not alone… We must, you and I, make our choice. We must turn one way or the other. Faith, or despair.

We are the body of Christ. We are His hands, feet, His visible representatives in bodies that, ‘if we saw God face to face’ with our sin natures alive, would certainly die.

Last night (after that horrid day yesterday) I went to worship practice. It was like pulling my own teeth without novocaine to motivate myself to go but I went anyway. After practice everyone on the worship team gathered around and prayed for me. Good, solid prayers I’ve heard a thousand times before. Believing solid people praying for a miracle, for my healing. Helpful, encouraging brothers and sisters who have supported me and through all my illness helped and hugged and offered listening ears. They were praying for strength in the trial, and healing from God, a true blessing…

One precious lady didn’t pray though. She just stood there and wept for me.

I felt so bad for her. Her heart was breaking for me.

“Here’s Roy again” I thought, “Wanting to share joy and zeal and life but instead inflicting discouragement and depression, handing it out like candy wherever I go by complaining, weeping, hurting, and now I’ve bummed out this child of God…”

I felt like the plague. With tears dripping off of my own chin I became even more discouraged, felt even more useless and broken.

She just continued to weep for me.

Like a light turning on, God’s ever present, ever speaking Holy Spirit began gently chiding and encouraging my heart. “Don’t worry for her, it is I that weeps within her for you. Remember my word says, “The Holy Spirit intercedes for you with groanings too deep for words. It is her spiritual sacrifice of worship to participate in your pain as a visible example that I participate in your pain. I groan in you and with you, for you. This is why my word says ‘Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with, with, those who weep.’”

I really think that more than anyone else who has ever prayed for me, or listened, or ever said, “I wish there were something I could do for you.” She did more. She ministered more, helped more, and accomplished more than any of them. And she wept… Just wept. She, in absolute humility, acknowledging her own uselessness in my situation, just wept. In the only way she knew how, in the only possible way there is, (by choosing to connect through her own pain,) she identified with me and demonstrated God’s incredible compassion for me. And that was everything I needed in the moment for God to speak in the stone hut within my soul.

This is also how God feels…

Consider Jeremiah 8: 21- 9:1 God speaking through the Prophet in the first person here. “ For the hurt of the daughter of my people I am hurt. I am mourning. Astonishment has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead, Is there no physician there? Why then is there no recovery for the health of my people? Oh, that my head were waters, And my eyes a fountain of tears, That I might weep day and night for the slain of my people.”

Look at Isaiah chapter 16 vs. 9-11 for another example of God’s feelings. God speaking through Isaiah in the first person… “Therefore I will weep bitterly for Jazer, for the vine of Sibmah. I will drench you with my tears, O Heshbon and Elealeh. For the shouting over your summer fruits and your harvest has fallen away. And gladness and joy are taken away from the fruitful field… For I have made the shouting to cease. Therefore my heart intones like a harp for Moab, and my inward feelings for Kir-hareseth.”

I believe God weeps.

Jesus said, “Most assuredly I say to you, the Son can do nothing of himself but what he sees the father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.” John 6:19.

The shortest verse in the entire Bible, but perhaps the single most important verse for the suffering is in John 11 verse 35 at the tomb of Lazarus. “He whom you love,” Most likely a childhood friend and maybe Jesus oldest and best friend in the world, Lazarus, dead and his relatives caught in the grip of grief… “Jesus wept.”

Hebrews 1:3 says, ”He is the radiance of His glory, and the exact representation of His nature...” Therefore when Jesus wept, He was only doing the will of His father in heaven. Just doing what God does when our own lives shake us like a terrier a rat.

When things become intolerable, and I scratch and pull at the walls of my cell, yearning, and seeking a way out, He is there. He is enthroned in the center. In the very middle of the maelstrom of agony He sits calmly, absorbing my suffering, and offering communion through it all.

I Repent.

I choose to turn from my thoughts of escape. To stand leaning on my sword here in the desert, and commune. ‘Oh be with me MY Lord, I need you so bad…’

Job and his wife understood very clearly the two ways (and ultimately the only two ways) possible for the suffering to turn. “You are a fool,” Yells Job’s acid-tongued wife after the herd of buffaloes from Satan stampede through the camp. “Curse God, and die” She screeches. Job’s response was incredible… “Shall we indeed accept good from God, and not adversity? You speak as a foolish woman.”

Acceptance… Acceptance… The most difficult task left to us…

How easily in my life (that is, the first thirty years) I accepted health and fun. Climbing mountains and whizzing down ‘elevator shaft’ (an outrageously steep ski run) on Mt. Hood. How completely I accepted this as the way things should be. Snorkeling down the Santiam River or standing on the beach enjoying the feel of the salt spray against my skin before plunging into the surf, the sun warm and enjoying the wonderful sensation of painlessness. Salmon fishing in the fall, hiking in the spring. Trips to Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park, riding motorcycles, etc. etc. etc.

How easy it was to believe in a loving God back then, even though I wasn’t very interested in knowing Him… But now my entire being recoils from pain and the constant temptation is to recoil from God as well.

I am not ‘accepting’ this well at all.

I don’t even want to try and explain the ‘trick’ God played on Job. “I bet he turns away from you when he’s hurting,” taunts the devil. “You’re on,” says God, “You can do what you like to him, only don’t kill him.”

Something about that really bothers me. A careful reading of Job shows that, after a while, all Job wanted was to be killed… Sometimes…

Sometimes I agree with him.

Now the only two places I can go to find evidence of a loving God is in the scriptures, and the temple within my soul. I find little or no evidence to support His loving-kindness in my circumstances. Just in my soul. In the presence that lives and loves here, within me…

I love the last verses in the book of Habakkuk. Chapter 3:16-18. “Decay enters my bones; and in my place I tremble, because I must wait quietly for the day of distress, for the people to arise who will invade us. Though the fig tree should not blossom, and there be no fruit on the vines, though the yield of the olive should fail, and the fields produce no food, though the flock should be cut off from the fold, and there be no cattle in the stalls, yet I will exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and he has made my feet like hinds feet, and He makes me walk on my high places.”

I don’t love that these verses describe terrible suffering. I do love that in the midst of terrible suffering the true lover of God can exult, can rejoice, and can even walk on the high places.

BILLIARDS

This is definitely optional reading, just a poem attempting to express my human condition.

Discontent and puttering, bounced from one thought to another. This surface of paper was once a stately pine swaying in the wind with what it was, or what it might have been.

A proud jutting mast on a clipper ship. The cut heavy center beam of a cathedral. A pier withstanding the thudding of surf. A pole to wave a flag with.

In the slow seasons the tree grew, this surface held rushing sap and frozen larvae. Woodpeckers wounds and squirrel young. Boy’s shouts and enduring the nails of a tree fort.

This surface, white and shallow as it looks chained by blue jail bar lines and Red Guard sentinel margin lines. Pierced by curved wire and buried behind the cover. Lost in the anonymity of the millions of other bound pages, reflecting none of the original life and beauty of the tree.

Now subjected to the idle scrawl and whims of my pen, a plastic tramping, scratching, rolling, elephantine express.

Thoughts to express. Wind of life to express… (Expressly so)

The paper suffers all of this without complaint. It’s only paper.

The abstract phrases and stumbling lines bounding about like billiard balls seeking to be free of the bordering bumpers and roll far and free on a real, green, sward of Velvet grass. Not dead wood…

They rebound and crack together creating disharmony. A vortex in my head, a thought tornado, a whirlpool that clings and whirls pulling memories and time out to spill like the ink spills out of the end of this pen onto the flattened trees called paper.

How would it be if God took our bodies and bones, our brains with their capability to be an artist or playwright, Poets or minstrel’s statesman or midwife? What if He mowed us down like trees, using our favorite things against us, then crushed us and ground us like sawdust until we were a fine white pulp.

What if He pressed the mess of muck into human paper? A flat, featureless plain of two dimensions with the blood of the visionaries as margin lines.

What would He write on this vast plateau of reduced man? Who would read it? Or understand...

NO!

The ricocheting billiard balls of undisciplined ideas rebound in my head once more and gibberish lands on the impassive white page.

I might as well stand back and blow ink through a straw onto the flattened wood. Random marks aren’t that much different from random thoughts bouncing off the edges of my mind. Yet they bounce and I understand the feeling they mark the page with, understanding not the ideas, or the flow of sense.

Some things are deeper than sense, or logic, or rhetoric. Isn’t that right? (You are not supposed to answer that one.)

I’m not trying to be clever, just honest to my soul.

There is no place in the straight-line fast lane, or the slow. There is no place in megahertz computer banks so adept at endlessly adding one plus one and each time making the fresh discovery that the answer is two….

The answer is not two…

There is no place in the foolish interaction I call ‘conversation’ for the silent signals from the hand of the inner man.

This page suffers the violence…

This page suffers the extreme puzzle of billiard balls never settling to rest in the pockets of dogma hemmed in by skull and skin, never coming to rest in the library of the cerebellum.

Well…

How did you expect to really understand anyway?

You are not I…

Maybe a like feeling in you will stir, maybe you will fling these muddy waters away.

I wish I could…

Maybe you will nod your head with a knowing smile and a little pity for me and remember how you lined up your own billiard thoughts for that trick shot trying to organize your own minds scurrying.

Well I am not you so bear with me while I scramble. I can, and must, drink the only drink that I’ve got. I won’t refuse it and shrivel up no matter what you say.

I’ll drink, and chase my greased pig life here and there even if my feet are bleeding.

As if they aren’t…

At least my footprints will be clear to see.

I haven’t accomplished anything here scrabbling and scribbling, reaching inside to grasp the things that like soap squeezed too hard fly at the slightest grasp.

A fly is hatched. He buzzes and snattles, jerking the air and zagging… Drawn to manure and garbage, born to be despised.

Hey, wait a minute… I ain’t no fly… I’m a man….

Sun on skin… Grass scratched back…

Children with plastic squirt guns learn how to aim…. I hope they don’t get wet. I am a man, a hu-man. I hew my way through life, the only trail the one I leave behind me.

I wonder if any termites got caught in the pulp of this paper?

My billiard balls change color as they rebound some more.

It is life that I long for. Not knowledge, not praise, not acclaim not concepts but life… I’ll do anything, live anywhere, eat anything, for life.

Not the motions of sleeping and waking, not the sham life of the old doddering priest and his rote prayers, the mass-produced masks that portray zombies as alive. Not, oh please not the shell, not the husk of the kernel.

Not the chaff… Oh God…

Not the chaff… Oh God…

Not the chaff but life booming like the laughter of Bacchus and his train. Life still and deep like the abyss between the points of the stars… Life fantastic and wonder-full like the myths of Dryads and centaurs, fairies and banshees of the old tales. Life, still as stone but graceful and fluid.

Let me get old and beautiful, my face chiseled away by pain, patience and sorrow, until at last these wildly rocketing billiard balls fall silent and inert on the old worn table. My eyes at last wrinkled and dry.

Dry and chuckling…

Chiseled and chuckling…

The man who shoulders His pack and stamps His bleeding feet can suffer no real harm. He feels the nails in hand and foot, His brow and side on fire he weeps, he dies.

He lays dead. Chiseled and chuckling he rises.

I can’t surround life there isn’t enough of me. When I try I’m spread thin and pop like a taunt balloon, or dried out soap bubble.

In spite of myself and the caroming pool table of carnival ideas one masquerading as a fat man, another as the hunger artist, another as the elephant man, the tightrope thrill-seeker, or Tom thumb…

The kaleidoscope turns and ‘presto.’ I have another point of view. Another peek behind the curtain…

Michelangelo pounded long and hard on a block of marble. David emerged chiseled and chuckling. You can bet his carnival was over.

A dog barked just now and reminded me I’m writing.

I’m sorry…

Someday I’ll explain.

Maybe…?

I HOPE!!! Well, I’m glad that’s out of my system; maybe I’ll delete that later, but for now it’s in.

I think one of the most difficult aspects about this whole thing is the sense of no control. I feel as if anything can happen. It’s as if there is no limit to the possible and probable suffering that I must go through.

How far…? How long…? How much…? How bad can it become…?

While I have no answer to this question the flip side is also worth asking. How deep…? How wide…? How much…? How close…? How rich can I become in my inner being…? These questions have answers that can only be discovered in the journey itself. It is only as God proves Himself faithful in my Spirit that I change, ‘from Glory unto Glory…’

Last summer was very difficult…

I was sleeping maybe one night in three. I simply could not get comfortable at all, sweating in the heat…

I was extremely queasy, more than usual and wasn’t able to work at all for over a month. I remember just laying in bed all night long, groaning in the darkness, so tired, so exhausted, in so much pain and nausea that I simply could not sleep.

Financial pressure finally drove me back to work.

With deep reserve and fear for safety I began driving, feeling stretched beyond all possible limits. I was still sleeping only three or four nights a week and working all day, at times my hands falling slack, for a few seconds at a time convinced I couldn’t possibly go on.

One day, after having been awake all night feeling horrid, (I wish I could fully describe how awful I feel…) I went to work.

The night before was pure misery ladled out in continuous spoonfuls. All night long I groaned and gagged, trying to find rest. It was hell on earth. When things get that extreme I just lay there and, ‘have it out’ with God. This is when some of the darkest Psalms make the most sense to me and they help me to realize that my questions and anger do not threaten God. That He doesn’t condemn me for my feelings. Who else is there to talk to at three seventeen am? And if I can’t lay all of my feelings and thoughts before Him how else can I handle them?

The questions crowd in like a thundering avalanche at night, threatening to bury my faith under the unbearable weight of pain… I just lay there wondering. Wondering how this could serve His purposes…? Wondering if the fault was mine…? If only I had enough faith, wouldn’t I be instantly healed…? Or… What…?

Wondering all kinds of things… Fear… Anxiety… Stress and sorrow foremost on my mind, my body a burden and a prison. Feeling abused and defeated, my life a useless waste of breath and air to myself and those around me.

In the ‘morning’ I went to work in a fog. I labored in a haze of pain and nausea; an indescribable narrowing of awareness until all that I felt was the load. To lift my arm was like lifting a heavy weight. I Just want to spin my head all the way around to try and relieve the tension and broken glass sensation in my neck.

It was a bleak, stark, day…

Grandma used to call a day like that, ‘earthquake weather,’ certain disaster looming at any second. I went through the day in a gray haze, just surviving each moment, trying to stay safe. Trying to endure each ‘snowcup…’ Trying to simply endure each moment, hoping desperately that the ‘rapture’ would happen.

