CONTENTS.
Light, Christmas & Music
1. Holy Longing
2. Suffering
3. Our Need
4. Birth of the Christmas Rose
5. Rescue From Darkness
6. Promised Light
7. The Joy That Thrilled All Heaven!
8. Sacred Mystery
9. The Greatest Epiphany
10. Our Answer
11. Homecoming
12. Love's Pure Light
•
Light, Christmas & Music.
What struck the match for this concert and its unique angle on
Christmas was when I discovered 1 John 1:5 in the summer of 2017 (somewhere in
June or July):
"This is the message we heard from [Jesus] and declare to
you: God is light; in Him there is no darkness at
all."
God is light.
Wow.
(That sound you heard was countless implications beginning to yawn, stretch and
wake each other up inside my brain.)
You see, all my life I had heard "God
is love." (Most likely you have too, whether you're a believer or not,
simply because of how broadly it's spoken.) But somehow I had lived almost 28 years
and totally missed the Bible verse - also in the book of 1 John - that gave a
different and equal definition for what and who God is.
God is love.
God is light.
Ironically in the book of 1 John, the definition of God as light
actually comes first, even though the definition of Him as
love is more popular. And not that it's necessarily related (though it might
be?), the first creation God uttered in Genesis was light (verse
3). He spoke His own essence into the beginning of His work before He ever
created the sun, moon and stars (1:16). This helped me understand why we won't
need the sun or moon in heaven. The origin of their light is
God Himself, and heaven will be saturated with His
Presence. It's a head-scratcher for me to try and imagine being somewhere
that's fully illuminated while being unable to pinpoint a specific source of
light, but I'm looking forward to experiencing it delighting my senses.
Because of these two "fraternal-twin definitions" of
God, my brain went off in the direction of transitive logic, one of the only
things I managed to enjoy and retain from studying geometry in my high school
years.
If A = B, and B = C, then A = C.
If [2+4] = [5+1], and [5+1] = [8-2], then [2+4] = [8-2].
If light is God, and God is love, then light is love.
Love is light.
That means: light is not ever unloving, and love is never a dark
experience or born of darkness. If something is resulting in darkness, it's not
love.
Light and love have the same value in helping us understand God's
goodness, in helping us know God and experience Him personally.
God is the original substance true light is made of.
God is the original substance true love is made of.
(No, I'm not saying we can
contrive God by turning on a lightbulb or lighting a candle.)
Light and love are synonyms and symbols for God's unchanging
integrity and desirability (they lead us to the same result) and because there
are two of them, we have an additional dimension of coming to understand,
experientially know and worship God for who He is.
For example, God isn't just love to me anymore.
He is also light.
The concepts of light and love are married in my soul when I think
about God.
I see light and I think of God and feel loved by Him.
Light makes me think about how His love
illuminates my life.
I see light and I'm reminded of His warming Presence of love.
I see light and I'm reminded of the effect of His
Presence: because it is warming, He thaws the parts of my soul that have gone
numb from the world's coldness and I begin to feel my spiritual potential
again; I begin to feel hope again for loving God back and going deeper with
Him.
(I see light and I also think about the effect of His absence...)
I see light and I'm reminded of what is true about Him,
informationally and experientially.
Light is the nature of Love.
Love illuminates what has been obscured & darkened.
When you're illuminated, you have more
clarity.
Love is the nature of Light.
Light warms and thaws what has been numbed & frozen.
When you're thawed and warmed, you have a
greater ability to connect.
The effect of receiving God's heart of Love & Light into your
own: You have clarity about what is desirable and safe to connect with
as well as the restored ability to connect.
Think about the speed of light. When you're young you
grow up thinking light is instantaneous. You have to be taught in school that
light travels at a measurable speed. It's just so insanely fast that
it seems instant. When we call on God, after being apart from Him, He is so quick
to travel. It's as if He's right there with us. We can't always sense His
Presence right away, but He's there as quickly as light travels.
In his book, Victory Over the Darkness, Neil T.
Anderson writes, "God does everything in the light." And I love that
about Him (it's us who can have blindfolds that block us from grasping His
movements). And when you think about it, how could He do otherwise? He is light.
In her book, The Healing Presence, Leanne Payne
writes, "To think or to picture apart from God is to inherit
darkness." And how could that not be true? God is light.
Apart from light, what you have is darkness. If you engage your mental
faculties in a way that doesn't factor God in, you will come up with a dark
result.
I've begun thinking about the Narrow Way to life Jesus described
as being a laser that blasts through obstacles rather than something narrow in
the sense that it induces claustrophobia and aggravation. To this, my husband Russell
recently responded, "You know what a laser is? Light."
Boom. Again, there it is!
A friend of mine named Deborah recently shared with me something
else that I never knew: when human conception occurs, there is a spark! A
bright flash of light! Upon researching, I've seen it called a zinc
firework. Wow. When a human being is conceived there is a
flash of light! Learning things like that makes my heart feel so full of
worship and gratitude by such an intimate reminder that we are made in the
image of God who is light, and who loves His creation with an everlasting love.
Even after sin has been marring His creation for thousands of years, there
is still literally light when we are
conceived. God...
These days, I'm starting to think that light was the first
definition for God in 1 John because it's so much harder to corrupt the
understanding of what light is than it is to corrupt the concept of what
constitutes love. Satan has fragmented our understanding of love into a
fathomless spawn of abusive and permissive distortions that would leave us in a
state beyond hopeless if not for the grace of God.
But it seems to me that the relationship between light and
darkness is so much simpler.
Darkness is the absence of light.
The presence of light simply and utterly does not allow for
darkness to remain.
Light shines in the darkness.
Darkness does not overcome light.
Darkness is not a substance.
It is a void.
An absence.
Emptiness.
Futility.
Hopelessness.
Frustration.
Powerlessness.
Darkness enables further accidents.
Darkness enables further harm.
Darkness enables disintegration rather than growth and healing.
Human immaturity and sin combine and compel us to make all sorts
of rationalizations about how love can and should be defined (usually according
to some angle that benefits us). But there's no logical argument that can be
made to convince a person that darkness is light or that light is darkness. I
think this is where we get the unforgivable sin from - blaspheming the Holy
Spirit: calling what is good evil and what is evil good, i.e., calling light
darkness and darkness light, which can only be done knowing good and well that
it's not true. To me, blaspheming the Holy Spirit is willfully investing your
heart in a lie until nothing can bring you back. You're fully corrupted and you
believe the lies you say. And those lies always involve an attack on God's
character.
And those attacks...they don't always look like attacks.
They don't always look violent.
Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and we need a godly
keenness of mind more than ever with each new day that we trek into the 21st
century.
Satan has had thousands of years to learn human beings, human
history, human culture and how the constellation of all our eras interface
today, all over the world. He used blatant brute force in more ancient times to
persecute Christians but all that did was make the church grow. And so, he
evolved as a villain. Simple-minded abusers are bulls in a china closet, but to
wreak evil that way is now only one of the
strategies in Satan's arsenal. The most advanced and successful agents of evil
are those who achieve their goals without letting you know that they're there.
In fact, the more you believe they're not there (that they
don't exist or that they're safe and good), the more power they have. The
more humans are in the dark, the more Satan gets
to steal, kill and destroy all while convincing us that humans and God are the
only forces of free agency at play so that we turn on each other and think that
God is turning on us as well, which makes us turn our backs on Him...! Satan
loves to make us think that God is a punishing sadist we should be afraid of.
But the fact that humans struggle to grasp (in their hearts, not just
cognitively) the goodness and trustworthiness of God is the result of Satan
performing a spin campaign wherein he projects his own traits onto God in our
minds. The results of the spiritual abuse fathered by Satan have been
devastating. Lies block light and create darkness that hides all sorts of evil
from being discovered and properly apprehended. Satan is the father of lies.
Praise God that He is the Father of
heavenly lights who does not change like
shifting shadows (James 1:17). God is blessedly, dependably consistent. Praise
God that when we draw near to God in truth (Psalm 145:18), He draws near to us
(James 4:8). You cannot draw near to God and remain under the power of lies.
You cannot authentically draw near to God and stay in the dark. There is no
stronghold, no suffering, no power in your life that is too strong for God, too
powerful to prevent you from receiving Him afresh, for the umpteenth time, into
your dry and aching soul.
I still need to hear that on a heart level, especially as
I keep racking up more years as a Christian. The more I learn, the more
information I know, which tempts me to subconsciously conclude that
there's less I should need because of how much I know now that I didn't know
before; because of how many answers I've collected. (Consciously I know
that that's "the wrong answer." Consciously I know that you're never
done learning and you're never done needing God. But integrating those truths
into my innermost being is the work of a lifetime.)
Information alone does not facilitate a living experience with
God. And as Ellen White wrote, "We need to have a living experience in
the things of God; and we are not safe unless we
have this" (PR 20.1). Also, the informational part of your brain gets
tired, whereas the hunger of your soul is ever-present because the
truest thing about humans is that we need Jesus. And so information is
just not always going to cut it when you're hurting and exhausted, when you've
been gutted and pummeled by the enemy of your soul (and made to feel like it's
your fault in the moments when it's not). For times like these, I love the way
Ellen White - again - puts it: "Often your mind may be clouded because of
pain. Then do not try to think. You know that Jesus loves you.
He understands your weakness. You may do His will by simply resting in
His arms" (MH 251.5).
The older I've gotten, the more I've staggered into the festive
Christmas season exhausted from the previous eleven months. Many of us feel
guilty that we don't feel more peppy, that we haven't finished our shopping or
that we just "don't have that Christmas spirit," but God has been
teaching me lately that it's actually entirely appropriate to approach
Christmas in a state of hunger and thirst. I recently had the insight that when
I approach Christmas feeling stretched, restless and full of discomfort, it
sounds an awful lot like Mary at full term, ready to give birth to a miracle.
And when I received that insight, I felt touched with grace and kindness by
God. I hope you do too, having read that.
(Also, think about this: light is especially
beautiful in winter - beautiful in barrenness - because that's the time of year
when the days are the shortest [so we crave light since we get so little of
it], also when there's little else about the world to draw our admiration -
it's all under snow. And even when there's no snow and nature appears skeletal
and stripped bare, the light is only more beautiful. The light is the star of
the show! In light of this - no pun intended - you can see the dry spells in
your life with a new grace, rather than as a disqualification. A dry spell in
your spiritual walk has all the potential in the world to be the overture of a
new symphony of intimacy with God.)
Christmas is one of the more poignant times of year when God has
wooed me specifically when I was weakened by pain and emptied of my strength
through my efforts to keep surviving. A poet named Rumi once wrote, "The
wound is where the light enters you," and God has made this my experience several
times, wherein our connection was rekindled during a season of suffering, which
never fails to render me especially vulnerable (making my heart fertile
ground). Always there are tears. Always I just want to rest in His Presence and
never leave. Always, I feel as though every hunger has been taken away and I
have no desire to speak, I just want to be there, like when you see
a loved one after a long time and you don't want to kiss or talk, you just want
to hug them and cry and let the reassurance of their
palpable presence and the joy of reunion pour into you as the frantic worrying
of your soul is replaced with a delicious quiet.
In the Christmases of 2013 and 2016, God specifically worked
through the holiday season in a way that deeply stayed with me. Looking back, I
see that He was carving out new spaces in my soul that He would be pouring this
vision into later on.
