Posts
As you can see, it's been a couple of years since I last wrote here. There's a good reason for that, that being that I've never actually liked or enjoyed writing. It comes out slowly, often painfully, occasionally agonizingly when I'm straining to put form to thoughts, emotions, and beliefs buried deep within my soul. It's not fun or easy for me and I don't like it.
That said, I've found to my chagrin that the very parts of writing that make it painful for me coincide remarkably with the value I gain out of it. Nothing else I attempt gives a concrete-ness to my thoughts, emotions, and beliefs like writing them down does. When I have a valuable thought and I don't write it down somewhere, somehow, it all too easily slips away from my consciousness and only resurfaces occasionally in fragments. Writing solidifies my learning process better than anything else I know.
I've barely written in the past five plus years.
You can imagine what that's done to my learning process. Everything I've learned over these past several years, most of them difficult, is deeply fragmented. This problem has compounded my capacity to read and absorb new information as well, to the point that for most of the past half-decade I've found myself unable to read anything constructive. I'd pick up a non-fiction book, read a few paragraphs, and have to put it down. I knew the information wasn't landing anywhere, so why read?
There were other things going on in these past seasons beyond just reading and writing issues, so the solution wasn't as simple as "just start writing again." But I might have solved it faster had I not had the problem backwards all this time. I thought I wasn't writing because I couldn't read, so there either wasn't anything I could write or I had to try to write EVERYTHING, and that was too daunting. Only recently have I realized that was backwards and I need to start by writing. So here I am. I'm starting...somewhere. There's no grand plan for how to sort through EVERYTHING (I've had plenty of schemes to that effect over the years). I do have a grand plan, one I'm excited about, but the purpose behind it is substantially different than the places I've gotten stuck at before. I'll explain more about that later.
For now, here I am again, writing, doing warm-up exercises for an internal voice that hasn't spoken above a whisper in years. If you'd like to hear that voice, subscribe and come along for the ride.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Friday, October 21, 2011
Spiritual Formation - Do you really want to be healed?
Last night I read a chapter in a book that I found myself underlining seemingly half the pages, connecting with on all sorts of levels. It's been a long time since I posted anything here, but I thought it was time to break that and share some of that chapter here.
Book: Renovation of the Church by Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken
Chapter: Spiritual Formation: Do You Really Want To Be Healed?
"Since the Donner experience, we have been enthralled with the possibility that human beings can actually change and become more like Jesus. We've oriented our church around this conviction. We have tried to take seriously Jesus' charge to 'make disciples' (Matthew 28:19). As we apprentice under Jesus, by God's grace we can
Put to death the misdeeds of the body. (Roman 8:13)
Be made new in the attitude of your minds. (Ephesians 4:23)
Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:24)
As Paul says, we were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.' (Romans 6:4) People increasingly immersed in the Kingdom of God will experience an authentic heart-level change. They will gradually become new and better people. This is not an addendum to the gospel but a central tenet of it. This is not for the elite few who are interested but normative for all who put their trust in Jesus.
...
Perhaps our greatest lesson from the past decade is that it is spiritually formative to be dissatisfied and unable to resolve all that dissatisfaction. In fact, there is hardly a better catalyst for transformation than to not get what we want. Sitting in the dissatisfaction, without frantically trying to resolve it, can do wonders for the human soul.
...
Ronald Rolheiser observes:
'Our lives become consumed with the idea that unless we somehow experience everything, travel everywhere, see everything, and are a part of a large number of other people's experiences, then our own lives are small and meaningless. We become impatient with every hunger, every ache, and every non-consummated area within our lives and we become convinced that unless every pleasure we yearn for is tasted, we will be unhappy. We stand before life too greedy, too full of expectations that cannot be realized, and unable to accept that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. When this happens an obsessive restlessness leaves us unable to rest or be satisfied because we are convinced that all lack, all tension, and all unfulfilled yearning is tragic. Thus, it becomes tragic to be alone; to be unmarried; to be married, but not completely fulfilled romantically and sexually; to not be good-looking; or, be unhealthy, aged, or handicapped. It become tragic to be caught up in duties and commitments which limit our freedom, tragic to be poor, tragic to go through life and not be able to taste every pleasure on earth and fulfill every potential inside of us. When we are obsessed in this way it is hard to be contemplative. We are too focused on our own heartaches to be very open and receptive.'
...
One man's story illustrates the split between salvation and transformation. We met over several weeks to discuss his struggling marriage. He is a long-time Christian and has been in the church for much of his life. He is well-versed in the language of the Christian subculture. After hearing his story, it was obvious his marital system needed to be overhauled. They had fallen into a series of destructive ruts, and no amount of tweaking was going to help. Since I was talking to him, we focused on God's invitation to trust and follow in spite of his circumstances. We talked about what it would look like to choose a path of spiritual formation in this situation. The only thing he could control was who he was becoming. In spite of whatever else had to happen, for the marriage to get better, he was going to have to get better. There were specific issues in the relationship where he had been passive and complicit. Moving toward Christlikeness meant counter-intuitive action. He couldn't keep relating the same way and hope for a different result. It was time for him to make a holy mess. He needed to courageously wade into some long-overdue conflicts with his wife. He needed to initiate conversation about the marriage. But this pushed him beyond his comfort zone. He kept hesitating to make a move. Did he want to be healed? He was stuck.
Now he is a good man, a nice guy. This man loves god and does his best to follow Jesus. Obviously, there are situations and relationships in life that don't get fixed (and maybe can't get fixed). The fact was, his spiritual formation might not improve his marriage at all. It is, after all, a broken world. But the end result of the marriage was not the point. The tragedy is that this man has drifted along for years as a 'happy' and 'nice' Christian, without realizing the gospel he believes invites him, indeed calls him, to transformation. He doesn't have to live with fear, passivity, and complicity. Transformation is possible through the Spirit of the resurrected Christ.
Somewhere along the way, though, it became acceptable for this man---and many of us---to profess faith in Christ without signing up to be transformed. Perhaps this inform's Dallas Willard's remarks:
...
(and here are a few more shorter snippets from the chapter that I just couldn't leave out here)
~"We study to conquer, not to be changed. We dig deeper into the Bible to sharpen our understanding of its content and meaning, not to have it sharpen us."
~"We are afraid of turning grace into works. So instead, we turn grace into divine magic that does everything for us."
~"Generalities are a good hiding place. 'Jesus died for my sins' is less scandalous than 'Jesus dies for my out-of-control anger that severely damages the people I love most.' 'I'm a sinner' is easier to admit than 'I'm a lustaholic.' In generalities, no one is exposed. But no one really grows. Real transformation happens in the unattractive details of our lives."
~"Our anger comes easily and routinely because of our many years of training in it."
~"Our issues and conditions have a way of leaking into our identity and becoming part of who we are. We forge a bond with our dark side. We hate our sins, but we also love them. We want freedom from our struggles, but we want to hold on to them. We can't live another day wit them, but we can't imagine life without them....Spiritual formation into Jesus' likeness is liberation from sin conditions, but who will we be after we are changed? What will life be like without anger or lust or fear or control? The uncertainty solidifies us as a dabbler in Christian discipleship."
~"We learned about the impact of hurry on the human soul when we started the retreat with four hours of solitude---and found out later that half the group spent most of the time sound asleep! Their bodies were ravished by their ruthless commitment to hurry."
Book: Renovation of the Church by Kent Carlson and Mike Lueken
Chapter: Spiritual Formation: Do You Really Want To Be Healed?
"Since the Donner experience, we have been enthralled with the possibility that human beings can actually change and become more like Jesus. We've oriented our church around this conviction. We have tried to take seriously Jesus' charge to 'make disciples' (Matthew 28:19). As we apprentice under Jesus, by God's grace we can
Put to death the misdeeds of the body. (Roman 8:13)
Be made new in the attitude of your minds. (Ephesians 4:23)
Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:24)
As Paul says, we were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.' (Romans 6:4) People increasingly immersed in the Kingdom of God will experience an authentic heart-level change. They will gradually become new and better people. This is not an addendum to the gospel but a central tenet of it. This is not for the elite few who are interested but normative for all who put their trust in Jesus.
...
Perhaps our greatest lesson from the past decade is that it is spiritually formative to be dissatisfied and unable to resolve all that dissatisfaction. In fact, there is hardly a better catalyst for transformation than to not get what we want. Sitting in the dissatisfaction, without frantically trying to resolve it, can do wonders for the human soul.
...
Ronald Rolheiser observes:
'Our lives become consumed with the idea that unless we somehow experience everything, travel everywhere, see everything, and are a part of a large number of other people's experiences, then our own lives are small and meaningless. We become impatient with every hunger, every ache, and every non-consummated area within our lives and we become convinced that unless every pleasure we yearn for is tasted, we will be unhappy. We stand before life too greedy, too full of expectations that cannot be realized, and unable to accept that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. When this happens an obsessive restlessness leaves us unable to rest or be satisfied because we are convinced that all lack, all tension, and all unfulfilled yearning is tragic. Thus, it becomes tragic to be alone; to be unmarried; to be married, but not completely fulfilled romantically and sexually; to not be good-looking; or, be unhealthy, aged, or handicapped. It become tragic to be caught up in duties and commitments which limit our freedom, tragic to be poor, tragic to go through life and not be able to taste every pleasure on earth and fulfill every potential inside of us. When we are obsessed in this way it is hard to be contemplative. We are too focused on our own heartaches to be very open and receptive.'
...
One man's story illustrates the split between salvation and transformation. We met over several weeks to discuss his struggling marriage. He is a long-time Christian and has been in the church for much of his life. He is well-versed in the language of the Christian subculture. After hearing his story, it was obvious his marital system needed to be overhauled. They had fallen into a series of destructive ruts, and no amount of tweaking was going to help. Since I was talking to him, we focused on God's invitation to trust and follow in spite of his circumstances. We talked about what it would look like to choose a path of spiritual formation in this situation. The only thing he could control was who he was becoming. In spite of whatever else had to happen, for the marriage to get better, he was going to have to get better. There were specific issues in the relationship where he had been passive and complicit. Moving toward Christlikeness meant counter-intuitive action. He couldn't keep relating the same way and hope for a different result. It was time for him to make a holy mess. He needed to courageously wade into some long-overdue conflicts with his wife. He needed to initiate conversation about the marriage. But this pushed him beyond his comfort zone. He kept hesitating to make a move. Did he want to be healed? He was stuck.
Now he is a good man, a nice guy. This man loves god and does his best to follow Jesus. Obviously, there are situations and relationships in life that don't get fixed (and maybe can't get fixed). The fact was, his spiritual formation might not improve his marriage at all. It is, after all, a broken world. But the end result of the marriage was not the point. The tragedy is that this man has drifted along for years as a 'happy' and 'nice' Christian, without realizing the gospel he believes invites him, indeed calls him, to transformation. He doesn't have to live with fear, passivity, and complicity. Transformation is possible through the Spirit of the resurrected Christ.
Somewhere along the way, though, it became acceptable for this man---and many of us---to profess faith in Christ without signing up to be transformed. Perhaps this inform's Dallas Willard's remarks:
In our efforts to orient our church around spiritual formation, we discovered how tempting it is for people to settle for a cheap alternative rather than the real thing. Some of us are consoled by the fact that, while we may not be experiencing transformation, at least we are frustrated by our complacency. We are satisfied with our spiritual dissatisfaction. We may be dealing with the same sin issue we were a decade ago, but at least we are frustrated about it. We may even like the impression others have of us as being frustrated by our lack of spiritual maturity. If we can't actually change, we can at least relish the fact that people think of us as wanting to change. We settle for impressing a few people. As C.S. Lewis said, 'We are far too easily pleased.' As Jesus put it, we have 'received [our] reward in full' (Matthew 6:5)."
...
(and here are a few more shorter snippets from the chapter that I just couldn't leave out here)
~"We study to conquer, not to be changed. We dig deeper into the Bible to sharpen our understanding of its content and meaning, not to have it sharpen us."
~"We are afraid of turning grace into works. So instead, we turn grace into divine magic that does everything for us."
~"Generalities are a good hiding place. 'Jesus died for my sins' is less scandalous than 'Jesus dies for my out-of-control anger that severely damages the people I love most.' 'I'm a sinner' is easier to admit than 'I'm a lustaholic.' In generalities, no one is exposed. But no one really grows. Real transformation happens in the unattractive details of our lives."
~"Our anger comes easily and routinely because of our many years of training in it."
~"Our issues and conditions have a way of leaking into our identity and becoming part of who we are. We forge a bond with our dark side. We hate our sins, but we also love them. We want freedom from our struggles, but we want to hold on to them. We can't live another day wit them, but we can't imagine life without them....Spiritual formation into Jesus' likeness is liberation from sin conditions, but who will we be after we are changed? What will life be like without anger or lust or fear or control? The uncertainty solidifies us as a dabbler in Christian discipleship."
~"We learned about the impact of hurry on the human soul when we started the retreat with four hours of solitude---and found out later that half the group spent most of the time sound asleep! Their bodies were ravished by their ruthless commitment to hurry."
Saturday, March 26, 2011
my reading list for the spring and summer
Hello everybody! By the end of this weekend I will be shutting down my facebook again for an unspecified time (though I may pop back on here and there, if I need to do something). But before I go I thought I'd share with you my plans for the next season of life I'm in. In short, it's reading, reading a TON. I feel like I've been back-logged in books for the past year or so; there have been plenty I wanted to read, but when I picked them up to do so I could barely get through even a page. Somehow I knew I couldn't absorb the information, that it wasn't time yet and I needed to take care of other things both inside and out first.
Well, over the last month and a half or so I've sensed the winds of my life shifting, signs of the seasons changing, and of of the biggest evidences of this has been a growing "book-lust" (for lack of a better term). I'll go on Amazon to by a book for me or a friend and I'll just start wandering around, or I'll be in Half Price Bookstore looking through every book on the clearance rack. My "wishlist" at Amazon is about to burst from the weight of the 23 books it now contains unless I alleviate it soon. It's time to read some books over here, and I can't wait for the weather to warm up enough for me to set up a little place on the front porch to get to it!
To give you a feel for what I'm embarking on, I want to share with you the current list of books on my "to read" bookshelves. At the end I'll share what I plan and hope to gain from all this, but for now just know that it's my goal to read 30-40 of these (so not all of them) between now and Labor Day. I'd love your thoughts on any or the whole of these books, especially ones you have read yourself.
And now, in no particular order, the books on my "to read" list:
Whole Life Transformation: Becoming The Change Your Church Needs
Keith Meyer
Heaven's Calling: A Memoir of One Soul's Steep Ascent
Leanne Payne
The Complete Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton
Crazy Love
Francis Chan
New Light on the Difficult Words of Jesus: Insights from His Jewish Context
David Bivin
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour vol. 3 and 5
Louis L'Amour
Love Wins:A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived
Rob Bell
God is the Gospel: Meditations on God's Love as the Gift of Himself
John Piper
Desiring God
John Piper
After Shock: Searching For Honest Faith When Your World is Shaken
Kent Annan
Jesus the Jewish Theologian
Brad Young
Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith
Marvin R. Wilson
Echoes of His Presence
Ray Vander Laan
God in Search of Man
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Herod King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans
Peter Richardson
The Politics of Jesus
John Howard Yoder
Apprenticeship With Jesus: Learning to Live Like the Master
Gary W. Moon
One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Ann Voskamp
After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters
N.T. Wright
The Kingdom Life: A Practical Theology of Discipleship and Spiritual Formation
Keith Meyer
Girl Meets God
Lauren Winner
The Broken Image
Leanne Payne
Setting Love In Order
Mario Bergner
The Jesus I Never Knew
Phillip Yancey
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Lesslie Newbigin
The Message and the Kingdom
Richard Horsley &Neil Asher Silberman
A Rabbi Talks with Jesus
Jacob Neusner
Transformed Into Fire
Judy Hougen
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction
Eugene Peterson
A Layman Looks at the Lord's Prayer
Phillip Keller
The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person
E. Stanley Jones
The Rest of the Gospel: When the Partial Gospel has Worn You Out
Dan Stone & Greg Smith
Kingdom Come: How Jesus Wants to Change the World
Allen Mitsuo Wakabayashi
Life of the Beloved
Henri Nouwen
Streams of Living Water
Richard Foster
In Christ
A.J. Gordon
The Ragamuffin Gospel
Brennan Manning
Simply Christian
N.T. Wright
Rediscovering the Kingdom
Myles Munroe
Surprised by Hope
N.T. Wright
The Great Omission
Dallas Willard
What's So Amazing About Grace
Phillip Yancey
The Spirit of the Disciplines
Dallas Willard
Knowing Christ Today
Dallas Willard
Abba's Child
Brennan Manning
NOT the Way it's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga
Renovation of the Heart
Dallas Willard
The Challenge of Jesus
N.T. Wright
Hearing God
Dallas Willard
Listening Prayer
Leanne Payne
A Traveler Toward the Dawn: The Spiritual Journey of John Eagan
edited by William J. O'Malley
The Irresistable Revolution
Shane Claiborne
Wounds That Heal
Stephen Seamands
Experiencing Father's Embrace
Jack Frost
Wired For Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Mind
William M. Struthers
Present Perfect
Greg Boyd
The Sacred Romance
Brent Curtis & John Eldredge
Blue Like Jazz
Donald Miller
TrueFaced
Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, & John Lynch
Becoming Human
Jean Vanier
The Divine Conspiracy
Dallas Willard
.....................................
And that's all for now! Plenty, I'm sure, though I don't doubt I'll add a few more to that list before this season ends, as well as take plenty off after reading them. Though I didn't list those books in any order other than how they're currently arranged on my bookshelf, if you know anything about them you may have seen a few themes emerge. For one, they're almost all books that will make a person think. A good percentage of them are thick, often difficult reads in which you need to follow the author's train of thought the whole way through in order to catch the full weight of his or her beliefs and convictions. That's certainly not going to make both reading and processing them an easy task, but one of the giftings God has given me is the ability to synthesize a lot of information, especially in areas I'm passionate about, and then to share it in a relevant and coherent manner. This will be the deepest testing of that gifting yet.
But to make a process like that worthwhile, you have to have a mission, a purpose, something to gain or achieve from all that work. This is where you may or may not have spotted some of the other patterns in all those books. With few exceptions, they are all intended to answer a few basic questions I've been asking at ever deepening levels over this past year and a half, questions that have been driving me deeper and deeper in a search for understanding what it is I'm here for and how my lifelong faith in Christianity intersects that.
I think, at the most basic level, all of the questions I've been asking have at their core this question: What is the good news of God, and how does it effect the live I live now, here on this earth? Within that question I've been all over the map, as my list of books evidences. I want to know how closely the gospels we preach here in America resemble the gospel that Jesus preached. I want to know what this "Kingdom of God" is that Jesus preached so often about. I want to know how internal transformation looks like, what I need to be transformed into, and how it happens. I want to learn how to live life in the Presence of God, in communion with Him, and to make His Presence my heart's home. I want to know what proper mission looks like, what role a person endowed with the very presence and message of God can have amidst those in this world who lack one or both. I want to know what it means to come to life in the life abundant that Jesus said He came to give. I want to know what a disciple is, what one looks and acts like, what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and what it means to make disciples of all the earth. I want to know.......I want.......I...........