Finally I was able to stop for a lunch break. I pulled the truck over by a Church and sat under a shade tree in the ninety-five degree August weather.

Desperately… Grimly, I got my bible out and tried to read something…

I Earnestly prayed in despair, “God please give me some true bread from your word.” Flipped here and there reading a bit here, and now there. Nothing leaped off the page at me. It all seemed like dead, dry religious hokum.

Giving up completely I lay back on the grass with my bible open on my chest and tried desperately to relax. “Why won’t He at least speak to me? Why won’t He deal with me…? Why no resolution…? I wish He would deal with me or leave me alone… Why must I be his testing ground…?”

With a sighing sense of defeat and despair, feeling as if God Himself had turned His back on me, failure and heaviness overwhelming every fiber of my being I just lay back on the sun-scorched brown grass and groaned.

Into this situation God’s precious Spirit spoke quietly in my heart. “Count to sixty, then read...” “WHAT IS THIS?” I thought. “Count to SIXTY…? This doesn’t make any sense at all.” Without the option of hopping to my feet and challenging the tennis players at the nearby court this seemed my only option so I began counting to sixty.

As I counted a little breeze began blowing the pages of my bible whispering back and forth. Curious bit still feeling the fool I finished my count then read this, Isaiah Chapter thirty-five…

“The wilderness and the desert will be glad, And the Arabah will rejoice and blossom like the crocus. It will blossom profusely and rejoice with rejoicing and shouts of joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They will see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God. Encourage the exhausted, and strengthen the feeble, Say to those with anxious heart, Take courage, fear not. Behold, your God will come with vengeance; the recompense of God will come, but he will save you. Then the eyes of the blind will be opened; and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. Then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb will shout for joy. For waters will break forth in the wilderness and streams in the Arabah. And the scorched land will become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; in the haunt of jackals, its resting-place, grass becomes reeds and rushes. And a highway will be there, a roadway, and it will be called the highway of holiness. The unclean will not travel on it, but it will be for him who walks that way, and fools will not wander on it. No lion will be there, nor will any vicious beast go up on it; these will not be found there. But the redeemed will walk there, and the ransomed of the lord will return, and come with joyful shouting to Zion, with everlasting joy upon their heads. They will find gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”

Bread at last.

I cannot describe the lifting and encouraging this scripture, coming in this way, blown to me by the ‘pneuma’ wind from God, had on my spirit during that earthquake weather day.

I would love to say that I felt physically better but I didn’t. Nothing had changed. I was still grinding through the pain, yet a great many things changed on the inside as I let the incredible ‘hope of glory’ come to a more complete life in my spirit.

I just lay back on the grass, choking on the pain still, but an incredible sense of ‘being cared for’ was driven home to me.

Think… Think of the truth. The truth of this scripture… The desert will be glad, the exhausted and blind, the lame and dumb will dance and leap, shouting at the top of their lungs and I will be right there.

I WILL BE RIGHT THERE!!!!!!!!

This is the ‘Hope Of Glory.’ This is the ultimate hope. This hope cannot be removed from anyone through any circumstances whatsoever. This hope is more secure and certain than any other truth to ever see the light of day.

“EVERLASTING JOY WILL BE UPON THEIR HEADS…”

Everlasting Joy…

Just think of it.

Take a few moments and close your eyes. Let your mind dwell on the implications of everlasting joy. Joy filling you up and growing so hot and intense until you must plunge into the sun itself to cool down. Forever… Everlasting Joy... Go ahead and take a few minutes to savor that phrase like fine wine. Let it run around on your tongue. Swallow it and digest… Everlasting… Let your Father in heaven speak something to you about that concept, EVERLASTING… Now JOY…

My oldest son Kyle expresses his frustration with trying to grasp eternity by saying, “I feel as if I am going to faint thinking about how God has always been alive and that He will always be alive without any ending, ever. It frustrates me and scares me like I don’t want to go there.”

He is only twelve years old and already the issues of mortality and eternity are mystifying his mind. Kyle loves Jesus and wants to do what is right but eternity… He can’t face it. Of course he is afraid and frustrated by the mystery, by the unknown, by the ‘other-ness’ of it all.

I know that when he arrives at that gate (hopefully after eighty or ninety good years) and the true nature of heaven becomes apparent to him He will dance, shout, and sing, and praise God with the redeemed.

The comfort for the chronic sufferer in all this is, not the ‘otherness,’ the unknown, not the spirit realm itself but the fact that sorrow, and sighing will flee away and be replaced, displaced like air is displaced by water in a glass.

Completely, irrevocably, replaced by everlasting joy.

My friend Ken at last forever free from his wheelchair and broken body leaping and running, laughing and shouting as he leaps higher and stays in the air longer than ‘Air Jordan’ ever even thought about it.

My mother, who suffers from a degenerative nerve disease called neuropathy, finding gladness and joy and a complete healing.

My own self, full of boundless energy climbing Mt. Everest in the new heavens and earth, completely restored. Experiencing the power and glory of a brand new body.

And you dear reader, at last free from all your pain and tears, re-untied with loved ones gone on before, hearing Jesus say, to you, “Well done good and faithful servant, enter into the (everlasting) joy set before you.”

First Corinthians chapter fifteen is an exciting ‘preview’ of what we will all someday become…

“How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain, perhaps wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as he pleases…. There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differs from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in Incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in Glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in Power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a Spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. It is written, The first man, Adam became a living being. The last Adam (Christ) became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second man is the Lord from Heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man…. Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised Incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on Incorruption, and this mortal must put on Immortality. So when this corruptible has put on Incorruption, and this mortal has put on Immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” O death where is your sting? O Hades where is your victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of death is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”

I love this scripture. It contains such a wonderful message of hope for the hurting. No matter what comes, we shall bear the image of the heavenly man. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in Strength and Glory. What incredible joy this is. We are still yet seeds now.

We are not ‘only’ going to receive bodies that will be as good as our present bodies on the best, most painless, energy filled day we ever had. And I can think of some outrageously fun days I’ve had on the ski slopes… We get Brand New Bodies. Any one of which, if allowed to compete in an Earthly Olympics, would sweep all the events and set new unbreakable world records in the process.

The bodies we are to receive ‘outshine’ these present ‘tents’ in every way. They will be new, unthinkably beautiful vehicles never before seen on this planet Earth. Eternal, more unbreakable and lasting than the hardest Titanium alloy. Perhaps this is the basis of the Superman myth and all the bullets bouncing off his chest.

So… As Bre’r Rabbit says in ‘The tales Of Uncle Remus’ as Bre’r fox and Bre’r B’ar are thick-wittingly arguing about the most tormenting, tortuously painful death for him… “Puhleease don’t throw me in that briar patch!!” Tricking them into doing just that. Remember him laughing in the briars… “HEE HEE!! Born and raised in the briar patch!” This will certainly be our laughter on that Bold Eternal day when we each receive our Eternal Temples…

Death holds no fear for me when I allow my mind to dwell in the brilliant light of this scriptural truth. With Everlasting Joy We will shout our praise to God. Everlasting joy… The very quality of existence in eternity…

BUT, the now…

The now when the pain grips and grinds and refuses to give any quarter. The now, when all seems dark. Where is our refuge? How can we so assimilate this ‘Immanuel,’ God is with us promise so as to survive and in some fashion triumph? I’m still working on this question and I know that in many ways I always will be until I’m home at last.

I’m starting to feel a strange detachment to my suffering. A deadness to it all as if my life is already over… That the essential part of me that feels enjoyment has been amputated, is gone, and will never return in this life. A stoic resignation… I’m not so sure if this is a good thing.

“Why, Why, Why, Why, Why? It just is.” Says the singer Van Morrison in one of his songs…

And now all that is left to me is usefulness. Not by any means to myself but rather usefulness to others… This writing for example, it does nothing for me. My prayer is that it is bringing hope and help, understanding and grace to you. That you as you suffer may find this useful… Psalm seventy-one says, “I have become a portent to many; for thou art my strong refuge.” Perhaps you will see His strength in me as a portent of His love and take heart, take hope, mostly that you will ‘partake’ of His life.

I am finding incredible… Fun…? No… Enjoyment…? No… MEANING AND HOPE, In doing the things that I can do. Putting my hand to the plow and doing the things that remain. The giftings in my life released for God to use to His glory. Playing my soprano saxophone with all of my soul in church and the doors of worship God opens in the hearts of others through my music… To write as honestly and openly as possible with my heart and soul positioned in worship… To follow Him whatever the cost, and to find meaning and hope in the struggle, in the ‘with-ness’ of the Holy Spirit. To hug my wife and children and to pray with all that I am…To not put a limit on what God is doing in and with me just because I am hating life in this dungeon. But to grimace, grin and tell my dumb jokes. (Why don’t cannibals eat clowns…? They taste too funny.” Rimshot!)

To weep and pour my heart out like water in His presence, pursuing this relationship I have with God.

I want to be a witness for Jesus to the lost.

The lost…

Like children in the woods those who haven’t trusted Him with their inner lives wander lost in the lonesomeness of their own souls.

The lost… All day long I see them striving to find inner peace, an inner sense of hope and purpose, but all there is for them is addiction and the pursuit of the empty promise of money. I heard someone say that Harrison Ford once said, “I can but anything I want. Anything but the one thing I want the most, peace of mind.”

I speak of the lost and yet this writing and the dark nature of my despair and struggle with pain seem to place me in that category. “What is the difference?” You ask. “What makes you think you aren’t lost?” Only Jesus living in me. Jesus said, “This is eternal life, that they may know me. He who knows me has eternal life.”

I have not found, I’ve been found.

I insist that all of this has meaning… I insist that there is an unseen world constantly ‘breaking in’ upon this one. That God hasn’t left us. That He is not separate but constantly tests and beholds our thoughts, motives, and lives. Hebrews 4:13 says, “And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” That last phrase, “Him with whom we have to do.” Has haunted me for all my life. He invades our world all the time.

A few months ago I had a singular experience. Angels invaded my world.

After a long miserable sleepless night I went to work and lived on the very edge. Near the end of the day I was hurrying to finish my route in time and didn’t look very closely at an intersection. I took a slight glance left, then right (it’s difficult to turn my head quickly, it feels as if my brain is sloshing around inside my skull) then floored it to make a left turn in front of a long line of oncoming cars. I continued to look to the right at the traffic as I pulled out into the road.

I was going maybe twenty-five or thirty mph when I heard a scream of terror. I just had time (with the gas pedal floored) to look left and see her. A cyclist wide eyed in terror right in front of my van maybe two feet away.

I knew… I knew I was going to run her over.

I have been a professional driver for sixteen years and have had many close calls, many near accidents, and a few minor ‘fender bender’ type accidents. On three occasions I have hit deer and two or three dogs and cats. That’s over an estimated five hundred thousand plus miles of driving.

There is a moment in the middle of an accident when you know its going to happen and there isn’t anything you can do about it. This was that kind of situation. I instinctively closed my eyes, and let off the gas stabbing for the brake but I knew deep down it was too late… There was just NO TIME! And horribly anticipated the ‘THUD-THOMP!’ Sickening sound I’d heard when I hit the deer. There was none! There was no THUMP! By now (milliseconds had passed) I had my brake on and was sliding to a stop in the middle of the road.

In the most extreme fear and regret, an agony of guilt already gripping me I jumped out of the van expecting to see a crumpled body on the road. My heart was pounding, my breath coming in gasps of terror, adrenaline flooding my system.

Instead of just one cyclist laid out on the road flattened by my 16,500-pound truck there were three people there in the middle of the street. Two men and the ‘victim.’

Agitated and confused I ran up to these men, my mouth flapping open in amazement. One of them was helping the cyclist to her feet and the other walked toward me. “It’s OK,” said the one near me, one of these ‘men.’ “We saw the entire thing, you didn’t hit her, she is OK.” I babbled something about being so sorry, then stuttered, “Are you sure? Is she really OK? I mean, I… I… I hit her… At least… I should have… Are you sure?” My mind couldn’t accept that she was unhurt, that she was, ‘UNHIT.’

The other ‘man’ was helping her up off of the roadway and sure enough, SHE WAS OK. This young woman was apparently mildly retarded and she simply got on her bike and rode off. She wouldn’t tell me her name or anything. (She was extremely shaken up.)

I was flabbergasted… I felt like yelling at her as she rode away to get back under my truck where she belonged and start bleeding.

I knew she should have been under my tires and shredded. I knew, in the normal course of events that I had hit her.

Or at least, should have hit her.

I was still sputtering to these two guys about how she just, “appeared in front of me. It’s my fault, etc.” One of them held up a hand to silence me, looked me straight in the eye and said, “YOU have GOT to focus… FOCUS man! You have GOT to focus.” Then both of them turned and ran across the street toward a car dealership. I remember they had blue mechanic coveralls on and I assumed that they both worked there.

Physically shaking with stress and relief I drove in to the FedEx station. I was so worked up that I got on the radio and carried on and on about this ‘close call.’

When I arrived at the station my manager suggested that I call the police in order to, ‘cover myself in case of a later lawsuit or hit and run complaint.’ I called the police, then called the car dealership to get the names of the two ‘witnesses.’ The lady I talked to at the car dealership walked through the entire shop trying to find the two people who saw this ‘accident.’ No one there had seen anything.

I believe these two ‘men’ were Angels.

No other explanation makes any sense at all. How was it that I ‘missed’ her? How was it that they were already in the middle of a four-lane road before I had even completely stopped my van? Why did this ‘man’ speak so forcefully to me, as if he knew I had reason to be unfocused? “FOCUS man, focus…”

I believe they were waiting in the realm of the unseen and at the exact moment of the accident, they stepped in and yanked her out of the way, then sent her and I on our way. Someday in eternity I will thank these ‘men,’ these Angels.

This is the difference. This… This wonderful intervention makes all the difference I need in my trouble now.

I know that God doesn’t always intervene. I know that many times the accident happens. The sickness continues. The discouragement and oppression goes on, and on, but all the same He intervenes. Deep in the soul He intervenes. The Bible says, “God causes ALL things to work together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.” This intervention occurs on all levels all the time. We just don’t see it.

THE REDUCTION OF THE I

How’s that for a chapter title? Sounds appropriately Freudian doesn’t it? First let me ‘define the I.’ The ‘I’ is the one part of me I experience. The ‘I’ is the self-aware part that is screaming and trembling; begging for relief. My own precious self is what I am dealing with. What I am writing about. What I am wrestling with.