Early into the process of grasping the vision, I was describing
the "God is Light" program as "theodicy through Christmas
music," and I think that's still appropriate. It doesn't go through the
whole story of the battle between good and evil (we Seventh-day Adventists call
it "The Great Controversy"), it simply starts by acknowledging every
human's innate longing, suffering and need and then responding by singing songs
that increasingly speak to our state with the increasingly beautiful truths of
God's goodness, motives and actions. And on that note, there's a song that
makes me cry in its simplicity:
Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full in His wonderful face
And the things of this earth will grow strangely
dim
In the light of His glory and grace
I think it's entirely appropriate to change that third line to,
"And the pain of this earth will grow strangely
dim," because there is something about just basking in the truth about
God's heart and His actions that crowds pain out of our core and into
peripheral regions. And then cobwebs can be blown out of our heart with the
wind of the Holy Spirit.
And then we can breathe again.
And then we can see again.
We're no longer oppressed by dark clouds right above our heads
bearing down on us.
We see blue skies and remember that all things are possible
with God.
We see blue skies and remember:
"There is more, more than
all this pain
More than all the falling down
And getting up again..." (Andrew Peterson)
We remember it's not all up to us and that doesn't make us
failures.
God is God and we are
not.
He brings the power.
We bring our helplessness.
It seems to be a pattern that most people have times of year when
their worst events and greatest regrets cluster. Mine is from August (my
birthday month) to November with a special emphasis on September and October.
During the fall, trees lose their leaves and I almost regularly suffer loss of
differing degrees - several times traumatic - that leaves me stumbling into
Christmas out of an autumn full of pain. Some falls have been better than
others, but I just can't think of a fall in the past 10+ years that wasn't
overshadowed by some degree of trial(s) that lasted for the whole season.
August-November of 2013 was no exception. Overlaying the sources
of pain and loss in my personal life, I was in the last fall semester of my
undergrad and was taking "Theology I" taught by Dr. Ante Jerončić.
Somehow I had gotten backwards and taken "Theology II" a year and a
half earlier, but I'm thankful for the hiccup, because we dealt with theodicy
during a portion of the class that couldn't have come at a better time. I
remember a story being shared of parents who were reeling to find out that
their child had been sexually abused by a close friend (or family member?).
They were asking either Dr. Jerončić or another spiritual leader in his story the
kinds of questions all sufferers ask in response to blinding pain. I can't
remember precisely what questions they were - I think something along the lines
of "Why was this allowed?"/"What do we do now?"/"How
do we cope?" - but I remember the answer Dr. Jerončić
shared from his story. It was basically: "You don't need/you won't be
healed by receiving an answer to your question. What you need is a deeper
experience with God."
You have to know Dr. Jerončić and know what his classes were/are like to
understand that what he said was spoken with the utmost gravity of heart. The
room was still. His whole existence is antithetical to the trite
"Christianity" of bumper stickers. The moment we all had in that
classroom was deeply personal and quiet. I sensed that some of us felt in our hearts
the reality Dr. Jerončić was describing. I remember clearly that I did.
I had an image in my heart of me - darkened and sore all over with suffering -
being drawn into and engulfed by God's heart of light and otherworldly love. He
was more than enough to cover everything. It was as if He were some kind of
living, velvety smooth medicine that soothed everywhere He touched. A deeper
experience of that would indeed turn suffering into something
bearable and even transform it into beauty and meaning. A deeper experience
of that and you could get through anything.
And later in December 2013, I began to get lost in His love again as He drew me
back into the light - back into Himself.
When I returned to classes in January 2014, it was the first time (and only
time since then) that multiple people commented to me that I looked better -
that they could see the relief in my face that it was as if a cloud had
cleared.
The next few falls had their trials and bittersweetness, but nothing that shook
me in my core. But then came fall 2016, which cut me open in a brand new way.
That was a season of a new kind of loss. Loss that had been deliberately
imposed because of abuses of power and deeply harmful character assassination
that harmed me personally, harmed my marriage and hurt my parents through its
implications (to name just a few things). I remember specifically the night of
October 15, 2016 when I was enjoying a visit with dear friends who had driven
to see my husband and me. I was letting myself relax and really laugh again,
beginning to feel like I was finally starting to catch my breath - that I was
enjoying a temporary oasis from the constant companion of strong pain. But then
the night's fellowship became a private disclosure of the strain of slander that
cut me the most. I remember literally feeling as if a cold knife had laid my
torso open and that darkness was pouring into me, turning all my blood to ice.
And I am not seeking to be dramatic. That is literally my physiological
experience. That wound functioned like some sort of landslide that ruined the
tunnel I had been trying to dig with God to escape from the prison of my pain.
Not only did it slam me back into the pain (while pouring on a fresh dose), but
it reinforced my jail cell with a paralyzing fear like an electric fence,
making me afraid to even try again. It took over a year after that before I
felt that something had finally blown a hole in my fear just so I could
remember what having hope feels like.
I approached December 2016 with a great sense of pain and alienation but it was
slightly alleviated by anticipation of a life change that would greatly improve
our situation in the New Year of 2017. As is my habit, I began surfing through
iTunes looking for fresh Christmas music to spark up my playlists. I don't
remember how I found them, but I found Christmas albums and an EP by artists I
already enjoyed: Gungor and The Brilliance. And there was a strong theme of
celebrating the metaphor of light in their holiday songs of worship about God.
I was hooked.
I listened to them compulsively and repeatedly like a thirsty person gulping
water. They made my heart smile again. They made me weep. There was something
about their message, and especially the instrumentation. The leaders of Gungor
and The Brilliance are brothers and - if I recall correctly - are classically
trained even though their songs don't sound explicitly classical. But they used
their skills to write songs that are simple to sing but have delightfully
artistic accompaniment that sound like what they're singing
about. I learned enough from voice lessons I had in college to learn what an
art song is - a song wherein the style of music is designed to complement and
enhance the meaning of the text. The Christmas songs by Gungor and The Brilliance
that dealt with light were art songs and they uplifted my heart. They weren't
just music slapped together with words like peanut butter and jelly. They were
songs that spoke of light and joy and healing while the music actually
sounded like what it feels like to experience those things.
God is light.
Light helps us see to find our way and avoid danger.
Light helps us see to recognize who and what we love, and who
truly loves us (and who doesn't).
Light is a symbol of truth, but you can't confine the definition
of light solely to truth. Yet since I've mentioned that I'll say that it has
blessed me to have it reinforced that since God is light and light is a symbol
of truth, God is what is true. And because He is
what is true, He is who will last. Evil exists and it's part of reality, but
evil is not what is true about the universe. Light is. Love is. God is. Not
evil. Evil will not last. Evil is a mystery and we can't help but acknowledge
that it exists (we'd be foolish not to), but it is vaporous and fleeting in
comparison to God's eternal substance (and that's a tall order considering the
immeasurable and lasting harm evil wreaks). That doesn't mean evil isn't
deadly. It is. Evil wreaks unspeakable horrors. But it does not
hold total sway and it will not last indefinitely. Evil will end.
One day there will be no more of it ever again,
because something more powerful and substantive and all-encompassing than evil
exists and His name is God! Hallelujah!
The light-themed music I discovered reminded my heart of these
truths in an experiential way. And we need that kind of reminding, because when
you are smack dab in the middle of suffering at its strongest, it's all too
easy to make an agreement that pain and evil are the truest and most reliable parts
of life. And they are not! Praise God they are not!
But our hearts need reminding.
We are a species relentlessly assaulted by evil.
It is okay that we need
regular reminding like daily nutrition.
It is normal to need constant recalibration.
Fast-forward to summer 2017 and you find me reading "God is
light" in 1 John 1:5 and making a big connection between that verse and
the Christmas songs that pierced my oppression and applied the medicine of
truth to my pain. In that moment, I knew what the title of the Christmas
program would be and I began exploring the lyrics of Christmas music with a
curiosity to see if Christmas music would have the theme of light in a general
way.
It was everywhere.
I was delighted!
I felt like I was on to something very special.
And I see now God was indeed giving me a very special gift, but it
took over a year to unwrap.
A new joy was being combined with an old joy for me.
The new joy was my burgeoning understanding of God as light and my
recent experiences in the past four years of Him calling me out of darkness and
into His marvelous light. (Prior to the fall and December of 2013 I
experienced the darkest season of my life, which I'd sunk into because of a
brutal fall season of traumatic loss in 2011 that gave me PTSD. It wasn't the
season of loss alone that birthed my darkest season. It was that I did not
respond to it with faith, but instead succumbed to it, which cost me for a very
long time. In a way I think it always will, but God is redeeming it. I'm not unkind
to myself, though - please understand. At the juncture where I failed to
respond to my pain with faith, it was mainly because I didn't know how and
everything I was experiencing was unprecedented and overwhelming. But now that
I know what I could have done differently, it's helped me to walk by faith much
more since then, especially in response to pain. Gradually my ship is
turning.)
The old joy still thrives within me: Christmas has been my
favorite time of year since I was a small child (literally since I can
remember), and I am one of those special uncrackable nuts who begins listening
to Christmas music sometimes as early as September. The first snow of the
winter season makes me giddy because I am a Christmas bunny through and
through. No matter how much I'm hurting, no matter how depressed I am, no
matter that I keep getting older each year, Christmas music sparks a special
joy in me, whether it's secular or sacred. And of course, the sacred Christmas
music has an even deeper hue and richer substance. (Also, as life has
taken me to places that have no snow at Christmas, as much as I love the movie
"White Christmas," and the concept of having snow at Christmas -
since I grew up in wintry Michigan [which has more to do with the Santa
Claus mythology] - I've come to realize that what is far more central to
me at Christmastime than snow is Christmas lights. Light in the darkness. Even
when it's daylight, the Christmas lights still put a sparkle in my soul and a
spring in my step. Snow without Christmas lights could be any day between
November and March. But a world without snow that still has Christmas lights is
most definitely uniquely Christmas. Light is therapeutic for depression, and we
humans are made in the image of God who is light and are ourselves conceived
with a spark. I really believe light speaks to the human soul in a special,
witnessing way - stirring hope on a level beyond words even when we're too
tired to engage with parcing out its meaning.)
Because of my relationship with Christmas - which I know is not
everyone's - I feel a genuine heaviness that's almost a despair when people
share with me that they don't like to celebrate Christmas because of how it's
been overrun by advertising, commercialization, and the mythical creatures of
Santa Claus, elves, reindeer and snowmen and so on. And I feel just about
indignant when I encounter Christians trying to tell me that Christmas is a
pagan holiday. (!!)
I know, I know. Jesus was not born on December
25.
But Christmas is not a celebration of historical anniversaries.
Christmas is a season of spiritual remembrance.
It is a time when we saturate our consciousness and are culturally
surrounded by direct and indirect reminders of one of the most incredible
events ever known: the Incarnation.
The Incarnation was spiritual, fleshly, mysterious, palpable,
relational and unprecedented.
The Incarnation was a miracle like no other.
Christmas is not a pagan holiday.
Talking about it that way is an unhelpful generalization I am
fiercely opposed to.
It is not irretrievable from the secular
commercialization.
It can be salvaged from what the world has tried
to make it, from how Satan has tried to clog its arteries with alternate
mythologies and sales at the mall.
And frankly, I personally feel that all Christians have a duty to
retrieve Christmas from how it can be bogged down with worldly trappings,
rather than settle for having a distant relationship with it or giving it no
recognition whatsoever. If I could address all
Christians-who-are-skeptical-about-Christmas right now, I would say:
Don't
let Satan rob you of the rich theology of Christmas
just
because the world has commercialized it.