"And this is eternal life, that they know you the only True God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." (John 17:3)
Well, over the last month and a half or so I've sensed the winds of my life shifting, signs of the seasons changing, and of of the biggest evidences of this has been a growing "book-lust" (for lack of a better term). I'll go on Amazon to by a book for me or a friend and I'll just start wandering around, or I'll be in Half Price Bookstore looking through every book on the clearance rack. My "wishlist" at Amazon is about to burst from the weight of the 23 books it now contains unless I alleviate it soon. It's time to read some books over here, and I can't wait for the weather to warm up enough for me to set up a little place on the front porch to get to it!
To give you a feel for what I'm embarking on, I want to share with you the current list of books on my "to read" bookshelves. At the end I'll share what I plan and hope to gain from all this, but for now just know that it's my goal to read 30-40 of these (so not all of them) between now and Labor Day. I'd love your thoughts on any or the whole of these books, especially ones you have read yourself.
And now, in no particular order, the books on my "to read" list:
Whole Life Transformation: Becoming The Change Your Church Needs
Keith Meyer
Heaven's Calling: A Memoir of One Soul's Steep Ascent
Leanne Payne
The Complete Father Brown
G.K. Chesterton
Crazy Love
Francis Chan
New Light on the Difficult Words of Jesus: Insights from His Jewish Context
David Bivin
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour vol. 3 and 5
Louis L'Amour
Love Wins:A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived
Rob Bell
God is the Gospel: Meditations on God's Love as the Gift of Himself
John Piper
Desiring God
John Piper
After Shock: Searching For Honest Faith When Your World is Shaken
Kent Annan
Jesus the Jewish Theologian
Brad Young
Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith
Marvin R. Wilson
Echoes of His Presence
Ray Vander Laan
God in Search of Man
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Herod King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans
Peter Richardson
The Politics of Jesus
John Howard Yoder
Apprenticeship With Jesus: Learning to Live Like the Master
Gary W. Moon
One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Ann Voskamp
After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters
N.T. Wright
The Kingdom Life: A Practical Theology of Discipleship and Spiritual Formation
Keith Meyer
Girl Meets God
Lauren Winner
The Broken Image
Leanne Payne
Setting Love In Order
Mario Bergner
The Jesus I Never Knew
Phillip Yancey
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Lesslie Newbigin
The Message and the Kingdom
Richard Horsley &Neil Asher Silberman
A Rabbi Talks with Jesus
Jacob Neusner
Transformed Into Fire
Judy Hougen
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction
Eugene Peterson
A Layman Looks at the Lord's Prayer
Phillip Keller
The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person
E. Stanley Jones
The Rest of the Gospel: When the Partial Gospel has Worn You Out
Dan Stone & Greg Smith
Kingdom Come: How Jesus Wants to Change the World
Allen Mitsuo Wakabayashi
Life of the Beloved
Henri Nouwen
Streams of Living Water
Richard Foster
In Christ
A.J. Gordon
The Ragamuffin Gospel
Brennan Manning
Simply Christian
N.T. Wright
Rediscovering the Kingdom
Myles Munroe
Surprised by Hope
N.T. Wright
The Great Omission
Dallas Willard
What's So Amazing About Grace
Phillip Yancey
The Spirit of the Disciplines
Dallas Willard
Knowing Christ Today
Dallas Willard
Abba's Child
Brennan Manning
NOT the Way it's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga
Renovation of the Heart
Dallas Willard
The Challenge of Jesus
N.T. Wright
Hearing God
Dallas Willard
Listening Prayer
Leanne Payne
A Traveler Toward the Dawn: The Spiritual Journey of John Eagan
edited by William J. O'Malley
The Irresistable Revolution
Shane Claiborne
Wounds That Heal
Stephen Seamands
Experiencing Father's Embrace
Jack Frost
Wired For Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Mind
William M. Struthers
Present Perfect
Greg Boyd
The Sacred Romance
Brent Curtis & John Eldredge
Blue Like Jazz
Donald Miller
TrueFaced
Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, & John Lynch
Becoming Human
Jean Vanier
The Divine Conspiracy
Dallas Willard
.....................................
And that's all for now! Plenty, I'm sure, though I don't doubt I'll add a few more to that list before this season ends, as well as take plenty off after reading them. Though I didn't list those books in any order other than how they're currently arranged on my bookshelf, if you know anything about them you may have seen a few themes emerge. For one, they're almost all books that will make a person think. A good percentage of them are thick, often difficult reads in which you need to follow the author's train of thought the whole way through in order to catch the full weight of his or her beliefs and convictions. That's certainly not going to make both reading and processing them an easy task, but one of the giftings God has given me is the ability to synthesize a lot of information, especially in areas I'm passionate about, and then to share it in a relevant and coherent manner. This will be the deepest testing of that gifting yet.
But to make a process like that worthwhile, you have to have a mission, a purpose, something to gain or achieve from all that work. This is where you may or may not have spotted some of the other patterns in all those books. With few exceptions, they are all intended to answer a few basic questions I've been asking at ever deepening levels over this past year and a half, questions that have been driving me deeper and deeper in a search for understanding what it is I'm here for and how my lifelong faith in Christianity intersects that.
I think, at the most basic level, all of the questions I've been asking have at their core this question: What is the good news of God, and how does it effect the live I live now, here on this earth? Within that question I've been all over the map, as my list of books evidences. I want to know how closely the gospels we preach here in America resemble the gospel that Jesus preached. I want to know what this "Kingdom of God" is that Jesus preached so often about. I want to know how internal transformation looks like, what I need to be transformed into, and how it happens. I want to learn how to live life in the Presence of God, in communion with Him, and to make His Presence my heart's home. I want to know what proper mission looks like, what role a person endowed with the very presence and message of God can have amidst those in this world who lack one or both. I want to know what it means to come to life in the life abundant that Jesus said He came to give. I want to know what a disciple is, what one looks and acts like, what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, and what it means to make disciples of all the earth. I want to know.......I want.......I...........
"And this is eternal life, that they know you the only True God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent." (John 17:3)
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Bones, skeletons, and truth
In the last year or so I came across the best analogy I've yet seen to describe the proper place for doctrine/truth within the Christian life. It comes Phillip Yancey and Paul Brand in "In the Likeness of God", but since the whole book is full of Brand sharing (from his knowledge as a surgeon) incredible parallels between the physical body and the spiritual body, ultimately this analogy is derived from Paul.
Doctrine and truth and such are the bones of the body. They provide structure, strength, permanence, shape, sturdiness, inflexibility, and a whole host of other similar adjectives to the body. They are essential to life as we know it; a broken bone can be healed, but while it is doing so it can't be used. And a bone out of place or improperly healed can bring all sorts of pain. Bones are designed by God to do exactly what they do, and to allow us to do pretty much everything we do. A person without bones, if such a person could exixt, would not live long. And even if they did or could they would be little more than a lump of fleshly pudding. Along the same lines, have you ever seen somebody with Brittle Bone Disease? Our church works with several of them in Belize, and they literally can't do anything for themselves. If you touch them wrong you can break their bones. Such is life for those without proper bones, and such is life for those with no truth in their lives. At worst they have no life at all, and at best they are incapable of anything.
But before we glorify bones too greatly, have you ever met a skeleton? The bones themselves do not bring life either. They are living, but only in order to provide structure and so on to the greater life that their life is utterly dependent on. Bones are only of value in the context of the body and in the ongoing story of what the body is doing.
I love and will never forget the comparison analogy Brand uses to show the flip side of the proper place and role for bones. Have you ever seen a crustacean or a mollusk, say a lobster? I'm sure you have. They carry their bones on the outside; an exoskeleton. Their "truth" is hard and often even sharp, able to keep at bay the outside world or to "pierce" anytihng within reach of it's claws. Lobsters make horrible pets, because all you encounter is their exoskeleton. They're actually quite soft inside, but that softness never quite reaches the outside world nor is it ever intended to.
Now all that is fine for lobsters and such, but for a human it's a horrible way to live. Can you imagine carrying around an exoskeleton wherever you went? Not only would it be needlessly cumbersome, but it would destroy all the warmth that human touch can convey and make it quite hard to love. You may truly love somebody with your soft insides, but you'll find it quite hard to convey that when every touch you make is hard. Humans were designed with skin on the outside and bones on the inside for a reason, and there's a reason Jesus loved to touch the people He brought healing and new life to. Exoskeletons are incapable of communicating love and a whole host of other godly emotions and actions, for all that they might feel on the inside.
There's another inherent limitation to an exoskeleton, and that's that you can't grow within it. All internal growth and new life leaves you just crushed against the inside of the exoskeleton. To really grow you have to abandon the current one you inhabit and either grow or find another one, a process that can be quite difficult, possibly painful, and extremely dangerous to the soft interiors of the crustaceans and mollusks that are forced to attempt it. And they were designed for it! What happens to a human when they attempt to do the same thing? Sadly, we've seen the answers strewn across the landscape of what we call the Church here an America today. How many people do you know who are living within the cramped conditions of a shell of laws that doesn't fit the person God created them to be? How many people do you know who went off to college with an exoskeleton of "Christianity" to protect them and, when forced to grow both by college and by that age and season of life, emerged from their exoskeleton in search of something better fitting only to be devoured by godless philosophies? Lacking the ability to grow from the inside out, as bones the way God designed them in us quite naturally do, no truth dwells INSIDE of them and their only capacity for growth is found in whatever they can find and attach themselves to, regardless of whether the exoskeleton they find is living or dead.
My last point on exoskeletons is that with an exoskeleton the full extent of the freedom and life God came to give us in Him is impossible. Picture a man wearing a full suit of metal armor, a literal "knight in shining armor," ha! He may be useful in war or look quite impressive astride his horse. He most certainly is quite protected from most anything the world outside may throw at him. But can he play baseball like that? Can he sit and have a quiet meal with his family? Can he read a book, love his wife, perform most any job competently, or enjoy the sunlight? Of course not! He is a caricature; his suit of arms was designed for war and for war alone is it good for. But we Children of God war not against flesh and blood, so of what noble use would such a suit be to us when worn in relation to other people? Take it off and go play baseball, I say! Go live the life God created you to, and enabled you to do so in part through the bones He has blessed you with. And when you encounter people while playing baseball (or whatever else your delight is in), go and share your delight in God's great world with them, giving them all the love and compassion and joy He has given you and clothed you with.
And now, when someone encounters you who lacks the life that you now have, they are quite naturally drawn to you and desire it for themselves. Quite the contrast from the reaction we in the church are used to by now from the world who often encounters little but pain and condemnation from our hardened exterior of doctrines, laws, and "truth." Truth it may be, but if it is not internalized in such a way that it enables real life to dwell in and flow through the body, it is of little use. So don't put on that suit of armor! Instead:
"PUT ON then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these PUT ON love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ DWELL IN you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."
(Colossians 3:12-17)
Doctrine and truth and such are the bones of the body. They provide structure, strength, permanence, shape, sturdiness, inflexibility, and a whole host of other similar adjectives to the body. They are essential to life as we know it; a broken bone can be healed, but while it is doing so it can't be used. And a bone out of place or improperly healed can bring all sorts of pain. Bones are designed by God to do exactly what they do, and to allow us to do pretty much everything we do. A person without bones, if such a person could exixt, would not live long. And even if they did or could they would be little more than a lump of fleshly pudding. Along the same lines, have you ever seen somebody with Brittle Bone Disease? Our church works with several of them in Belize, and they literally can't do anything for themselves. If you touch them wrong you can break their bones. Such is life for those without proper bones, and such is life for those with no truth in their lives. At worst they have no life at all, and at best they are incapable of anything.
But before we glorify bones too greatly, have you ever met a skeleton? The bones themselves do not bring life either. They are living, but only in order to provide structure and so on to the greater life that their life is utterly dependent on. Bones are only of value in the context of the body and in the ongoing story of what the body is doing.
I love and will never forget the comparison analogy Brand uses to show the flip side of the proper place and role for bones. Have you ever seen a crustacean or a mollusk, say a lobster? I'm sure you have. They carry their bones on the outside; an exoskeleton. Their "truth" is hard and often even sharp, able to keep at bay the outside world or to "pierce" anytihng within reach of it's claws. Lobsters make horrible pets, because all you encounter is their exoskeleton. They're actually quite soft inside, but that softness never quite reaches the outside world nor is it ever intended to.
Now all that is fine for lobsters and such, but for a human it's a horrible way to live. Can you imagine carrying around an exoskeleton wherever you went? Not only would it be needlessly cumbersome, but it would destroy all the warmth that human touch can convey and make it quite hard to love. You may truly love somebody with your soft insides, but you'll find it quite hard to convey that when every touch you make is hard. Humans were designed with skin on the outside and bones on the inside for a reason, and there's a reason Jesus loved to touch the people He brought healing and new life to. Exoskeletons are incapable of communicating love and a whole host of other godly emotions and actions, for all that they might feel on the inside.
There's another inherent limitation to an exoskeleton, and that's that you can't grow within it. All internal growth and new life leaves you just crushed against the inside of the exoskeleton. To really grow you have to abandon the current one you inhabit and either grow or find another one, a process that can be quite difficult, possibly painful, and extremely dangerous to the soft interiors of the crustaceans and mollusks that are forced to attempt it. And they were designed for it! What happens to a human when they attempt to do the same thing? Sadly, we've seen the answers strewn across the landscape of what we call the Church here an America today. How many people do you know who are living within the cramped conditions of a shell of laws that doesn't fit the person God created them to be? How many people do you know who went off to college with an exoskeleton of "Christianity" to protect them and, when forced to grow both by college and by that age and season of life, emerged from their exoskeleton in search of something better fitting only to be devoured by godless philosophies? Lacking the ability to grow from the inside out, as bones the way God designed them in us quite naturally do, no truth dwells INSIDE of them and their only capacity for growth is found in whatever they can find and attach themselves to, regardless of whether the exoskeleton they find is living or dead.
My last point on exoskeletons is that with an exoskeleton the full extent of the freedom and life God came to give us in Him is impossible. Picture a man wearing a full suit of metal armor, a literal "knight in shining armor," ha! He may be useful in war or look quite impressive astride his horse. He most certainly is quite protected from most anything the world outside may throw at him. But can he play baseball like that? Can he sit and have a quiet meal with his family? Can he read a book, love his wife, perform most any job competently, or enjoy the sunlight? Of course not! He is a caricature; his suit of arms was designed for war and for war alone is it good for. But we Children of God war not against flesh and blood, so of what noble use would such a suit be to us when worn in relation to other people? Take it off and go play baseball, I say! Go live the life God created you to, and enabled you to do so in part through the bones He has blessed you with. And when you encounter people while playing baseball (or whatever else your delight is in), go and share your delight in God's great world with them, giving them all the love and compassion and joy He has given you and clothed you with.
And now, when someone encounters you who lacks the life that you now have, they are quite naturally drawn to you and desire it for themselves. Quite the contrast from the reaction we in the church are used to by now from the world who often encounters little but pain and condemnation from our hardened exterior of doctrines, laws, and "truth." Truth it may be, but if it is not internalized in such a way that it enables real life to dwell in and flow through the body, it is of little use. So don't put on that suit of armor! Instead:
"PUT ON then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these PUT ON love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ DWELL IN you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."
(Colossians 3:12-17)
Sunday, October 10, 2010
To Please or to Trust?
From: Truefaced
By: Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, and John Lynch
And so the day comes when we are forced to choose. Eventually, we each find ourselves arriving at a pivotal place on our journey with God. We stand before two roads diverging in the woods, and our choice will make all the difference. We may not even realize we are making this choice, but we all make it many times on our journey. It’s the most important ongoing decision any of us will make as Christians.
As we’re walking down life’s road, we arrive at a tall pole with signs pointing in two different directions. The marker leading to the left simply says pleasing God. The one leading to the right reads Trusting God. It’s hard to choose one over the other, because both roads have a good feel to them. We discover there is no third road and it becomes obvious that we will not be able to jump back and forth between the paths. We must choose one. Only one. It will now indelibly mark the way we live.
Pleasing God and trusting God represent the primary and ultimate motives of our hearts, the inner drives or desires that cause us to act in a certain way. These motives, in turn, produce multiple actions.
Pleasing God and Trusting God are both admirable, but since I can only have one primary motive, I ask myself, “Which of these motives best reflects the relationship I want to have with God?”
In the end, I choose the path marked Pleasing God. The Trusting God path seems too, well, passive. I want a fully alive experience with God. The Pleasing God path seems like the best way there. I think, All right then, my mind’s made up. I am determined to please God. I so long for Him to be happy with me. I’ll discipline myself to achieve this life goal. I know I can do it. Yes, I will do it this time. I will please Him and He will be so pleased with me. So we set off with confidence. We are immediately comforted to see that the path is well traveled.
In time I come to a door with a sign that reads Striving to Be All God Wants Me to Be. These words reflect the values that flow out of the motive of Pleasing God, and they describe how we believe we should act. Since my motive is a determination to please God, I will value being all God wants me to be. So, I open the door by turning the knob of Effort. The motive of Pleasing God has now produced the value of Striving to Be All God Wants Me to Be. As I enter this enormous room, a hostess with a beautiful smile greets me and says in an almost too polite tone, “Welcome to The Room of Good Intentions.”
Oh, yes. I like the ring of this name. I also like being perceived as someone who is well intended. “Well, thanks,” I answer. “I think I’ve found my home. How are you?”
The hostess pauses for a moment and then reaches into her purse to pull out a mask bearing a guarded expression and a thin smile. She puts it on and answers, “Fine. Just fine. And you?”
The entire room gets suddenly quiet, awaiting my answer. “Well, umm, thanks for asking. I’m kind of struggling with some things right now, some areas that don’t seem to be in keeping with who I know I’m supposed to be. I’m not really sure I’m doing well on a lot of—“ The hostess cuts me off, putting her finger to her lips and handing me a similar mask. I’m not quite sure what to do. I don’t really want to put it on, but others in the room are smiling and motioning for me to do so. I want so much to be accepted here that I slowly put it on.
And now everything feels different. I am quickly overcome by the realization that less self-revelation would be a smart game plan here. I realize that no one in this room wants to hear about my struggles, pain, or doubt. If I want to be welcome here, I’d better keep my cards closer to my vest and give the appearance of sufficiency. So, I slowly and carefully say the words, “Actually, I’m fine. I’m doing just fine. Thanks.” Satisfied, everyone in the room turns back to their conversations.
You see, everyone in The Room of Good Intentions has the value of Striving to Be All God Wants Them to Be. They are sincerely determined to be godly. Their value produces actions that are best summarized by an enormous banner on the back wall that reads, “Working on My Sin to Achieve an Intimate Relationship with God. They have made it their goal to be godly, and they fully expect the same of everyone else in the room.
As I read the words on the banner, I can’t help but think, Sounds a lot like, “Be holy as your heavenly Father is holy.” Yep, I’m in the right place. The people here have sincerity, perseverance, courage, diligence, full-hearted fervency, a desire to please God, and a sold-out determination to pursue excellence. Yes, this is the place I’ve been looking for. Oh, I’m going to make Him so happy. One day soon, we’ll be close. I just know it!
Yet as weeks turn into months, I can’t help but noticing that many people in this room sound a bit cynical and look pretty tired. Many of them seem alone. And if I catch them when they think no one is looking, I see incredible pain on their faces. Quite a few seem superficial—guarded. After a while I realize that my thinking has begun shifting too. I no longer feel as comfortable or relaxed here. I have this nagging anxiety that if I don’t keep behaving well—if I don’t control my sin enough—I’ll be on the outs with everyone in the room. And with God!