I’m not talking about basic self-awareness, this is unavoidable, and I believe that when at last we are completely done with selfishness and are free and at home in heaven we will have more self-awareness, not less than we have now. For the ‘I’ to be reduced is something else entirely.

I’ve been sitting here staring at my screen for ten minutes now and I find that I can’t define the ‘I’ that must be reduced. To pray is to be aware of myself. To, “I think, therefore I am.” Is an undeniable truism. Yet we still have this call to die to self, to give up self, to deny ourselves. Even as my self is eaten up with pain I have the call to let go and move on. To let go and stop being self-centered, focused on myself.

I remember how easy it was to ‘forget about myself’ before pain came in to monopolize my life. But the old, ‘forgetting myself’ accomplished through catching a great wave and enjoying the energy in the flow, the ‘zone,’ as it were; to become so occupied with fun that I forget myself isn’t quite what God had in mind. Probably some of my most selfish moments have been those times of greatest absorption and self-forgetfulness ‘in the zone of fun’ on the ski slopes, or while rock climbing.

My selfishness must be annihilated. My self-centeredness must go…

Dag Hammerskjold, the secretary of the United Nations during world war two pinned this down with an observation. “Suddenly I saw that he was more real to himself than I am to myself, and that what was required of me was to experience this reality of his not as an object but as a subject and more real than mine.” This is the call. To let go of my self-centered, ‘me-first’ thinking and living and to move out into the light of ‘God-first-others-next’ living. To experience “this reality of his (God’s and others) not as an object but as a subject and more real than mine.”

Like Gollum, a character in Tolkien’s classic fantasy trilogy ‘The Lord Of The Rings,’ I can’t give it up. My Selfishness is like that Ring of Power, the Great Ring that must rule and reign and ultimately eat away at the mind of the ‘ring-bearer.’ ‘My precious it must not be lost,’ Gollum used to whisper as he brooded over his prize in the darkness. There was a built in curse living within the ring of power, just as there is a curse inherent in the ‘ring of selfishness.’ A curse of obsession. Anyone who held the ring found out that, in the end it does not bless but only corrupts.

Gollum was a ‘normal’ Hobbit (a mythical creature somewhat like an elf) when he found this ring. He murdered his own cousin for it. When he put it on he became invisible and at the end became absolutely preoccupied with this ring until there was no room for anything else inside his being.

He forgot the sunlight, abandoned all relationships, crawled into a hole, and wriggled like a snake far beyond anyone else’s reach into the heart of darkness under a mountain. In an underground lake he whispered and held communion with, “My Precious.” The only thing that he loved, yet through the ages the one, lasting hatred in his life.

Eventually the ring itself, ‘his precious,’ weary of Gollum and feeling the dark command of it’s real master Sauron (the absolute evil) took a new servant and Gollum was forced to go slinking into the sunlight drawn by, and repelled by his own self-awareness, yet seeking his selfishness (symbolized by the ring) hating even the reflected sunlight of the moon. At last Gollum finds ‘his precious’ again but in the moment of claiming it as his own he is compelled by its command to leap with it into a fire destroying himself and it.

Gollum is a great symbol of the unrepentant self. The self that refuses to give in, refuses to let go of its sin and hand itself over to a Father that knows how to fix it, how to heal it, even at the cost, the necessary destruction of ‘The Precious’ itself.

Last night I slept so thinly. Clinging to the very edge of sleep, aware of the pain even in my dreams, sluggishly running behind the chariot of sleep, my fingers barely brushing the back rail trying vainly to climb aboard and sink into the true bliss of unconscious rest. I tossed and turned all night long.

This morning is gray... This morning is old washed out socks… This morning is bleached of wonder and zest. I am a ‘73’ Vega sitting on blocks and rusting away into a pile of ruin on an old abandoned logging road.

This morning the ‘I’ within me is sitting on the floor of my cell, staring at the wall and gripping the rusty bars, counting the days left until my transformation. I can feel the reduction. I can feel my self becoming smaller, more superfluous, more peripheral, more ‘excluded from what is going on in my soul.’

“He must increase, I must decrease” These words of course were spoken by John the Baptist in the waning part of his ministry. I have become fascinated with John the Baptist in the last few months. The progression of the self in John’s life offers for me a clue of what God is doing in me (and for me) in the midst of all of this agony.

John began his public ministry with great fanfare and spectacular success. He appeared on the scene, a wild man in the desert eating locusts and honey, shouting both judgment and redemption, his ‘I’ central to the message itself. “I am a voice of one crying in the wilderness…. I baptize in water. Among you stands one you do not know. He comes after me, the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.”

Even as he pointed forward to Jesus he was still center stage, his self strutting like a supporting actor on stage before the star’s big entrance. His ‘I’ was huge.

I imagine John the Baptist felt his importance in God’s plan acutely. He knew he was the Emissary, the herald of the Messiah and that everyone would always associate ‘Himself’ with the beginning of the messianic reign.

The MESSIAH… We cannot fully grasp what that meant to a Jew. With their rich oral and written tradition of being God’s people. The incredible promises of the prophets all pointed to him. They interpreted all of the messianic promises so as to apply to themselves, coming true in this world.

Consider Isaiah chapter sixty “Arise, shine for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you, and His glory will appear upon you. And nations will come to your light and Kings to the brightness of your rising… They all gather together, they come to you… You will see, and be radiant… Your hearts will thrill and rejoice… The wealth of the nations will come to you. (“O baby” they all thought, bring it on.”) They will bring Gold and frankincense… (Does anyone remember the stable?) Surely the coastlands will wait for me; and the ships of Tarshish come first, their silver and gold with them, for the name of the Lord your God, because He has glorified you… For the nation and the kingdom, which will not serve you, will perish… The sons of those who afflicted you will come bowing down to you…”

Check it out for yourself, there are some fantastic promises of conquest and riches in the prophetic writings. Incidentally, if the Messiah had fulfilled these scriptures in this earthly fashion the Children of Israel would have simply become another oppressive Roman Empire holding the surrounding nations as slaves to their religious king.

Into the midst of this mistaken interpretation John spoke. Inspired by the Holy Spirit John said the right things yet potentially dreamed the wrong dreams. I imagine that in his ‘I’ dreams at night he saw himself as the prophet of the Messiah, perhaps a captain in his conquering army, maybe a Governor holding a position of importance in the new order.

He didn’t have the slightest idea that ‘the messiah’ would really turn out to be a lamb slain on the sacrificial altar of God’s justice. The ‘Suffering Servant’ was NOT an interpretation the Jews ever entertained about the Messiah.

John was convinced, backed up by his internal, personal calling from the Holy Spirit (a calling he received even in the womb, “Behold,” Elizabeth said, “The baby within me leapt for joy at the sound of your greeting.”) that Jesus would be a conquering man of war like Moses or David and that he would quickly crush the Romans and set Himself up as the Everlasting Emperor of the world.

A friend of mine pointed out to me that John may have lived exclusively in his head. The dreams and interpretations of his own life were both formed, and lived out in his head. While wholeheartedly doing what God had called him to do, his flesh ‘filled in the blanks’ and his fantasy life was rich with what he himself would become in the Messianic reign.

Instead, for John, there was this.

Most of his followers left him.

The crowds of people ignored him, quickly recognizing the power and authority of Jesus ministry. John never raised anyone up from the dead, never walked on water, or turned a little boy’s lunch into a feast for thousands of hungry listeners.

Jesus himself never even invited John to ‘come, follow me.’ When John’s political impotency became evident Herod imprisoned him, only bringing him out of his cell now and again as a buffoon, a party diversion. A jester to laugh at.

As John’s I slowly but steadily eroded in the prison, doubt began to gnaw at his dreams. Jesus was not behaving at all like the scriptures said He would. Was John wasting his life? He knew God had called him as herald to the Messiah, Why was Jesus not overthrowing the Romans? (Why is Jesus not healing me…? You?)

John knew that HE was ‘THE VOICE!’ crying in the wilderness.’ He knew he was important and that his life must not be simply wasted in prison. If Jesus was not the one, he must plan a prison break, escape and go back to the desert, become central again and preach the old message until the true Messiah comes. ‘The true Messiah would never allow his herald to languish in prison like this.’ John may have thought. Finally driven to distraction by disappointment and disillusionment He sent one of his last followers to Jesus asking, “are you really the one, or should we look for someone else?”

Jesus reaction to this question is interesting. He seems almost amused by it; in fact He doesn’t even answer directly. He knew who he was and doesn’t castigate John for his wavering faith. I imagine Jesus merely smiling as He says, “Go and report to John what you hear and see; the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who keeps from stumbling over Me.” Jesus is saying, “I am who I am not who you want me to be; but who I am is tremendous!”

Still John was stinking in jail and needing an answer to his question; the problem of God not behaving himself according to his plans and agenda.

John’s question clings to me like an anaconda plaguing me with its urgency at times. ‘Jesus, are you really the one?’ It gnaws at me like John in jail. ‘Don’t you know? Can’t you see my desperation? I (there it is again. “I…”) am yours, spirit, soul, and body. I have sacrificed my life in service to you. I have followed as hard and as faithfully as I can and you treat me like this? ‘Jesus are you really the one?’” This question releases a process, and the process is necessary.

This process is essential.

I find that the majority of my emotional pain brought on by my physical pain lies in the no mans land between the enchanted country of ‘If Only’ and myself. Between what is, and ‘if only’ there is a wasteland of emotional turmoil not reconcilable to my desires. As I yearn for ‘if only’ all I do is grieve. “’If Only’ I weren’t ill, ‘If Only’ I weren’t in pain, ‘If Only’ I were in heaven already, if only I weren’t dizzy, ‘If Only’…” It’s primarily as I stretch out my hand to the unattainable goal that my heart bleeds and my cries tear holes in my hopes.

So it was for John. I imagine him languishing in prison and fiercely, patriotically thinking, “If only He would strike! If only He would reveal himself! Even the jawbone of a donkey would be weapon enough for the messiah to mobilize the people and begin the revolution to throw off the yoke of the hated Romans!

Hearing only rumors of what Jesus was doing he ached as he longed for Jesus to conquer and deliver him. That Jesus would at last destroy the enemy so that he could take his place at the side of the messiah and enjoy the favor of the people and long awaited comfort after all those long desert years eating bugs.

But John had to sit and eat his longings instead. I think Jesus ‘ignored’ John for a reason. I believe Jesus was hoping that John would finally ‘get it’ and begin to live for eternity, serving God in his spirit and bowing low to God’s will for him no matter what came.

Jesus knew John would be beheaded. Jesus knew that this process of waiting in the dark in prison or in illness and pain; living with disappointment would be a common feature of his kingdom in the centuries to come.

And even now Jesus is hoping that I will finally step away from the windows of my cell and allow the beheading of my hopes for health (even though He still reserves the right to heal me someday) so that I can behold him high and exalted keeping me safe and secure in his hands as I continue to suffer.

THIS PROCESS IS ESSENTIAL

Jesus said, “A rich man cannot enter into the Kingdom of God… It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven.” Jesus wasn’t talking about sewing. Neither was He referring exclusively to material riches. There is a ‘richness’ in our souls, a ‘richness,’ an attachment to this world, a connection to the temporal that is entirely distracting and ultimately negative.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

‘So what does a camel going through an eye of a needle have to do with being rich or poor in spirit? And what does it mean to be poor in spirit?’ You ask…

The eye of the needle was a ‘gate’ into the city. A very narrow, short gate only large enough for one man bent double, to pass through. Three or four men could defend this gate against an army. Generally it was used only at night as an ‘emergency gate’ into Jerusalem for travelers caught outside at night where the highwaymen and thieves prowled.

For a camel to ‘pass through the eye of the needle,’ it must first be entirely unloaded, then forced to its knees, then made to crawl in order to go through. This is not ‘natural’ behavior for a camel. Many camels are not able to submit to this process. They simply can’t submit themselves to the crawl. They spit, and buck, and won’t move.

These camels must spend the night outside the safety of the walls in danger from lions and thieves. It is impossible to ‘drag’ them through. The choice of humility, submission, and safety is theirs alone.

Can you imagine the ‘submitted camel,’ hurting on its knees crawling through the eye of the needle towards safety and shelter pleading with its master… ‘Are you really… the one?’

John (and you and I) was going through the eye of the needle here. Traveling from the outer periphery of the self proud and encumbered by its own sense of non-contingency, its own inflated, self-centered importance. “I am the ‘ship of the desert!” The self declares. John was traveling from the wastelands outside of the city of God, through the abject humility of the ‘eye of the needle’ of suffering, in order to at last arrive through submission and pain into the safety of the sheltering arms of the father.

It is significant to me that eventually John the Baptist was be-headed. The life of the head must die.

In this process of personal suffering it seems like essential portions of my personality, indeed, essential parts of my very inner being are being ground off of me. Parts that I can not afford to lose. Parts that do not seem ‘removable’ without irreparable damage done to my ‘psyche.’ However, I’m beginning to find (and recklessly trust) that nothing truly irreparable can be removed from me.

My second eldest Son Travis got a ‘fossil kit’ for Christmas last year, a toy, a hard plastic dinosaur skeleton encased in a soft mixture of clay and sand. Soft brushes and plastic picks, tiny toy ‘Archeology tools’ were included in this kit. When you first open the box there is nothing but a ‘blob’ of clay visible. He scraped and brushed and sanded until all the soft sand and clay was gone and nothing remained but the ‘dinosaur bones.’ The ‘bones,’ being hard plastic can not be damaged or ground down by the soft brushes in the kit.

In the same fashion chronic pain can only strip so deeply. It can only grind away the superficial, the surface person… There are deep stratum, deep ‘rooms’ within my heart that pain can not touch or even disturb. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) pain leads me to… No, pushes me to the threshold of these doors. Pain grinds away at the surface places and forces me back until I find these ‘protected places.’ Within these rooms only two people are allowed, God, and me.

These areas in my being are definitely not ‘in my head.’ Definitely not located in the realm of my intellect. I’ve found through my own ruthless self-examination that you can take a human being and put his Spiritual ‘head’ against a giant millstone and his head will be ground away. Continue the pressing, the grinding, and you will find that his Spiritual body where Jesus dwells can not be ground away no matter what.

The ‘I’ in the head, so busy, so worried and so concentrated on itself is relatively unimportant. To go one step further, this head, this… ‘I’ must, must, must, must be eliminated at last. And if not eliminated, then it must be reduced.