They
have commercialized it, but they have not consumed it,
just
like the light has shone in the darkness rather than be overcome by it.
Celebrate
Christmas.
Celebrate
what Christ did for us and in us.
Revel
in how the ultimate messages cannot be drowned out,
even
by the pervasive attempts to commercialize and secularize it to death.
Because
once you know how to look for the Christmas message,
even
the "pagan" fairy tales in Christmas are helpless against bearing
witness to
God's
character of generous gift-giving, goodness and joy.
Christmas is a protest against the darkness.
It's a season packed with spiritual potency.
It's not about shopping till you drop and behaving like a bunch of
saps.
That's just how Satan tempts many people to relate to it.
My fellow Seventh-day Adventists and I regard prophecy as one of
our most important biblical treasures. Sometimes, frankly, it gets
overemphasized to where people forget that love is the
greatest of these. Love is what will still be around and
paramount even after prophecies one day cease (1 Corinthians 13:9-10). But
because prophecy is so extremely important on this side
of heaven, let me say this:
The first Advent of Jesus - which is what we celebrate and
remember at Christmas - was a fulfillment of prophecy. Christmas is not less
important than prophecy. Good grief! Christmas was the
fulfillment of prophecy! Satan likes to make Christmas look
unnecessary, sappy, nostalgic and wasteful in contrast to prophecy looking
"edgy and relevant," which makes both of them distorted. Christmas
becomes too sugary and prophecy becomes too brittle. He does this in order to
demonize and divorce them because the two are actually so potent when
married! The Cross & the Resurrection are how we know that Love
wins. Prophecy is about knowing how Love wins the end of the
story. Prophecy is how we know how Love wins - the
mechanics of Satan in end times for us to be aware of and on our guard against.
Blending the salvation [inextricable from the Incarnation] and prophecy is like
the crucial necessity of blending both a heart that is willing to love and the
wisdom that can recognize abuse and set boundaries to preserve their heart to
love redemptively.
In looking at Christmas with prophecy in mind, I also found this
interesting chiasm (which Seventh-day Adventists should take
to heart!). If someone else already thought of it, I had no idea and am not
trying to plagiarize someone else's work. But here goes:
*
First
Advent = Fulfillment of prophecy
Jesus
comes as the epitome of helplessness and scandal.
He
comes to destroy the devil's work.
He
comes to make it possible for us to have union with God in our hearts
so
that we can live in the world but not of it,
so
that we can have victory over sin and darkness through Christ.
Pentecost
Historic
outpouring of the Holy Spirit
The
Latter Rain
Historic
outpouring of the Holy Spirit
(Eclipsing
the extent of Pentecost!)
Second
Advent = Fulfillment of prophecy
Jesus
comes as the epitome of power and majesty.
He
comes to wipe the remainder of the devil's work off the face of the earth.
He
comes so that true believers can finally have union with God in every single
way
and
be utterly free of the relentless assaults of Satan
and
the endless harassment of our sinful natures.
*
The Second Coming of Jesus will be the Second
Christmas.
At the time of Christ's first Advent, the human family was in an
extremely dark place, and we are headed back towards that time again. Christ's
second Advent is coming soon. People missed out on Jesus the first time because
even though they had all the information they needed, it was not married to the
right experience, which led them to actually reject Jesus...! They
were idolizing external circumstances rather than seeking identification with
God within, in their characters (which would have transformed their angst about
their external circumstances).
Today, we are at serious risk for that. Jesus said in Matthew 7:21
that not everyone who says, "Lord, Lord...!" will enter the kingdom
of heaven, but only those who do the will of God. And the will of God is for us
to identify with Jesus and to illuminate the lives of others by loving as He
did. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 says that even if you have the gift of prophecy and
can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and have incredible faith and can
speak in tongues that it's like chalk screeching on a blackboard without love.
Jesus made it clear in Matthew 25 that whatever we do or don't do for people
regarded as the scum of society (or the scum right outside your comfort zone)
will be regarded as done or not done unto Him, and it will reveal
whether or not we really know who Jesus is and have a relationship with Him (vs.
knowing lots of stuff about Him), which will either open or close for us the
gate to eternity, because eternal life is knowing the Father
and Jesus (John 17:3). Romans 2 makes it clear that there are people who do
God's will even without "having religion," because it's written on
their hearts. They don't appear religious or even Christian, but how do they
live? What choices do they make? How do they steward their power? How do they
relate to the powerless? How do they treat those who are afflicted and
addicted, pitiful and pathetic?
"This is how love is made complete among us
so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment. In this world
we are like Jesus." (1 John 4:17)
And the season of Christmas is when we remember the genesis of
Jesus' example as a human being, the principles of which stayed true till His
death. Usually when people are strategizing to garner power, they work and plan
hard to "really make an entrance." Jesus shows us the binding power
of intimacy rather than the power of being impressive by showing us how
close God wants to be to us through the most intimate identification
possible: the Incarnation. One-third of the Godhead literally and
permanently became a member of our species.
The Son of God became human at the smallest and most vulnerable
level in order to experience everything. (I write more
about this down in the devotional section for "Sacred
Mystery.")
I will say, though, that it seems as though Jesus didn't
experience everything because He didn't experience becoming
physically elderly, and that does make me wonder. Maybe
there's an answer for that somewhere in a book I haven't read yet and maybe I
just need to wait for Jesus to explain it to me Himself. Maybe He didn't stay
after His resurrection to die naturally of age because God never intended for
us to age and become decrepit, though He did intend conception and birth (which
Jesus experienced). Yet Jesus experienced a blinding number of other things God
didn't intend (abuse, slander, torture, rejection, murder, and on and on...).
And maybe Jesus only lived on earth to the age of 33 as some sort of poetic
"Second Adam" response to the First Adam being a fairly young
creation when he first let sin into the world (since Jesus came to
super-abundantly show under infinitely worse circumstances that Adam could
have passed the test in the Garden of Eden, and therefore that we can
now, through Christ in us our hope of glory). I don't have all the answers, but
I know the heart of my God, so I'm comfortable with not being able to resolve
every technicality that pops up in my head. (But the bottom line is
that Jesus' example was one that did not shy away from scandal, vulnerability,
powerlessness, misunderstanding, sacrifice, and touching the unthinkable with
kindness. We should do the same, and do it like Jesus did it: by throwing
ourselves wholly on God in utter dependence. Christmas is a time to make a new
start, even though it's not New Year's. But it can spark a season of repentance
that will help us start the New Year right.)
And speaking of things I can't resolve, I personally see even
"secular Christmas" as a season that can't help but bear witness
(even if it's as if through a glass darkly) to the goodness of God, even in
a ridiculous (but funny) movie like "Elf" that
makes no mention of Jesus. It's still a movie about reunion after a lifetime of
separation, restoration from disconnection to connection, the gift of new
relationships (and becoming a new person in light of them), and the joy of
experiencing new dimensions of love and appreciation for possibilities that
were previously unknown. And in higher quality Christmas films that still don't
mention God - like "White Christmas" - what makes its story so special
is that it's all about unselfish giving on behalf of relationships, which is
deeply in the spirit of Christmas. And the glorious moment the whole movie is
working up to is shining a light on the beloved WWII General
who meant so much to so many, and who had just received a disheartening
rejection when he'd tried to reapply and serve his country afresh. And I don't
mean the spotlight that was turned on when he entered the room where all the
merriment was prepared. I mean the light of love that was shone on him by all
those who'd served under him, who traveled on Christmas Eve to honor all that
he had given and done for them, who had come to celebrate his character,
calibre and heart.
I believe that because God has put eternity into the hearts of
human beings, even the non-Christian versions of Christmas simply are
not barren of the echoes and themes of the true story even when they
refuse to reference it. And so even when I am surrounded by secular versions of
Christmas while shopping in a mall or eating in a restaurant, I don't feel
oppressed. I wish more Christians could tap into this and let their hearts be
warmed, rather than aggravated, by the time of year when so much around them is
actually praising God's goodness without realizing it. Because even the secular
celebrations of Christmas are all about love and light. They're not about
violence, they're not about darkness, they're not about evil, they're not about
cruelty, they're not about power. They're simply "less than" -
they're simply not the ultimate expression. But they are still precious.
They're not a virtuoso violin performance, but they are like a beginner
learning to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. They're still a celebration of
relationships, light, joy, beautiful & cheering music, and the impulse of
love to give in a way that makes a much-needed difference.
And speaking of music...
Christmas cannot be fully celebrated
without music.
The power of music is too often downplayed as a mere accessory or
avoided out of fear of "becoming like the world" rather than
unabashedly harnessing its power for good. James 1:17 says that every good and
perfect gift is from above, coming down from "the Father of heavenly
lights, who does not change like shifting shadows," and music is one of
those good and perfect gifts. Music is a language that creates union between
thoughts and feelings, which results in a spiritual experience that can never
be replicated apart from music. And when this spiritual experience takes place
in Christian contexts, what a power for good it is!
"Music can name the unnameable and communicate the
unknowable. ... When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for
something they never had. ... Music is love in search of a word. ... Music is
enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music. ... Words make
you think a thought, and music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel
a thought." (Leonard Bernstein) (Edgar Watson Howe) (Sidonie Gabrielle)
(Sergei Rachmaninov) (E.Y. Harburg)
"In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified and
when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity. Solitude
is accompanied by a new hope and pity for ourselves, which makes us more
indulgent and more understanding, and we have the certitude of finding
something again, that which lives forever in music." (Nadia Boulanger)
"Language is too feeble for us to attempt to
portray the love of God... Music was made to serve a holy purpose, to lift the
thoughts to that which is pure, noble, and elevating, and to awaken in
the soul devotion and gratitude to God. ... Music forms a part of
God's worship in the courts above, and we should endeavor, in our songs
of praise, to approach as nearly as possible to the
harmony of the heavenly choirs. ... Singing, as a part of religious service,
is as much an act of worship as prayer. The heart must feel
the spirit of the song to give it right expression." (Ellen G. White)
"...come into His Presence with singing. ... Speak to one
another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to
the Lord with your heart, always giving thanks to God the Father in
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." (Psalm 100:4, Ephesians 5:19-20)
Honestly, I don't know how everyone's experience of Christmas
could not be inextricable from music.
Music has been an essential carrier of both the story and
especially the spirit of Christmas for ages now. Music has
conveyed - like no mere writing can - the spirit of a mass of Christ
engulfing us and flooding our souls.
The spirit of God with us.
The spirit of the deep joy, peace and wonder of
what it means to have intimacy with God.
•
Holy Longing.
When I chose "holy longing" as the spiritual title for
the opening song of the Christmas concert, I'd actually forgotten about the
following quote by St. Augustine:
"The whole life of the good Christian is a holy
longing."
I was thinking about how the opening song I chose expresses the
longings of an older, wiser and sadder human heart; the longings for the many
sorely needed manifestations of restoration in our dark, dangerous, broken, and
suffering world. I like my programs to be journeys, which means they all need a
starting place. A place of need. A piece of reality, which might be a window
into the past or an acknowledgement of the present, depending on where you're
at in your journey. (We all never stop needing God, but some of us have
reached the portion of the journey where we're plugging our need into His
fullness and primarily experiencing His sustenance, whereas others of us
haven't gotten there yet and are earlier in our pilgrimage, experiencing our
thirst as predominant.)