So, I start investing more effort into sinning less, and I feel better…for a while. But the more time I spend in The Room of Good Intentions, the more disappointment I feel. Despite all my striving, all my efforts, I keep sinning! In fact, some days I’m fixated simply on trying not to sin. I seem to never be able to get around to doing those things that displease Him! Other days I can’t seem to do enough. I never get through my list of things to work on. It feels like I am making every effort to please a God who never seems pleased enough! I carry an overwhelming sense of guilt because I have to hide my sin—from everyone in the room and from God. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the road of Pleasing God has turned into What Must I Do to Keep God Pleased with Me?
The stifling atmosphere in the room and the tightness of my mask make it hard for me to breathe. I am so tired of pretending and keeping up appearances.
As I search for the door, someone walks up to me and, looking over his shoulder, whispers, “Hey, umm, I’m going to check out that other path back at the crossroads. For the last several years I’ve given this room everything I’ve got, and something’s just not working for me. You look tired too. You want to go retrace our steps and head out for the Trusting God trail?”
So back I go to the fork in the road. Hmmm. It still feels wrong to take the road marked Trusting God—as if I’d be getting away with something. I look around for a third road, maybe some combination of the two, but no such luck. There are just the two roads. Still. The road of Trusting God sure sounds a lot less heroic than the other. A bit ethereal and vague. And it appears to give me nothing much to do other than, well…trust. All I’ve ever heard in the Room of Good Intentions was that I have to “sell out, care more, get on fire, buck up, shape up, and tighten up.” This road doesn’t seem to give me any of that. But I think, I’m only risking a little time and effort. I can always head back to the Pleasing God path if this turns out to be a dead end. Besides the cracks in my mask are getting bigger and bigger—I don’t know how long I can keep bluffing. People have got to be catching on that something’s just not right with me. I don’t know what else I can do. If this road doesn’t take me to where I want to go, I’m cooked. I’ve got no other game plan. I need answers—real answers—and quickly. I’m running out of time…and rubber cement.
So, I begin walking on life’s path with the motive of Trusting God. This road is definitely less worn than the other one. I have second thoughts every fifty yards or so. But I cannot bring myself to return to the emptiness of the alternative, so I walk on, looking for that second door. Eventually, I spot it, and as I approach it I read the words on the sign above it: Living Out of Who God Says I Am. I tilt my head to the side, thinking that the phrase might make more sense if I do. Those are certainly some words, one right after another. What in the world do they mean? It can’t mean what I think it means! When do I get to do something here? Where’s the part where I get to prove my sincerity? Where are my guidelines? When do I get to give God my best? I shake my head and stoop down to read what it says on the doorknob…Humility.
Suddenly everything snaps into focus. I’ve tried so hard, I’ve supplied all the self-effort the other room demanded, yet received nothing but insincerity and duplicity. I’ve run out of answers, run out of breath, run out of ability, and so I cry out, God, if anything good is to come out of this whole deal, you will have to do it. I’ve tried. I can’t. I’m so tired. Please God, you will have to give me the life I am dreaming of. I can’t keep doing this anymore. I’m losing confidence that this life in you is even possible. Help me. You must make it happen or I am doomed. With those words I turn the doorknob.
As I step inside, another hostess immediately approaches. She smiles kindly and, with a voice that is at once knowing and reassuring, says softly, “Welcome to The Room of Grace.” I answer tentatively, “Thank…you.”
She presses, “How are you?” The room grows quiet.
Well, I’ve been here before and so, not to be duped twice, I answer. “I’m fine. Pretty fine…Who wants to know?” And the room stays quiet. Gun-shy from the first room, I interpret their silence as judgment, and so I yell out, “All right, listen! I’m not fine. I haven’t been fine for a long time. I’m tired. I feel guilty, lonely, and depressed. I’m sad most of the time and I can’t make my life work. And if any of you knew half my daily thoughts, you’d want me out of your little club. So there. I’m doing not fine! Thanks for asking!”
I reach for the doorknob to leave and hear a voice from far back in the crowd. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? I’ll take your confusion, guilt, and bad thoughts, and I’ll raise you compulsive sin and chronic lower back pain! Oh, and I’m in debt up to my ears, and I wouldn’t know classical music from a show tune if it came up and bit me. You better have more than that puny list if you want to play in my league!”
The greeter smiles and nudges me to say, “I think he means you’re welcome here.” Emboldened, I smile, and call back, “Do you struggle with forgetting birthdays?” He walks right up to me all the way from the back, puts his hand on my shoulders and says, “Birthdays? I can’t remember my own!” Everyone in the room laughs the warm laughter of understanding, and I am ushered into the fold of a sweet family of kind and painfully real people. There is not a mask to be seen anywhere.
As I walk further into the room, I notice a huge banner on the back wall. This one reads: Standing with God, with My Sin in Front of Me, Working on It Together. I think, Wait, this can’t be right. How can this be? It sounds presumptuous, careless. Imagining God with His arm around me as we view my sin together? Come on! Surely they’ve written it down wrong. I’ve always been told that my sin is still a barrier between God and me. If it could be true that God actually stands with me, in front of my sin, well, that would change everything. If it were true, God has never moved away from me no matter what I’ve done! Oh my gosh, I’d have to rethink everything.
Despite my doubts, I can’t help but notice that in this room, The Room of Grace, everyone seems vitally alive. The people are obviously imperfect, full of compromise and struggle, but they’re authentic enough to talk about it and ask for help. Many have a level of integrity, maturity, love, laughter, freedom, and vitality that I don’t recall seeing in the people in the other room. I feel the start of something I haven’t felt in…well, as long as I can remember. It’s safety or something like it. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.
------------------------------------
In review:
If my life motive is an unwavering determination to Please God,
Then my value will be Striving to Be All God Wants Me to Be,
And my action will be Working on My Sin to Achieve an Intimate Relationship with God.
When we embrace the motive of pleasing God and live in The Room of Good Intentions, we reduce godliness to this formula:
More right behavior + Less wrong behavior = Godliness
This theology comes with a significant problem: It sets us up to fail and to live in hiddenness. It disregards the godliness—righteousness—that God has already placed in us, at infinite cost, and will sabotage our journey. Once we choose the path of pleasing God, the bondage of performance persistently badgers us. Our determination to please God traps us in a formula that affixes our masks so tightly we’ll need jackhammers to get them off!
…
God paid an infinite price to buy us back, to redeem us, and to give us a new identity. So, he gets deeply disappointed when we choose not to believe what He says is true about us. He values our high-priced identity, and He wants us to do the same. How can we show that we value our identity? Please read these words slowly: By trusting what He says is true about us.
If my motive is Trusting God,
Then my value will be Living Out of Who God Says I Am,
And my action will be Standing with God, with My Sind in Front of Us, Working on It Together.
…
We discover in The Room of Grace that the almost unthinkable has happened. God has shown all of His cards. He reveals a breathtaking protection that brings us out of hiding. In essence, God says, “What if I tell them who they are? What if I take away any element of fear in condemnation, judgment, or rejection? What if I tell them I love them, will always love them? That I love them right now, no matter what they’ve done, as much as I love my only son? That there’s nothing they can do to make my love go away?
“What if I tell them there are no lists? What if I tell them I don’t keep a log of past offences, of how little they pray, how often they’ve let me down, made promises they don’t keep? What if I tell them they are righteous, with my righteousness, right now? What if I tell them they can stop beating themselves up? That they can stop being so formal, stiff, and jumpy around me? What if I tell them I’m crazy about them? What if I tell them, even if they run to the ends of the earth and do the most horrible, unthinkable things, that when they come back, I’d receive them with tears and a party?
“What if I tell them that if I am their Savior, they’re going to heaven no matter what—it’s a done deal? What if I tell them they have a new nature—saints, not saved sinners who should now ‘buck-up and be better if they were any kind of Christians, after all He’s done for you!’ What if I tell them that I actually live in them now? That I’ve put my love, power, and nature inside of them, at their disposal? What if I tell them that they don’t have to put on a mask? That it is ok to be who they are at this moment, with all their junk. That they don’t need to pretend about how close we are, how much they pray or don’t, how much Bible they read or don’t. What if they knew they don’t have to look over their shoulder for fear if things get too good, the other shoe’s gonna drop?
“What if they knew I will never, ever use the word punish in relation to them? What if they knew that when they mess up, I will never ‘get back at them’? What if they were convinced that bad circumstances aren’t my way of evening the score for taking advantage of me? What if they knew the basis for our friendship isn’t how little they sin, but how much they let me love them? What if I tell them they can hurt my heart, but I never hurt theirs? What if I tell them I like Eric Clapton’s music too? What if I tell them I never liked the Christmas handbells deal with the white gloves? What if I tell them they can open their eyes when they pray and still go to heaven? What if I tell them there is no secret agenda, no trapdoor? What if I tell them it isn’t about their self-effort, but about allowing me to live my life through them?”
When you come to the crossroads, you decide which road to choose largely upon how you see God’s “gamble.” Do I really believe this stuff will hold up—for me? This is the way of life in The Room of Grace. It is the way home to healing, joy, peace, fulfillment, contentment, and release into God’s dreams for us. It almost feels like we’re stealing silverware from the king’s house, doesn’t it? Truth is, the king paid a lot so that you wouldn’t have to try to steal any silverware. He gets to give it to you; and some other stuff so big and good and beautiful that we couldn’t even begin to stuff it into our bag of loot. Wow! It takes the eyes some adjustment to look into such light, huh?
If we refuse to enter The Room of Grace, we will constantly be striving in The Room of Good Intentions. We will strive to change into something we are not yet: godly. In The Room of Grace we grow up and mature into something that is already true about us: godly. The first room creates a works-based, performance-driven relationship with God and puts the responsibility on our resources. The second room places the responsibility on the resources of God.
God is not interested in changing you. He already has. The new DNA is set. God wants you to believe that He has already changed you so that He can get on with the process of maturing you into who you already are.
From: Truefaced
By: Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, and John Lynch
And so the day comes when we are forced to choose. Eventually, we each find ourselves arriving at a pivotal place on our journey with God. We stand before two roads diverging in the woods, and our choice will make all the difference. We may not even realize we are making this choice, but we all make it many times on our journey. It’s the most important ongoing decision any of us will make as Christians.
As we’re walking down life’s road, we arrive at a tall pole with signs pointing in two different directions. The marker leading to the left simply says pleasing God. The one leading to the right reads Trusting God. It’s hard to choose one over the other, because both roads have a good feel to them. We discover there is no third road and it becomes obvious that we will not be able to jump back and forth between the paths. We must choose one. Only one. It will now indelibly mark the way we live.
Pleasing God and trusting God represent the primary and ultimate motives of our hearts, the inner drives or desires that cause us to act in a certain way. These motives, in turn, produce multiple actions.
Pleasing God and Trusting God are both admirable, but since I can only have one primary motive, I ask myself, “Which of these motives best reflects the relationship I want to have with God?”
In the end, I choose the path marked Pleasing God. The Trusting God path seems too, well, passive. I want a fully alive experience with God. The Pleasing God path seems like the best way there. I think, All right then, my mind’s made up. I am determined to please God. I so long for Him to be happy with me. I’ll discipline myself to achieve this life goal. I know I can do it. Yes, I will do it this time. I will please Him and He will be so pleased with me. So we set off with confidence. We are immediately comforted to see that the path is well traveled.
In time I come to a door with a sign that reads Striving to Be All God Wants Me to Be. These words reflect the values that flow out of the motive of Pleasing God, and they describe how we believe we should act. Since my motive is a determination to please God, I will value being all God wants me to be. So, I open the door by turning the knob of Effort. The motive of Pleasing God has now produced the value of Striving to Be All God Wants Me to Be. As I enter this enormous room, a hostess with a beautiful smile greets me and says in an almost too polite tone, “Welcome to The Room of Good Intentions.”
Oh, yes. I like the ring of this name. I also like being perceived as someone who is well intended. “Well, thanks,” I answer. “I think I’ve found my home. How are you?”
The hostess pauses for a moment and then reaches into her purse to pull out a mask bearing a guarded expression and a thin smile. She puts it on and answers, “Fine. Just fine. And you?”
The entire room gets suddenly quiet, awaiting my answer. “Well, umm, thanks for asking. I’m kind of struggling with some things right now, some areas that don’t seem to be in keeping with who I know I’m supposed to be. I’m not really sure I’m doing well on a lot of—“ The hostess cuts me off, putting her finger to her lips and handing me a similar mask. I’m not quite sure what to do. I don’t really want to put it on, but others in the room are smiling and motioning for me to do so. I want so much to be accepted here that I slowly put it on.
And now everything feels different. I am quickly overcome by the realization that less self-revelation would be a smart game plan here. I realize that no one in this room wants to hear about my struggles, pain, or doubt. If I want to be welcome here, I’d better keep my cards closer to my vest and give the appearance of sufficiency. So, I slowly and carefully say the words, “Actually, I’m fine. I’m doing just fine. Thanks.” Satisfied, everyone in the room turns back to their conversations.
You see, everyone in The Room of Good Intentions has the value of Striving to Be All God Wants Them to Be. They are sincerely determined to be godly. Their value produces actions that are best summarized by an enormous banner on the back wall that reads, “Working on My Sin to Achieve an Intimate Relationship with God. They have made it their goal to be godly, and they fully expect the same of everyone else in the room.
As I read the words on the banner, I can’t help but think, Sounds a lot like, “Be holy as your heavenly Father is holy.” Yep, I’m in the right place. The people here have sincerity, perseverance, courage, diligence, full-hearted fervency, a desire to please God, and a sold-out determination to pursue excellence. Yes, this is the place I’ve been looking for. Oh, I’m going to make Him so happy. One day soon, we’ll be close. I just know it!
Yet as weeks turn into months, I can’t help but noticing that many people in this room sound a bit cynical and look pretty tired. Many of them seem alone. And if I catch them when they think no one is looking, I see incredible pain on their faces. Quite a few seem superficial—guarded. After a while I realize that my thinking has begun shifting too. I no longer feel as comfortable or relaxed here. I have this nagging anxiety that if I don’t keep behaving well—if I don’t control my sin enough—I’ll be on the outs with everyone in the room. And with God!
So, I start investing more effort into sinning less, and I feel better…for a while. But the more time I spend in The Room of Good Intentions, the more disappointment I feel. Despite all my striving, all my efforts, I keep sinning! In fact, some days I’m fixated simply on trying not to sin. I seem to never be able to get around to doing those things that displease Him! Other days I can’t seem to do enough. I never get through my list of things to work on. It feels like I am making every effort to please a God who never seems pleased enough! I carry an overwhelming sense of guilt because I have to hide my sin—from everyone in the room and from God. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the road of Pleasing God has turned into What Must I Do to Keep God Pleased with Me?
The stifling atmosphere in the room and the tightness of my mask make it hard for me to breathe. I am so tired of pretending and keeping up appearances.
As I search for the door, someone walks up to me and, looking over his shoulder, whispers, “Hey, umm, I’m going to check out that other path back at the crossroads. For the last several years I’ve given this room everything I’ve got, and something’s just not working for me. You look tired too. You want to go retrace our steps and head out for the Trusting God trail?”
So back I go to the fork in the road. Hmmm. It still feels wrong to take the road marked Trusting God—as if I’d be getting away with something. I look around for a third road, maybe some combination of the two, but no such luck. There are just the two roads. Still. The road of Trusting God sure sounds a lot less heroic than the other. A bit ethereal and vague. And it appears to give me nothing much to do other than, well…trust. All I’ve ever heard in the Room of Good Intentions was that I have to “sell out, care more, get on fire, buck up, shape up, and tighten up.” This road doesn’t seem to give me any of that. But I think, I’m only risking a little time and effort. I can always head back to the Pleasing God path if this turns out to be a dead end. Besides the cracks in my mask are getting bigger and bigger—I don’t know how long I can keep bluffing. People have got to be catching on that something’s just not right with me. I don’t know what else I can do. If this road doesn’t take me to where I want to go, I’m cooked. I’ve got no other game plan. I need answers—real answers—and quickly. I’m running out of time…and rubber cement.
So, I begin walking on life’s path with the motive of Trusting God. This road is definitely less worn than the other one. I have second thoughts every fifty yards or so. But I cannot bring myself to return to the emptiness of the alternative, so I walk on, looking for that second door. Eventually, I spot it, and as I approach it I read the words on the sign above it: Living Out of Who God Says I Am. I tilt my head to the side, thinking that the phrase might make more sense if I do. Those are certainly some words, one right after another. What in the world do they mean? It can’t mean what I think it means! When do I get to do something here? Where’s the part where I get to prove my sincerity? Where are my guidelines? When do I get to give God my best? I shake my head and stoop down to read what it says on the doorknob…Humility.
Suddenly everything snaps into focus. I’ve tried so hard, I’ve supplied all the self-effort the other room demanded, yet received nothing but insincerity and duplicity. I’ve run out of answers, run out of breath, run out of ability, and so I cry out, God, if anything good is to come out of this whole deal, you will have to do it. I’ve tried. I can’t. I’m so tired. Please God, you will have to give me the life I am dreaming of. I can’t keep doing this anymore. I’m losing confidence that this life in you is even possible. Help me. You must make it happen or I am doomed. With those words I turn the doorknob.
As I step inside, another hostess immediately approaches. She smiles kindly and, with a voice that is at once knowing and reassuring, says softly, “Welcome to The Room of Grace.” I answer tentatively, “Thank…you.”
She presses, “How are you?” The room grows quiet.
Well, I’ve been here before and so, not to be duped twice, I answer. “I’m fine. Pretty fine…Who wants to know?” And the room stays quiet. Gun-shy from the first room, I interpret their silence as judgment, and so I yell out, “All right, listen! I’m not fine. I haven’t been fine for a long time. I’m tired. I feel guilty, lonely, and depressed. I’m sad most of the time and I can’t make my life work. And if any of you knew half my daily thoughts, you’d want me out of your little club. So there. I’m doing not fine! Thanks for asking!”
I reach for the doorknob to leave and hear a voice from far back in the crowd. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? I’ll take your confusion, guilt, and bad thoughts, and I’ll raise you compulsive sin and chronic lower back pain! Oh, and I’m in debt up to my ears, and I wouldn’t know classical music from a show tune if it came up and bit me. You better have more than that puny list if you want to play in my league!”
The greeter smiles and nudges me to say, “I think he means you’re welcome here.” Emboldened, I smile, and call back, “Do you struggle with forgetting birthdays?” He walks right up to me all the way from the back, puts his hand on my shoulders and says, “Birthdays? I can’t remember my own!” Everyone in the room laughs the warm laughter of understanding, and I am ushered into the fold of a sweet family of kind and painfully real people. There is not a mask to be seen anywhere.
As I walk further into the room, I notice a huge banner on the back wall. This one reads: Standing with God, with My Sin in Front of Me, Working on It Together. I think, Wait, this can’t be right. How can this be? It sounds presumptuous, careless. Imagining God with His arm around me as we view my sin together? Come on! Surely they’ve written it down wrong. I’ve always been told that my sin is still a barrier between God and me. If it could be true that God actually stands with me, in front of my sin, well, that would change everything. If it were true, God has never moved away from me no matter what I’ve done! Oh my gosh, I’d have to rethink everything.
Despite my doubts, I can’t help but notice that in this room, The Room of Grace, everyone seems vitally alive. The people are obviously imperfect, full of compromise and struggle, but they’re authentic enough to talk about it and ask for help. Many have a level of integrity, maturity, love, laughter, freedom, and vitality that I don’t recall seeing in the people in the other room. I feel the start of something I haven’t felt in…well, as long as I can remember. It’s safety or something like it. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.
------------------------------------
In review:
If my life motive is an unwavering determination to Please God,
Then my value will be Striving to Be All God Wants Me to Be,
And my action will be Working on My Sin to Achieve an Intimate Relationship with God.