The heart must come into its own…

A classic Christian devotional writer from centuries ago, Jeanne Guyon has this to say about the self.

“The ultimate stage of Christian experience is The Divine Union. Meditation will not bring about Divine Union; neither will your love, nor worship, nor your devotion, nor your sacrifice. Nor does it matter how much light the Lord gives you. It will take an act of God to make union a reality. In the Old Testament the scripture says, ‘No man shall see God and live.” (Ex. 33:20) If your prayer still contains your own life, that prayer cannot see God. Your life will not know the experience of union with HIS life. All that is of your doing, all that comes from your life, even your most exalted prayer, must first be destroyed before union can come about. All the prayers that proceed from your mind are merely preparations for bringing you to a passive state; any and all active contemplation on your part is also just preparation for bringing you to a passive state. They are preparations. They are not the end. They are a way to the end.

The end is union with God!

You will recall that John tells us in Revelation 8:1 that there was silence in heaven. This is a picture of the center of the inmost part of man. In that place all must be hushed to silence when the majesty of God appears.

The effort of the self must be stilled. But even more! The very existence of the self must be destroyed.

There is something in the Universe which is the very opposite of God; it is the self. The activity of the self is the source of all the evil nature as well as all the evil deeds of man. On the other hand, the loss of the selfhood in the soul increases the purity of the soul! In fact, the soul’s purity is increased in direct proportion to the loss of self!

As long as you employ your self-nature in any way, some faults will continue to exist in you. But after you depart from your selfhood, no faults can exist, and all is purity and innocence.

It was the entrance of the self, which came into the soul as a result of the fall, that established a difference between the soul and God.

How can two things so opposite as the soul and God ever be united? How can the purity of God and the impurity of man ever be made one? How can the simplicity (or singleness) of God and the multiplicity (endless fickleness) of man ever melt into one element?

Certainly much more is required than just the efforts that you can make.

What, then, is necessary for union to be achieved? A move on the part of Almighty God himself. This alone can ever accomplish union.

For two things to become one, the two must have similar natures. For instance, the impurity of dirt cannot be united with the purity of gold. Fire has to be introduced to destroy the dross and leave the gold pure. This is why God sends a fire to the earth (it is called his wisdom) to destroy all that is impure in you. Nothing can resist the power of that fire. It consumes everything. His wisdom burns away all the impurities in a man for one purpose: To leave him fit for Divine Union.

There is impurity in you. More than you could ever conceive. And it is fatal to union with God. But your Lord burns to be one with you, so he will consume the dross. (Do not be surprised when this actually happens!)

What is the name of this impurity? Self. Self is the source of all defilement, and it prevents any alliance with purity! The rays of the sun may shine upon mire, but those rays will never be united with the mire.

God wishes to make your soul pure. He purifies it by His Wisdom just as a refiner purifies metal in the furnace. Fire is the only thing which can purify gold.

Again, the fire that consumes us, utterly, is His highest wisdom.

This fire gradually consumes all that is earthly; it takes out all foreign matter that separates these things from the gold.

The fire seems to know that the earthly mixture (of the self) cannot be changed into gold. The fire must melt and dissolve this dross by force so that it can rid the gold of every alien particle. Over and over again, the gold must be cast back into the furnace until it has lost every trace of pollution. Oh, how many times the gold is plunged back into the fire. Far, far more times than seems necessary. Yet you can be sure the forger sees impurities no one else can see. The gold must be returned to the fire again and again until positive proof has been established that it can be no further purified.

There comes a time, at last when the goldsmith can find no more mixture that adulterates the gold. When the fire has perfected purity, or should I say simplicity, the fire no longer touches it. If the gold remained in the furnace for an eon, its spotlessness would not be improved upon nor its substance diminished!

So you see, God’s justice, and God’s wisdom must come like a pitiless and devouring fire. That fire destroys all that is earthly. The fire destroys the sensual, the carnal, and all self-activity.

All this purging is necessary before the soul can be united to its God.

You can be sure dear reader, that you will never be motivated enough to allow this purging process to happen to you! Man, by his nature, is very reluctant to submit to such a (painful) transformation. All of us are greatly enamored with self and very fearful of its destruction. You can be sure that you would never consent if it were not that God takes it upon himself to act upon you… (Make it so… Penitent snow…)

Oh it is true that when Your Lord actually began burning, destroying, and purifying, you did not recognize the hand of the Lord in your life. You certainly did not recognize the operation as something good. You had the opposite impression!

Instead, you saw all that beautiful gold in you turning black in the fire rather than becoming bright as you had expected. You stood looking at the circumstances around you that were producing all that tragedy in your life. You thought all the purity in your life was being lost.

If, in that moment, the Lord had come and asked for your active consent, at best you would hardly have been able to give it. It is more likely that you would not have been able to give consent at all.

There is something that you can do at times like those, however. You can remain firm in a passive consent, enduring as patiently as possible all that God has introduced into your life.

It may be true that you cannot give to the Lord your active consent in such a dark and difficult hour, but neither are you able to put an obstruction in his way. You cannot say “yes” You cannot say “No.”

What can you do?

Pressed between these two points, you find that you are capable of doing nothing. In such a situation you have given the Lord your passive consent! God is not usurping when he then assumes full power and total guidance.”

This is a lengthy quote, and you really should get her book, ‘Experiencing The Depths Of Jesus Christ,’ but I believe it illustrates my point far better than anything I could ever write.

The most selfishly central ‘I’ in the world is a newborn baby. A baby is completely unaware that anything else exists. All a baby knows is need. All he (or she) knows is Mommy and Mommy sacrificing all that she has for him. The middle of the night… Baby is hungry… Or fussy… Or bored… He screams… The self-central must be cared for!! Mommy comes… Maturity for the baby is learning slowly that others really do exist. That Mommy gets busy and the ‘I’ must wait. This process of the “reduction of the ‘I’” begins very early in his life.

Psalm 131 say’s, “Lord my heart is not haughty, nor my eyes lofty. Neither do I concern myself with great matters, nor with things too profound for me. Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his Mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the lord from this time forth and forever.”

A weaned child… I have watched with interest the process of ‘weaning’ in my own children. This is the very first test of ‘faith’ for most people. The loved baby has entirely ‘gotten his way’ in every single instance up until now. He’s hungry and the breast appears… Dirty diapers, immediately cleaned. He cries and ‘abracadabra’ Mommy comes to hold and feed him.

The weaning… Now for the first time the pain of being denied a perceived and comfortable good is thrust rudely into his life. He is hungry and cries, then instead of the warm sweet milk of the breast, a cold hard spoon full of glop is unceremoniously deposited in his mouth. Crying in hunger and frustration he spits out this ‘solid food’ and throws a tantrum for the breast. Mommy (deeply desiring the very best for her baby, and knowing the nutritional value of solid food calmly ignores this outburst, and timing it perfectly) shoves another spoonful of glop in his mouth at the end of a breath forcing him to swallow. ‘O betrayed!’ How could Mommy do this! ‘Off with their heads!’ screamed the queen in Lois Carrols classic book, Through The Looking Glass.

After this manipulated and completely unwilling feeding Mommy holds him tight and loves him dearly as he cries and cries for the breast. “‘I’ must have it!” He must think. What a little death this must seem like to the baby! This is the single most painful process he has been through yet. “Why o why can’t I have the breast?” He thinks, and throws another tantrum. Inevitably, after several weeks of this unfair treatment he finally yields, finally ‘breaks,’ and plaintively cries himself to sleep on Mommies ‘chest.’

The baby cannot now ‘engage Mommies mind.’ There is no verbal communication possible between Mother and child. The little mind is not yet able to even think in words let alone speak. But there isn’t anything more peaceful or beautiful than the eye contact between a mother and child. See the toothless little grin… The mother humming… Contentment…

How can I imagine that any of my thoughts can be interesting to the Creator of light and time itself? On an intellectual level I cannot ‘engage his mind.’ All I can do is suck my thumb and commune with Him. “Like a weaned child I have stilled my soul within me.”

The ‘breast’ has been transformed into a ‘person’ for the infant. At this point the baby is a little older, a little more suited to socialization. Now the baby wants Mommy for the love of it, not the milk of it. He has taken his first step toward real love and true personality.

How strange and wonderful that even these early steps must be taken ‘through the eye of the needle.’

We must become convinced of our superfluousness. We must come to the place of realizing our depended-ness. That in the final analysis nothing depends upon my ‘I’, and that God, as inexorable and unstoppable as a Glacier creeping toward an old tree will uproot me.

He will ravish me with His love. Song of Solomon says “I am my beloved’s and His desire is for me… Listen, My beloved! Behold, He is coming, climbing on the mountains, leaping on the hills! My beloved responded and said to me, Arise my darling, my beautiful one, and come along, come away with me for the winter is past, The rain is over and gone. The flowers have already appeared in the land; the time has come for pruning the vines, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in the land.”

He truly is the “Great Lover.” He will, one way or another at last be truly first in my life at any cost to Himself, for if God is with us when we suffer, if He really feels all we go through, then He Himself suffers in us. And because He is with me I can choose, through acceptance and continual worship, to experience the full consciousness of His presence, His ‘joined-ness.’ Growth therefore means that His one-ness to and with me becomes more perfect, more complete as I go on.

Every last inch of pain that I go through is all part of the weaning process. That ‘I’ should be reduced… That ‘I’ can be weaned from myself and that God’s compassion might be birthed in me instead.

Ultimately He Himself pays the full price of the ‘reduction of my I’ within his own being. The ‘suffering God’ within me bears it all, absorbs it all, feels it all, and knows it all. Not even one of my smallest thoughts escapes His notice. The only choice that I have, the only response I can make is Job’s, or Job’s wife’s. Acceptance, or cursing.

I choose acceptance.

Weeping, I choose acceptance.

I am forced to make much of the ‘purifying and conforming’ nature of suffering. Pain produces in us a disinterest in this world. Pain reveals the emptiness of riches and strips the wealthy and the bankrupt of all pride. The millionaire and the skid row bum moan in the exact same tones, it is one of the great levelers and equalizers of all flesh.

As the years have passed and the ‘permanent nature’ of this condition of pain becomes more of a certainty, something that will always cling to my flesh, thorns as a way of life, pain as a constant companion; I find that acceptance is becoming a weary way of life.

The truly exciting part about it is the inner life. The ‘reduction of the I’ carries with it the seeds of the freedom of the Spirit. Meister Eckhart again speaks to this condition of the reduction of the self and resulting freedom.

“When physical fire kindles and burns wood to sparks, the wood absorbs the fires nature and becomes like the pure fire that hangs immediately under heaven. The burning wood suddenly forgets and abandons its father and Mother, brothers and sisters on earth and hurries upward to seek its Father in the sky. Here below, its father is the fire, its mother is the wood, and its brother and sister are other sparks. It does not wait for them but hurrying up, it mounts to its true Father in the sky. He who knows the truth knows that physical fire is not the true Father of the spark. The real, the true Father of all fire is above. It is not only father and mother on earth that the spark forgets but rather it denies and forgets itself, because of a natural affection, to get to its sky Father, even though it has to be extinguished in the cold of the air between… The more innocent and poor the soul is, the less it has to do with creatures, the emptier of things that are not God, the more surely it takes to God, gets into him and is made one with Him… When fire goes to work on wood, kindling it to burning, the fire first fills the wood with desire for its own dissimilar nature, by taking away from the wood its solidity and coldness, its hardness and watery moisture. Thus the fire makes the wood more and more like itself and still neither can rest, be satisfied or quieted in mere warmth, heat, or likeness. The fire begets itself in the wood, giving the wood its own fiery nature, even its own being, so that wood may be identical with the fire and neither more nor less distinct. Before this can happen, there is always a smoking, crackling struggle between wood and fire, but when all unlikeness is removed and done away, the fire quiets and soothes the wood.”

I know this is rather esoteric writing and comes from a thought process long gone. The mystic writers of the thirteen hundreds are a million miles away from the technological mind from nineteen ninety-nine. Still I want to challenge you. Go back and read that stuff again, especially those of you who are in pain.

The wood burning in the campfire is done with the earth; finished with sap and leaves, with enlarging and ‘living.’ (In the sense of ‘in this world, and of it’ as a tree growing is, opposed to, ‘In this world, but not of it.’ As a tree split into kindling and waiting for fire is) Yet the true process of the woods ‘life’ (stick with me here in this allegory before it completely breaks down) really only begins as the fire splits and penetrates the wood. The tree finally living as the ‘sappy’ knots explode in a shower of sparks, the wood yielding and yielding to the pain of fire, at last becoming glowing coals, the fire completely ‘impersonating’ the wood. Just as Jesus seeks to impersonate you and I with His own essence…

The wood itself at last inseparable from the fire. Look long at the coals, they glow with ‘inner fire’ now. Radiating heat all night long, the struggle and ‘movement’ all done, (“Be still, and know that I am God.” Saith the Lord.) The coals now and only now ready to be used for cooking.

Nothing is as good for roasting marshmallows and hot dogs than coals.

And nothing on earth releases the presence of God within the human soul-heart like the abandonment of the self.

The question you might be asking is; why do it? Why not just leave all this behind, ignore it all and… Watch T.V.? Just say to ourselves like the rest of the world, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

If you truly are suffering (and really, who among us isn’t?) This is insufficient.

Numbness waits like a lion beside the path down that road… A sediment of the Spirit whose only outlet is addiction (carrying with itself a whole new level of inner pain) is the inevitable end and companion to the person who chooses this path.

Are you really alive?

How can you tell?

Is your soul alive?

What will you say and do the in the moments after your last breath of earth air when you take your first breath of air in the resurrection?

You MUST deal with this area of your inner being. It is as insistent and constant of a need as food.

As a child you cried for your mother even when you weren’t physically hungry. How is it that now you ignore your Spirits cry for God? Your Spirit must be fed. It is so hungry. It must be nurtured. It must be allowed to grow, and roam, and question, but most importantly, rest in the Shepherds peace-giving arms.

UNIVERSAL

Here I sit again staring at my screen feeling awful… I can’t describe how difficult it is to NEVER… EVER… feel good… I’d like to start this chapter out with a cool poem or an inspiring quote but frankly I just don’t have the energy to hunt anything up… I swear it feels like the spine in my neck is coming apart.