The opening song sings of a contrast between childlike desires and
the opened eyes of an adult, which reminds me of the following passage:
"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I
reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind
me" (1 Corinthians 13:11).
And even though humans grow up and develop broader worldviews than
what they had as children, it's a common illustration of understanding adults
as still having a young child inside of them, especially those who are still
living with unresolved brokenness that cries out for healing.
I failed to bring the book with me on my vacation which has the
source of this quote, but I know I read recently an incredibly insightful line:
"I cried when I was born and every day shows why." The inner child of
an adult is the remnant of our original innocence which never completely dies
unless you deliberately cauterize your own soul. A friend of mine told me that
the original meaning of the word "innocence," means
"unwounded." We usually understand "losing your innocence"
as having a sexual connotation, but the loss of innocence is so much more than
that. We begin to lose our innocence when we begin to experience pain (God
never intended pain in the Garden of Eden). And this is why I love something Ty
Gibson said in his series Reimagining God: "Everything
eternal is made of innocence."
That, to me, translates to: everything that will last
forever is made of un-woundedness. Everything that lasts forever will have no
pain in it.
This is what we long for. God also longs for it, making it a holy
longing. And the purest form of this longing is to not just have it for
ourselves, but for everyone possible to have it too.
•
Suffering.
Suffering is an equalizer.
No one in the universe is untouched by the reverberations of pain
on this planet.
Rightly and wrongly, everyone is touched by suffering. Absolutely
everyone.
We
humans (obviously).
All
non-human life on earth.
Our
planet is wearing out like a ragged garment. We're having natural disasters at
a greater frequency and greater severity than ever in history. Animals are
suffering and becoming endangered and even extinct because of the choices of
humans. The destruction of their habitats, hunting them down for commodities we
make out of them, pollution, and plain old human cruelty to animals. "We
know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth
right up to the present time." (Romans 8:22)
God
the Son.
Jesus,
the Man of Sorrows who endured physical and psychospiritual abuse and torture
throughout His life on earth (not just at the end of it) no being before Him or
since Him ever did or ever can experience. Go and read (or re-read) Isaiah 53.
God
the Father.
"'God
was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself' (2 Corinthians
5:19).' God suffered with His Son." (Ellen White, Steps
to Christ) Even though Jesus couldn't sense His Father's Presence, God the
Father was in His Son's agonizing trauma, suffering in
intimate solidarity.
He
was by no means aloof. He was in it.
God
the Holy Spirit.
The
Holy Spirit fills and connects people. When Jesus left the wilderness after His
temptations, He was "full of the Holy Spirit." It is through the Holy
Spirit that we connect with Jesus, who connects us to the Father. The Holy
Spirit uniquely suffered at Calvary because He could not alleviate His beloved
Jesus' suffering on the cross. Of course He had the technical ability, but
there's a special kind of suffering that comes from restraint - when you're
holding back something you're fully capable of doing and that you want to do.
But for some greater motivation, you're choosing to not allow it to emanate
from you. All three members of the Godhead had agreed to suffer wildly in order
to save us. Jesus became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21) and
the Holy Spirit is never found in sin. And during the time when Jesus was dead
in the tomb, the Trinity went from three to two. The Trinity experienced death
and loss in the most intimate way in order to save us. Also, we humans today
can ourselves grieve the Holy Spirit by our
choices.
Angels.
They
suffered in watching what Jesus endured throughout His life and especially on
the cross. And I'm sure our guardian angels suffer when we insist on making unspeakably
dark and stupid choices.
Satan.
There
is nothing unjust about Satan's suffering (all of it is his own harvest of his
own seeds willfully sown and for no good reason) but he has and does experience
pain. To suffer the loss of heaven must have been excruciating, but it was his
own fault. And we can make him suffer in a way for us to rejoice over because
of how despicable he is: "The devil is enraged at the sound of fervent
prayer for he knows he will suffer loss." (Ellen White)
Demons.
They
also suffered the loss of heaven, and they suffer when we rebuke them in the
name and authority of Jesus Christ. Their suffering is not wrongful but it is
still pain.
Unfallen
worlds who watch us.
There's
always a type of hurt you experience when you watch something terrible happen
to someone else. You feel this when you watch a difficult movie. It's the
mildest of the pains but it's still pain.
I chose the second song in this program because it was used at the
end of a poignant film (Pay It Forward) that closed on a note of suffering
mixed with just enough hope to really make you cry. In
response to an innocent young person being killed in an accident while they
were trying to do a good deed, a massive amount of people showed up at the
young person's home in a show of solidarity - each one carrying a candle that
flickered in the darkness. And beyond the crowd of people and flickering
lights, you saw the main road jammed with cars trying to get close, carrying
people who also wanted to come and be with those who were grieving.
The song I chose was playing during this scene.
The first time I ever saw this movie I cried so hard.
I was in my preteen years and didn't see this movie again for almost a decade.
When I watched it again, I was even more moved. It was such a poetic and
perfect swirl of the wildly raging, breath-stealing pain of irretrievable loss
and the undeniable tender touch of not being alone in the
pain, even though no one has the answer of why it was allowed to happen and how
on earth to move forward.
The ending of that movie was a prayer in and of itself.
A prayer for help rising out of the midst of almost-hopelessness.
The moment could hardly have been charged with more grief, yet it
was not without beauty.
It's in these moments that we need to remember:
We are not alone.
We are not without help.
Angels are not supposed to be the objects of our worship, and I'm
personally not well-versed in how to discern whether I'm being helped by the
Holy Spirit or an angel or a blend of the two, but I know from Scripture and
the inspired writings of Ellen White that these divine beings are sent to me to
help and protect me and I can pray for more of them and know that God responds.
I hope you find some comfort and hope in the following passage:
"The angels of glory find their joy in giving, - giving love
and tireless watchcare to souls that are fallen and unholy. Heavenly beings woo
the hearts of men; they bring to this dark world light from the courts above;
by gentle and patient ministry they move upon the human spirit, to bring the
lost into a fellowship with Christ which is even closer than they themselves
can know." (Ellen White, The Desire of Ages)
•
Our Need.
Suffering creates a serious need.
I think the most acute suffering is psychological.
I'm convinced that the realm of the psyche is where all pain
ultimately lands.
Some suffering is not at all physical - it shoots straight for the
heart (though it can bleed into the body through psychosomatic effects as a
symptom of how overwhelming it is) through hurtful words and receiving awful, life-altering news.
But when physical harm occurs, the psyche is impacted and most often - long
after the physical healing has taken place - pain is still ricocheting in the
human soul even though the body is "fine."
We have a serious need in our psychological pain that we don't
know how to heal. We don't know what to do with it or how to relate to it so
that suffering can be bearable. Pain is crushing the life out of us. We don't
know what to do with our pain. When pain enters, it dismantles and dominates
everything in our experience.
Pain is hard to deal with even when there's meaning in it.
And vastly more so when it is brutally senseless.
And when you factor God in, things can become vastly more
complicated before they get better. We are riddled with "why"
questions as if strapped against a target in front of a machine gun. Why did a
God who identifies Himself as love and light not protect us from harm and
darkness? Why did He allow what just happened? Why did He allow this beloved
person or beloved set of circumstances to be ripped from my arms? Why?!
We weep and we groan and we crawl around and we curl up into little
balls and rock ourselves trying to catch our breath. Or maybe we don't catch
our breath and we're just wracked with sobbing until only exhaustion makes us
stop.
For many people, the season of Christmas seems a cruel mockery to
them because they are lost in the abyss of their need for God to speak light
and love into their suffering.
•
Birth of the Christmas Rose.
Few things can make you feel empty like the fullness of pain.
You feel both like a waif and also like you're carrying the weight
of the world in your chest.
Pain hurts. No one healthy desires to experience pain. I certainly
haven't. And like many people, I've spent a long time trying
to avoid it. And I've had a lot to run from: the traumatic loss of a loved one
through a car accident that killed her so violently she died before help
arrived, "normal" deaths of loved ones (it never feels normal!),
mind-blowing betrayals of trust, narcissistic abuse in the guise of a close
friendship, nearly being killed in a car accident by two 18-wheeler trucks,
being sexually assaulted by an ex I was close friends with before we dated
(later he told me "your eyes wanted it"), sexually harassed by one of
my husband's former bosses and then sexually slandered by that man's colleagues
(which had the effect of psychosexual assault, harming me as an individual, my
marriage and my parents due to the implications of the slander), being
subjected to abuses of power by these men who professed to be Christians, and
plenty of other things I won't take the time to name right now.
Correspondingly to all that, I've lost a lot of time failing to
relate to my pain truthfully, in the light. I didn't see it as a failure to
relate to my pain in the light; like just about everyone, I was just trying to
cope in the moment.
I'm finally in a season where I know that God and I are making
progress on this, and I've learned something in the past year or so:
There's
something beautiful about feeling exactly how much pain you're in and no longer
stifling the truth it is trying to tell you.
Letting yourself feel all the pain can have a beauty to it because
it's a form of rest. You're no longer fighting something that
is true of you. And in addition to having a strange beauty about it, allowing
yourself to feel the truth of your pain is a very fertile choice. If you're not
surrendered to God, it can be fertile for destruction, but if you're doing it
while holding God's hand, it can be exponentially fertile for redemption.
Every time in the past that I let God help me face my pain rather
than try to hide from it - even if only temporarily - my life significantly
changed. I'm by no means a guru at this, but I know that lately God has brought
me to the place where I am letting Him change my thinking about suffering on a
much more fundamental level, which has resulted in Him being born in me in a
much more lasting, masterful way. I'm learning to trust Him while I'm hurting
enough to keep my heart open to being led and taught and molded by Him in
the midst of suffering that is ongoing, rather than only being
receptive to comfort.
Acts 3:19 says, "Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your
sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord..."
Not repent as in, "You've been so bad you need to
repent!" but rather as "Dear one, change your thinking so that what
separates you from union with the Lover of your soul can be removed, because
God longs to restore your soul and bring you Home to His heart."
Acts 3:19 was a verse that caught at my heart in December 2013
when I was experiencing one of those temporary seasons of letting God help me
face my pain for awhile. And my life significantly changed. During that time,
songs about God being born in the heart and the haunting Christmas carol
about looking to Jesus as a blooming rose (evocative of Isaiah 53) were songs I
had on repeat like medicine I never wanted to stop drinking. I remember that
season as being a time of softness and light even though my pain was nowhere
near done being felt or resolved. That fall and that Christmas were a spiritual
season when I learned that peace can coexist with pain.
In the Beatitudes (Matthew 5), Jesus said that the poor in spirit
are blessed because theirs is the kingdom of heaven. We don't need to approach
Christmas (or any season) feeling like a superhero with a million bucks. We
just need to know that God brings the power and all we have to do is bring our helplessness and
He will create the union He wants between our hurting hearts and His.
"Christ lifts up the contrite heart and refines the mourning
soul until it becomes His abode." (Ellen White, Thoughts From the
Mount of Blessing)
He can transform our grief (a thing that so often alienates us
from connection) into intimacy with Him.
God can transform grief into intimacy.
He is that powerful.
It is one of the most powerful forms of creativity I have ever
conceptually understood and experienced. Few things are as powerful as grief,
especially after a trauma. Yet God can penetrate and permeate even the darkness
of that with transforming light that creates meaning
and beauty.