When we embrace the motive of pleasing God and live in The Room of Good Intentions, we reduce godliness to this formula:
More right behavior + Less wrong behavior = Godliness
This theology comes with a significant problem: It sets us up to fail and to live in hiddenness. It disregards the godliness—righteousness—that God has already placed in us, at infinite cost, and will sabotage our journey. Once we choose the path of pleasing God, the bondage of performance persistently badgers us. Our determination to please God traps us in a formula that affixes our masks so tightly we’ll need jackhammers to get them off!
…
God paid an infinite price to buy us back, to redeem us, and to give us a new identity. So, he gets deeply disappointed when we choose not to believe what He says is true about us. He values our high-priced identity, and He wants us to do the same. How can we show that we value our identity? Please read these words slowly: By trusting what He says is true about us.
If my motive is Trusting God,
Then my value will be Living Out of Who God Says I Am,
And my action will be Standing with God, with My Sind in Front of Us, Working on It Together.
…
We discover in The Room of Grace that the almost unthinkable has happened. God has shown all of His cards. He reveals a breathtaking protection that brings us out of hiding. In essence, God says, “What if I tell them who they are? What if I take away any element of fear in condemnation, judgment, or rejection? What if I tell them I love them, will always love them? That I love them right now, no matter what they’ve done, as much as I love my only son? That there’s nothing they can do to make my love go away?
“What if I tell them there are no lists? What if I tell them I don’t keep a log of past offences, of how little they pray, how often they’ve let me down, made promises they don’t keep? What if I tell them they are righteous, with my righteousness, right now? What if I tell them they can stop beating themselves up? That they can stop being so formal, stiff, and jumpy around me? What if I tell them I’m crazy about them? What if I tell them, even if they run to the ends of the earth and do the most horrible, unthinkable things, that when they come back, I’d receive them with tears and a party?
“What if I tell them that if I am their Savior, they’re going to heaven no matter what—it’s a done deal? What if I tell them they have a new nature—saints, not saved sinners who should now ‘buck-up and be better if they were any kind of Christians, after all He’s done for you!’ What if I tell them that I actually live in them now? That I’ve put my love, power, and nature inside of them, at their disposal? What if I tell them that they don’t have to put on a mask? That it is ok to be who they are at this moment, with all their junk. That they don’t need to pretend about how close we are, how much they pray or don’t, how much Bible they read or don’t. What if they knew they don’t have to look over their shoulder for fear if things get too good, the other shoe’s gonna drop?
“What if they knew I will never, ever use the word punish in relation to them? What if they knew that when they mess up, I will never ‘get back at them’? What if they were convinced that bad circumstances aren’t my way of evening the score for taking advantage of me? What if they knew the basis for our friendship isn’t how little they sin, but how much they let me love them? What if I tell them they can hurt my heart, but I never hurt theirs? What if I tell them I like Eric Clapton’s music too? What if I tell them I never liked the Christmas handbells deal with the white gloves? What if I tell them they can open their eyes when they pray and still go to heaven? What if I tell them there is no secret agenda, no trapdoor? What if I tell them it isn’t about their self-effort, but about allowing me to live my life through them?”
When you come to the crossroads, you decide which road to choose largely upon how you see God’s “gamble.” Do I really believe this stuff will hold up—for me? This is the way of life in The Room of Grace. It is the way home to healing, joy, peace, fulfillment, contentment, and release into God’s dreams for us. It almost feels like we’re stealing silverware from the king’s house, doesn’t it? Truth is, the king paid a lot so that you wouldn’t have to try to steal any silverware. He gets to give it to you; and some other stuff so big and good and beautiful that we couldn’t even begin to stuff it into our bag of loot. Wow! It takes the eyes some adjustment to look into such light, huh?
If we refuse to enter The Room of Grace, we will constantly be striving in The Room of Good Intentions. We will strive to change into something we are not yet: godly. In The Room of Grace we grow up and mature into something that is already true about us: godly. The first room creates a works-based, performance-driven relationship with God and puts the responsibility on our resources. The second room places the responsibility on the resources of God.
God is not interested in changing you. He already has. The new DNA is set. God wants you to believe that He has already changed you so that He can get on with the process of maturing you into who you already are.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
October Newsletter
To the precious friends God has blessed me with, Hello!
As I’ll delve into in a bit, I’m entering into a season of my life where being alone will be a necessity a good percentage of the time. In the midst of that I’d prefer to not lose touch entirely with the friends not directly involved in my life, as well as share a bit of what I’m learning and growing up in my season of seclusion. To that end, I’d like to write a monthly “life-update” blog. For those of you who have been waiting for a couple of weeks for this first one, I hit a busy stretch of life lately and apologize for the delay.
So where to start? Many of you I haven’t seen or heard from since I graduated from the Honor Academy last year and headed for home. It was quite a transition. Not only was I exiting the relatively protected culture of the Honor Academy, but I also had just gotten back from a few weeks in Uganda and was coming home to a family life centered around taking care of a very sick father. As jarring as the first two might have been, I never really bore the full weight of them as Dad’s situation and my own rather critical financial situation took my almost exclusive focus. God has answered my financial needs in some rather creative ways this year, in abundance above and beyond what I had asked for. And early on some of the income paths He led me down left me with much greater flexibility to be with Dad and the family than the plans I had had would have allowed for.
Dad was battling with cancer for most of the year I spent in Texas at the Honor Academy. After my arrival home, though we didn’t know it at the time, he had only about a month left, departing us just a few days shy of his 60th birthday. I got to be there with him as he breathed his last, and had in fact just finished blessing him, thanking him, and saying goodbye to him as he did so. I remember feeling as if he had heard me and knew it was ok to let go, so he did.
In answer to the question I’ve heard many times this last year, I’m doing just fine. We all are. The transition to our new state of “family” and “normal” took about a month, and then life went on. We all miss him, to be sure, but we know where he is and know that he was at peace with dying, especially knowing he would be leaving Mom well enough off to be secure. Service was always his strongest love language, and even after death his life of service continues to bless us. One of the most amazing discoveries I’ve made this last year in the wake of his death is how many ways I am like him. I see so much of him in myself now; two years ago I wouldn’t have thought that to be true; four years ago I wouldn’t have wanted that to be true. It’s amazing how death changes your vision---almost immediately following it I could barely remember my soul’s complaints and even memories against him (and there were many, as my family life growing up left much to be desired). Only the good remained, and could even be seen much clearer. This past year I’ve seen much of that same good in me, in my passions, gifting, and temperament. Thinking upon it recently, I came to the realization that it almost felt like a mantle had been passed on to me. Indeed, that may just be what has happened, and the things he left unfinished or un-started with his life I can carry on. I think I understand the Biblical tradition of a father speaking a blessing over his sons better now, and though Dad never quite did so with his words, I feel the weight of that nonetheless.
Moving on to other matters, this last year has certainly not been the easiest for me, particularly from January on. I’ve gained a much more up-close and personal understanding of brokenness, something I had desired before in name only. The actual experience of discovering my state of brokenness was and is rather excruciating. It feels like death, though later on one finds out that it is only death to the false self, a fellow I’ve tried to be all my life but who actually does not possess any reality and God can have no relationship with him. I’ll write more about this troublesome fellow as this winter proceeds, but for now it’s important to note that the initial experience of brokenness is the unmasking of the false self. This exposes me to the true broken state of my own spiritual life and, shockingly, also places me squarely at the gateway to the Kingdom of God. Blessed are the beggingly dependent in Spirit, Jesus says, for to them belongs the Kingdom of God.
True brokenness will leave you beggingly dependent, as you discover each and every resource you’ve come to rely upon can’t hold water. I picture a deep well full of living water and my soul with a terrible ache to even just touch it. Every single ladle, bucket, or tool I brought from home to obtain the water fails me---all have holes and simply cannot hold the water to draw it to myself. In the same way my false selves simply cannot contain, cannot even touch the life God offers me. They’re all man-made and incapable of the divine. So I sit here at the well and can do nothing else but cry “GOD! HELP ME!!!” Then I sit down next to the well and wait. There is nothing else to do.
I remember first reaching this point somewhere around May of this year. I had discovered my brokenness in a new way (“Something inside of me is broken—it just doesn’t work right”) and my inability to fix it. Both facts stood out staunchly in my heart and grieved me, as much of my false self has been built around my spiritual competency, so this felt like a direct blow. Now, I’ve been broken and unable to fix that before, but the solution I came up with then was to cover up. “You have faults, Joe? It’s ok to let the minor ones show. Indeed, if you embrace them people might even see that as heroic. But if you let the big ones show then people might see the truth about you. Then you might see the truth about you. And who knows what horrors may be hidden there? Don’t go there. Cover up, put your mask back on.” I heard all that and more this time, just like every other time, only this time I didn’t do it. This time I just sat there by the well with my broken ladles and told God that if he wanted me to have His living water He was going to have to get it for me, and if He needed me I was going to be right here by the well, waiting.
This summer for about two months I did little else but work. There was nothing else I could do, so I worked and waited. I remember during this season consistently having to resist the urge to “cover up.” In conversations with friends they would ask how I was doing and I would have to confess my state of internal barrenness. The hardest thing of all was having to just leave it at that, not being able to explain or convince them of all the ways “God was using this to do this in me, or for this purpose.” I couldn’t set the record of my spiritual competency straight, as my false self desperately clamored for. I just sat there, unable to explain. And I worked every chance I could. And I waited. There was simply nothing else to do.
“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might He increases strength. Even youths shall faint and grow weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28-31)
If we’ve been in church for any length of time, we’ve heard the last verse of this scripture before, but in many ways the promises listed here of renewal are exactly what I have needed. I’ve been a soccer referee for ten years now, and it pays well and I do a good job, but I can’t remember ever doing as many games in past years as I have this year. Some weeks this summer I reffed as many as 14 games a week, and usually no less than 6. For my other job I deliver about 6 paper routes bi-weekly, and two monthly, with the majority of those being house-to-house walking routes. Now combine the two jobs and you’ve got yourself a very physically demanding lifestyle while soccer season lasts. “They shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” has been exactly what I’ve needed from the Lord. Thank you, Father, for protecting me from injury and maintaining my energy during those grueling stretches.
As needed as those promises are for me, that is not all promised here; it’s also no accident that eagles are mentioned here. Do you know how an eagle learns to “mount up with wings”? Moses refers to the process in his song in Deuteronomy 32:11, “Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions, the Lord alone guided [Israel].” The mother eagle decides her young are ready to fly and stirs up the nest, pushing them out of it. The young eagle then does what any other young eagle would do—plummets downward from his high perch, probably flapping his unused wings awkwardly and complaining bitterly. “How could you do this to me?? I thought you loved me!” But before the young eagle can crash land, mother sweeps in and catches it on her back, bearing it away on eagle’s wings and giving it its first taste of the wonders of flight. The Lord Himself compares this experience to His rescuing power, specifically of Israel from Egypt: “I bore you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself.” (Exodus 19:4) But this experience of being carried on eagle’s wings is only temporary; the young eagle still must learn to fly itself. So mother eagle lifts it up high in the air and then tilts and drops it again! This cycle is repeated until the young eagle can fly on its own, and if it is ever going to experience life as God intended it to, it HAS to fly.
It’s the same with us. I am fully capable of “mounting up with wings like eagles” in the areas of life God has called me to follow Him in, but the process of learning to do so involves a lot of flapping, floundering, and falling on my part. It’s all perfectly safe, but doesn’t feel even remotely so. I’ve felt like that a lot this past year, and I’m guessing you all can relate too, if you’ve ever really tried to follow God into something you felt way over your head in.
There’s a second fact true of at least some eagles that I find equally if not more fascinating, and even more closely connected to my life right now. A few times throughout their lifetime, some eagles will fly away to an elevated hideaway. Isolated and protected by the setting, the eagle proceeds to tear out the feathers with his beak. They are good and useful feathers and have carried him for years, but out they are torn by the roots. Next its talons must go, then finally the beak is ground to a stub on the surrounding rocks. The eagle now looks pitiful, possesses nothing of value, and is capable of nothing but waiting on God to make it whole again, trusting He will faithfully do so in His time. “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not grow weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
Over this past year God has asked me for thing after thing in my life to give to Him. To a great extent, they’ve been good, useful things, even things I believe He gave to me Himself. “How can you ask me for that, God? That was a gift from you in the first place! Indeed, I would never have sought it out had you not directed me to it. If you take even that, Lord, will there be anything on earth I am left with?” Silence from the heavens. *sigh* “Alright Father, I don’t understand but it’s yours. Help me tear the roots out.” This has been the process time and time again this past year, and though the actions now are customary, it remains no less painful every time I begin to tug clumsily at another root.
I now am about to enter an intentionally secluded season of life. Though I welcome and would probably deeply cherish efforts by those of you taking the time to read this to call or e-mail me and say hello, I have to guard against initiating that contact myself, as there are some roots there that need to be torn out. I’ve removed distractions, freed my calendar as much as possible, and generally tried to clear space for God to move however He wants to. Yet having said that, I don’t enter this season passively. I want to learn and grow, to be renewed in His strength and to walk in His life. I seem to learn best through reading, processing, and writing, so I plan to do as much of that as I can.
I eagerly await any responses you may have for me regarding anything I’ve written here or just life in general. Thank you for being in my life. Every single one of you receiving this has made it better just by being a part of it.
your friend,
the Beloved one of God,
Joe
As I’ll delve into in a bit, I’m entering into a season of my life where being alone will be a necessity a good percentage of the time. In the midst of that I’d prefer to not lose touch entirely with the friends not directly involved in my life, as well as share a bit of what I’m learning and growing up in my season of seclusion. To that end, I’d like to write a monthly “life-update” blog. For those of you who have been waiting for a couple of weeks for this first one, I hit a busy stretch of life lately and apologize for the delay.
So where to start? Many of you I haven’t seen or heard from since I graduated from the Honor Academy last year and headed for home. It was quite a transition. Not only was I exiting the relatively protected culture of the Honor Academy, but I also had just gotten back from a few weeks in Uganda and was coming home to a family life centered around taking care of a very sick father. As jarring as the first two might have been, I never really bore the full weight of them as Dad’s situation and my own rather critical financial situation took my almost exclusive focus. God has answered my financial needs in some rather creative ways this year, in abundance above and beyond what I had asked for. And early on some of the income paths He led me down left me with much greater flexibility to be with Dad and the family than the plans I had had would have allowed for.
Dad was battling with cancer for most of the year I spent in Texas at the Honor Academy. After my arrival home, though we didn’t know it at the time, he had only about a month left, departing us just a few days shy of his 60th birthday. I got to be there with him as he breathed his last, and had in fact just finished blessing him, thanking him, and saying goodbye to him as he did so. I remember feeling as if he had heard me and knew it was ok to let go, so he did.
In answer to the question I’ve heard many times this last year, I’m doing just fine. We all are. The transition to our new state of “family” and “normal” took about a month, and then life went on. We all miss him, to be sure, but we know where he is and know that he was at peace with dying, especially knowing he would be leaving Mom well enough off to be secure. Service was always his strongest love language, and even after death his life of service continues to bless us. One of the most amazing discoveries I’ve made this last year in the wake of his death is how many ways I am like him. I see so much of him in myself now; two years ago I wouldn’t have thought that to be true; four years ago I wouldn’t have wanted that to be true. It’s amazing how death changes your vision---almost immediately following it I could barely remember my soul’s complaints and even memories against him (and there were many, as my family life growing up left much to be desired). Only the good remained, and could even be seen much clearer. This past year I’ve seen much of that same good in me, in my passions, gifting, and temperament. Thinking upon it recently, I came to the realization that it almost felt like a mantle had been passed on to me. Indeed, that may just be what has happened, and the things he left unfinished or un-started with his life I can carry on. I think I understand the Biblical tradition of a father speaking a blessing over his sons better now, and though Dad never quite did so with his words, I feel the weight of that nonetheless.
Moving on to other matters, this last year has certainly not been the easiest for me, particularly from January on. I’ve gained a much more up-close and personal understanding of brokenness, something I had desired before in name only. The actual experience of discovering my state of brokenness was and is rather excruciating. It feels like death, though later on one finds out that it is only death to the false self, a fellow I’ve tried to be all my life but who actually does not possess any reality and God can have no relationship with him. I’ll write more about this troublesome fellow as this winter proceeds, but for now it’s important to note that the initial experience of brokenness is the unmasking of the false self. This exposes me to the true broken state of my own spiritual life and, shockingly, also places me squarely at the gateway to the Kingdom of God. Blessed are the beggingly dependent in Spirit, Jesus says, for to them belongs the Kingdom of God.
True brokenness will leave you beggingly dependent, as you discover each and every resource you’ve come to rely upon can’t hold water. I picture a deep well full of living water and my soul with a terrible ache to even just touch it. Every single ladle, bucket, or tool I brought from home to obtain the water fails me---all have holes and simply cannot hold the water to draw it to myself. In the same way my false selves simply cannot contain, cannot even touch the life God offers me. They’re all man-made and incapable of the divine. So I sit here at the well and can do nothing else but cry “GOD! HELP ME!!!” Then I sit down next to the well and wait. There is nothing else to do.
I remember first reaching this point somewhere around May of this year. I had discovered my brokenness in a new way (“Something inside of me is broken—it just doesn’t work right”) and my inability to fix it. Both facts stood out staunchly in my heart and grieved me, as much of my false self has been built around my spiritual competency, so this felt like a direct blow. Now, I’ve been broken and unable to fix that before, but the solution I came up with then was to cover up. “You have faults, Joe? It’s ok to let the minor ones show. Indeed, if you embrace them people might even see that as heroic. But if you let the big ones show then people might see the truth about you. Then you might see the truth about you. And who knows what horrors may be hidden there? Don’t go there. Cover up, put your mask back on.” I heard all that and more this time, just like every other time, only this time I didn’t do it. This time I just sat there by the well with my broken ladles and told God that if he wanted me to have His living water He was going to have to get it for me, and if He needed me I was going to be right here by the well, waiting.
This summer for about two months I did little else but work. There was nothing else I could do, so I worked and waited. I remember during this season consistently having to resist the urge to “cover up.” In conversations with friends they would ask how I was doing and I would have to confess my state of internal barrenness. The hardest thing of all was having to just leave it at that, not being able to explain or convince them of all the ways “God was using this to do this in me, or for this purpose.” I couldn’t set the record of my spiritual competency straight, as my false self desperately clamored for. I just sat there, unable to explain. And I worked every chance I could. And I waited. There was simply nothing else to do.
“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might He increases strength. Even youths shall faint and grow weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28-31)
If we’ve been in church for any length of time, we’ve heard the last verse of this scripture before, but in many ways the promises listed here of renewal are exactly what I have needed. I’ve been a soccer referee for ten years now, and it pays well and I do a good job, but I can’t remember ever doing as many games in past years as I have this year. Some weeks this summer I reffed as many as 14 games a week, and usually no less than 6. For my other job I deliver about 6 paper routes bi-weekly, and two monthly, with the majority of those being house-to-house walking routes. Now combine the two jobs and you’ve got yourself a very physically demanding lifestyle while soccer season lasts. “They shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” has been exactly what I’ve needed from the Lord. Thank you, Father, for protecting me from injury and maintaining my energy during those grueling stretches.