Back in nineteen-ninety, nine years before this awful experience of continuous pain began I was forced into recognizing intellectually the Universal nature of suffering. That all of us to one degree are crippled and suffer and just because you are not suffering as severely as I am, (or I as much as you) doesn’t mean anyone’s personal experience of suffering is meaningless or insignificant in any way.

One day I was driving my truck at work, cruising along feeling fine in downtown Salem when a poor miserable soul in a wheelchair rolled past in the crosswalk in front of me at a traffic light.

He was a sight. (Poor soul…)

He was twisted and crippled, his head forced to the left, nearly lying on his shoulder so that he could only look forward with one eye. His face was drawn and disfigured, one hand looked immovable, withered and cradled tightly to his chest, the other wrapped around the control stick on his motorized wheelchair.

He was truly pitiful sitting there, unable to… Well, I’m sure you have seen many people like him in your life. Take a moment to allow this mental picture to form in your mind’s eye.

I became enraged by the injustice of it all in that moment. (Remember that this was years before my own toil here in the snowcups began.)

I began angrily questioning why.

There were healthy and happy college students having a great time playing on the nearby tennis court and the contrast in that moment got to me in a big way. I began to pray, demanding an answer from God. “Why is it, that this man must be so crippled, that he must sit there in such pain and restriction while these others enjoy there lives so much…? There is nothing wrong with them, and no doubt they have sins and failings, why must this man suffer? It just isn’t fair God…”

I prayed along these lines for a few minutes, (usually fruitless prayers) then felt God speak in my heart. His still small voice began chiding me, “Roy, why do you imagine that you, or those students on the tennis court, are any different in my sight from this precious man in the wheelchair? In my eyes, in your insides, in your spirits, in the essence of your beings, you are all in wheelchairs. You are all crippled beyond your imagining. Sin has ruined all of you. Don’t imagine that anyone you see, no matter how healthy, hearty and hale is walking true and free in his or her spirits. Not one of you is anything but twisted and crippled and broken in my sight. So my child, lay no burdens on any one. They, and you, simply cannot carry them.”

I think about this word a lot these days…

All around me I see people who are hurting. People who look great on the outside, but when you begin to get to know them and they start sharing their problems it quickly becomes evident that they are not so well off. I am learning to picture that crippled man in his wheelchair, such suffering so evident in his visage, and super-impose that mental picture over the healthy, even smiling people that I see before me every day.

It helps me to be merciful…

Pain… What an awful thing it is.

Phillip Yancey in his book, ‘Where Is God When It Hurts’ (which by the way is an excellent book) talks about the physical value of pain. He writes about Leprosy as a prime example.

He writes about how leprosy is widely misunderstood as the ‘rotting away disease.’ In reality leprosy is a disease in which the nerve endings simply die off. There is no pain for these people… A state that at first thought seems to me to be greatly desirable. No pain… Consequently Lepers can seriously injure themselves without being aware of it. Infection sets in and they don’t even feel it and the flesh then literally rots away.

A boy easily turns a key in a rusty lock (that a strong man cannot open because He feels the pain of tearing flesh) and in the process rips his fingers open to the bone and doesn’t even notice. Lepers will reach into a fire to pull out a potato without feeling pain and burn themselves severely. An infection goes completely ignored. A finger can be slammed in a door and torn off and it goes completely unnoticed.

The ‘pain’ of leprosy is truly horrid… It is the pain of social ostracism. To be rejected so thoroughly by society… A man tells of how he had to sit in his car outside of a church as his daughter got married within. He was ‘outcast,’ asked to stay away from his own daughters wedding because of his leprosy and the stigma attached to leprosy. Imagine that you must stand by helplessly as your body literally rots away and there is nothing that can be done.

And this is a disease with no ‘pain…’ and the inevitable consequences of living in a pain free body.

My Mother, who suffers from neuropathy, had a very close call because of the lack of pain. Or at least the lack of the ‘proper’ sort of pain.

Neuropathy is a mysterious nerve disease of unknown causes and mechanism in which the nerves in the extremities of the body slowly die off. They just shut down and wither away. Even though there is a numbness and lack of pain in her hands and feet Mom is in tremendous pain from the dying nerve endings. She lives with it every day.

A few months ago she was helping out on a remodel construction job at church. She stepped on a screw early on in the day without knowing it. Without feeling any pain (“O desire of my heart,” I think) the screw became embedded in her shoe and worked its way in as she continued walking around without the gift of pain in her feet. The screw pierced through her shoe, into her foot and worked its way all the way into a bone. All day the screw ground around in there. She felt no more discomfort than she usually does what with the tingling and numbness of neuropathy.

She got all the way home without discovering anything was wrong. Finally when she took off her shoe, she had to tug and pull, “Why won’t my shoe come off?” She was thinking. When she finally got her shoe off (pulling the screw out by sheer force) her sock was soaked in blood. She saw the screw sticking up through the sole of her shoe on the inside. Only then did she see the hole in her foot.

She immediately rushed to the emergency room. The doctors there told her she probably was going to have to have her foot amputated because of infection. (Apparently the inside of a bone is very susceptible to infection.)

She was still not feeling any pain from the injury itself although her overall pain level from the neuropathy was just as high as ever.

We all immediately began to pray for her. Many people in her Church and family were begging God to stop the infection, to save her foot from amputation.

God was so faithful and her foot healed up just fine. There was no infection at all. Praise Him for his excellent love!!!

Yancey makes the strong and obvious case for pain. How good it is, how life is truly impossible without it, what a wonderful ‘security alarm system’ it is, how finely crafted we are with our ability to feel both pain and pleasure with the same nerve endings.

Really, you should read his book, its much more concise and makes a ton more sense than these ramblings of mine. The only difference between these writings and his, besides his incredible scholarship and logic vs. my ramblings… I am right there… I am in the fire… It’s ‘goring my ox’ not his…

Pain, when it is working right, helps to make the world go round. Pain is actually a wonderful gift that blesses and helps our lives. There are accounts of children who are born without the ability to feel any pain and they usually don’t survive into adulthood as they jump from the tops of trees and so forth without fear.

What to do though, when it rages unchecked and out of control…? When pain is like a dragon breathing threats and fire waiting around every corner. When pain is the single most present reality to your life. When there isn’t anything that can be done about it but to stand bent and helpless as an old tree in the face of the hurricane and lean as far away from it as possible. When the only problem is, every way I lean is into the pain itself. (Oh I want to flee from it but I don’t know how.)

When every single waking, and most of my dreaming thoughts are centered around pain and I am obsessed with, controlled by and feel as if I am possessed with and by pain…

When…

Oh can’t you see? Don’t you understand? This is why I, who never ever dreamed of writing a book about pain, am sitting here like a blacksmith over his anvil pounding with all of my soul. Hammering with every fiber of my being.

Hammering out my heart’s blood and trying to come to terms, trying to make a treaty of peace, trying desperately to make a life out of this ruin I’ve become. Sitting in desolation in the ruins of the castle, water and fire rising on all sides, yet still wielding my hammer and sword, determined to never give in.

This is written from the deep… By his own admission in his book Mr. Yancey wrote from the comfort of the fireside.

This is writing from the coals themselves… Take a long look, this is a song from the dark side of the moon, an epistle from prison.

The abyss of suffering is dark.

It’s lonely… It’s frightening… It’s out of my control… Out of my hands… Spinning like a car on ice… I am hesitant to even write about my true feelings about this ‘Under the Lava’ experience because I don’t want to depress anyone, yet the truth of my life calls for transparency.

So… The Truth…

The truth is, I’m sitting here weeping as I write.

The truth is, I contemplate with dread twenty two thousand more days like today and my Spirit recoils in horror thinking of the journey in the cattle car that waits…

I no longer fear death. I no longer fear terminal illness. I no longer fear men in any way. I do not fear financial ruin or the ‘Y2K bug’…

I fear pain itself…

I fear for my sanity at times…

I think I am writing this mainly to try and work through my fear of pain itself and finally learn to ‘live with it,’ to somehow ‘get used to it.’

I am fairly certain that there are many TV ‘evangelists’ that would have serious doubts about my salvation based upon this writing and to them (and to you too if you are part of the health-wealth-and prosperity doctrine camp) I have no defense… Nor do I feel the need to defend myself. Why don’t you go count your money or something? I’m busy.

I was thinking today (between groans) of a fountain of water. Water… A clear cool jet springing pure and steady from out of a pipe set flush with the cement in a fountain in the park. A ‘pillar’ of water is created in that moment, bubbling up, then falling back to earth only to be renewed by the pressure from the pipe again. This pillar of water only exists in the moment itself. This pillar is never really the same from moment to moment, nor can the ‘moment’ of its ‘life’ be defined. Is a ‘moment’ a second…? Three seconds…? Maybe a tenth of a second…?

The water is a fountain, a ‘pillar,’ only because of the underground hidden pressure bubbling up unseen from the underground source. Does the ‘pillar’ of water ever worry about its source? Does it ever stress out thinking, “What if the source fails?” Of course not, it just springs up and sparkles.

I am so glad Jesus said, “Out of your innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.”

Think…

“Your innermost being…” That, ‘agent of the soul’ untouched by the flesh… The temple of spirit deep within every human being that God longs to open up to his light, tear the roof off of and dwell richly within, waiting for us to commune with him. “Shall flow rivers.” A river (singular) might dry up someday (although I suspect Jesus was thinking of the indefatigable Nile when he said this) but rivers? (Plural)

Contrast the mighty flood of the Colorado River with your average fountain in your local City Park. The Colorado flows with hundreds of thousands of gallons per minute compared to two or three in the city fountain…

Now combine two or three of the world’s greatest rivers (The Mississippi, the Amazon, and the Congo… Think Niagara Falls…) and then imagine… That… flowing up from within your inmost being… Raging, huge and as calm as glass. This ‘rivers’ from within from Jesus will never fail, never cease, and never grow muddy or polluted.

“Living water.” Jesus defines these ‘waters’ by standing up in the middle of a highly symbolic public religious ritual at the temple in Jerusalem and proclaiming, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.”

The basis of this ritual was firmly rooted in the historic actions of God while the Children of Israel followed Moses through the desert during the great Exodus from Egypt. Once when the children of Israel were dying of thirst God brought forth hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, (enough to quench the thirst of over five million people and their livestock.) from a rock…

It was during the yearly celebration ceremony of this miraculous deliverance when Jesus, the poor carpenter Joseph’s Son from Nazareth… of dubious birth… spoke this living water word.

During the yearly ritual a Priest brought water from the pool of Siloam in a golden pitcher (Hmmm there is Siloam again, can this pool be a symbol of Jesus Himself? Remember the blind man with the mud in his eyes) and poured this symbolic water out on the altar while the people shouted and sang…

The water would flow over the sacrifice and altar then out through a pipe that led through the city and finally empty outside of the city wall onto the earth. The Israelites believed that Jerusalem was the belly of the world and that the temple was the world’s ‘navel.’ Jesus knew exactly what He was doing at this moment. Water flowing from the navel… What a great illustration of the ‘water of life’ pouring out of our innermost beings onto a needy world…

Jesus seized upon this very moment to call Himself the living water. He was the Rock the children of Israel drank from in the desert and He is still the rock we all drink from in our own personal deserts.

This alone is the reason I still hope as I stare twenty two thousand more days of pain in the face. That’s assuming I live to be one hundred, I so hope I do live to be old and gray, maybe by then I will be wise enough to write a really good book on pain

He is the operating agent of life within my inner being.

He is the living water that transforms my broken-ness and crippled-ness into meaning and joy. He is my hope and the desire of my soul. My inner being shouts and sings, “HE, HE, HE, HE ALONE!!!!” He will never fail me, never dry up, never leave me nor forsake me. I love him so.

He is the water from the pool of Siloam poured out upon the eyes of my heart to relieve the blindness of my Spirit…

In this instance it is not the blind man seeking Siloam but the living, acting, thinking, water from Siloam being carried within the golden pitcher of my Savior’s Spirit seeking to be poured out upon the dry rocky altar of my heart.

Jesus is the Great High Priest who pours the essence of His love out upon the altar of my soul. See the book of Hebrews chapter 5-8 for a complete explanation of this High Priest business…

How did I ever think that I could find him? He is finding me. He is carrying the river from underneath His Father’s throne in the infinitude of his own Spirit.

He is The Great High Priest carrying the living water of Himself inside the golden pitcher of his own sacrifice on the cross roaming the streets and scouring the countryside looking for his lost sheep. My role is to sit silently in my blindness and pray, and hope, and wait. He is faithful to find me. He will find me… HE HAS FOUND ME!

He is the Lord, the one who ‘springs up oh well, within my soul.’ He is eternally ‘begetting his character in my soul…’

He is the magnificently gentle faithful God who as it says in Ephesians chapter one, “LAVISHES HIS GRACE UPON ME.”

About two years ago I was playing with my children in the heat of a Saturday in July. It was a massive family water fight. They had ‘super-soaker’ water guns… I had… THE HOSE… Guess who won… It was no contest at all…

They were laughing and shouting, almost pitifully trying to ‘soak’ me. I was standing there with THE HOSE… Connected to the faucet, connected to the main city water main, connected to the river itself… The water flowing from THE RIVER and endlessly available to me (and them) and flowing at full force all over them, delighting them, cooling them in the one hundred degree weather. It was a great time.

God’s Spirit quickened in my soul this scripture from Ephesians chapter 1:7-8. “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight.”

My boys were wet, they couldn’t get any ‘wetter’ yet THE HOSE kept pouring, kept arcing far out over the yard, able to cover every square inch of the yard. As long as they stayed in the yard they could not escape me. Nor did they want to. The heat was too intense outside of THE HOSE’S reach.

Jesus is the living water, the cooling water of a person living in my inner being bringing life, and hope and joy even in, or I should say, especially in the midst of great pain. Though I am ‘wet,’ though I am covered, though I am His and nothing can separate me from Him, still he lavishes his great love all over me. I can still laugh and shout and sing under THE HOSE of his favor, the outpouring that never ceases because it is impossible that our God, ‘the consuming fire’ could ever cease.

How can Eternal Power and love ever fail? Why in heavens name would I ever want to leave his yard?

The experience of broken-ness, of being human, fallen, and essentially ruined in some fundamental way is a universal experience. This experience of universal pain began of course in the Garden of Eden.

Into the midst of absolute perfection and innocence, Like deadly nerve gas seeping unseen and unexpected, into the very heart of comfort and repose the snake slithered in… Satan… Full of jealousy and hatred for God and every work of God he tempted, and won.