This truth is most transformative when you experience it.
As C.S. Lewis put it, "Experience is the most brutal of teachers but you
learn, my God, do you learn." When you experience an amount of
disorienting pain that is so overwhelming it literally frightens you - that
wrecks your soul so thoroughly that you can't even recognize yourself anymore
so that you spend years feeling like you're gone in
your own body (alive but dead inside) to the extent that
you completely lose confidence in your own abilities to
control your quality of life and conjure a spiritual spark in your own soul...
When you experience that, you come to the end of yourself and the end of
illusions about what you can do for yourself. And it is such an utterly lonely,
insanely frustrating, wholly thwarted, desperate place of perfect and complete
discouragement. When you have not merely tasted that but been forced to drink
that cup for time out of mind, it is no small thing when you
encounter God's power to create change. His defiant creativity to
rescue you from the power of sin and the pull of pain and to redeem them both
into something that isn't shameful or frightening.
Oh my soul, it is no small thing.
It feels like a reality I can only scratch the surface of in
words. I wish I could impart it to you because of its potency to make you see
the infinitely desirable goodness of God. But I know I can't. And God probably
designed it that way because He wants each one of His children to have a wholly
authentic, completely choice-based experience with Him.
I hope you pursue it.
•
Rescue From Darkness.
This part of the program is like spiritual warfare in the form of
a lullaby. It seems like an oxymoron at first, but through the eyes of faith it
makes such sense: once we experientially tap into God's goodness and strength
and taste it, we really can rest as peacefully as a child in its
mother's arms, deep inside a fortress protected by the most elite warriors
imaginable.
This song sings of the intimate, personal, understanding safe
haven of a relationship with Jesus who is full of tender solicitude for our
wellbeing. And how I love knowing that there is a safe place I can run to.
There was a time when even my relationship with Jesus was badly assaulted by
Satan in my earlier twenties. Living life without haven was a
waking horror. I only lived that way because Satan used traumas to push me into
buying into a cruel deception that had several grains of truth in it - those
grains were my mistakes. But praise God, long story short, He called me out of
darkness and into His marvelous light, and I will never believe those
time-stealing lies ever again.
"The One who is in you is greater than
the one who is in the world. In all these things
we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with
the glory that will be revealed in us. And we know that
in all things God works for the good of those who love Him,
who have been called according to His purpose. I pray that out of His glorious
riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your
inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I
pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together
with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is
the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you
may be filled to the measure of all the
fullness of God. For I am convinced that
neither death nor life,
neither angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future,
nor any powers,
neither height nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ
Jesus our Lord." (1 John 4:4b, Romans 8:37, 8:18, 8:28, Ephesians
3:16-19, Romans 8:38-39)
There's a quote I found in one of Ellen White's books about Jesus (Desire
of Ages) that I instantly loved: "He would ascend to the Father,
to be again the Adored of the angels; and thither His murderers
could never come."
Jesus would no longer be constrained to dwell in the smog of
hatred. He would no longer abide in the tension of danger. He would be able to
let His guard down and not have to fight off lies and mind games anymore (and
other types of assaults). More than that, His environment would be (and is)
permeated with the celebration of who He is rather than with godless character
assassination. Oh the relief He would know (and now enjoys). And the Holy
Spirit impressed it on my heart that although we're not in heaven, when we
enter the haven of our relationship with God by tuning out the
world and turning our eyes on Jesus, we taste a little of this safety and
celebration. When we abide in the haven of God's love in
Christ Jesus, safety is central and pain is peripheral. And there are graced
moments when we can even tune out the pain and only be conscious of God's
goodness as He restores our souls. Satan, his demons and the people who become
their pawns in trying to murder our souls can never enter the haven of
God's love. It is an utterly safe place that travels with us wherever we go -
oh how I love this part of being a Christian! It is a place we can all retreat
to inside our heads (no one can take it away from us) as we commune with God in
the new hearts He's given us (Ezekiel 36:26-27), new hearts which are now
separate from our sinful nature - circumcised to God. In the haven of
God's love, "despite the roar of our days, our hearts [can] grow
still" (God With Us).
Even when we might feel convicted to remain in a situation that is
unfair to us, even if we faithfully follow God into a situation that is
dangerous, always within us will be a safe place for our souls in the haven of
God's love in our hearts as we commune with the Lover of our souls, the King of
angel armies. It is a treasure beyond telling.
•
Promised Light.
Oh the glory of fulfilled prophecy!
Oh the glory of a seemingly impossible hope come true after so
much waiting...!
Oh the glory of God's ability to speak substance
into nothing like only the Creator can.
Light had been promised to the Jewish nation because darkness
needed no promise to increase. Negatives need no reinforcement, but positives
always do. The promise that was needed was an assurance that deliverance would come,
because the encroaching moral darkness was about to become suffocating for the
light of the human spirit. And this darkness was owing to God's nemesis - the
antithesis of light, and therefore the antithesis of love and truth: Satan, the
father of lies and abuse - the spawn of darkness.
The Jews - the original people of promise - were darkened by
Satan's deceptions about God's true nature through the eroding spiritual abuse
of the men in religious leadership who used their positions of power to twist
God's original ceremonial system into a perversion that served themselves while
exploiting everyone else.
Because the original people of promise were darkened, they weren't
shining to the surrounding nations as they would have if they were in a healthy
flow of give and take with God. Stagnant seasons like that are why God never
puts all His eggs in one basket. Wise men from foreign countries saw the star
(the huge concentration of angels traveling to bear witness to Christ's birth)
and they followed it to Bethlehem. They investigated, and in so doing gave the
spiritual abusers in religious leadership another chance to re-engage as it
became obvious that the circumstances of prophecy's fulfillment were plain as
day.
The wise men were gentiles, so from one angle you could say they
were people walking in darkness.
And they saw a great light.
They didn't just physically see it.
They got it.
And they worshiped Jesus.
Gentiles got it before the informed people of promise, because the
promise threatened their control. But there was a remnant of the people of
promise who did get it a little after the wise men.
The shepherds.
They weren't people who had a formal education, so from another
angle you could say they were also people walking in darkness (in a sense
everyone was in one way or another). They were not the elite, they were not
those who had most access to Scripture, who had most reason to be attuned.
And they saw a great light.
They didn't just physically see it.
They also got it.
And they also worshiped Jesus.
This is encouragement for us.
The shepherds were common people, people with no social prowess.
People who didn't have education.
People who didn't have influence.
But they had integrity.
They had a desire to see the Lord.
And it was rewarded.
We are in a time of
severe darkness in the 21st century. Darkness needs no promise for us to know
it will increase on its own. Such is how atrophy and entropy work in the sphere
of humanity from the highest pursuits of morality down to the most basic levels
of human decency. And Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew that in end times -
because of the increase of wickedness - that the love of many would grow cold
(Matthew 24:12). By His own mouth, we hear love compared to something that is
supposed to be a warming substance inextricable from holiness and antithetical
to evil. And because love grows cold that means hearts are growing dark. We're
in an age where we're longing to feel like God is with us, longing to not be
alone, longing to not be in the dark. And there is a promised light that we in
the present can look forward to - the Second Advent of Jesus, the Second
Christmas, which will be more than the dawn of redeeming grace. It will be the
dawn of eternity wherein the remnant people of the human race will make the
realms of endless day their forever Home.
Even so, come Lord Jesus.
•
The Joy That Thrilled All Heaven!
I designed this vocally challenging medley the way I did because I
am so tired of hearing renditions of the more joyous Christmas carols
that sag without spirit, that plod on without appropriate
animation. (I don't regret it, but it did come back to bite me when the
first performance date fell the day after our church congregation losing a
sweet lady named Linda we loved earlier than expected to cancer. I had
practiced it so many times with exuberance and catharsis, but when the night
came to actually perform it, I had suppressed grief locked in my vocal chords
and could not do it justice like all the times I had at home. But while that
felt like a loss, I realize that I probably wouldn't have been doing justice to
Linda's memory if I was able to do a song about heaven-thrilling joy justice
the day after she passed away. The second performance was slightly better but
still difficult. But I've reconciled myself to the unique circumstances playing
an undeniable role in my voice struggling with what it had always soared
through prior to the loss.)
The title - "The Joy That Thrilled All Heaven!" - I got
from Ellen White in Desire of Ages. I read it in passing and then
did a double-take. YES! That seemed to me to be an appropriate way of describing
the joy heaven must have felt to know that
the Son of God had gotten through the pregnancy and had been born into
the human race! And more than just the joy of the moment, there was an
overarching spiritual joy that was looking into the future. The joy that
thrilled all heaven can thrill us head to toe as well - because it's the
joy God gives (it already thrills the angels!).
It's not contingent on avoiding sadness.
It's a joy that can coexist with grief.
It's a joy that redeems grief and anchors the human soul while
it's being blown about by brutal circumstances.
It's a joy that is the very opposite of naive.
It's a joy that has known the worst and is somehow, divinely undiminished.
It's a joy that somehow doesn't have scars, a joy that doesn't limp,
a joy that cannot be subdued by the battering of suffering, a joy that somehow
multiplies even as suffering and darkness seem to spread, because just
as where sin abounds, grace abounds even more, where darkness abounds, light is
going to abound all the more and give it no quarter.
When I dwell on it, this kind of joy brings my weary heart to deep
tears as I remember that yes there is - thank God! - HOPE that
gives me back to myself when I've been utterly disheartened by "life"
on this fallen planet. Because Jesus came to make His blessings flow far
as the curse is found - leaving no part of the curse unconquered
- there is a goodness strong enough to beat evil and
preserve me in the midst of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and one day that
goodness will be all we know, Hallelujah!
•
Sacred Mystery.
The grandeur of this is not easily conveyed in words.
It can never be grasped without an open heart.
It cannot be grasped merely with the mind.
You must be open to trembling in awe and responding with worship
as this intimate scandal dawns upon your heart.
The Incarnation is what opened the era of having an
unfathomably personal relationship with God. The Incarnation
is what made intimacy with God possible for anyone and everyone - not just the
famous patriarchs and prophets, but for all people so that we
could all be one in Christ.
For women, not just men.
For trafficked humans, not just free people.
For people of color and minorities, not just the privileged.
For foreign cultures, not just yours.
For the mentally handicapped, not just the brilliant.
For the disabled, not just the glorious.
For the disfigured, not just the gorgeous.
For young people, not just the older generations.
For the innocent, not just the experienced.
For the poor, not just the wealthy.
For blue collar lay people, not just the academics.
For victims and survivors, not just "normal" people.
For repentant offenders, not just victims and survivors.
For broken people, not just healthy people.
For people who have sinned greatly, not just those with few
regrets.
And so on.
Through the Incarnation, God began to show us (and
His faithfulness shows us still) just how deeply He longs for full
union with us. He became one of us in Jesus.
In Jesus is full union between divinity and humanity. The Living Word became
helpless and voiceless for nine months and remained wordless for as many months
as it took Him to learn how to talk and develop a vocabulary like we all had
to. His humility in submitting to such a reorientation utterly floors me.
Slow down and pray for God to help your heart touch the
reality of what I've just told you. It's like touching a force field,
but in a way that doesn't nearly kill you. But you are blown
away by the substance of this truth.
We humans can be misguided in how we seek to identify with what we
love. Fans of superheroes dress up like them and try to act like them.
Something in us wants to be so close to them that we almost become them.
There's a merging that we crave when we put a paramount value on something that
appears to promise us life and power.