As needed as those promises are for me, that is not all promised here; it’s also no accident that eagles are mentioned here. Do you know how an eagle learns to “mount up with wings”? Moses refers to the process in his song in Deuteronomy 32:11, “Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions, the Lord alone guided [Israel].” The mother eagle decides her young are ready to fly and stirs up the nest, pushing them out of it. The young eagle then does what any other young eagle would do—plummets downward from his high perch, probably flapping his unused wings awkwardly and complaining bitterly. “How could you do this to me?? I thought you loved me!” But before the young eagle can crash land, mother sweeps in and catches it on her back, bearing it away on eagle’s wings and giving it its first taste of the wonders of flight. The Lord Himself compares this experience to His rescuing power, specifically of Israel from Egypt: “I bore you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself.” (Exodus 19:4) But this experience of being carried on eagle’s wings is only temporary; the young eagle still must learn to fly itself. So mother eagle lifts it up high in the air and then tilts and drops it again! This cycle is repeated until the young eagle can fly on its own, and if it is ever going to experience life as God intended it to, it HAS to fly.
It’s the same with us. I am fully capable of “mounting up with wings like eagles” in the areas of life God has called me to follow Him in, but the process of learning to do so involves a lot of flapping, floundering, and falling on my part. It’s all perfectly safe, but doesn’t feel even remotely so. I’ve felt like that a lot this past year, and I’m guessing you all can relate too, if you’ve ever really tried to follow God into something you felt way over your head in.
There’s a second fact true of at least some eagles that I find equally if not more fascinating, and even more closely connected to my life right now. A few times throughout their lifetime, some eagles will fly away to an elevated hideaway. Isolated and protected by the setting, the eagle proceeds to tear out the feathers with his beak. They are good and useful feathers and have carried him for years, but out they are torn by the roots. Next its talons must go, then finally the beak is ground to a stub on the surrounding rocks. The eagle now looks pitiful, possesses nothing of value, and is capable of nothing but waiting on God to make it whole again, trusting He will faithfully do so in His time. “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not grow weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
Over this past year God has asked me for thing after thing in my life to give to Him. To a great extent, they’ve been good, useful things, even things I believe He gave to me Himself. “How can you ask me for that, God? That was a gift from you in the first place! Indeed, I would never have sought it out had you not directed me to it. If you take even that, Lord, will there be anything on earth I am left with?” Silence from the heavens. *sigh* “Alright Father, I don’t understand but it’s yours. Help me tear the roots out.” This has been the process time and time again this past year, and though the actions now are customary, it remains no less painful every time I begin to tug clumsily at another root.
I now am about to enter an intentionally secluded season of life. Though I welcome and would probably deeply cherish efforts by those of you taking the time to read this to call or e-mail me and say hello, I have to guard against initiating that contact myself, as there are some roots there that need to be torn out. I’ve removed distractions, freed my calendar as much as possible, and generally tried to clear space for God to move however He wants to. Yet having said that, I don’t enter this season passively. I want to learn and grow, to be renewed in His strength and to walk in His life. I seem to learn best through reading, processing, and writing, so I plan to do as much of that as I can.
I eagerly await any responses you may have for me regarding anything I’ve written here or just life in general. Thank you for being in my life. Every single one of you receiving this has made it better just by being a part of it.
your friend,
the Beloved one of God,
Joe
Sunday, November 1, 2009
The Healing Presence
Originally posted on 05/18/08 at http://cookie-monster44.xanga.com/657573564/the-healing-presence/
(As with before, you may wish to print this out and read it at your leisure rather than reading it all online and straining your eyes the whole time. Whatever you prefer.)
(As with before, you may wish to print this out and read it at your leisure rather than reading it all online and straining your eyes the whole time. Whatever you prefer.)
“Did Jesus ever have a wounded heart? If so, when and how? And if not, why not? And if not, then why should we have them? If not, what was He doing that kept His heart from being wounded?
Can a heart that is hidden in Christ ever be wounded by the stones of this world? If a heart has been broken by God can it still be wounded by men?”
Last summer I privately asked these questions of a friend in the midst of a month of tremendous transformation in my life. I had discovered in late June, 2006 that I was not who I thought I had been all twenty years my life, and as you can imagine, it shook my world. I discovered that “the ‘real I’ was my human spirit in union with Christ.” As I wrote at the time:
“Who am I, my true self at the core? My true self is my spirit united with Christ. And as such, every character trait, gift, talent, ability, fruit, blessing, etc. found in Christ is in my true self as well! As Hudson Taylor put it, “It is a wonderful thing to be really one with a risen and exalted Saviour, to be a member of Christ! Think what it involves. Can Christ be rich and I poor? Can your right hand be rich and your left poor? or your head be well fed while your body starves?” Talk about a discovery that will change your life…wow!
In Christ:
~I am blessed with every spiritual blessing. (Ephesians 1:3)
~I am holy and blameless. (Ephesians 1:4)
~I have a spirit of power, love, and sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7)
~I am healed by the stripes of Jesus. (1 Peter 2:24, Isaiah 53:5)
~I am delivered from the power of darkness. (Colossians 1:13)
~I am redeemed from the curse of the law. (1 Peter 1:18-19)
~I am sealed by God. (2 Corinthians 1:21-22)
~I am a new creation. (2 Corinthians 5:17)
~I am God’s child. (John 1:12, Galatians 3:26)
~I am clothed with Christ. (Galatians 3:27)
~I am forgiven and washed in His blood. (1 John 2:12 & 1:9, Ephesians 1:7, Hebrews 9:14, Colossians 1:14)
~I am a temple of the Holy Spirit. (1 Corinthians 6:19)
~I am a saint. (Romans 1:7, Philippians 1:1)
~I am the bride of Christ. (Revelation 19:7)
~I am the head and not the tail, I am above and not beneath. (Deuteronomy 28:13)
~I am dead to sin. (Romans 6:2&11, 1 Peter 2:24)
~I am God’s beloved. (Deuteronomy 33:12)
~I am more than a conqueror. (Romans 8:37)
~I am co-heir with Christ. (Romans 8:17)
~I am free from condemnation. (Romans 8:1)
~I am born of God and the evil one does not touch me. (1 John 5:18)
~I am God’s masterpiece. (Ephesians 2:10)
~I am an ambassador of Christ. (2 Corinthians 5:20)
~I am called by God to a holy life. (2 Timothy 1:9)
~I am the salt of the earth. (Matthew 5:13)
~I am the light of the world. (Matthew 5:14)
~I am God’s friend. (John 15:15)
~I am a member of Christ’s body. (1 Corinthians 12:27)
~I cannot be separated from God’s love. (Romans 8:38-39)
~I am a citizen of Heaven. (Philippians 3:20)
~I am a branch of the true vine. (John 15:1&5)
~I am one through whom Christ can do all things. (Philippians 4:13)
~I am seated with Christ in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 2:6)
~I am hidden with Christ. (Colossians 3:3)
~I am one spirit with Christ. (1 Corinthians 6:17)
~I am complete. (Colossians 2:10)
Since my true self is united with Christ, then my true self is every bit as: loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, free from jealousy, humble, forgiving, without pride, selfless, self-giving, forgetful of sins, truthful, compassionate, caring, protecting, trusting, hopeful, persevering, gracious, slow to anger, just, pure, solid, miraculous, permanent, sweet, fresh, vibrant, never weary, big, intimate, born of the heart, true, clean, electric, creative, excellent, passionate, respectful, graceful, fearless, Spirit-filled, gentle, dedicated, devoted, integrous, heroic, filled with love for the Father, and for other people, among countless other attributes, as Christ is!
Plumbing the depths of Christ is a journey for all eternity, but the more we discover He is, the more our minds can be renewed to realize we are in Him too. In discovering all this, we are never to forget that we are only the vessels and He is the treasure inside. “I live, yet not I.” But even as we remember that, we never forget that all is ours in Christ, and all is ours in Christ right now. Because the spiritual world is not bound by time or space, but exists outside of it (more on this as I discover it in a different post), then what is true of me in the future is true of me now, and has been true of me in the past as well, though I did not realize it then. On the flip side, what is not true of me in the future is not true of me now, and has been not true of me in the past as well. The eternal is truth, the temporal is not. And the truth is Christ in me, the hope of glory, the Word of God in its, His fullness.”
Discovering this central truth of Christ in me as my real, true identity has had a ripple effect across more areas of my life than I can count since then. In the first month that followed I tried to capture in words that I could share with my friends all that was happening in me, all I was learning. This post was the result. If you haven’t read it yet, you should stop right here and go read that before you read the rest of this, because everything I’ve learned and will be writing about since then is based on what I learned and wrote about there. If you have read it before, go read it again. Refresh your mind.
As Alan Leininger, one of my business advisors, has said, “It’s not the things you don’t know that will hurt you most; it’s the things you think are true but aren’t.” Human beings are very logical creatures (with some exceptions, but I won’t name any names here!). We use logic to take two or more pieces of information and fit them together into a consistent whole, then we live our lives based on the conclusions we have drawn from that process. But conclusions drawn from logic are only as good as the accuracy of the information the conclusions are drawn from. If the information is inaccurate, then no matter how logical the conclusions drawn from it are, they will still be wrong, grounded in something other than reality. This point is proved well in a fascinating quote my friend Samuel shared with me a while back about mental disorders:
“If the great reasoners are often maniacal, it is equally true that maniacs are commonly great reasoners….Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the one who has lost everything except his reason.” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy chapter 2)
If I believe that A + B = C and that C = 4 because I believe that A and B are both equal to 2, then any conclusions I come to regarding the role of C in my life are only as good as the accuracy of my belief in the identity of A and B. If B actually equals 7, then I need to change my conclusions about C or I’ll be living in denial. This is why the things you think are true (and have drawn other conclusions from) but actually aren’t are so dangerous. So when I discovered that such a core belief as my true identity had been wrong most of my life, it rocked my world. It forced me to look at some of my conclusions about what my “C’s” truly equaled and reexamine them in the light of what I now believed to be true. The new conclusions I came to soon led to opening up and reexamining other conclusions I had drawn from those first conclusions, and so on and so forth, hence the ripple effect. If you throw a big enough rock into a lake, it will eventually send waves to all parts of that lake.
The questions I asked at the beginning of this post were all a part of that process of opening up and reexamining conclusions and beliefs I had either taken for granted in my life or had never even thought about before. What I wrote last summer in my post captured just the first few waves; what I’ve learned this last year has taken me into some much deeper waters. I asked those questions simultaneously in a series of e-mails with a friend, and the answer I came up with, especially the final question at the end, didn’t make her happy. I’ll share the answer I came up with back then later on in this post, but I found the answer to be very exciting, not offensive
Still excited about what I was beginning to believe, but frustrated at my lack of ability to communicate it effectively, I attempted to explain how we didn’t have to remain wounded to another friend, also wounded, and she didn’t quite share my point of view either. The first friend summed up both their objections with a piercing question I quoted near the end of my long post: “When theory hits the reality of a sinful world, what happens?” To effectively speak, write, or share with others in any form this hope of transformation, I would have to be someone transformed. I couldn’t just tell somebody that healing from lifelong wounds was possible, I had to show them. I had to live the answer.
“It is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go on explaining a thing without knowing what it is. That is why a great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about nothing--all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum.” (C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, p.214) (Emphasis mine)
“I’m recalling something I read from Oxford Bishop Richard Harries: ‘One of the most remarkable religious publications this century was the book of sermons by Harry Williams entitled The True Wilderness. This spoke to millions because, as he avowed, there came a point in his life when he was unwilling to preach anything that was not true to his own experience.’ That is the secret of a truly powerful messenger, who carries weight, whom God will use mightily. Can you imagine the effect if every pastor made that vow? Too many men are far too willing to offer their thoughts on subjects in which they have no real personal experience--especially experiences of God--and their ‘wisdom’ is not grounded in reality. It is theory, at best, more likely speculation, untested and unproven. At its worst it amounts to stolen ideas. Such clutter fills the shelves of most bookstores.” (John Eldredge, Way of the Wild Heart, p.262)
I don’t want to offer just empty words, and I don’t want to learn from those who write them. My prayer is that I might live the truths I have found and attempt to share here, and that these words would reflect that. May you be transformed, as I am being, “till Christ be formed in you” (Galatians 4:19).
Incarnational Reality
So where to start? To believe you can be transformed you have to first believe transformation is possible. This sounds blatantly obvious to many people, and indeed if you had asked me growing up if transformation was possible I would have readily answered in the affirmative. If, however, you had asked me why I believed transformation was possible, I don’t know if I could have given a solid answer. As I’ve already written a bit about above this, all that changed with the discovery of my identity in Christ and what Leanne Payne terms “incarnational reality.” An obvious question presents itself in the light of this belief: “If this is who I really, truly am in Christ, not in theory but in reality, how do I become this person?” I love the way Henri Nouwen asks this with his wonderful use of the name “Beloved”, a word/name that has come to mean very much to me in this past year:
“I say this because, as soon as we catch a glimpse of this truth (our Belovedness), we are put on a journey in search of the fullness of that truth and we will not rest until we can rest in that truth. From the moment we claim the truth of being the Beloved, we are faced with the call to become who we are. Becoming the Beloved is the great spiritual journey we have to make…If it is true that we not only are the Beloved, but also have to become the Beloved; if it is true that we not only are children of God, but also have to become children of God; if it is true that we not only are brothers and sisters, but also have to become brothers and sisters…if all that is true, how then can we get a grip on this process of becoming? If the spiritual life is not simply a way of being, but also a way of becoming, what then is the nature of this becoming?” (Life of the Beloved p. 43-45)
I love that ending question, and would love to let it just sit in you for a while, but Nouwen himself doesn’t wait long before offering an answer.
“Becoming the Beloved means letting the truth of our Belovedness become infleshed in everything we think, say, or do. It entails a long and painful process of appropriation or, better, incarnation. As long as “being the Beloved” is little more than a beautiful thought or lofty idea that hangs above my life to keep me from being depressed, nothing really changes. What is required is to become the Beloved in the commonplaces of my daily existence and, bit by bit, to close the gap that exists between what I know myself to be and the countless specific realities of everyday life. Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, talking about, and doing from hour to hour.” (Life of the Beloved p. 45-46)
Mario Bergner sums up the answer:
“To the Christian, all becoming is incarnational--it is a life that is poured into us from on high. That Life is Jesus.” (Setting Love in Order p. 100)
All becoming is incarnational! But what does that mean? What does the term “incarnational reality” mean, anyway? I use it freely in my life now, but a few years back it would have been mostly gibberish to me, like it probably sounds to most of you right now as well. Simply put, incarnational reality is what I wrote about in my previous post. It is about the reality Christ in us, the Spirit of God dwelling inside human beings and transforming us from the inside out. Mario Bergner, writing about his journey to healing from a homosexual lifestyle, tells of how he first tasted incarnational reality.
“The power of the great truth, ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Colossians 1:27), became a tangible reality in me a few months after I received that life-changing infilling of the Holy Spirit. I was by this time in the habit of beginning every day by setting my eyes on God through Scripture reading and prayer.
After reading Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God and accounts of Frank C. Laubach’s spiritual walk, I decided to start trying some of the things they did. I would call to mind the holy name of Jesus as often as possible. First, I decided to call on His name at least once each hour of the day. Gradually I would increase to once every half hour, then to every fifteen minutes, then to calling on Him every minute. Of course I failed miserably at the beginning, sometimes with hours going by without thinking of it. Then I would simply begin again, making sure not to inflict any false guilt on myself for not doing it. After a while, I found if I forgot to practice God’s presence, I would be reminded by the Spirit within me to do so. On many a morning I would awake and hear the Spirit calling on the name of Jesus from within me. Soon I noticed that whenever my thoughts would wander, they would wander toward Him.
As I purposely practiced the presence of God by looking up and out of myself and calling to mind the name of Jesus as often as possible, I began to notice the beauty of the world around me--in my students, my cat, the landscape of southeastern Ohio.
One spring afternoon, I sat in the office of the Chairman of the Theatre Department at the university where I was teaching. The rest of the faculty filled the chairs around the chairman’s desk. Behind his desk was a large picture window with the drapes fully opened. The winter’s snow had melted, and green leaf buds dotted every branch.
Shortly after the meeting started, my thoughts began to wander. I began to give thanks to Jesus for the beauty of His creation and for the budding trees outside the window.
Noticing that my full attention was not invested in the meeting, the chairman asked me, ‘Mario, are you with us?’
‘Sorry,’ I replied.
As the meeting continued, I was extra careful not to gaze out this large picture window. Rather, at the next moment of boredom, I looked down at my hands and gently pinched the skin over one of the knuckles of my left hand with the thumb and index finger of my right hand. While lifting this tiny pinch of skin off my knuckle and suspending it between my two fingers, I thought to myself, God’s beauty and reality is being mediated to me through the spring scene outside the window; how much more beautiful and real is the Spirit of God indwelling this tiny pinch of my skin.
Suddenly the meaning of Christ being in me washed over me like waves of living waters. I then realized that if God’s Spirit was mysteriously living in that tiny pinch of skin being lifted off my knuckle, that His very presence was also permeating through every cell and fiber of my body, whether I felt it or not. The words of 1 Corinthians 6:10-20 (RSV) flowed through me like life-giving blood: ‘Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.’
While this truth was still flowing through my mind, I looked at the tip of my pinky finger and realized that if all I had of the Spirit of God indwelling me was what was in the tip of this tiny finger, I would have enough divine power to be healed. From that moment forward, I knew in the deepest part of my heart that I would be completely healed from homosexuality. And I eventually was. Sheer joy welled up from within me. I must have been glowing with religious awe.
Unbeknown to me, the chairman had been catching glimpses of me during this entire time. As I stared in wonderment at the tip of my pinky and the reality of the power of God indwelling it, he asked in a most peculiar voice, ‘Mario, what on earth is going on over there?’
Embarrassed that I had once again been caught not paying attention, I replied, ‘Oh, you’d never understand this if I told you.’
‘Try me,’ he quipped.
Not knowing any other words to use to describe my discovery of this age-old truth, I joyfully shared with him and the rest of the faculty members team a term I had learned from Leanne Payne. ‘I’ve just come into Incarnational Reality!’
His face went completely blank, and he stared at me without any expression for several seconds. Then his eyes blinked a few times, and he finally looked away without saying a word back to me. The faculty meeting simply continued.
From that day forward, I related to my body in a completely different way. It wasn’t just a body; it was the temple of the Holy Spirit. Whenever I had a fleshly desire, I refused to despise my body for it. Rather, I practiced the presence of Jesus until the sinful desire and temptation ceased. This is not some pie-in-the-sky platitude nor esoteric theology. It is a down-to-earth, practical and ordinary reality available to every Christian.
When I came to Christ in my teens, I never heard any teaching on union with Christ through the Holy Spirit indwelling the believer. It was only ten years later, after attending Leanne Payne’s adult Christian education class and later receiving the powerful infilling of the Holy Spirit at that little church in Ohio, that I came into the reality of ‘Another living in me.’ This reality is a central truth to the healing of persons.
In every Christian there is a healthy place within, that internal place where he is in union with Christ. About those who love Him, Jesus said, ‘My father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’ (John 14:23b). From that home within, we can dare to listen to our hearts and all that is within them. The Christian who finds after conversion that his heart is filled with garbage (as I did) is equipped to sort through all his inner confusion once he is assured of that healthy place within. That place where Jesus and the Father have made their home.
Of the eighty times the word union appears in Today’s English Version of the New Testament, seventy-nine times it refers to the believer’s union with Christ. One seminary professor of mine constantly reminds his students, ‘the theme of being “in Christ” is so prevalent in the writings of St. Paul that it practically appears on every page of his epistles.’