Adam and Eve ate…

All became ruined…

Sin, pain, and death entered into them…

They became twisted, bent; their selves became like God, just as Satan had predicted their selves became the very center of their own consciousness. Before, only God was the center.

God, greatly desiring to save them and help them had no choice but to introduce a deadly enemy into His creation… Pain and death…

Look at the curses God lays on Adam and Eve. The same curses that we all still toil under. “To the woman He said, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, In pain you shall bring forth children; yet your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you… To Adam He said, cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; For you are dust, and to dust you will return.”

Look at the major ingredients here, these are all brand new elements never before seen or heard of. These are NOT part of the original perfection of Creation… These are temporary, transitory creations that, like scaffolding around a construction site are definitely not part of the final, eternal picture. These are the major elements that will pass away with the sun itself.

1. “The multiplication of pain.” This one speaks for itself.

2. “Desire for your husband.” This isn’t referring to sexual desire. This is the introduction of power into relationships. Eve ‘desired’ to be in charge, to be the controller. This is the basis of all ‘nagging.’ “Your desire will be to rule over him.”

3. “He will rule over you.” Power as an essential element in the relationship between Adam and Eve. These dominant power games weren’t originally present in the Garden.

4. “Cursed is the ground…” Some essential, verdant quality of the earth itself was lost. I wonder… Did every plant before the curse yield eatable fruit? Maybe ‘puff-balls’ from Oak trees used to be a luscious fruit. Maybe ‘pine cones’ used to be a delicacy we cannot imagine before the curse. Adam and Eve did not have to plow, or weed. The Garden simply, ‘bore fruit.’

5. “In toil you shall eat of it.” We all know very well what this one means… That awful four letter word, WORK…

6. “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you.” To add insult to injury, now the very ground is not only cursed but it actively resists and throws in its own frustrating growth that is worse than useless.

7. “Death… You will return to the ground, because from it you were taken; and to dust you will return.”

In a nutshell… Increased pain… The politics of power introduced into relationships that were originally characterized by love… The oppression of women… The earth became poisoned… Heavy labor… The futility of thorns and crop failure… And then death itself…

At first glance this curse seems a trifle excessive. It looks as if God threw the book at Adam and Eve for a tiny transgression. All they did was eat an avocado for crying out loud.

With deeper study each of these curses bears within itself in the form of pain and suffering the very seeds of our redemption.

I think that one of the worst results of the ‘fall’ (not the curses that God laid on afterward but the fall itself) was the ‘de-focusing’ of our very selves. In the moment of the yielding to temptation the self recognized itself and as Satan said, we became ‘like God.’ Our own inner beings recognized the thrones within our Spirits and we all sat down, preening ourselves on these thrones. We lost sight of God, we ‘de-focused,’ our eyes became dim and we truly began the destructive process of living only for ourselves. Like Narcissus we discovered the mirror in the pool and began idol worship.

The only way out of this selfish pit is the ‘door of achor.’ The path of trouble… As suffering enfolds our lives, as each of these ‘curses’ comes down upon our lives, our ‘selves’ are brought face to face with the reality of our true unimportance. The stars do not worry, they don’t tremble when one of us gets sick, is in pain, or dies.

This is an insult to the self on its own throne, the ‘I’ that sees itself in every situation. How is it that we get embarrassed so easily? It is because we see ourselves as on a stage all the time. During worship we are afraid to lift our hands or kneel down because, “Everyone will see me.” We truly believe “‘Everyone’ is watching ‘me.’” In reality everyone else is too pre-occupied with himself or herself to really notice…

We sit enthroned, idolatrous creatures rebelling before our maker.

The true, ‘unfallen’ state that Adam and Eve enjoyed was one in which the self was totally unaware of itself. The soul was in complete contact with God, and in the process knew itself fully, but thought of itself not at all. There was only a sense of wonder and the abiding presence of God. This is a state in which embarrassment is not possible. Nakedness covered by the presence and glory of God cannot know itself to be naked.

Now the soul is lost to both itself and God. It is no longer possible for us to ‘know our own souls.’ Into this intolerable brokenness steps God’s ugliest, yet most faithful ‘enemy-servant’, pain.

Pain is so humiliating to the self. Especially chronic, continuous pain… My ‘self’ enthroned in my inner being is outraged that God (my magic genie in a bottle to my American Christian mind…) is unwilling to heal me. As important and huge as I seem to myself, continuous pain sends an important message to my inflated ego.

God through my own pain seems to say to me. “You… You are nothing… You are utterly insignificant… You are not important and I’m not moved by your difficulty…” Let me tread carefully here… I believe God’s love is infinite and the cares and trials of His children are so, so important to him. But still He allows chronic pain to teach me that I am not God, and that I am not important. While the indifference of the universe to my suffering may show this to be true in relation to my physical discomfort, the crucifixion of His own Son reveals His love for me in such a fantastic manner that I can not ever completely despair of His love for me.

Under the burden of pain my self importance and self centered-ness fades, and fades, and fades until all I can see is His Supremacy…

I realize now that I truly am not important… As Job learned so well in the day of his trial.

When God finally answered Job out of the whirlwind He didn’t explain Himself or defend Himself. Instead He attacked Job’s ‘self’ on the throne of his heart. “Who is this that darkens counsel?” God proclaims, “Gird up your loins like a man.” (A little sarcasm to cut Job’s self even lower…) “I will ask you, and you instruct me!” Oh that’s gotta cut deep, Job. (Or as my son Kyle says, “Oh, that’s gonna leave a mark!”) “Where were you when I laid the foundation? Tell me if you have understanding?”

God then proceeds to spin for Job a partial list of everything that only He can do. “Where is the way to the dwelling of light?” “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?” A long list of things that only God can do… Check it out for yourself, Job chapters 38-41.

I think it’s important to look at Job’s two-fold response to this speech from the whirlwind.

This speech by the way, is the longest first person declaration to a man from God in the entire bible. Interesting that God’s longest ‘speech’ to men is made in response to horrible suffering… All the rest of His words are spoken through His intermediary prophets. Proof positive that God does care about our sorrows...

God, without regard for Job’s feelings first buries his ‘self’ completely underground then plows it out of hiding, then finally pins it to the wall where Job can squirm no more.

Job’s first response comes after a chapter of God’s declaring (bragging it almost sounds like) His own mighty power. “Have you ever in your life commanded the morning, and caused the dawn to know its place?” (Oooh Job, that’s gotta hurt.) “Have you entered into the springs of the sea? Or have you walked in the recesses of the deep?”

Who could answer any of this?

After God carries on and on so eloquently about His own mighty power, Job from deep underground and still in hiding says, “Behold, I am insignificant; what can I reply to you? I lay my hand on my mouth. Once I have spoken, and I will not answer; twice, and I will add no more.”

This seems like a position of humility and Godliness but it still isn’t enough for God. Now Job has only been humbled. Hiding from God is not God’s desire for His dearly loved children. When Job says, “Once I have spoken, and I will not answer; twice, and I will add no more,” he is really only retreating and hiding from God. Job is saying, “I now shut up. For good… I now retreat into complete non-being.”

Job’s ‘I’ is now completely abased through pain and the sarcasm of the almighty and he is now on the very edge of erasure. Job chooses absolute obscurity here. It’s as if He is saying, “I will not speak, think, complain or even be…” I believe the eastern religions call this place nirvana, or the place of nihilism, the place of fruitless silence. Job was choosing bitterness and stoic silence… A completely joyless, relationship-less martyrdom.

This position still isn’t the proper man-God relationship that God desires.

After all this Odyssey of pain Job still hasn’t ‘gotten’ it. Intent on accomplishing His purposes with Job like a hunter God launches off into another description of his power as demonstrated by His creation.

“Leviathan…” (The animal that symbolizes God’s infinite power.) “Who will pierce his jaw with a fishhook? Lay your hand on him; remember the battle; you will not do it again!” And so on and so forth, a long monologue about power and God’s supremacy over all the creation…

God seemed quite willing to carry on like this for a long time until Job gets the point. The truth that God wants Job to know him.

God wants his heart more than he wants his silence.

More than God wants me to quit whining and complaining about my pain he wants me (and Job in his day) to be in relationship with him.

Job finally breaks and admits his willingness for relationship with God. Job, driven to distraction says, “I know you can do all things, and no purpose of yours can be thwarted. Hear now and I will speak; I will ask you, and you will instruct me. I have heard you by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees you; therefore I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes.”

Finally pain and the curses brought about by the result of the fall in the Garden of Eden have transformed Job’s inner ‘I’ into a true man. Job now both knows his own insufficiency and insignificance, his complete nothingness, and he knows the love and relationship with God resulting from repentance.

Job is saying he at last is willing to take God on his own terms. He is finally ‘weaned’ from the warring elements of his desire for comfort and he finally expresses his desire for God.

Just to rest in God. Just to be His, at any cost. Just to know him. “I will speak, and you will listen.” I picture Job at this point physically turning over. Up until now before the Lord he has probably been prostrate, face down in God’s presence. At last now he turns over (curious how most people die on their backs and not their faces…) and faces God.

Now I too, with the dry choking dust of the desire for non-being still coating the inside of my mouth (“cursed be the day of my birth…”) choose the cleansing taste of the living water of Jesus’ presence.

This moment I repent from despair and the refuge of complete silence, and choose to open up my inner being to His inspection and His communion.

There are four parts to Job’s entire process that I both relate to and have (and am) going through.

1. “Curse God and die…” This is the natural response of the flesh that wants comfort and enjoyment above all else. When the flesh fails and pain becomes THE State of being, the immediate response of my flesh is anger at God, then escape at any cost. This is the point where so many commit suicide. When I focus completely and only on the flesh, on my highest possible good being ‘enjoyment’ and ‘fun,’ suicide seems like the highest possible good. All this proves is that my sights are not set high enough… These times are among the worst moments of life. When despair and a deep black oppression brought on by the certainty of tens of thousands of days of pain ahead descends like a black cloud shutting out all other sources of thought, hope, light and life.

2. Job’s initial response, that of bitter acceptance based on self-righteousness… “Why me? I don’t deserve this. I am a good person.” This is a much healthier outlook than suicide but it is still far from the right place. This is a position that has both a defense and an attack. This position attacks God… “What kind of Creator are you?” It outrageously screams, “You are treating me unfairly, You must be the one at fault.” The defense of the self is based upon the same lines of thinking… “I have always been a good person, I don’t deserve this. I have never done anything wrong. This sort of pain should be reserved for criminals or politicians.” While this position will save your life, it is not a position that will release the life of God within your soul. Acceptance with bitterness and complaining is like drinking a six pack of beer to escape pain in the evening. Eventually alcoholism becomes the central problem. This is why so many people are so bitter toward God.

3. The third choice is when the pain of what is, is accepted without any conditions, complaints, prayer, attempts at relationship, or any doings with God whatsoever. Job chapter 40: 4-5 “I am insignificant, what can I reply to you? I lay my hand on my mouth. Once I have spoken, and I will not answer; even twice, and I will add no more.” Complete defeated stoicism… While this is better than acceptance with bitterness in the sense that it at least allows for a little quietness of heart… Uncontrollable anger does not plague me when I am sitting in this particular corner with my nose to the wall. The anguish of the unanswerable why questions have become quiet here in this place of isolated, numbing blindness. The place of ‘non-caring-being…’ but there is still no possibility for life, love, or the joy of God to be loosed in my spirit.

4. Absolute acceptance based upon relationship with God. Job 42: 1-6 says, “Then Job answered the Lord and said, I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted. Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have declared that which I do not understand. Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. Hear now, and I will speak; I will ask thee, and do thou instruct me. (That last sentence should be the true title of this book.) I have heard thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees thee, therefore I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes.”

This at last is God’s ordained position for those who suffer constantly.

An acceptance based on relationship with God.

Frequently I find myself reading the book of Job again and again seeking answers, seeking the truth, trying gamely to find a way through the middle of my own trouble as the questions pile up. I’ll bet I’ve read Job over twenty five times in the last ten years or so.

The book of Job has countless truths, as is true of all the scriptures, layered in meaning within meaning, but one of the foundation themes of the book of Job seems to be this.

God bringing something wonderful into existence in Job’s heart.

Something… in fact, ‘The One Thing’ that is absolutely impossible for God to create directly. Even as an almighty, omnipotent being there is one thing that is not possible for God to make. Only one… This ‘one thing’ is formed in the fires of Job’s (and ours in our time now) sufferings. “What is this, ‘one thing?’” you ask, Worship…

Free-Will-Worship-Freely-Chosen-and-freely-given.

Worship from a truly free moral being who thinks and feels as if he may be already in Hell beyond all hope of redemption, yet chooses to create in him or herself the one thing God cannot create, Worship…

Don’t get excited, I can almost hear some of you yelling, “Hey! I thought God could do anything!” Now I know that God could easily take hold of any of us and possess us. That he could easily force our arms in the air and bow our knees. Sure He could make us sing and I’m certain He could even make us feel good about the entire process. As easily as a man playing a musical instrument God could ‘play us’ and we would be in the motions of worship. But then we wouldn’t be free will creatures anymore but robots. He would then not be worshipped but only a powerful puppet-master pulling strings to make the marionette dance involuntarily.

Worship must be a choice the free will being freely makes or it simply isn’t worship at all. An easy, pain free life can be construed as God pulling strings to garner the response of worship, as Satan accuses God of in the first chapters of Job.

“Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan slimes, “Hast thou not made a hedge about him and his house and all that he has on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. Put forth thy hand now and touch all that he has; He will surely curse thee to thy face.”

Satan is accusing God here of playing with loaded dice. He’s saying that Job does not really love God but that Job is only serving God as a cat ‘serves’ its owner because of feeding time. Purring because of his full stomach and the luxury of the warm place on the rug in the sun. The question to be settled with Job was this.

Can a free will being love God after God removes every shred of comfort?

How easy it would be for God to give us all beach homes and luxurious lives filled with pleasure. It would be a snap for Him to give us perfect bodies without pain and grant us constant youth. In fact the bible promises such a world when we at last win through to the glories of heaven.

I’m sure that in such a world many people would be giving God praise for such pleasure, but would it truly be worship? Would it be free? Or would it just be us doing ‘payback’ service to our benefactor? Cats purring for our food?

A true choice can be proven true only after it’s been tested. An earthquake proof house only proven strong after the shaking. Our love for God can only be proven true by testing. The only possible test is trouble. The earthquake… Without explanation… Until we are shown to be true… Or false…

Remember Job summed his own entire life up by saying, “I have heard Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees Thee, therefore I retract, And I repent in dust and ashes.”