Loving something always leads to identifying with it.
We don't deserve to be loved like that, but God did
anyway, though not from the crooked and clouded motives our fallen humanity is
riddled with. He didn't love us in a selfish way, pretending to be something
He's not in order to make Himself feel more powerful. Oh, so far from it...
God loved us through Jesus in the most unselfish way possible. The
shining paradox is that He both expanded Himself to become something
He'd never been before (human) and incalculably reduced Himself
to become a member of the fallen, mercy-abusing, and
dignity-destroying species He had created (human). (And it blows me
away that God went to so much self-costing effort to save and
redeem us rather than wiping the universe clean of us and starting over. It
blows me away when I let myself sink into this truth...)
While His character never changed and is the same yesterday,
today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8), He underwent an corporeal, ontological
pushing and pulling, stretching and squashing,
expansion and reduction - a holy contortion of love in order
to become one of us, in order to speak the language of our hearts
more intimately than ever, in order to crawl right into the center of our
disintegrating condition and breathe its atmosphere, in order to redeem us from
the inside out through union with His sinless self.
"...the Word of God in its fullness -
the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now
disclosed to the Lord's people...the glorious riches of this mystery, which is
Christ in you, the hope of glory."
(Colossians 1:25b-26, 27b)
God loving us so completely and committedly that
He crawled into our condition to live there permanently
and be our hope of glory (since we are utterly hopeless,
incapable and barren of merit on our own) - this is the heart
and soul of Scripture.
This is what the Bible is about.
•
The Greatest Epiphany.
The greatest epiphany is when you know who God is.
When the heart of God is made manifest to the eyes of your heart.
It's never something you talk yourself into.
It's always a gift that is suddenly given to you, but as gently as
velvet while your soul tremblingly opens wide in response to the Still Small
Voice that has touched your heart's ability to see.
God's heart interacts with our sin and pain like light with
darkness and love with isolation. The darkness cannot stand or stay. The isolation
melts into union. Love will save us from our sin. Love is greater than our
pain. God is Light in our darkness, Presence in our vacancies, Fulfillment in
the midst of our gnarliest longings. The Uncreated - the One who has no origin,
but always was and is and will be the great I AM - now shines through the
created - a sea of fallen, desperately unworthy souls. The One without origin
who always has been has wrought a miracle through which He can indwell His
created ones who are so small and so predictable and so frustrating. And
through His faithfulness, He can make them good again through union with
Himself, in whom there is no darkness at all.
This is an experience: Your heart locks eyes with the reality of
who God is in all the glory of His compelling, otherworldly,
incalculable goodness. His capabilities are fathomless. It truly is
a sin to worry. Worrying is an act, an engagement of your
energies that separates you from God because it is investing in a jagged yet
cyclical line of thought that is wholly disjointed from who God is, utterly
disconnected from what is most substantive and true in the universe: what God
can do and how much He loves you.
January 13, 2006 was the first time I experienced this. It was my
first personal experience with God. It was one of the
strongest unions of information (the illumination of receiving messages of
love) and experience (the warmth and touch of being filled and wrapped in God's
loving embrace of light) that I've ever known. Messages and conclusions were
firing through my mind while emotions were undoubtedly sweeping clean through
me. I was 16 years old. In all the years since then, whenever I've come close
to doubting in the present, I remembered that experience in the past - a
powerful, blazing torch in the dark - because in that moment I knew I was
having a supernatural experience that simply was not of this
world. And even though I went through powerfully dark experiences
later on that shook my core like a rag doll, the light of having seen God's
heart shone in my darkness and all the dark experiences that have tried to
consume me have all been powerless to drown out the message of that memory.
I saw His heart.
I cannot unsee it.
Christmas 2016, I discovered a song that helped me to fix my eyes
on God's heart of light and love once again in the midst of a massive wound
that had found its second wind. It was this song that I used as the main part
of this section of the program. As a small introduction to it, I used a piece
of a hymn that is not a Christmas carol. This hymn was sung at the funeral of a
woman who had been a second mother to me and was then torn permanently and
suddenly from thousands of human hearts through a car accident on October 14,
2011. I cried violently and uncontrollably at her funeral (and several times
before and after that, on & off again for about two weeks straight).
Sometimes it left me physically gasping for air. I'd never cried like that
before and only about two times since then have I ever come close to that. My
grief was full-bodied and overpowering and dark. It came in waves. I saw a
friend of mine (her name is Jasmine) I hadn't seen in years who also loved her.
Upon seeing each other, we instantly walked to each other and hugged like
magnets. We kept vigil over each other during the funeral as our sobbing took
turns. I held her when her sobbing started. She held me during mine. I can't
remember if I was crying or not when I heard the hymn. But I remember it was
sung with quiet solidity and beauty by Michaela Lawrence Jeffery. It's been a
staple in my playlists ever since. I changed the lyrics of the portion I used
by taking pieces from different verses and making them into one new verse and
by exchanging the word "love" for "light."
O Light that will not let me go
I rest my weary soul in Thee
My heart restores its borrowed ray
And feels the Promise is not vain
That morn shall tearless be
O Light that will not let me go...
I weep when I meditate on how many times and in how many ways
God would not let the darkness have me, when Light came
looking for me - amidst my own sin and its shame, and amidst the imposed shame
and sins of others against me - to pull me out of the pit and wrap me in
Himself.
This is redeeming grace.
"What better news is there to the abused than the fact that
Scripture is adamant [that] Jesus has no dark side?" (Beth Moore)
Oh how I LOVE that.
Jesus has no dark side.
In Him is no darkness at all.
No obscurity.
No lying.
No danger.
Only truth.
Only love.
Only clarity.
Only reliable substance that will not pull the
rug out from underneath our hearts.
Only a loving warmth that will never leave us out in the cold.
In Jesus' prayerful communion with His Father, He ended it with
John 17:26, saying:
"I
have made You known to them and will continue to
make You known in order that the love You have for Me will
be in them and that I Myself may be in them."
How could the consummation of this be only informational and not
an experience?! Receiving the most potent information - positively and
negatively - always results in an experience of pain or pleasure. Information
and experience were never meant to be demonized and segregated. They were
always meant to be married and mutually affirming. And in John 17:26, I wrote
out what Jesus is describing as it dawned on me, personally:
"Jesus wants His Father's love for Him (and
Jesus is perfect; the Father's love for Jesus is the gushing, free love for
something that has no flaw and causes no pain) and His
own very Presence, the presence of His incredible existence, to be IN me!
Jesus has prayed that the ravishing love perfection
deserves and His own presence of
1: love that understands and
2: power that protects and
3: peace that soothes and
4: light that clears away darkness
would be inside of me! He prayed that it would
be possible and available! I need never feel shame ever again for wanting to
experience His Presence of Love and Light in my heart and psyche ever again! It
is unbiblical to feel shame over such a desire!! Jesus wants
it for me! It was His beautiful idea first. Experiencing His Presence is His
will!"
My heart is heavy both with gratitude to God for this rich
revelation and also with awareness of the effectiveness of Satan in making it
so hard to see God that I would need (and be so overjoyed by) such an extensive
clarification of what should be so biblically obvious upon reading Scripture:
that God is kind, not a sadist, that He is loving, not spiritually abusive,
that He wants the best for me and that it will be a best that
I can experience, not just an abstract best I am ordered to accept
on cold, blind faith.
"Love is about showing, about manifestation, about epiphany."
(Emilie Griffin)
In June 2013, I wrote the following in response to the beginning
of God bringing me out of the longest and darkest season of inner death and
spiritual separation I've ever known. It was a season of reaping many bitter
seeds I'd sown over all the years of not responding to my pain
with faith. It was more torturous for me than the violent grief I described
earlier. And so, as you can imagine, to begin to experience a resurrection
dawning in my soul let loose deep springs within me as God
transformed the worst era of my life into my greatest anchor of conviction.
"Dear Jesus"
By Chloe Danielle Murnighan ©
Dear Jesus, hello again
I'm so glad I have You to talk to
This never happened to me before
This thing I have to go through
I don't know what I'd do without You
I'm so blessed that I can't lose You
Even if I wanted to because
You saved me for the best
And me for the best
And my heart will always long for You
You've ruined me for less
Dear Jesus, draw me close to You
Dear Jesus, thank You so much!
What a wonderful world You've made
This never happened to me before
This life with You that others trade
I don't know where I'd be without You
I'm so amazed at all You went through
Just so I'd always have You, oh God
You saved me for the best
And my heart will always long for You
You've ruined me for less
Dear Jesus, draw me close to You
Dear Jesus, I am so sorry
For all those times I rejected You
I know I died inside each time
That I tried saying goodbye to You
I don't know why I did that to You
I can't believe I tried to leave You
When all You ever did was that
You saved me for the best
And my heart will always long for You
You've ruined me for less
Dear Jesus, draw me close to You
Please forgive my sins
Wash me white as snow
Bring truth to my inmost being
Where only You would know
Create in me a clean heart
As if I'm in a world apart
A haven where I bloom
Where all I care about is You because
You saved me for the best
And my heart will always long for You
You've ruined me for less
Dear Jesus, draw me close to You
I love You, I love You, I love you.
•
Our Answer.
Because the greatest epiphany is to
see who God really is and be forever moved by it, our answer
is to fix our eyes upon Jesus and lose our autonomy in identifying with the one
true Lover of our souls who is both our Man of Sorrows and Hope of Glory.
Jesus embodied the nucleus of our "why" questions. Jesus
made God bright as day. The answer is not the removal of suffering. The answer
is intimately partaking of Jesus' life. The answer is knowing Jesus through
participating in both His sufferings and His resurrection and victory over the
darkness. The answer is His Healing Presence making our suffering peripheral
and bearable. Our answer is the Light that will shatter all confusion: Jesus.
He experienced total abandonment so we would never have to. Jesus told us that
if we remain in Him, He will remain in us. Our pain doesn't need to
separate us from God. Our pain doesn't need to make us utterly
bereft of communion and connection. And even while we may writhe in pain that
there are so few humans who will connect with us when we're
hurting, even while we might even be resentful that "only God" (!!)
is always there rather than the human contact we crave, remember this: God
is the safest Person to connect with when you're suffering - the only completely safe
Person. Extremely dysfunctional bonds can be made when you connect
with the wrong person during a season of suffering, and those bonds can produce
almost unbearable fruit of renewed and exponentiated suffering that makes your
heart bleed in brand new dimensions.
God is the only Person we can fully give ourselves over to in the
throes of our suffering and the end result be completely beautiful.
Our answer is not the removal of suffering.
Our answer is that our experience of suffering can change.
Our answer is that because Jesus is greater than our pain and He is
Christ in us, the embodiment of our hope of glory, He can make us
greater than our own suffering. He can expand the geography of your
soul so that suffering no longer towers threateningly over you, but becomes
small in comparison with the meaning and beauty that restore your heart and
shed blessed light on your pain-darkened, aching mind.
Philippians 3:10 paints the picture that to really have intimacy
with Jesus means tasting His pain, not just His power. And when you think about
love, your heart remembers that love makes you want to share your loved one's
pain. Love hurts at the thought of its beloved suffering alone. The way to
relieve suffering is to share in it - is to let it be a realm of communion with
God and - carefully - with others. Connection is the medicine the tames pain to
a dull roar we can live with. "What's the answer to suffering in this
world? Destroy it with co-suffering..." (Ann Voskamp)
Some wounds and their corresponding pain you can't prevent.