This mystical union between the believer and God is the reality that empowers us to be transformed from the inside out. It ought not to be confused with monism where God is in everything, or with New Age (Gnostic) notions about man being or becoming God. As Orthodox theologian Father Kallistos Ware has said, ‘Although ‘oned’ with the divine, man still remains man; he is not swallowed up or annihilated…’
This union with Christ also empowers the believer’s prayer life. Evangelical theologian Dr. Donald Bloesch writes:
‘Still another way in which Christ makes a genuine prayer life possible is by His dwelling within the hearts of believers. He not only intercedes for us in heaven, but by His Spirit he makes his abode within the deepest recesses of our being. We can therefore call on Him with confidence and assurance because He is infinitely near. Paul reminds his hearers, “Do you not realize Jesus Christ is in you?” (2 Corinthians 13:5) Confidently he proclaimed, “Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Colossians 1:27). Within the being of every Christian there is an inner light, a voice within, which moves us toward prayer. And this inner presence is an abiding refuge in times of trial and tribulation.’
It was the reality of Christ in the believer that enabled the early Christians to suffer martyrdom with such joy. In A.D. 202 Septimus Severus, emperor of the Roman Empire, issued an edict outlawing the spread of Christianity. This edict was directed especially against new converts and their teachers. One new convert, Felicitas, was pregnant at the time of her arrest. She was imprisoned for many months and during that time she gave birth to a baby girl. Seeing her moan in childbirth, her jailers asked how she expected to face the beasts in the arena. She answered, ‘Now my sufferings are only mine. But when I face the beasts, there will be another who will live in me and will suffer for me since I shall be suffering for Him’ (italics mine).
This reality of ‘Another living in me’ was key to my healing from homosexuality, and it is key to the healing of all persons. For no matter what horrible memory came up, no matter what vile sin was revealed from within my heart, no matter what petty or ludicrous thought raced through my mind, no matter what soul-shaking pain overcame me, I now knew that Jesus was living in me. Because there was ‘Another living in me,’ I had the courage to face the beasts within the arena of my heart. That healthy place where Jesus indwelt me was my true center.” (Setting Love in Order p. 95-99)
A healthy place within? A true center? Leanne Payne, a co-worker and mentor to Mario Bergner, explains further.
“To experience this prayer (Ephesians 3:16-17) fulfilled in our lives is to find our true center, the ‘home within’ that is solid and strong, a place of rest and strength. From that center we live. From that center we ‘abide’ in Christ and He in us. We are to practice His presence. We no longer have to live from the center of the lower self, the unspiritual or incomplete self which is compelled and driven from its position of self-centeredness.
Fr. John Gaynor Banks writes of this true center:
‘There is a center in every man in which and through which God works. To that Center He speaks; through that Center He acts. When a man discovers his own divine Center, he stands at the gateway to a very powerful living.’
But we can be Christians and yet, when immature or unhealed psychologically, fail to live from our true center. Rather, we live out of a complex of diseased feelings, attitudes, and, as we shall see, images or symbols that have nothing to do with our new selves in Christ.” (The Healing Presence p. 81-82)
Healing the first wound/ seeing others rightly
Since I found myself unable to effectively communicate this hope of transformation to others, I set out to apply what I was learning to my own life and to finally face some issues in my own life I had never really been able to deal with before. The first and most glaringly obvious issue was my attitude towards my father. Without going into my whole family history here, I grew up in an alcoholic household. After many, many lapses, my father finally conquered that. More persistent than that, however, was his addiction to cigarettes. For ten plus years he had promised us he would quit, and he would try numerous times each year, but the longest he ever made it was almost three months. And he was not pleasant to be around when he was off nicotine, usually, so the innumerable attempts wore on us all, but it was still better than when he wasn’t trying. The point of this all is to say that I had developed an “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude about his ability to quit smoking, which represented for me all the rest of his addictions and anger issues and shortcomings. I no longer believed that he would ever really change.
The discovery of incarnational reality changed all that. If I now view myself differently not because of anything different I’ve done but simply because Christ lives in me, should I not also view fellow believers that I encounter differently simply because Christ dwells in them too? More specifically, if my dad is in Christ and Christ in him, then I need to learn to be able to see him just as I am now learning to see myself--as a new creation in whom the old things have passed away! Just as with myself, it’s not because he’s done anything specifically that I begin to view him this way, but rather because of what Christ has done. He truly is a new creation in Christ and I need to see him that way, even if he never does or ever steps into the new life freely available to him.
I love this thought from Mike Mason:
“We gain access to heaven by believing in God through Jesus Christ. Similarly, we gain access to earth by believing in people, also through Jesus Christ…
…In order to believe in people we must make a decision to know only the good in them. If our eyes are open, we’ll see the evil too, but we must decide to know only the good. After all, only the good can truly be known. Good reveals, evil conceals. The evil in people is what keeps us from knowing them. To know them, we must look to the good.
By looking at people with the eyes of faith--past all the masks, the games, the lies--we pierce through to the truth of the person whom God created. God did not create anyone to be a failure, a thief, a drunk, a bore. This is not who people are. Who, then, are they?” (Practicing the Presence of People p. 31-32)
John Hyde, a missionary in India around 1900, also learned to look at the good in people.
“Mr. Hyde had a wonderful experience, to which he owed, I believe, his power with God, and therefore with man. He used to speak of it as one of the most direct and solemn lessons God had ever taught him. He was up in the hills resting for a short time. He had been burdened about the spiritual condition of a certain pastor, and he resolved to spend some time in definite intercession for him. Entering into his ‘inner chamber,’ he began pouring out his heart to his Heavenly Father concerning his brother somewhat as follows:
‘O God! Thou knowest that brother how--‘ ‘cold’ he was going to say, when suddenly a Hand seemed to be laid on his lips, and a Voice said to him in stern reproach, ‘He that toucheth him, toucheth the apple of Mine eye.’ A great horror came over him. He had been guilty before God of ‘accusing the brethren.’ He had been ‘judging’ his brother. He felt rebuked and humbled before God. It was he himself who first needed putting right. He confessed this sin. He claimed the precious Blood of Christ that cleanseth from all sin! ‘Whatsoever things are lovely…if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things.’ Then he cried out, ‘Father, show me what things are lovely and of good report in my brother’s life.’ Like a flash he remembered how that brother had given up all for Christ, enduring much suffering from relations whom he had given up. He was reminded of his years of hard work, of the tact with which he had managed his difficult congregation, of the many quarrels he had healed, of what a model husband he was. One thing after another rose up before him and so all of his prayer season was spent in praise for his brother instead of in prayer.
He could not recall a single petition, nothing but thanksgiving! God was opening up His servant’s eyes to the highest of ministries, that of praise.
Mark the result also on that brother’s life! When Mr. Hyde went down to the plains, he found that just then the brother had received a great spiritual uplift. While he was praising, God was blessing. A wonderful Divine Law, the law of a Father’s love. While we bless God for any child of His, He delights to bless that one!
This was the secret of John Hyde’s power with God. He saw the good in God’s little ones, and so was able to appreciate God’s work of grace in that heart. Hence He supplied the heavenly atmosphere of praise in which God’s love was free to work in all its fullness.
This, too, was what gave him power with men. We are attracted to those who appreciate us. All our powers expand in their presence, and we are with them at our best. Hence they call out all that is good in us, and we feel uplifted when with them.
To such souls we turn as naturally as the flowers to the sun, and our hearts expand and bloom out with a fragrance that surprises even ourselves.
Now this is a law that holds good especially with children, and with those who are yet young in the Christian life. The more mature God’s people are the less they depend on man’s approbation or censure, but not so when they are children. Remember, too, our Lord’s solemn warning against casting a stumbling block in the way of any of His little ones! When we look at their faults, we shrivel up their energies, they are at their worst. In a word, we encourage their faults by thinking about them.
Let us remember above all else that God’s people on this earth are in the making. This is His workshop and souls are being fashioned and formed in it. The final polishing touches we will not receive in the present life, but when this body of our humiliation has been transformed. Suppose you go into a carpenter’s shop and begin to find fault with his unfinished chairs and tables! You say, ‘How rough this is! What an ugly corner that is!’ The carpenter will doubtless get angry and say, ‘Bear in mind that I am still making these things. They are not yet finished. Come and see the pattern after which they are being fashioned. See, this is what they will yet be like when I have done with them.’ He shows you beautiful chairs and tables--shining, perfectly formed, polished to perfection! Is the carpenter not right? Is the critic not in the wrong? The one looks at the things which are lovely and eternal. The other at those which are unlovely and, thank God, fleeting.
Would you have power with God and man for the upbuilding of the Indian Church--of any Church? Follow the method of the Carpenter of Nazareth who never broke the bruised reed, who never quenched the smoking wick, no matter how much smoke it was giving out. He turned His eyes to the light of God, there burning dimly, and by doing so blew it into a flame till erring disciples became the Light of the World. This is the way of Love and of Eternal Hope. The other way is the way of sense and of present fact and failure--all of which are fleeting--none of which is the Eternal Truth in Eternal Love.
I never met a man whose very presence seemed to help the weak become strong, the sinful to repent, the erring to walk aright so much as John Hyde. The secret of his success in building up the people of God lay in this method of looking for all the good in men and making it so to expand that the evil was driven out for want of room. Then should we shut our eyes to the faults of all? Should we never reprove sin? Turn to our Lord. Did He not do so at times? Yes, to the impenitent--to those who opposed Him and would not come to Him for help. Just because He was in the habit of looking at all that was good--for that very reason He was able to reprove with all the greater power. No one could do so more severely than our Lord just because He loved much and sympathized so much with all that was good in men.” (Praying Hyde, edited by E.G. Carre p. 136-140)
Seeing Christ in my dad doesn’t mean I ignore or deny Dad’s faults, but that I see something greater than them (Christ Himself) in him and no longer define him by his faults. At the same time, seeing Christ in him doesn’t mean I must accept the flaws as an unchanging part of him and resign myself to dealing with them the rest of my/his life. Seeing Christ in people is nothing like the worldly “virtue” of tolerance.
“It is one thing to accept a person where he or she is, and another to accept their malignant behavior that works against them as well as others. It is also one thing to accept the real person who stands before you needing to be freed, and another to accept (and direct a kindly tolerance toward) his or her old carnal self who dons whatever ‘face’ the occasion might call for while preventing the real, creative self from coming forward. Jesus Christ never wasted His time energy, and prayer by helping a person ‘practice the presence’ of the old carnal self. He didn’t converse with it, or exercise the great virtue of kindness toward it. He paid attention to it only by saying, ‘Die to it!’
The practice of the presence of Jesus is vital on the part of one who would minister healing in His name. In practicing His presence (within myself as well as without and all about), I also pray to see those I minister to through His eyes, and His eyes alone. Through years of doing this, I am convinced that He so loves and concentrates on freeing the real person that He hardly sees the old illusory one once it has been discerned and named as the usurper it is. Rather, His lovingkindness blazes out in healing light toward the real person He created.” (Leanne Payne, The Broken Image p. 105-106)
As Mike Mason spoke of earlier, the evil we see in people is not who they truly are, at least not in this life while they still can choose good or evil. Evil itself is not real--not in that it doesn’t exist, but in that it has no substance. C.S. Lewis provides a wonderful picture of this in my favorite book of his, The Great Divorce, in which all of hell, as infinite as it seems to those in it, is no bigger than an atom of the real world, of heaven itself, and the people who have chosen it have turned into wisp-like ghosts, of no measurable size or solidity whatsoever. The evil they have chosen is not real and they themselves reflect that. (I posted a fantastic section from that book here. Feel free to go read it, if you’d like.) The masks we cover our selves with, the personalities we take on, and the false selves we live out of are substance-less.
“The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs,’ all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented--as an author invents characters in a novel--all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My Wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a personality of my own.
At the beginning I said there were personalities in God. I will go further. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
Your new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come as you are looking for Him. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” (C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity)
“The fallen self cannot know itself. As we have seen, we do not know who we are and will search for our identity in someone or something other than God until we find ourselves in Him. In the Presence, conversing with Him, we find that the ‘old man’--the sinful, the neurotic, the sickly compulsive, the seedy old actor within--is not the Real, but that these are simply the false selves that can never be rooted in God. We find that God is the Real and that He calls the real ‘I’ forward, separating us from our sicknesses and sins. We then no longer define our selves by our sins, neuroses, and deprivations, but by Him whose healing life cleanses and indwells us. From being bent toward the creature--the horizontal position of the fall--we straighten up into the completing union with the Creator--the vertical, listening position of the free creature. We find that we are one in Him and that He is in us. Thus in the presence, listening to the word the Spirit sends, spiritual and psychological healing takes place. Our Lord sends a word--of joy, judgment, instruction, guidance. And that word, if hidden away in an obedient heart, will work toward the integration of that personality. As I listen and obey, I become” (Leanne Payne, The Broken Image p. 135)
If my dad is not a composite of all the grievances I have against him, who, then, is he? If God did not create him to be forever addicted to cigarettes, what did He create him for? The very fact that I was now asking these questions showed how far I had come along in relating to my dad and my attitude towards him. Amazingly and wonderfully though, as I was beginning to ask these questions for the first time I didn’t have to look too hard or too creatively for the answers, because as I was asking them my dad was finally breaking free for good of his own accord. As of now he hasn’t smoked in about two years. And as I suspected all along, my real father, buried underneath most of the time for so many years, is coming forth and I’ve enjoyed getting to know him better. While I obviously don’t think that my change in heart is what caused him to change, but I do believe that when forgiveness takes place (which is a necessity if you want to see someone through Christ’s eyes, or rather is a part of the process of seeing someone through Christ’s eyes) it creates a much more conducive atmosphere for someone else to grow in, so I believe it helped. At the very least it didn’t hurt him, and it helped me immensely, because unforgiveness always holds the one who refuses to forgive in greater bondage than it does the unforgiven person, though both are usually affected. Seeing and forgiving my dad through Christ’s eyes turned out to be easier than I thought it would be because he was actively working and growing with God as I learned to forgive him, but it still freed me up from my own anger and bitterness and frustration enough to begin to move on to the next wound in my life.
Rediscovering the second wound
I didn’t immediately begin dealing with the next wound in my life. In fact, it didn’t really surface from the depths of my heart until early December, a few months later. Instead I began to dig deeper into understanding the process of renewing the mind. In my post last summer I wrote of renewing the mind as the only way growth and transformation is possible. It is the bridge that connects who we are in Christ right now with who we appear to ourselves and to the world around us to be right now. And while I believed then and still believe now that to be true, it was something I had never thought of before that summer, so I wanted to dive deeper into it. One of my mentors recommended I read a book by Greg Boyd and Al Larson entitled Escaping the Matrix which I spent late October and most of November digging into. It was fantastic!
October and November were also months of attempting many new things, of pushing myself further in some things I had dabbled in some before, and of generally learning how to apply in my life what I had learned over the summer. I was growing in Christ and stepping into some of the responsibilities of adulthood I had run from before. Life was good and I was learning how to do something, to be someone with mine. All the growing I had been doing was stretching me on the inside, but all that stretching also stirred up some deep places inside me. It wasn’t long before another long-buried wound broke to the surface again. For soon I would be 21.
2006 had been a very good year for me in many ways, but none more so than in the way I had been able to break free from some social ineptitudes and a general inability to connect with people and make good friends that I had lived with for most of my teenage years. More specifically, I had many friends throughout those years, but nobody I really trusted, nobody I felt understood who I really was or cared enough to want to find out. Looking back now, I can see many ways in which I isolated myself and didn’t let people have an opportunity to get to know me well, but at the time I felt somewhat abandoned and very frustrated. One result of this loneliness was my choice not to have a real birthday party for several years in a row. But now, back in 2006, I had met some wonderful people, found some good friends through hard work, and was going to have a party for my twenty-first birthday.
Without going into all the details, it was a wonderful party. We did some fun things and we did some meaningful things. The whole event was deeply symbolic for me. But the symbolism combined all the stretching I had been going through, all that I had learned in the last year, and all of the people (that could make it) that I had come to trust gathered together in one place at one time, and those three things together touched a deep reservoir of pain I had kept buried for a long time and had indeed almost forgotten about.. I was fine until after everyone left, but then the pain of all the loneliness of those years resurfaced. Many times when I desperately need to seek God I will go for a walk in the woods (Theodore Wirth Park) near my house. For a period of my life, I would take a quiet time each morning and go out for a wander through every little nook and path of the woods, usually staying out for an hour or two; eventually I came to know every little trail by heart. And if I needed to go for a walk at nighttime I would walk around the woods (I don’t live in the world’s safest neighborhood) until I felt at peace in my heart. But that night I did something I had never done before and will probably never do again: I went for a midnight walk through the woods. Over that walk and through the next few days I came to two conclusions: One that this pain was nothing new but rather something very old that I had been running from for a long, long time, and two I finally had the resources, knowledge, friendships, and courage to stop running and finally come face to face with the old pain and learn to deal with it. So I set aside most of the activities I had been keeping busy with and set out on what I termed a “healing journey.” A couple of weeks into it, here is what I wrote on xanga about what I was going through:
“I am 21 now, have been for almost two weeks.
It feels pretty much the same as the end of twenty did.
Same hopes.
Same struggles.
Same plans.
Same desires.
Same songs in my heart.
Same song playing on my site (time for a change soon, I think).
Same unread books on my bookshelf.
Same books I've read countless times and have recommended to others countless times.
Same long-neglected prayer closet in my room.
Same inspirational quotes on the door to my long-neglected prayer closet.
Same never-ending battle to kill all the box-elder bugs that creep their way into my room during winter.
Same tendency to make a mess of my room.
Same foods for breakfast and lunch.
Same old athletic trophies collecting dust.
Same old teddy bear keeping watch over my room (now missing his right eye, in an apparent attempt to remind me of Matthew 5:29 (It's a long story--don't ask)).
Same job.
Same work schedule.
Same family patterns and struggles.
Same extra padding around my stomach.
Same wounds.
Same strongholds and fears formed to protect those wounds.
New hope.
What? The truth is that although much of my life looks and even feels the same right now, and I've painted a somber mood thus far in my post, I'm actually in a very hopeful state of mind. Why? Because I am finally in a position to deal with the fears and strongholds formed around some of the deepest wounds I've carried around for years! The wounds I've never really been able to tell any friends about because they indirectly came from and were consistently reinforced by my friends...
Yes, I can finally see on my horizon freedom from those wounds, and the glimpses I have been getting of life beyond them contains more joy than anything I've experienced before.
More on this, including some thoughts on strongholds, as I continue to work through all this.
To all my friends out there reading this: Thank you for being so instrumental in helping me reach this point where I feel safe enough with you in bringing this wound to light so it can be healed. Major changes are in the process inside me right now, if not the outside yet, and I'm going to need you to make it through this.
Please don't abandon me. I can't do this alone, though God knows I've tried to.
Jesus, help me. I'm so close...”
I initially planned to give myself from mid-December through late January for this healing journey, but it would wind up lasting all the way into May of 2007. What I learned would change my life…again.
Defining the heart and mind
As a high school graduation gift in the summer of 2004 my parents had sent me to a conference they had been to the previous year and was highly recommended by our church, Leanne Payne’s annual conference. As a prerequisite to going, I was supposed to read Leanne’s two main books: The Healing Presence and Restoring the Christian Soul. I tried to read them but couldn’t understand half the terminology she was using, and it was all way too complicated for me at the time as an 18 year old. Despite not really understanding the books, I went anyway and had a wonderful time, receiving some very valuable insights that made the whole trip worthwhile. I also came away very impressed with the effectiveness of Leanne Payne’s teaching even though I didn’t get all of it yet. Upon arriving home from the conference I stashed away the books in my “God-will-bring-me-back-to-this-when-the-time-is-right” portion of my bookshelf.