This at last is God’s ordained position for those who suffer constantly.

An acceptance of all things based on a relationship with God.

Lamentations chapter 3:39 says, “Why should any living mortal, or any man offer complaint in view of his sins? Let us examine and probe our ways, and let us return to the Lord. We lift up our heart and hands toward God in heaven.”

This is the coldest corner in my dungeon that has the smallest most unattractive door but it opens up into the widest wildest space in the universe. That of wonderful inner life and communion with God…

“I will speak, you will listen.”

When Job says, “Therefore I retract.” He meant… Everything… He retracted everything he ever thought, dreamed, felt, or imagined about God and pain and indeed, about life itself.

Now God and God alone is on the throne of Job’s inner temple, and Job has become His priest. Job now chose to live the rest of his days dwelling in God’s presence, ready to yield to anything just for the unbelievable privilege of relationship with God.

This sums up the totality of God’s will for our lives. There is nothing else but this.

Early in this process of pain and suffering I felt that I wanted heaven more than anything else on earth and that because, ‘To die is gain.’ I faced the constant temptation to turn to death, to think of death as the ‘ultimate healing.’ I used to long for Death as the place of painlessness and ultimate comfort.

I now renounce that position…

I now choose to join Job in the temple… I retract… I repent…

I will not sit with my nose to the wall anymore, with my face in the dust and my mouth closed.

I stand instead with my golden water pitcher in hand, next to the altar of praise in my heart and pour out the water of Jesus’ presence back to the Father within me.

I now choose to know God… At any cost… No matter how difficult or painful…

I am so excited about the prospect of His Presence. I know now that no matter what, He will always be Immediate in my Spirit and that my inner life will be rich simply because of His faithfulness. There is a huge chance that I will be groaning and weeping in pain for the next twenty two thousand days but I still feel a peace with that.

This too is His path…

This too is His will…

This too is His glory for my life…

I want to be filled with His love and His life based on His terms alone. I bring nothing to the inner table of His presence…

He brings it all. Broken… Cracked… Hurting… Lonely… I choose Jesus.

On His terms… These terms include nothing less than a complete unity of my Spirit and Soul with His.

It only takes the smallest sip of this silent living water to wash away the dusty taste of non-being, the filthy, rotten deathly taste of despair. There is nothing so refreshing, nothing so wet to my parched soul… The psalmist says, “Thy lovingkindness is better than life.”

Yet as satisfying as this water is to my suffering soul I still can’t pin it down. I still can’t describe it.

It comforts me to know that people far more advanced in their faith and relationship with God can’t describe it either.

The TV reporter Dan Rather once interviewed Mother Theresa and asked her, “What do you say when you pray?” Theresa answered with little hesitation. “I don’t say anything, I just listen.” Dan Rather, derisive, then asked her “OK, then what does HE say?” She replied quickly, “He doesn’t say anything, He just listens also, and if you can’t understand that then I can’t explain it to you.”

This is a unity of the soul and God that can’t be explained, only yielded to. This is a high path that cannot be pointed out, only followed step by step.

Out on the face of the ocean there are no paths marking the sea-lanes. The wise mariner consults his sextant and sets his course by the stars. The psalmist says, “Thy way was in the sea, and thy paths in the mighty waters, and thy footprints may not be known.” Psalm 79:19

This way, though well trodden by the feet of millions of God’s children before, during, and no doubt after my puny lifetime, is a complete mystery to me. I am so grateful for water. So grateful for His leading…

Unrelenting pain is such a necessary risk for God to take. He must reduce us, yet in the process He risks the perception in us, that He doesn’t care about us, that we will think He is not there for us, that He will not answer our prayers for healing because He doesn’t care enough.

This is why most of the bible is devoted to lengthy descriptions of God’s love for us. I love psalm one hundred and thirty six; twenty-six Divinely redundant verses of, “His loving-kindness is everlasting…” Go check it out, “He did… This! So… His lovingkindness is everlasting…” then more of what He did, then “His lovingkindness…” The entire psalm follows this pattern. The incredible works God’s deliverance on Israel’s behalf.

Another psalm of lasting beauty and power is Psalm one hundred and three… “As high as the heavens are above the earth, So great is His loving-kindness toward those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west (who can measure that infinite distance?) so far has He removed our transgressions from us. Just as a Father has compassion on his children, So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him. For he Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust.”

Lord grant us the faith to see beyond… Grant me the faith to see the process, and to see your love lavished upon me in every moment…

Christmas time… What a week! It’s 3:45 in the morning...

Saturday morning and I have to go to work at 6:30. Less than three hours from now but I thought I would write a little now while the fire is scorching the silver. I need to hammer while the iron is hot and the fire is melting me.

This season has been nearly impossible for me to handle what with the huge workload of Christmas presents to deliver but through grace and worship alone I am nearly done for the year. Work… I wish I were independently wealthy. Usually I do around sixty-five delivery stops a day.

During our ‘normal’ season, the ‘non-peak’ times of the year I have a ten-minute break in the morning and can go lie down in the back of my truck to rest and read the bible. Then I have two hours of work until it’s time for lunch and I can rest some more for an hour. Sometimes I can come home for lunch. After lunch it’s more work until 4:30 or so. At last I can go home. These ‘normal’ days are exhausting but I can still find a balance. (Barely…)

It’s Christmas season now though. In the last three to four weeks before Christmas our volume nearly doubles. The workload at FedEx goes up so high we don’t have enough lift to handle it so freight has been trickling into our location all day long, sometimes three trucks a day. So we go out at eight am, then come back to our station, get more, take it out, come back to get more, go out, etc. etc. etc.

I've been doing 110 and more stops a day… AAaarrrrrhhhgggg!!!!!

This is way out of balance working over twelve hours a day. I go so hard and fast and these days I don’t have an opportunity to rest even for five minutes all day. I just go and go and go...

The pain and anguish physically has been huge and I don’t know how I’ve pushed through...

In tears and numbness of heart I’ve worked a few nights feeling like I am barely able to see the road and that only through fierce squinting. It’s a given that my headache becomes massive in these moments. (Once more I speak of the moments.)

So yesterday I was worshipping and singing and praying and sighing and leaning into Jesus… Pressing in with all my heart focusing on the cross. Feeling as if I was ‘putting my head into His wounded side’ right through the soldier’s wound made by the spear so that I can then dwell in His very heart. I think this was why His heart was pierced as He hung there, to create a doorway. To make a passageway through pain and death into His heart for us to enter in and behold His compassion.

The cross, both the pain and the glory… The cross that leads to the death of self that can only happen at that place. The cross... Yes! The cross is everything. Heaven is our destination but the cross is where we live, entering into His heart through that ‘spear-made doorway’ (as it were) and unifying with Him and His suffering on the cross as our flesh dies as well. The scriptures say, “Even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us; that the world may believe that Thou didst send Me.”

The cross… Such an inexhaustible treasure and scandal to our flesh. An instrument of terrible torture and the joy of God mixed together. My spirit and mind are always yearning for heaven but I live there. At the foot of the cross...

I am not even real sure what that means... I’m not sure really what anything really means. But I know we are loved infinitely and all of our efforts are judged and amplified by the cross... It is all through the cross. We are His ‘children-poems’ and as such He washes our lives into perfection through the cross.

I seem to get off on those rabbit trails all the time don’t I?

I’ve got two dogs. Beagles… They live for only one thing as scent dogs, hunting. When I take them for a walk on the hill behind our house their noses actually drag on the ground and all I can hear is snuffling as they eagerly tug on their leashes. They are insanely intent on hunting. Totally focused. Sometimes I chuckle and shake my head as I walk (far more slowly than they would like) and pray, “Dear Lord give me such a heart to hunt your truth down! Give me such a single-minded devotion to sniff out only your rabbit trails.” When finally they do catch a scent everybody in the town below knows it because they go off in their beagle hunting bellows, sounding out over the valley as they strain and pull at their leashes, spoiling for the chase.

I guess these writings are my hunting bellows as I catch little whiffs of grace now here, now there.

Anyway yesterday I was hurting big time and began to complain a bit. Whenever I complain to the Lord, even though it doesn’t make me a bit unacceptable to God and His compassion is still poured out to me it does remove my head from His heart on the cross and leaves me simply hanging there before Him but not “in Him” in the deepest sense of yielding to the cross. His will is that I should suffer without despair as Jesus did, consistently giving His heart to the Father in the midst of His agony. (Remember Gethsemane, when Jesus, sweating blood prayed, “Father, not my will but thine be done.”)

God began to lead me to consider the implications of the gospel. If I am truly, even though I can’t really feel it to be true, worthy of nothing but eternal agony in the flames of Hell because of my sin, then all I get that is agony to me now is nothing but what I truly deserve. All my pain and an eternity more I completely deserve and so like the thief on the cross who got saved I affirm with him, “I am only getting what I deserve, but He has done nothing wrong.”

I understand now that all of the madness and burden of pain I’ve ever experienced is truly only a tiny foretaste of the infinite agonies of hell that should be mine.

I never have any reason to complain in this light. God is just even though I should suffer the very pain of Hell itself now. Any good thing at all, even the good of wiping tears away and feeling the hollow but real comfort of tears itself is grace.

In every moment I began to see grace.

When I make deliveries even through pain and tell a joke or share a single moment of a smile… Grace.

Every single song I sing as I drive, every single moment of worship as I go, every single sense of God’s presence hidden in the secret place in my soul… Grace.

It would be enough if God only (without giving us His presence) saved us from Hell when we died.

But the gospel! He goes so far as to come and make us His home, His temple.

We become the place where He lives.

The bible says, “I do not dwell in any house made by human hands (even if it is such a lavish waste of money like the crystal cathedral in Los Angeles) but I dwell in the hearts of those who are lowly and humble.”

Again I recognize the wonder of His name. Immanuel… God is with us.... WOW!

On Thursday night this week I had an awful time. I was driving and delivering having not stopped one single time, even for the restroom. “I gotta go! But there is no time, no time.” Not even for one minute. All day long… At around six-thirty, way after the sun is down.

Wet and cold out in the constant Oregon rain, in the pitch dark I was near a friend’s house in town. In tears, not so much feeling sorry for myself but simply because there are times tears just have to flow. You know what I mean, involuntary tears of pain.

I was working and praying and loving the Lord in my extremity of stress and discomfort, longing and longing for heaven and yet praying and praying for more life at the same time. I stopped at their house and crashed on their couch for ten minutes and read the last two chapters of the book of Revelation again. It seems like that must have been the thousandth time I’ve read this portion of scripture, my favorite part of the bible I return to like a dog scratching at the door on a cold winter night wanting in.

I read this under the fresh revelation of the idea that all that I am is worthy of eternal damnation and that all that I am has been amazingly filled with the lamp of Jesus life. I was amazed to even be able to imagine that indescribable country as within my reach let alone come with confidence and claim my place there.

As I read God was gently giving me the boldness to come and in the secret place of my heart where only He can see or know, He was urging me to come and like a settler homestead as much of the hope and joy of that land as I wanted and needed. He spoke to me that there has never ever been a man that is as close to Him as He wants them to be in this life and that He wants me to strive to be as close to Him in my secret heart as any man alive has ever been.

Now I know that I wont be, that there will always be people drawing nearer to Him than I yet He kept encouraging me that I can be closer. That I can draw nearer.

This is the extent and glory of His love.

I am absolutely blown away by this love that gurgles and glows and reigns and rules in my heart. It is so good to be a Christian. I want to talk and think and sing and live to contemplate nothing else on earth but Him.

One of the central ideas, one of the staples of truth that sustains me as I groan and groan, is my certainty that all of this has a purpose. That God in His infinite love really is deriving infinite joy from my faith and that something wonderfully good is happening deep in my spirit through constant suffering.

I had an argument today with a dear friend about this. Does God want to heal me, or not? Does God want me to suffer, or does He want to heal me? It was a painful, divisive argument. Painful because of the divisiveness and relationship bending but more so because of the implications of a yes answer.

What if God really does want to heal me but can’t because of me? What if I don’t have enough faith; or the ‘right kind’ of faith? What if, although I am ‘naming it and claiming it,’ I fall short of the ‘claiming faith’ that will release healing?

This is a very painful idea to me.

If this is true then it truly leaves me in the outer darkness. I find myself disqualified from healing and then disqualified from God himself.

How can I be sure that I have enough faith for salvation since I obviously don’t have enough faith for healing? If I am to be disqualified from healing because of my lack of faith, how can I really know that I will be invited into heaven when I die? At the very least I should be allowed to enjoy this life a little.

Early on in this trial I believed this ‘name it claim it’ theology. When healing didn’t occur, deep feelings of rejection and self-condemnation almost overwhelmed me. ‘Obviously the fault is mine…’ etc.

“Maybe I am only attempting to justify myself by seeking meaning in the pain. Maybe my friend is right… Maybe… Maybe God doesn’t love me enough to heal me… Maybe I’m being punished for my sin… Maybe I’m not one of ‘the elect’ John Calvin and all the rest of the ‘predestination’ people tried so hard to identify through outward signs of grace. ”

This theology releases nothing but confusion and bitterness in me. If this is true, where does that leave me but outside the camp? Completely rejected and all alone, abandoned by every one, even God himself.

Hebrews 6:9-19 does such an excellent job of dispelling this lie from Satan that I am forced to conclude this theology untrue. God swears by Himself alone in this verse (because every man is untrue) and puts to rest my fears. “In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, in order that by two unchangeable things, IN WHICH IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR GOD TO LIE, we may have strong encouragement, we who have fled for refuge in laying ahold of the hope set before us.

My only hope is to go through, not around the pain… My only refuge is to somehow ‘fit’ God into the picture of my life as it has become; a useless-hurting-rusting-broken-washing machine exposed in the rain.

To see His glorious face shining upon me with unutterable love even though I have become what I now am. What am I good for now? Not much…

Even my good friends, in the name of trying to help (as I obsess over the agony) are growing weary of my gloom and are starting to draw away. I think they are becoming depressed themselves just hanging out with me. Today my friend said, “Lets just give it a rest. Lets stop thinking so deeply and just live.” I wish I could. When I try to ‘just live’ I find that I cannot. Each breath carries with it the unbearable burden of pain and I must turn and squirm, I must struggle, I must DEAL with it.

This is why I have been seeking a way, through the theology of suffering, to see God’s infinite purpose in this.