Some wounds and their corresponding pain you just don't fully get
over (on this side of heaven).
You learn to make room for them.
You give God permission to enlarge your soul.
You are willing to let God lead you into mystery, into a
transformation you cannot quickly understand, but which will become the
reorienting anchor of your life if you keep holding onto God, if you keep being
present to Him no matter how shabby or slaughtered you feel.
You've heard the phrase, "slowly but surely," and it
dawned on me recently that sometimes slowly means surely.
Lasting change is almost never quick change. Lasting change is almost always
slow change. And on that note, I chime in with Teilhard de Chardin who wrote to
"trust in the slow work of God."
And while we are pregnant with waiting, let us fix our eyes upon
Jesus.
We are not a people with nothing to look forward to.
We are not a people who have nothing right now.
Turn your eyes upon Jesus.
Look full in His wonderful face,
as the song sings.
Peer deeply into His incredible life of love and
light in the Gospels.
Camp there. Make it the filter through which everything else must
be sifted through before you allow it into your heart. Stay there.
As my friend Alison Segura (artist name Nosila) has written:
"The heart of the matter
The only thing that lasts
The issue, the substance is Jesus
The heart of the matter
The one thing that holds fast
The center, the focus is Jesus."
(The Heart of the Matter)
Turn your eyes upon the Being in whom all of heaven's riches were
poured out in order to save, redeem, comfort, transform, and even glorify
ragamuffins such as we!
Glory to God in the highest!
•
Homecoming.
The song that makes up the lion's share of this medley in the
program is a song I'm pretty sure I instantly loved. Just the opening
instrumentation felt like God's hand gently touching my forehead as He told me
to rest and just be present to the pain I was in and the truth it was telling
me about the condition I was in. And as the song goes on, it sang a prayer over
me that made me feel God's love and comfort. I feel all of that every time I
listen to it afresh.
I was in between homes the first time I discovered this song.
It was early December 2016 and my husband and I were almost at the
end of a temporary, 3.5-month stay in a single-wide trailer. Most of our
belongings were in a storage unit several hours away where we had been rushed
to shove them, having been given only a week to dismantle and pack up our home
(which my mother had just finished helping me unpack and furnish
and nest in just 2 months earlier) and move to our "trailer
situation" with no guarantee of employment beyond the end of the year.
Decorating all of this were the broken hearts of the beloved people we were
forced to leave behind, thinly veiled contentment and smarm from the few who
did not love us, the discovery of false friends, character assassination
against us both from leaders we had formerly trusted, sexual slander - also
from them - aimed at me specifically, several other shades of dishonesty and
abuses of power, as well as the mindblowing gall the main leader had in saying
to my husband after most of the above: "Don't let yourselves become
victims." It was a quaint little cyanide cherry on top that was - for
me - almost the straw that broke the camel's back. I wish I
could tell you that what I've just written was an exaggeration. The truth is
that it's merely a condensation of the nightmare we lived.
Our ministry situation involved a 1-hour commute both ways,
meaning 2 hours of driving every time we went in. One of the few things about
that season that I felt God's hand in was that our temporary residence was
ensconced in an environment of solitude and nature, and every morning and
evening our trailer gave us an expansive, healing view of sunrises and sunsets
that lit up the nearby lake with glory. God provided so that my suffering could
be encapsulated in the beauty of His creation and in the safety of solitude so
that I could freely grieve in private.
He provided other gifts as well. Sweet souls, children and adults
(especially children), who were each like a caress of fresh, cool air against
my hot cheek. There was literally a moment early on in this season when a child
who barely knew me just toddled up to where I was sitting and started touching
my face with her soft and cool little hands and smiling up at me with eyes that
sparkled with delight I hadn't had time to earn. My heart surged and I almost
began crying because it was one of those few moments when I knew God
was loving on my broken heart through the sweet little one who was loving on
me. Through her innocence God was speaking to my heart to remind me that I
wasn't what everyone was saying I was, that all the nightmarish smog around my
soul was not the truest thing.
That little girl and her spunky sparkle gave me joy and made me
laugh several times during our stay there. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote that
"The soul is healed by being with children," and even though the
slander against me should have meant that I shouldn't have been chosen for it
(another example of the staggering and sloppy inconsistencies of those who
sinned against us), I was placed in charge of the childcare program for
the prophecy seminar we had been assigned to help with. It was my job to
minister to the children, but the truth is they ministered to me. I
was by no means healed by the time I found the song I began this section by
mentioning. I had been just stabilized enough to manage, but my heart still
needed extensive spiritual surgery. And it has taken the past two years since
then for me to start feeling like myself again.
For long into our time here in West Virginia, I was afraid to
invest much in unpacking and nesting beyond the basics for fear of some
unforeseeable and uncontrollable socio-spiritual hurricane sweeping through and
ripping me out of my home again. You see, prior to the nightmare I've
mentioned, I'd lived in several places for different periods of time since I
left my parents' home to start college, but in none of them did I ever feel the
sense of being full nested and able to rest. They were the places I lived, but
none of them felt like home. But 2 months before "the nightmare" I
finally accepted my mother's offer to fly across the country and help me finish
unpacking and settling all our belongings into a fully established home.
She and I bonded through the experience and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves as I
accepted her mentoring in the project I just couldn't-finish-myself of
homemaking.
I remember the Friday evening when we celebrated the fruit of all
our hard work while waiting for Russell to get home from his summer classes
several hours away. Mom and I had gone to thrift shops for used furniture and
to a carpet store for discounted remnants that could be cut into the shapes we
needed. The house was furnished, organized and clean. Outside the sky was clear
as the sun was beginning to set and somewhere inside I had lit a Yankee Vineyard candle
that smelled richly of perfect grapes. Sabbath was setting in and all was well
in my little realm. My heart rested and I felt an emotion I hadn't felt
in years - a deep sense of security and joy that I used to
feel as a child in my parents' home after we'd cleaned the house to get ready
for sundown and could finally rest and welcome the Sabbath.
It's for memories like these that I wish I could just impart or
upload the feeling so you could really know what I'm talking
about. It was an experience of substance and meaning and peace and groundedness
that permeated me with joy, contentment, gratitude and praise. And it wasn't
merely our home. We lived in a beautiful little neighborhood with beloved
friends nearby. It was the kind of neighborhood where you could leave your
house unlocked. One of our friends would often leave his delectable, utterly
mouthwatering monkeybread on our counter for us to find later and feast on with
glee. It wasn't just our house that gave me that feeling. It was as if my mom
and I fixing up the house was simply the last piece to click into place in
order to experience what home means in the broadest, comprehensive sense. Far
more predominant than any challenges and stressors we faced in ministry, we
were warmly embraced by love, beauty, and safety. It was a small foretaste of heaven.
The good thoroughly outweighed the bad and everything felt so stable...until it
didn't. Being ripped out of our home, out of our community, out of our
love-insulated life was one of the most excruciating things I've ever
experienced, compounded by the tears of those who loved us, the lies of those
who didn't, the silent pain of my husband, and my raging helplessness to fix
any of it.
The trauma of losing my home in so many ways made me fiercely
paranoid (that's code for "wildly terrified") about letting my guard
down again with anyone or anything for fear of having it ripped away again
while darkness ate my heart for dinner.
God doesn't want any of His loved ones to live that way.
The prison of fear is simply not livable, no matter how many
creature comforts you stock it with.
The only way to live that is suitable for a human being is
freedom.
Even in my most paranoid and brittle, self-protective state I knew
that it was not God's dream of me and that a lot of healing needed to happen. I
was under no illusions about the fact that I was not in good shape. But I
didn't know how to get where God wanted me to be in light of how few securities
are guaranteed in this life.
Ever so slowly, and in roundabout ways (another blog for another
time), God has been teaching me that the home of a human being's heart is His
heart.
Our home is the heart of God.
My home is the heart
of God.
My relationship with Him.
The Haven of His love in Christ Jesus that
nothing can separate me from.
God's heart is where I can safely store mine.
The one impregnable security I am guaranteed is
God's love for me.
God's love for me is stronger than the ways I die inside.
God's love for me is stronger than the ways my dignity is
assaulted.
God's love for me is stronger than the ways my safety is
threatened.
Because of this, I can have Home anywhere and everywhere that I
travel to or that I'm dragged to. Home can be there with me even when I'm
forced to go somewhere I don't want to be, when I'm forced to leave where I
want to stay. Home can be there with me even when what I love is ripped from my
arms while I'm powerless to stop it.
Home is the feeling of God's love and light inside me and
surrounding me in an embrace, filling me with His fullness and protecting me
with the atmosphere of His Presence, which Satan cannot break
into. Home is a candle burning brightly in my mind that the darkness has not
and cannot overcome. Sometimes Home is like a grand mansion in my heart when
I'm full of joy and sometimes it's a small, plain room with a simple cot where
God holds me while I cry over a situation that is all but barren of His
Presence.
Some have said that home is where the heart is. But that's not
good enough for me anymore. Not everywhere I've set my heart in the past could
last. I have felt so many things giving out beneath me. I just know inside of
me that the truest understanding of home is a spiritual reality, not a physical
one, and that at last being at home in God's heart of love and light is the
sweetest dream I could ever know, that any of us could ever know.
We need never be lonely if we remain in Jesus.
Not really. Not ever again.
We will always have Someone.
And He is more than enough to fill us with His fullness and enfold
our souls in safety.
He is more than enough to superabundantly regenerate what was
violated and stolen.
I can never be ripped out of my Home again.
And if you make the heart of God your Home, neither can you.
No matter what pains and losses and outrages do occur,
your heart can be safe and secure through it all.
Nestled, nourished in Love and Light.
In Him.
•
Love's Pure Light.
The devil's work that Jesus came to destroy (1 John 3:8) was the
work of separating us from the union with God humanity originally enjoyed in
Eden; the ugly work of making God seem dark - or even evil - to us. Jesus came
to give us union - to reunite and reconcile us to the Father who Himself loves
us (John 16:27). Jesus came to restore what was broken. To shine light into our
darkness. He came to lighten our night until the morning - coming very soon -
when all the wrongs will be made right with the permanence of eternity.
Luke 4 tells of how Jesus - shortly after the temptation by Satan
in the wilderness - went to His hometown of Nazareth, entered the synagogue and
stood up to read a passage of Scripture (from Isaiah 61) that one could argue
was the inaugural address of His ministry:
"The
Spirit of the Lord is on Me,
because
He has anointed Me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He
has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and
recovery
of sight for the blind,
to
set the oppressed free,
to
proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
And if you turn to Isaiah 61 and read, there are a few more verses
that fill out that first section:
"...to
proclaim the year of the Lord's favor
and
the day of vengeance of our God,
to
comfort all who mourn,
and
provide for those who grieve in Zion -
to
bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead
of ashes,
the
oil of joy
instead
of mourning,
and
a garment of praise
instead
of a spirit of despair.
They
will be called oaks of righteousness,
a
planting of the LORD
for
the display of His splendor."
For right now, yes, we are still waiting.
Some of us have experienced some of those blessings coming true
for us. A few of us have radiant testimonies of the richness of its
fulfillment. Much of the human family has yet to taste and see that the Lord is
good.
So yes, for right now we are still waiting.
We all - even those of us who have known what it
is to have an overflowing heart - have yet to see the unfurling of this
prophecy in its utter fullness.