After my midnight walk, God led me back to them and I began to read through them again. As I did they still didn’t make much sense, but some things were beginning to come together. Within a few weeks of digging into her books I felt I had a solid grasp on what she was talking about. More complicated than just understanding her terminology and use of language, however, was integrating what I was learning from her books with what I had learned over the summer and what I had just learned from Greg Boyd’s book. Greg hardly even mentioned the heart, talking only of the mind in his book, dealing with both the conscious and the unconscious minds. Leanne, on the other hand, spoke of the spirit and soul and of “the two minds,” referring to both the heart and the mind. Other authors and friends used the same terms but in completely different ways. As you might guess, I was confused. If all transformation is through renewing the mind, what role does the heart play? If my spirit is united with Christ, is my soul as well? What exactly is the heart, anyway? If everybody defines these terms differently, how do I determine which definition is correct?
My first breakthrough came when a friend (I don’t remember who, but whoever you are, thanks!) mentioned offhand in a conversation that the Old Testament doesn’t have a word equivalent to the New Testament and modern word “mind.” That the mind is something in and of itself is a thought that originated with the Greeks, whose thought and language had permeated the culture in which Jesus lived and taught, but the Jewish writers of the Old Testament had no such concept of the mind as an individual thing and included it when they wrote of the heart! For example, compare Luke 10:27 and Matthew 22:37 with Deuteronomy 6:5. Both quote from Deuteronomy 6:5 and both add the word mind to the quote. (It also explained why my Pastor had kept going back to Proverbs 4:23 in a series on renewing the mind--I couldn’t figure it out and at the time it drove me nuts!) After going into a brief but fascinating overview of how we came to perceive as separate the mind and the heart, thinking from being itself, Leanne Payne speaks of how the Bible views the heart.
“From this brief historical overview, we see why we speak of ‘head and heart’ the way we do. Our language reflects at once the historical schism, as well as the attempt to overcome it and explain the knowledge of faith and the imaginative-intuitive-symbolic ways of knowing. But I want to make it clear that such language is a concession, a necessary one in that it acknowledges this historical ideology which has resulted in a psychological schism (between thinking and being) within the souls of men and women everywhere. But it is unfortunate terminology in that it too can seem to divide what should only be differentiated, and can therefore mislead us into the opposite error of undervaluing the discursive reason, its symbolic capacities, its power to complement and balance the intuitive-feeling mind. It can and does lead to differentiation in the ‘two minds’ that are inaccurate and therefore misleading.
The Bible knows nothing of the schism we have suffered, so it does not use the metaphor heart in this way. ‘In Biblical language,’ the heart is ‘the center of the human spirit, from which springs emotions, thought, motivations, courage and action—the “wellspring of life”’ (taken from the NIV Study Bible commentary on Psalm 4:7) In the scriptures, therefore, the heart of man refers to both ‘minds’---or as we say today, to ‘head knowledge’ as well as ‘heart knowledge.’ It also refers to both the spirit and soul in man. Therefore, rather than speaking of healing the head in contrast to the heart, the ‘conscious’ in contrast to the ‘unconscious,’ or the spirit in contrast to the soul, it speaks very simply of cleansing the heart. This cleansing radically starts the transformation in every faculty, preparing the total inner man for a transposition---an infilling of God’s Spirit.
This means, of course, just as in any number of cases in the English language, that we use a language symbol in more than one way. When we say ‘head and heart,’ we acknowledge the schism that is in man and has to be healed. But in terms of prayer for healing, we hold firmly to the Scriptural metaphor which rightly speaks of man’s inner being in this integrated way. We are then less likely to make the healing of man more complicated and difficult than it is…
…So the Bible, while acknowledging the differing faculties of the heart, does not speak of its ‘two minds,’ but of one heart with two mindsets.” (The Healing Presence p. 161-162)
This new understanding led to another, bigger breakthrough: Leanne Payne and Greg Boyd were, in effect, saying exactly the same thing, just with very different language! I didn’t have to pit one against the other on whom I should listen to; I could integrate them, I just needed a standard definition to mold everyone else’s definitions to. Eventually I decided to go with Leanne Payne’s definitions (which doesn’t make everybody else’s terms necessarily wrong, like, for instance, Dallas Willard in his book Renovation of the Heart; it just makes them different).
So what are the heart and mind, spirit and soul, anyway? What roles do they play? And how does all this fit in with what I wrote last summer about transformation solely via renewing the mind?
“The Scriptures consider man as a whole, and we err if we fall into the trap of trying to separate and define too closely the differences between the faculties of the mind (e.g., the conscious and the unconscious), or where one leaves off and the other begins. And the same is true of spirit and soul. Spirit and soul differ, the faculties of the mind differ, but to try and differentiate them by separating them is to do what the Scriptures do not do and what great Christian minds such as St. Augustine (in regard to spirit and soul) have failed to do.
Even so, all who pastor souls effectively, from St. Paul to this present day, have to deal with the essential makeup of man. To pray aright and to see healing take place, we have to discern where the need is. We will do a person no good and perhaps a lot of harm if we pray for his salvation (in effect, for the healing of his spirit) when he has in fact already accepted Christ, and his need is for emotional or physical healing. And we do live in a day when the church is in great confusion over these matters. One part of the church actually refuses to acknowledge the need for healing of the soul (as if full sanctification necessarily occurs at the moment of new birth), while another denies, for all practical purposes, even the need for the new birth (the essential healing of man’s spirit). To go even further, few Christians can discriminate between the psychological and the spiritual, and they think, like the pagans of old, that the mind is the highest element in man. This is only one more way of saying that we twentieth-century Christians have lost the understanding of Incarnational Reality.” (Leanne Payne, Restoring The Christian Soul p. 70-71)
“’In reference…to man’s psychical nature, ‘spirit’ denotes life as having its origin in God and ‘soul’ denotes that same life as constituted in man. Spirit is the inner depth of man’s being, the higher aspect of his personality. Soul expresses man’s own special and distinctive individuality. The pneuma (spirit) is man’s non-material nature looking Godward; the psyche (soul) is that same nature of man looking earthward and touching the things of sense.’ (H.D. McDonald, Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, p. 678)
The Scriptures use the terms interchangeably, though they differentiate between spirit and soul. To speak of the soul is also to speak of the spirit in that the spirit of man expresses itself through the soul. Conversely, of course, to speak of the spirit is also to speak of the soul, for the two are wed in man’s makeup. We know nothing of a human spirit in isolation from a soul, or a soul in isolation from a spirit.
To speak of prayer for the healing of the soul is, primarily, to speak of prayer for releasing someone from psychological sickness and emotional pain due to hurts and deprivations of the past. Prayer for healing of memories is in this category. When someone has such a need, he has a psychological barrier to freedom in Christ. Though the human spirit is united with Christ, God’s Spirit cannot ‘radiate’ through this problem area until the person gets help to understand and deal with it. This is where the gifts of counseling and healing come in, and people need to open up in prayer to receive them. Until one does, he is being determined by the difficulties of the past and lacks healing.” (Leanne Payne, Restoring the Christian Soul p. 70)
As best I understand it now, I am a spirit, have a soul, and live in a body. My spirit was crucified with Christ and raised to life with Him and is now united with Him and has been ever since I repented and accepted His salvation. This spirit is the “real me,” my true self and center, the “healed place within” that Mario Bergner speaks of. My soul itself is something deeper than just the sum of these, but it contains and speaks of my thoughts, emotions, memories, beliefs, habits, attitudes, and so on and so forth; it contains and stores all my life’s experiences. At the time of my conversion it was not transformed, though in many cases (like my dad’s) some things do change, but they are just a taste of the results of the work that must lie ahead on the road to transformation. My flesh is…well, let’s not go there now. I’ve still got a lot of questions about the flesh and what it can and cannot do so we’ll save those for another time. Two observations will suffice for now: Jesus came in the flesh, just as we all do, yet He was without sin, so having flesh in and of itself does not make you sinful. In Christ, my spirit is no longer bound by my flesh but has authority over it.
My heart, a metaphor, as Leanne Payne notes above, speaks of both my spirit and soul together, hence the widely varying, at times seemingly contradictory descriptions of the heart.
“The natural (fallen) heart has lost the divine splendor. It is separated from God and from holy converse. It ‘is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,’ cries Jeremiah (17:9). ‘Who can understand it?’ he asks. All the psychologies in the world are attempts to know it.
God knows it: ‘I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind” (Jeremiah 17:10). The Scriptures name many of the kinds of hearts the Lord finds in His examination: broken, grieved, discouraged, obstinate, proud, wicked, trembling, double, subtle, perverse, sorrowful, fretting, heavy, unsearchable or unfathomable, cunning, despiteful (insolent, arrogant, and boastful), bitter, stony, uncircumcised, overcharged, troubled, foolish and darkened, jealous, envious, impenitent, evil, whorish, deceitful, hard, scheming, diabolical, covetous, and so on.
These are hearts that are either sinful or wounded and need healing. In their healing, Jesus first of all comes and stands in the midst of that heart. He who is the light of the world illuminates it. He then speaks the healing word, one which, if received and acted upon, sets the heart free from all the other dominating voices: those of the world, the flesh, and the Devil.
This is a profound view of man; it is incarnational. Christ is in us, radiating up through us, granting to us the holy imagination, the holy intellect. Our two minds are thus hallowed, as well as our sensory and feeling faculties, our wills, our intuitive faculties, our bodies. As we listen to the One who completes us, we find balance and harmony in all those areas. We find genuine integration of all that we are. We are completed in Him. This is by no means a simplistic view of healing if indeed we believe in the Real Presence--within, without, forgiving and completing man.
We then have hearts such as these, also named in the Scriptures: willing, perfect, tender, soft, pure, upright, clean, fixed, wise, merry, meek and lowly, honest and good, single, true, compassionate, circumcised, thankful, and so on. We have a tiny foretaste of the divine splendor we shall once again know when, at the Marriage supper of the Lamb, the union of God with His people will be finally and perfectly consummated.” (Leanne Payne, The Healing Presence p. 135-136)
How the mind works
One thing I need to point out is the journey I’ve gone on in understanding the soul. Last summer’s post was all about the role of the spirit in a believer. I also wrote that the only transformation necessary (and indeed possible) was renewing the mind. While I don’t disagree with that now, I failed then to define what the mind was and hadn’t really taken into account the subconscious, or for that matter even really knew much of anything about the subconscious. To quote Morpheus from the Matrix, I didn’t know “how deep the rabbit hole goes,” and how deeply engrained are our lifetime of thought patterns that need to be renewed. In retrospect, I wouldn’t change anything about that post. It challenges me to remember who I am in Christ every time I reread it. But I do want to share now what I didn’t know then after a year focused on digging into the depths of my own soul and struggling to find ways to let the truth of my Belovedness become infleshed in everything I think, say, and do.
Amongst discovering all the other things that renewing the mind speaks to, that the rabbit hole goes much deeper than just my conscious thoughts to the very depths of my soul, it’s almost easy forget that it also speaks of…renewing the mind! And if we’re going to renew the mind, it might be helpful to understand how it works. It’s very difficult to fix something when you don’t know how it’s supposed to work! I’ve spent some time this past year gaining a better understanding of how the mind operates and the more I learn, the more I want to learn. It’s quite fascinating. The book I read last November, Escaping the Matrix, by Greg Boyd and Al Larson, guided me on most of my journey through discovering the workings of the mind. It contained the most modern scientific information available (written in 2006) about the mind and how it works. What the mind does on a second by second basis over the course of a lifetime is nothing short of unbelievable.
“In all God’s creation there is nothing as awesome and mysterious as the human brain. It weighs only three and a half pounds, but this little organic computer can in most respects outperform the largest and most sophisticated computers humans have been able to construct.
Consider that one gram of this gray matter (roughly the size of a pea) is more complex than the entire global telephone system. The average adult brain consists of more than 10 billion neurons (National Geographic magazine, as I’ll quote in a little bit, cites a number ten times bigger) communicating with one another through more than ten trillion synaptic connections. (Synaptic connections are the junctions or gaps between the axon and the dendrite of a neuron. The biochemical neurotransmitters are released from the axon to stimulate and communicate with the dendrite of a second neuron.) As unbelievable as it sounds, the number of possible neuronal connections in the brain is more than all of the stars in the known universe (approximately 50 billion galaxies with an average of 100 billion stars each). Although the average dendrite is a fraction of a millimeter in size, if you were to line up all the dendrites in your brain, the line would circle the globe five times!
The brain registers particular experiences or produces particular thoughts by firing in certain patterned ways with its billions of neurons connected by its trillions of synapses. The magnitude of this complexity is beyond comprehension. Among other things, we simply have trouble thinking in terms of trillions. Fortunately, the brain communicates much faster than you can possibly count, and it operates along millions of neurological pathways all at once. Were this not the case, it would take several lifetimes to think a single thought!
The feats the brain is capable of are even more amazing than its astounding complexity. At this very moment your brain is accessing its memory files to identify each mark on this page as a meaningful letter, each collection of letters as a meaningful word, each collection of words as a meaningful sentence, each collection of sentences as a meaningful paragraph, and so on. During this process, you’re being impacted by an estimated 100 million bits of information per second. The reticular activating system of your brain deletes 98 percent of this while the rest of your brain filters the remaining 2 million bits of information. From all this, your brain brings to your conscious awareness only the five to nine pieces of information per second it believes is most relevant to you at the moment.
For example, you probably weren’t consciously aware of the weight of your buttocks pressing against the chair on which you’re now sitting until we just now made that piece of information relevant to you by having you read this sentence. That means that the original five to nine pieces of information that you were consciously attending to changed. You had to let go of one of the chunks of data in order to consciously attend to the weight of your derriere against the chair, which you are doing again right now. Though you only became conscious of your weight on the chair when we mentioned it, your brain was already monitoring it at an unconscious level.
We could have just as easily turned your attention to your rate of breathing, to the sounds outside your window, to various odors you may be smelling, to the beating of your heart, or to the color of whatever occupies the upper left corner of your peripheral vision at this moment. The brain is perpetually taking it all in, processing it, and offering your conscious self a mere fraction of this information. Every time you change your conscious focus, you alter the five to nine pieces of information to which you are consciously attending.
As we said earlier, every distinct aspect of your experience is a particular pattern of neurons firing on one another--what is referred to as a neural-net. A neural-net is activated in response to appropriate stimuli sometimes referred to as a ‘trigger.’ For example, you know what the word trigger means because your brain has been programmed to activate a distinct neural-net that identifies these markings (t-r-i-g-g-e-r) as having a particular meaning. You’re interpreting electrical signals.
Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. What’s actually happening is that light is being reflected off the markings on this page with a particular vibration. These vibrations are stimulating your eye in a particular fashion that is sending a pattern of electromagnetic activity into your nervous system and up to your brain. This pattern of electromagnetic activity is triggering a distinct neural-net that is being interpreted as having a specific meaning. And all of this is happening automatically, according to a pre-established program (that is, your past learning) at a minute fraction of a second.
So it has been for every word you’ve read in this book thus far. And at every moment your brain was at the same time deleting 100 million pieces of data. Without this designated ability to delete the vast amount of superfluous information we would not be able to function. (Escaping The Matrix p. 30-33)
To make sense of the present and prepare for the future, the mind has to sort through the past to find patterns of information (neural-nets) it has stored that are similar to the present patterns of information it is currently receiving. In other words, it is your memory, in all its different forms, that enables you to live in the present.
“The whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the massive glob of neurons that interpret it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what is about to happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Our brains are fundamentally prediction machines, and to work they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories. Most of the things that pass through our brains don’t need to be remembered any longer than they need to be thought about…If everything we looked at, smelled, heard, or thought about was immediately filed away in the enormous database that is our long-term memory, we’d be drowning in irrelevant information.” (National Geographic, November 2007, p.51,54)
A couple of days before I was planning on writing this section on how the mind works, a magazine we don’t get and I don’t normally read appeared on our front couch downstairs. It was the most recent National Geographic and its cover story was titled: Memory: Why we remember, why we forget. Knowing my main focus was on how the mind works specifically in regards to memories, I snatched it immediately and read through it eagerly.
“What is a memory? The best that neuroscientists can do for the moment is this: A memory is a stored pattern of connections between neurons in the brain. There are about a hundred billion of these neurons, each of which can make perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons, which makes a total of about five hundred trillion to a thousand trillion synapses in the average adult brain. By comparison there are only about 32 trillion bytes of information in the entire Library of Congress’s print collection. Every sensation we remember, every thought we think, alters the connections within that vast network. Synapses are strengthened or weakened or formed anew. Our physical substance changes. Indeed, it is always changing, every moment, even as we sleep.” (National Geographic, Nov. 2007 p. 36)
“Though there is disagreement about just how many memory systems there are, scientists generally divide memories into two types: declarative and nondeclarative (sometimes referred to a explicit and implicit). Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car or what happened yesterday afternoon…Nondeclarative memories are the things you know without thinking about them, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror.” (National Geographic, Nov. 2007 p. 41)
I have never had to relearn how to ride a bike; once was enough. I will never have to relearn (barring injury, of some sort) how to throw a baseball, say “pretzel,” make a snow angel, find my way home, drink a glass of water, drain a three-pointer in Dylan’s face, sit quietly next to a stream, swing on a swingset, walk or run in a straight line, flip a light switch, calculate (simple) mathematics, how to turn a page while reading a book, or how to read the words in that book if they are in English. My mind has stored the neural-nets it associates with these activities and reactivates them whenever it needs them, often without my having even to think about them consciously.
“Once installed, these neural-nets operate automatically and deterministically---remember, they’re just organic transmitters of electromagnetic energy---and they do so faster than your conscious mind can ordinarily grasp. For example, you did not have to think about the meanings of the markings when they were triggered. The neural-net that gives meaning to these particular markings operates on autopilot, as it were. Once it is installed, these markings will continue to deterministically and automatically activate the organic transmitters of electromagnetic energy associated with them until the brain is reprogrammed to do otherwise.
This God-given, deterministic, autopilot aspect of the brain is actually a wonderful gift, for it allows us to process information quickly, efficiently, and accumulatively. We don’t have to keep learning things over and over again. The brain neurologically stores conclusions it has reached and treats these as reality until it is instructed to do otherwise. You instantly know the meaning of every word you’re reading right now only because of this. This mind-boggling efficiency and stability works to our advantage when our neurons have been programmed to fire in ways that communicate truth and that are beneficial to us.” (Boyd and Larson, Escaping The Matrix, p. 34-35)
This efficiency goes deeper than just mundane, every-day activities. It also is true of much more complex systems and beliefs. For example, when my mom tells me she loves me I believe her without much thought--conscious thought, that is. Subconsciously (or nondeclaratively, as National Geographic puts it) my mind has just ran through a hundred memories in which she has proved she loves me through her actions and words, so my mind has already concluded that she loves me and I believe her when she says so. Sometimes the conclusions our mind makes stem from a single memory rather than a multitude of them. Or maybe a single memory stands out from among a multitude of them and you come to a conclusion based on that one memory, like the conclusion I’ve come to that prayer is powerful. On that account, I won’t go into details here but ask me sometime about my aunt Crystal (who was a witch, a medium) and the details surrounding the end of her life. You won’t ever convince me that God doesn’t answer prayers. That memory, as all memories do, comes attached to a meaning (and sometimes an emotion), which is one of the reasons I remember it in the first place.