There are few books about this, especially in America. There is almost no devotional literature written to, and from, the chronically ill in modern times. There are reams of material about suffering coming out of the past. The saints of God who didn’t have the advantages of Tylenol and the excellent medical techniques for reducing pain we now have. People in the past dealt with pain on a daily basis (like I am) simply because they were alive in an era before vaccines, or antibiotics.

There is a book written by Jeanne Guyon called ‘Experiencing The Depths Of Jesus Christ’ that I recommend to everyone I know. It was written hundreds of years ago but it still is a best seller for those who are desirous of leaving the comforting glow of their TV sets and setting forth on a journey to discover Christ in a deeper manner. You really should set these poor writings aside and buy her book.

There is a chapter in her book called “Abandonment and suffering” which is especially meaningful to me as my precious self becomes reduced more and more every day. She takes one more step than I do in the idea of the reduction of the self. She claims the self must become abandoned, then annihilated… Suffering is the only pathway of God’s grace.

All TV preachers prepare to be challenged.

“There is a possibility that you might make a mistake concerning your abandonment to the Lord. You may abandon yourself hoping and expecting always to be caressed and loved and spiritually blessed by Him. You, who have given yourself to the Lord during some pleasant season, please take note of this. If you gave yourself to him to be blessed and to be loved, you cannot suddenly turn around and take back your life at another season… when you are being crucified!

Nor will you find comfort from man when you have been put on the cross. Any comfort that comes to you when you are knowing the cross comes to you from the Lord.

You must learn to love the cross. He who does not love the cross does not love the things of God. (Mt. 16:23) It is impossible for you to truly love the Lord without loving the cross. The believer who loves the cross finds that even the bitterest things that come his way are sweet. The scripture says, ‘To the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet’ (Proverbs 27:7)

How much do you desire to hunger after God? You will hunger after God, and find him, in the same proportion that you hunger after the cross.

Here is a true spiritual principle that the Lord will not deny: God gives us the cross, and then the cross gives us God… (God gives us the cross, and then the cross gives us God!) You may be certain there will come to you an inward spiritual advancement when there is also in your life a real progress in knowing the experience of the cross. Abandonment to Christ and the experience of the cross go hand in hand.

Then how will you treat suffering? Or, to put it in another way, how do you respond to the Lords working of the cross in your life?

You respond this way. As soon as anything comes to you in the form of suffering, at that very moment a natural resistance will well up somewhere inside you. When that moment comes, immediately resign yourself to God. Accept the matter. In that moment give yourself up to him as a sacrifice.

By doing this, you will eventually make a wonderful discovery. It is this: When the cross does arrive in your life, it will not be nearly as burdensome as you first feared. Receive it from God, no matter what it is. The burden is far lighter this way.

Why is the cross so much lighter when accepted in this way? Because you will have desired the cross, and you will have accustomed yourself to receiving everything from the hand of the Lord. Do not misunderstand these words. I have not described to you a way to get out of the cross. Even though you completely abandon yourself to the Lord and completely resign yourself to suffering, this will not prevent you from feeling the weight of that cross. If you have not felt the cross, then you have not suffered. Feeling the pain of suffering is one of the principal parts of suffering. Pain is an inescapable aspect of the cross. Without it, there has been no cross at all. Suffering is woven into the nature of the cross. Pain is at the center of knowing suffering. Please remember that your Lord chose to endure the most extreme violence the cross could offer.

Sometimes you may bear the cross in weakness; at other times you may bear the cross in strength. But whether you bear it in weakness or in strength, bear it! Both weakness and strength should be the same to us since we bear the cross in the will of God.”

I know this was an extremely lengthy quote but it serves to illustrate the difference in attitude that different era’s have had toward suffering. Madame Guyon and her generation considered suffering to be a perfectly normal blessing from God. Sent by God in order to release His life in our souls. “God gives us the cross, then the cross gives us God.” What a truth! When I say things like this to my friends I get a lot of resistance. “No, God isn’t like that, He loves you. This is not His will for you, His will is for healing.”

I have found this to be untrue.

He is not locked in Aladdin’s lamp waiting for me to rub the lamp and then grant my three wishes, Health, wealth, and long life. It is I who wait in the bottle for him…

I exist for His pleasure, not He for mine. I am certain He is deriving infinite pleasure from my faith in the midst of this fire, and that I am gaining an infinite reward but still I wait at His table. Still in His Sovereignty I groan. And as a happy side effect am growing to know Him and love Him more, and more, and more every day.

I believe that all of us have a specific destiny, a potential for meaning. To put it another way, all of us must find the expression of God’s meaning in and for our lives. Maybe this meaning is incredibly small, like that of a stillborn baby, given to the parents ‘in utero’ only so that maybe the babies family and friends can come to know their own mortality and turn their own hearts back to God.

Maybe a person’s entire life can be boiled in the eyes of God all the way down to one single conversation, just one seed planted, an act of kindness to the next Billy Graham. An act that has immense eternal significance, but to the person living it at the time… seems meaningless.

In God’s great economy a missionary might spend twenty years laboring to make only one convert, struggling with despair and feelings of failure, yet that one convert will, after the faithful missionary is long gone, reach his nation for Jesus.

There is no way that I can know, measure or understand the meaning of my life.

Maybe the entire ‘meaning’ of my life in the eyes of God is to be summed up in this writing. Perhaps you who are reading this are also in an agony of chronic pain and despair and somehow you will take heart and reach deep inside and find Jesus in a new, fresh way.

Maybe you will arise from the ashes of your ruined life and continue on in this wonderful journey toward spiritual wholeness that we all must (and will) walk all the way through. Maybe you and I will meet at last in the wonderful homeland of heaven in the not so distant future and you will tell me what this writing meant to you. Until then I will never really know.

I think only God himself can know the true meaning of a person.

Only He can even understand exactly what a person really is.

First Corinthians fifteen says we are just seeds now. Seeds to whom God will give a resurrection body as He wishes. Imagine a pinecone in your hand. Now imagine the tree springing from the seed over three hundred feet tall with birds singing in the branches and boys building tree houses. The pinecone is already the tree, all it takes is time, and you are the tree in heaven already, all it takes is time.

Perhaps all this pain has been given me only for God’s own benefit. Maybe I am a spectacle with only one purpose in this life… To give God joy…

I don’t know…

I am coming to the place where I don’t care. It doesn’t concern me what the ‘meaning of my life’ is. These concerns are far beyond me.

It is my privilege and joy simply to be allowed to follow Him like a puppy dog completely subject to His bidding. Does it please Him that I await at the door while He dines? Very well, I’ll wait. Does it please Him to walk with me in the park after dinner? Then I will walk.

If He wants me to lay like a seed trapped in a glacier, slowly moving through the depths of the ice throughout the long centuries until at last I am ‘calved’ down at the end; I know that then at last I will sprout and flower and bear fruit.

I am crazy in love with Him and my life is entirely His to spend as He pleases. Who am I that I should complain in the light of His Love? Praise God for His indescribable gift of Himself. His Holy Spirit living and moving deep in my soul.

The fact that I have this love burning way down past all the surface storms and passions, down below in the depths of my being deeper than where the darkest evil lurks in me is enough for me. He is there, below it all like an underwater volcano in the depths.

He eternally erupts within me.

This simple fact makes my life something precious and worthwhile. Worthwhile even as I weep and choke. Worthwhile even in the harshest moments…

About fifteen years ago I took my wife to see one of the greatest mimes in the world, the Frenchman Marcel Marceau. He was performing at a theater in San Francisco. All of ‘Frisco’s’ high society was there.

Me in my jeans and feeling out of place…

Monsieur Marceau, with nothing at all, with no props and no assistants created entire worlds on that empty stage. He would reach down to pet a dog and you could almost ‘see’ the dog. He performed for several hours. Many of his skits were hilarious. In one called, ‘the pickpockets nightmare,’ He fell asleep then ended up picking his own pocket in such a funny, well, you would have to have seen it.

One of his skits struck me to the core of my being. (It seems all true art strikes there.)

He began in the middle of the stage. He was ‘miming’ a man in a factory working an assembly line. With an incredibly tortured, yet resigned look on his face he was rushing to keep up with the machine. Getting a little behind (remember all this without props) then through stress and frantic, frantic rushing, catching up again. Gyrating wildly with his arms yet in the same repetitive motions imposed by an assembly line he was sweating and cursing, compelled to keep the pace by the machine.

There was not a shred of peace, or joy in any part of his expression. There was nothing human or redeeming in his actions. He was like a piston, or a drive shaft completely integrated into the machine.

Finally the longed for whistle announcing quitting time.

He sagged to a stop, fatigue and meaninglessness written all over his face. He punched out, then rode home with strangers, no one speaking or interacting on the bus and at last arrived at his own cheerless, empty flat.

Alone in his flat he did the necessary chores. Mechanically cooking, eating, cleaning, then came the highlight of this crippled working mans day.

He climbed upstairs to his attic and after rummaging around for a moment, found his treasure chest. An old trunk full of momento’s and keepsakes, pictures and forgotten baseball gloves, the last bits of memories from better times.

For the first time his face unclenched from the mask of tightness and pain. Breathing deeply of the dusty smells from the trunk, carefully lifting out each treasure and by inflections of the face and body revealing what each one was, signs of life began to appear on his countenance. Here is an old wedding dress, there a baseball glove, a picture of a long lost, long separated love… A child’s old broken toy and so forth. Happy smiles and sighs of longing accompanied each item, and he would spend a few minutes in sweet reminiscing and inner peace as the memory of what once was, overcame the reality of what now is.

At this point he completely surrendered to the fantasy world and after cranking up an old Victrola record player, began dancing with the wedding dress or perhaps an old party dress. For a few precious life-giving minutes the fantasy became real for him. With exaggerated movements and gallant gestures he revisited the site of his greatest happiness, the long gone past.

There was such a striking contrast in this human being with human feelings and longings juxtaposed against the factory worker cut off from all true reality during the day.

Finally his house of cards fell apart as the record player wound down and he realized he was only holding an old dress, not the longed for love of his life.

Slumping he carefully replaced his treasures in the trunk… To be brought out the next evening for a repeat performance no doubt…

Then he went to bed…

In the gray, gray rainy morning he rose and went back to the factory. Raw from sleep he began to thrash about in time to the rhythm of the machine, desperately keeping time to its demands. It was very clear that this was the totality of this man’s life, that every day he lived the cycle of the machine and the memories, and that the pace at the machine was only possible because of the memories and the fantasy life each evening.

This was a very long, heavy-duty drama and my wife was sound asleep long before it was over…

I sat entranced by his genius and thunderstruck by the message. Something almost prophetic within me told me that this skit had deep meaning for my life. This was years before chronic pain entered in to establish it’s own horrid lordship over my flesh. It was as if part of me stored this entire performance away in the library of my mind for a time in the future that I would need its inspiration. Full of the enjoyment of painlessness I quickly forgot this night and climbed mountains and laughed and loved being alive for years on end.

It was only a few months ago that I even remembered this man and his great performance.

I was working and groaning, suffering heavily as I drove and forced to keep pace with the job I have. “I Gotta do fourteen to seventeen stops an hour or else…’ No time to stop and talk with anyone… No time to breathe or think, just… Go…

From the desperate churnings of my brain trying to make sense, trying to come to terms with awful nausea and pain, out popped this memory of Marceau.

Immediately I recognized myself in the factory frantically running to keep time with the machine, forced into movements resembling nothing Human Beings were really created for… Hurrying to deliver packages to people who because of my job, then have to hurry to finish work in order to ship them back so they can hurry to another shipment, etc…

At first this memory just made me feel worse. “OK” I thought, “So I am reduced to the agony of repetitive pain and suffering, each day carefully doling out its portion of monotonous nausea and torment, I have become that man through pain, so what?”

I began praying and asking the Lord to reveal to me anything good or helpful about this memory as the conviction from the Holy Spirit continued to grow in me that there was something there for me, something encouraging and life giving.

The climbing of the stairs is the key…

When this burned out factory worker wanted life, he climbed the stairs to his attic. He went up, first and foremost in his mind and spirit he went up to the upper story…

This is essential for you and I.

God is showing me how to go up to my attic… The inner attic room where He dwells.

Not in order to commune with the nothingness of old memories of what once was… Not to long for the past and the good things it once held but to descend (or climb) into my own heart of hearts and there to meet with and commune constantly with him.

AS I WORK AND GROAN.

His desire is for this ‘upper story life’ to be the center of my life.

Real life does not consist of the machine and the herky-jerky motions of pain. Real life is found only there… Here, in my own heart in the silence…

Waiting patiently for his grace to meet me.

To not wait for the evenings when at last I can sit and for a moment escape the hustle of work and motion in order to at last commune with God but to carry the trunk full of treasure around with me and to live there in the promises of God as a lifestyle.

I cannot point the way to this room for you. I can’t give you a road map. I can barely find it within my own being let alone try and help you navigate the depths of your own heart. But I do know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if you seek him you will find him.

I assume you are still reading this because of your pain (or because you are a faithful friend of mine that really loves me and wants to understand…) I beseech you, give Him a chance. A real chance… Don’t just fling out a few half-hearted prayers and when communion doesn’t instantly appear in your heart give up. I completely understand how pain can both drive you to, and away from God.

Please, oh Please draw near to Him. It is so precious this place that I have found to stand here ‘Under the Lava.’

I am so blessed to be allowed to hurt like this that my inner life can take on such richness. Literally nothing else on earth could have ever brought me here to the place of my greatest desiring. Nothing else could have ever induced me to lay aside myself and the pleasures of this life long enough to become His friend.

I don’t know how long I must walk until like Frodo I at last reach the Grey Havens and can sail over the Ocean into the west. Indulge me for a moment and read some of the last few paragraphs of Tolkiens ‘The Lord of the rings’ trilogy.

Those who haven’t read this wonderful book yet, I COMMAND YOU to skip this, you don’t want to ruin the end for when you finally get around to reading this best of all books among books.

“’Yes,’ said Gandalph; ‘for it will be better to ride back three together than one alone. Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shore of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.’

Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. There he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart. Beside him stood Merry and Pippin, and they were silent.

At last the three companions turned away, and never again looking back they rode slowly homewards; and they spoke no word to one another until they came back to the Shire, but each had great comfort in his friends on the long grey road.”

Even now I long for healing but I can truly, truly say, “Thank you Father God for this walk through the valley of pain.”

The end

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