Jesus destroyed the devil's work but He hasn't wiped it off the
face of the earth yet. It still twitches with a certain level of life, but its
core power has been dismantled and destroyed. Sin cannot rule over us because
we are now under grace. And it sets us free because God's redeeming grace
teaches us to say no to the darkness that wants to seduce us so it can swallow
us whole (Romans 6:11-14 & Titus 2:11-14). As Stasi Eldredge put it in a
Ransomed Heart podcast, "We suffer under a canopy of grace." We are
living now at the place in human history where it is darkest just before the
Dawn, yet even "the darkest" is not all there is. We have Love's Pure
Light with us to help us find our way and make a life
in even these conditions that we can be thankful for; a life
that brings glory to God and hope and help to harmed human beings as Jesus
breaks and multiples the little we have to give so it can feed thousands and
more.
The heaviness of our night has been lightened in both senses of
that word: both as a burden eased and as pitch blackness illuminated with hope.
"Hope which is seen is no hope at all" (Romans 7). We can't
physically see what we're hoping for, but we can see it by the eyes of faith.
And our faith can actually be nurtured by the fact that suffering is not
removed from us, because we are seeing and living a vitalizing miracle...! It
is the faith-building, heartening experience of watching God make our
suffering dance. I know that might sound strange, but let me break this down:
it's one thing when a source of danger, pain, and harm just - poof! -
disappears, or when you're able to run away from it and start a new life.
That's nice in its own way, but what if it comes back? What if it finds
you? It's just not the strongest way of removing fear. What really
drives out all fear is watching God dominate the bully of the power that our
suffering wields - right in front of us again and again until
we have no doubt left in us. What really makes us complete in love is watching
God bend it to His will right in the middle of our lives - right in the heat of
a crisis - because through that, we get to watch over and over again as our
suffering is defeated by the Higher Power of Omnipotence, by our God who is
both epic and intimate in His unwavering commitment to us despite all our
inconsistencies.
Our time right now of waiting is an opportunity to experience in
a much deeper and more lasting way that the darkness of suffering is not what
is truest or most powerful, because Love and Light are. Because God
is. We can watch God's goodness dominate our pain into submission
so it no longer suffocates us. We can watch Him give us peace that passes
understanding in horrible situations that remain unresolved. We can watch the
light endlessly and resiliently shine in the darkness and not be overcome. We
can watch Him love us in the midst of Satan actively hating us
through ill and cruel human beings and not be disheartened by the dark evil
that so easily defeats us when we try to go it alone. We can watch God win over
and over and over. And in so doing, our faith grows stronger and stronger and
stronger.
But before I end, I hear a specific question making a specific
noise in my mind like a butterfly or bird that's pinned down but still alive,
and flapping to get free and fly. And I want to speak to it one last time.
Even though I no longer feel like I'm drowning in
my own suffering, I am positive that countless people have not found the
griphold I have that has been helping me catch my breath. I hear that "Why?" question
still echoing from
rape victims,
survivors of childhood sexual abuse,
humans who were beaten as children,
the children who are all being differently assaulted and consumed
right now,
minds that are being tortured and twisted,
psyches that are being battered through willful manipulation,
innocence that is being cauterized through betrayal,
lives that are being senselessly ended,
relationships being brutally cut off,
truth that is being silenced,
deceptions that are being performed,
sin that is being ignored,
minorities living in fear,
bodies that are being sold,
lies that are being told,
free wills that are being violated,
hearts that are being rejected,
love that is being discarded,
characters of kindness that are being smeared and defiled,
suffering humans who are being denied safety
and others being ripped out of their homes far more violently than
I was ripped from mine.
I hear a crying, guttural, broken groaning out of countless souls
in the human family around me: "Why did God let that happen to me?
Why is God letting this happen to me now?"
I don't know.
I would insult your dignity to pretend that I did.
But I do know that each of our answers do exist.
And while this is requires vigorous imagination, I know it will be
an answer good enough to eclipse and shrink our most traumatic,
soul-killing, core-throttling, violently destructive and nauseatingly
disheartening experiences-that-burned-our-hearts-to-dry-white-ashes into a
thing so small that it is not worth comparing with the glory that
will be revealed to us and - yes - in us
(Romans 8:18).
My PTSD will be a fleck of dust compared to my future glory.
This thought still makes me weep.
Because I have known the terror of feeling reduced to vaporous
helplessness, because I have lived for years in a struggle with negative side
effects that almost won't budge (that I can only change
ever-so-slowly) this truth means the world to me.
Because of this truth, I hang my helpless soul on Jesus.
I don't have to understand everything right now.
I gladly surrender my need to know.
But that doesn't mean there is nothing for
me to know...!
On the contrary, God has shown so much to me.
Volumes and volumes of insights and revelations have already
tipped the scales against the pain of mine that burned whole new caverns in my
being. I'm not even constantly conscious of all the things God has revealed to
me, but when I try to become present to all my lessons (still not remembering
everything, I'm sure), I am overwhelmed with gratitude. My
brothers and sisters, God is enough for me. (He is enough for
each of us as if we were the only person on earth!) And then I remember
that incalculably more glory is coming on top of this gratitude...
...and I am undone.
The assurance that one day all will be well - so
substantive that it pours fullness into my soul - takes away my restlessness to
know it all right now.
"My heart is not proud, LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore."
(Psalm 131)
My living experience with God slakes and stills
the part of me that thrashes for information from Him.
I know that all of our healing simply can't and won't happen
on this side of heaven.
In the Revelation of Jesus Christ, the apostle John wrote to us
about heaven: "Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as
clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the
middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the
tree of life... And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the
nations" (Revelation 22:1-2).
Healing will take place in heaven.
That means not all of our healing will happen here.
The leaves of the tree of life in heaven are
for the healing of the nations - for us.
Even after our bodies are glorified and we first arrive in heaven,
our hearts still won't be completely healed. Even with Christ in us
right now, how can we heal all the way when Satan is still
free to attack us, when we still have sinful nature? How can we experience full
healing before we experience heaven itself? How can there be full
healing in a world that is fallen?
No, the fullest healing will happen in heaven when we are utterly
free from sin and the relentless assaults of Satan. Whenever you feel
the pain you think you'll never get over, remember this:
heaven will heal it all.
When Jesus was crucified as a ransom to set us free, His heart was
raped by sins of the world on the cross. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that
Jesus became sins for us that we might become the righteousness
of God. Jesus experienced full union with sin even though He never
consented to sin. Jesus experienced the full union
with separation from God. His body wasn't
just beaten and tortured. His heart and psyche were gang-raped by
all the sins and crimes
of all human beings
against themselves
and against others
and against all living things
from the beginning of time
till the end of earth's history as we know it.
He became all of our heinous pain and all of our
raging failures in their purest, fullest form.
It is no wonder to me
that Jesus gave up His spirit
long before His body should have given out.
It is a wonder to me that Jesus lived as
long as He did with such an unspeakable horror happening to Him. One millisecond of that (probably
less) and one of us wouldn't even be anymore.
In doing this, Jesus experienced the victimization that
paradoxically gives us victory.
In doing this, Jesus was our atoning sacrifice.
I've heard atonement taught as "at-one-ment."
What this means is that Jesus came to create the way to union
between God and humans, to reconcile what was unbridgeable at infinite cost to
Himself. All our worst traumas combined are just a drop of
Christ's trauma on the cross.
I am not thankful for my PTSD, because it has made my spiritual
life and my relationships harder. But I am grateful for what God has
done with it - for how He has been creative to redeem the way my soul
has been wounded. When you've been traumatized, you need help
right away, because it's the kind of injury (in body or mind) that can quickly
affect everything about you and put it at serious risk. The
injury feels like too much for you, something that shatters
all sensations of control so that all you feel is two things: seriously
threatened and completely helpless. Trauma can leave you dead inside. It's the
worst kind of pain, the worst kind of wound. It leaves you feeling very, very
afraid - living with far more fear in general, even after the threat or the
actual harmful event is over.
Yet in a way I never could have predicted, God has used trauma to
actually connect me with His heart like never before. God
has used it to help me know His heart.
Experiencing profound powerlessness made the
Cross brand new for me. You see, both Jesus and Satan experienced
trauma during the weekend that changed everything. Jesus' trauma was in the
crucifixion. Satan's trauma was in the resurrection.
Jesus died from psychological trauma.
His body gave out long before it should have, physically.
And it was because of what happened to His heart.
And so I say this again with the utmost gravity:
His heart was raped by sin on the cross.
He was forced to experience the separation from God (spiritual
isolation and emotional loneliness of the purest, profoundest kind), as well as
the pain and punishment of spiritual crimes that He never
consented to commit. Jesus never consented to commit a single sin, but out
of love for us (while we still hated Him!) He chose to experience the
suffering of what it's like when darkness forces itself on the human heart. He
had the divine power to remove Himself at any time, but He chose to experience
as a human what total powerlessness against violation feels like. He never
deserved punishment, but even after 33 years of abuse from the fallen human
family, He chose to receive and absorb the punishment that
Hitler and others like him deserve, just to give them the option of repenting
and being transformed into the image of God!
Jesus never consented to sin, but His heart was forced into union
with darkness (He became sin) so that He could be the
sacrifice that sets us free. Jesus' heart was raped for us. And not just once.
But for every sin of every human. Who wouldn't die from
something like that?! Only Love consents to experience pain
to spare someone else from a consequence (especially a righteously deserved
consequence). And the pain Jesus said yes to experiencing is something we will
never be able to calculate. And He loved us like that so that
no abuse, no addiction, no trauma, and no crime could ever be
stronger than the power of His Love and Light to change our lives and transform
who we are. God's love is stronger than the ways we die inside.
This is the God who humbles Himself to walk alongside
us through His Holy Spirit.
This is the triune God
who took the fullness of trauma into Himself so that we could be reconciled.
He did it so that trauma would not be the end of our story.
So that darkness would not be the end of our story.
As I mentioned earlier, Jesus' trauma was in the crucifixion.
Satan's trauma was in the resurrection. Satan's trauma was in the realization
that he was going to die, that he had lost the
war. Just like our trauma-triggers can give us flashbacks that make us suddenly
helpless and filled with fear, Satan is now triggered and made helpless by the
name of Jesus when we claim it as the deeply loved, infinitely valued, fully
embraced members of God's family that we either now are or can become. He
cannot stay when Jesus' name is claimed. He cannot maintain power when his
greatest flaming failure is triggered.
Indeed, God came down to earth in Jesus to lighten our night.
The love we're hungry for is the love that never leaves.
The light we yearn for is the light that illuminates our
night.
The love we're hungry for is the love that's strong enough
to stay with us through the darkness of our own
failures and the darkness others' failures plunge us into - to stay and show us
how we can still have an abundant life in spite of everything.
And when we get to Heaven,
Jesus is the only One who will keep His scars.
Every way in which our scars have held us back will be removed.
Such is God's Love.
Indeed, God's love is stronger than the ways we die inside.
And Love's Pure Light is now with us on earth in Jesus, our
Heavenly Peace.
Jesus, who gives us the wholeness of shalom that
passes our incomplete understanding of everything in our present that remains
unresolved.
Jesus, our hope of glory who is our everything.
Jesus, our Man of Sorrows in whom all things hold
together - even our pain and loss.
Jesus, the one true Lover of our souls.
I don't know what more I can say now except this:
"The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you.
The Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace."
(Numbers 6:24-26)