Go back to how much information our minds process per second: 100 million bits. Throw out 98% like our minds do automatically and that still leaves you with 2 million bits of information per second of all different varieties. Of all that information per second, even of the 5-9 bits of conscious information per second, how does your mind decide what to and what not to store long-term? How does it know when to retrieve it? The mind stores information it believes may be useful to you in the future and retrieves it when it believes it may have relevance to you in the present, or in a more neurological term, when it is triggered.
Let’s dig a little deeper: How do our minds retrieve these memories? What do they consist of? Why can they be so powerful at times? Greg Boyd and Al Larson had a fascinating answer. I quote them at length here because their answer has completely revolutionized the way I think of “renewing the mind.”
“Stop now and answer this simple question: what is in the backseat of your car? Please take the time to do this exercise. The more time you take to understand these new concepts the easier it will be to do the life-changing exercises later in the book! So consciously observe; be a detective of your mind. What is in the backseat of your car?
Got it? Now ask yourself: how did I do that? Thought processes are behaviors you do. They don’t just happen. We want to help you discover how you do the thought process of remembering what is in the backseat of your car. How do you retrieve this information? You might be inclined to answer, “I did a search and activated neural-nets that store the sought-after information.” While technically correct, that is not what we’re asking. We’re asking, how did you do the thought process of remembering what is in the backseat of your car? We’re asking you to investigate the outcome of what you experienced when you did this cognitive search. How do you know what is in the backseat of your car so that you are able to answer the question ‘What is in the backseat of your car?’
You didn’t see a ticker-tape strip of conceptual information flowing across the screen of your mind giving you the sought-after information, did you? As we’ve said, the brain doesn’t think primarily with conceptual information. Rather, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that you reexperienced the backseat of your car. This is how the brain thinks. It replicates or re-presents (literally, makes present again) experienced reality.
If you did ‘what’s in the backseat of my car?’ as Al did, you instantly saw a visual picture of your backseat. You saw it from the perspective of the front seat of your car. If you did it as Greg did, you saw the backseat looking in through the passenger side rear window. For Al the picture flashed for a fraction of a second. For Greg it lasted a while during which he lifted up a coat to see what was under it. For both of us the experience was in color, but Al’s re-presentation was a snapshot while Greg’s was a video.
Others may have investigated their backseat from the perspective of sitting in the backseat, and it may have been in black and white. For others the visual may have been so fast that you couldn’t clearly make out anything on your internal screen. Yet you ‘just know’ what’s in the backseat. For still others, some sense other than visual may have stood out when you did, ‘what’s in the backseat of my car?’ For example, if you thought you smelled a rotting ham sandwich the last time you were in your car, you may have instantly experienced an internal odor in response to our question. If the last time you looked for something in your backseat was in the darkness of an unlit garage, you may have internally experienced what you felt at the time in response to our question.
Whatever happened inside of your brain in response to our question, this is how you did the memory of your backseat. We all do it differently. But we all have this in common: we remembered by reexperiencing. We re-present reality when we think.
Let’s try another one. Recite the Lord’s Prayer in your mind. (If you don’t know it, try the Pledge of Allegiance.)
Okay, now say it to yourself again, but as you do so, notice that you can hear each word of the Lord’s Prayer (unless, of course, you are deaf, in which case you saw each word signed). If you did it as Al did, you heard each distinct word in your own voice. Indeed, you could locate the voice as coming from a space between your mouth and nose. If you did it as Greg did, you heard each word in your own voice but could not identify it coming from a specific location. Others may have heard the words of the Lord’s Prayer in someone else’s voice---your pastor, mother, or spouse. Some may have heard the voice from a specific location, like Al, while others did not, like Greg. For some it was soft; for others it was loud. Still others may have seen things in their mind as they heard the prayer. Greg saw an ancient script of the prayer, Al saw a re-presentation of God the Father as he said the prayer. Others may have seen a church, a stained-glass window, a Bible, or something else they associate with this prayer.
Again, what you experienced in your mind when remembering the Lord’s Prayer was how you did this memory. We all did it somewhat differently. But we all did it experientially.
The two main points from these simple exercises is (1) that thought has a concrete, sensory, experiential structure made up primarily of internal sights, sounds, and feelings, and (2) we all do the structure of memory uniquely.
Let’s follow the white rabbit down the hole a little deeper. This exercise will be a bit more involved. The previous two exercises helped you discover how you do a memory. This one will help you understand how you do an emotion.
We want you to do a pleasant memory. Take a moment and mentally re-present an event from your past that you consider fun, happy, or pleasant. It could be a vacation you went on, a time alone with a sweetheart, a past achievement, etc. As soon as you finish reading this sentence, we’d like you to stop reading and take time to get this pleasant memory vividly reexperienced in mind.
Got it? Okay. Hold the memory in mind and study it carefully. Notice how you are doing this behavior called ‘remembering a pleasant event.’ You’re re-presenting the event to yourself, as though it was presently real, aren’t you? You’re internally replaying the pleasant memory in ways similar to how you initially recorded them. And notice that you’re employing one or more of your five internal senses in your re-presentation of your past.
Some are seeing pictures (visual) and/or hearing sounds (auditory). Some feel their bodies in the re-presentation (kinesthetic) and/or are smelling odors (olfactory). And a few may even be re-presenting something they tasted (gustatory). We shall refer to the way we employ our internal senses in re-presenting thought as ‘the VAGOG code’ (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory, Gustatory).
No two people do a pleasant memory exactly alike. In fact, if two people experienced exactly the same pleasant event, their re-presentation of the memory would not be done in exactly the same way. The pleasant feelings you have about this particular memory are there because of the unique way you do this particular memory. What you saw, hear, felt, smelled, and/or tasted (the VAGOG external) is transformed into particular electromagnetic waves or a code you employ (the VAKOG internal) in remembering the pleasantness of the event. Alter any of the specific distinctions of how you do this memory---that is, change the way you internally see, hear, feel, smell, or taste when you do this memory---and the feelings that surround this memory will change….
…As we shall see more clearly later on, our brains know how to do a memory---or any thought---in a specific way that elicits the meaning and attached emotion for which it is searching. If it is triggered to do ‘pleasant,’ it knows what to re-present and how to re-present it to be congruent with that emotion. If it is externally triggered to do ‘fear’ or ‘shame,’ our brains know ho to do that as well. In fact, every single emotion you presently do has a unique VAKOG code; this is the brain’s way of referencing one emotion as opposed to another emotion. If you change any of the internal VAKOG codes distinctions, you will change the emotion to some degree.
Why is all of this important? Because while we don’t have the power to directly change our emotions, we do have the ability to change the re-presentations with which emotions are associated. We can’t change fear, shame, jealousy, or any other emotion simply by willing it away. But we are able to permanently alter the re-presentations to which these emotions are associated. When we become detectives of our own minds and learn the specific ways our brains structure a particular emotion (the VAKOG code it employs in the re-presentation that includes the emotion), we will be able to choose to do it or not….
…Recognizing how we do particular thoughts and particular emotions associated with these thoughts is very important. Until we become aware of how we actually do our emotionally laden thoughts, it will be difficult to gain control over them….
…We are more than our neurons and have the power to take thoughts, and therefore emotions, captive to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5; Rom. 12:2). But it’s very difficult to capture and renew something of which we’re not aware. We can wish and pray and promise all we want. But so long as we keep seeing, hearing, and sensing in our mind the virtual reality that is associated with our emotion, the emotion will not change. Indeed, it cannot change, for the emotion is part of the same neural-net we are seeing, hearing, and sensing.
More specifically, the emotion is the meaning dimension of what we are seeing, hearing, and sensing. The VAKOG code you elicit to do a particular thought is what it is precisely because this code contains a particular emotion….
…What all of this demonstrates is that we don’t think primarily with conceptual information. We think with concrete, sensory information. We think by replicating reality on the inside. We quite literally re-present---make present again---our experience of the world when we have a memory. More technically, we reactivate the same network of neurons that were initially activated in our initial experience, to some event experiencing the event all over again. The reexperience or re-presentation will replicate the intensity of the original experience to the degree that our inner re-presentation is like the original experience---concrete, vivid, and with all our senses.
This isn’t just true of memories. It’s how we generate our thoughts. We think by replicating sense experience on the inside. As authors Lakoff and Johnson put it, all thought is ‘embodied.’ Even our most abstract and general thoughts are metaphorically rooted in our concrete, physical experience. Whenever we think, we in some way replicate aspects of our bodily experience of the world. We think by turning our sense experience of the world inward.
We didn’t need modern cognitive philosophers or neuroscientists to tell us this. Almost everybody throughout history who has paid much attention to how we think has seen this. As far back as the fourth century BC, Plato described thought as an inner artist painting pictures on the soul. His student Aristotle spoke of the mind as a sort of soft wax upon which impressions are made with our senses. (Today we know that the ‘wax’ consists of neurons.) He concluded that ‘the soul never thinks without a mental image.’ With the exception of several decades of misguided thinking in the twentieth century, this has been an almost universally shared insight….
…Most of us haven’t paid attention to Aristotle’s insight that ‘the soul never thinks without images.’ Most people just assume they think with conceptual information---which perhaps explains why we tend to trust conceptual information so much to transform us, despite our uniform experience that this trust doesn’t usually pay off. We just haven’t known there was anything else to go on. Why have we missed this?
Think of it this way. If we asked you to describe an elephant, you can only give us conceptual information. You’d say something like, ‘a very large mammal with a long trunk.’ You’d give us our shared surface structure meaning, not your deep structure meaning. But it’s not because you want to hide anything from us. It’s simply that you can’t possibly give us your deep structure---that is, what you’re actually experiencing when you do the behavior of ‘thinking of an elephant.’
Only you can experience your actual mental behavior. Only you can experience your neural-nets from the inside. Only you can see, hear, and sense what you do in your mind. Only you have direct access to your deep structure. To give others an answer, you have to provide an informational report of what you experience. And you have to use the shared surface meaning of words to do it. So you abstract conceptual information out from your internal experience to communicate to others. You give interpretive information about your thought because you simply can’t give the internal holographic experience that is your thought.
Because the holographic virtual reality we experience in our minds occurs much faster than our ordinary, conscious minds notice,” (elsewhere in the book Boyd and Larson write that the unconscious mind operates hundreds of times faster than the conscious mind does, explaining that “the frontal lobe region of the brain, where most conscious thought occurs, operates much more slowly than the amygdala, an almond-shaped area of the brain that receives signals of potential perceived danger and sets off a series of reactions that will help protect the person. Our fight-or-flight instinct kicks in before we even think about why we need to fight or flee.”) “and because we are so used to instantly producing this virtual reality under the right triggers (asking a question, for example, triggers a search for meaning), we usually assume that the information we give is the reality we experienced. We mistake the abstracted information for the actual internal experience. In fact, because we rarely if ever need to become conscious of our mental images in daily life, many people don’t even know they have them. We think we ‘just know’ things. In reality, however, we know things because we experience them inside. Or better, our real knowing is an experience---a sensory experience in our minds.
Remember, your brain only gives your conscious mind five to nine chunks of the 2 million pieces of information it is processing each second in accordance with whatever it deems relevant for a task it is performing. Our odd questions throughout this chapter have (hopefully) been forcing your brain to make your mental images relevant to your conscious mind. But in ordinary life our brains don’t deem this information relevant, which is why it’s so easy to miss. It’s also a major reason why we stay enslaved in the Matrix. We can consciously know a good deal of true information while unconsciously experiencing lies. And experience almost always trumps conceptual information.
If we are going to take every thought captive to Christ, we’re going to have to do so according to the rules that govern thought. And the rule is: thought is a form of experience, and the more concrete and like reality the experience, the more impact it has on you. (It might interest some readers to hear a brief (and oversimplistic) neurological explanation for why conceptual information in and of itself can’t transform us while experienced events can. To change the way we think, feel, or respond to situations, the relevant network of neurons has to be altered. This involves constructing new synaptic relationships with other neural-nets. This in turn requires that the relevant neural-net as well as the new neural-nets fire together…Simultaneous activation creates new synaptic connections. Conceptual information about an event does not activate the relevant neural-nets, but emotion-laden experiences do.) You can’t fight experiential cancer with a Band-Aid of conceptual information. (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping The Matrix p. 48-60)
Strongholds
Going back to mid-December, 2006, I had just learned all about the mind what I’ve just shared, and I had just begun the process of defining the Body, soul, spirit, and all the other terms people use to describe the makeup of man. Another question arose in me, needing to be answered. (It felt like I was going backwards at the time, finding more questions than answers!) Something else needed to be defined before I could ever hope to deal with it properly; I needed to find out what a wound truly was, because I knew I had them.
As I should have guessed, the answers I found and the definition I came up with only led me into some even deeper questions. Go figure, right?
In terms of renewing the mind, a wound is commonly known as a stronghold of the mind. I didn’t mention them in my post last summer mostly because at the time I wasn’t facing too many of them, but I have been familiar with the concept of strongholds ever since my pastor had preached a wonderful sermon series on renewing the mind a few years back. (I’d love to share those with you. They’re fantastic. So if you want them, just let me know and I’ll find a way to get them to you.) Then in early 2006 I saw a very vivid illustration of what a stronghold is. As some of you know, my mom was hospitalized for six weeks in February and March of 2006 with a staph infection. During the first week of her hospitalization she was very close to dying and was placed in intensive care. The staph bacteria had gotten into her bloodstream and was traveling all over her body. In certain spots it had congregated into encrusted pustules, “pus sacks,” in essence. Her body was being pumped full of all kinds of strong antibiotics but they couldn’t penetrate these pus sacks. The bacteria had “circled the wagons” in these certain spots, encrusting itself with the bacteria that the antibiotics had killed, effectively preventing the antibiotics from reaching the living bacteria inside and creating a protected breeding ground for the bacteria. Mom had these all over the place, with one in her neck pressing on her spinal chord, a few in her midsection, and a whole mess of them in her left thigh. Unless these pustules were completely removed via surgery, even if we somehow were to erase every single strain of the staph infection from every other part of her body, she would never be able to remain healthy, because the infection would keep spreading from these strongholds. As long as they remained she was in danger, so whenever the doctors found one or some they always scheduled surgery as soon as they possibly could. Mom’s fine now, thank the Lord, but the harrowing experience taught us all many lessons, and one of the impressions I came away with was this vivid picture of strongholds.
Ed Silvoso, as quoted by my pastor in the series I referred to above, defines a stronghold thusly: “A mindset impregnated with hopelessness that causes one to accept as unchangeable something that is absolutely contrary to God’s design and desire for you.”
The funny thing is that strongholds exist not because our brains are in any way incapable or are fighting against us, but because our brains are working incredibly well, and have been ever since the day we were born. As I quoted before, “The brain neurologically stores conclusions it has reached and treats these as reality until it is instructed to do otherwise.” The good news is that when our minds get good information about life, love, reality, truth, who God is, who we are, and so on, they work wonderfully well. But the bad news is that when our minds have been fed bad information about life, love, reality, truth, who God is, who we are, and so on, they still work wonderfully well.
“But what if the coded information that has been installed in our neurons is not true and is not helpful? What if an installed neural-net contains meaning that is completely out of sync with what God tells us is true? Now the remarkable efficiency of our brains that God intended for our advantage works against us.
Think about this for a minute or two. The brain processes and installs falsehoods with the same efficiency and stability with which it processes truth.
As automatically as you understand the words you are reading right now, you will experience as real something that is not real if an activated neural-net tells you so. And you will not notice it any more than you noticed your brain retrieving the meaning of the words you are reading right now. You will to this extent be in bondage to the efficiency of your brain and be trapped in a deceptive virtual reality. Not only this, but to this extent you will have been reduced to an automated, programmed, deterministic extension of whoever installed these neural nets.
You are to this degree imprisoned in the Matrix. You are to this degree a slave. For ‘people are slaves to whatever masters them” (2 Peter 2:19).” (Boyd and Larson, Escaping The Matrix p.35)
“To the extent that we do not choose to align our internal re-presentations with the truth that is in Christ, our thoughts are chosen for us. We allow ourselves to be defined by experiences of the past rather than by our Creator. We enthrone as functional lord our alcoholic father, our frustrated grandmother, our mischievous little brother, or any other person or event that installed lies into our lives. To the extent that we do not take authority over our thoughts, someone or something else does.” (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping the Matrix p.119)
Neurologically speaking, a stronghold is nothing more than a conclusion (or a set of conclusions) reached sometime in the past and strengthened through continued application, all stored through combinations of neural-nets.. The term is more commonly used in a negative sense, referring to areas of our mind and life in which Satan has gained a foothold, but it can also be used no less accurately in reference to those same areas under the rule and reign of God. A stronghold in and of itself isn’t a bad thing at all; it’s very natural. The stronghold isn’t the problem: the lies it contains are. But a stronghold built around and containing lies can leave a person feeling very helpless against it.
It’s also important to note the general ineffectiveness of information to tear down lie-encoded strongholds in our minds. Just like the antibiotics couldn’t break through to the core of the pus sack, all the information we throw at these strongholds has all the long-term effects of a band-aid---effective with little cuts, but completely useless to stop major bleeding. The information just doesn’t go deep enough.
“The crucial difference between information and re-presentations is that information is abstract while our imaginative re-presentations are concrete. This is why memories can sometimes be so influential in a person’s life. We don’t experience memories as information but as concrete, vivid re-presentations of past events. For example, a young woman who was raped as a child doesn’t simply remember that she was raped. Rather, she re-experiences the rape when she remembers it. In all likelihood from the perspective she had when it occurred. (This can be explained neurologically. The same network of neurons that recorded the event are reactivated in the memory of the event. From a neurological perspective it is as though the event were happening all over again. This is essentially how all memories operate, though the network of neurons that contains the memory can in time be associated with other networks of neurons and thus morphed in the process.) This vivid memory will continue to shape this woman’s view of herself and the world precisely because it is concrete and experiential, not abstract.” (Greg Boyd, Seeing Is Believing p. 73)
How does a person who re-experiences a rape, even subconsciously, every time she remembers it find healing? Is it even possible? What about the guy? If he repents of his sin and turns to Christ but is still wracked by guilt can he ever truly be free from that guilt? Should he be? Can either of them ever taste joy and freedom, let alone live in it?
Wounds
I wrote earlier on that wounds are often equated with strongholds, but one of the fascinating things I came to believe was that the two are not the same, but rather two separate, individual parts of a whole. Usually when people speak of either strongholds or wounds they speak of both together, but it benefited me greatly to distinguish between the two. The wound is the far more dangerous one. It is the still-in-pain, still dangerous, infectious bacteria inside the pus sack. A stronghold is just your mind’s response to the unhealed wound. It is, in a twisted way, your mind’s way of protecting you from the wound’s message.
“It’s a classic Catch-22. The devil convinces a person of a lie and then convinces him or her of the need to hide the lie at all costs. When lies like this are installed, we spend a significant portion of our lives trying not to be what we never were in the first place! (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping The Matrix p. 62)
The stronghold is our mind’s attempt to hide the lie, or at least to manage it. The wound is the lie we’ve been convinced of itself, contained in a memory or memories which is one of the reasons it feels so true. Even if we managed to somehow remove or deal with the stronghold and retrain our mind but never dealt with the underlying wound that the stronghold sprang up around, the wound, like Hydra, will just haunt us somewhere else in our life. (We in my family are very familiar with this concept, with one example being Dad’s many attempts to quit smoking. Whenever he would manage to stop smoking for a while he would fill that void in his life with something else, most commonly being either gardening, candy, or television. Dealing with the specific stronghold of cigarettes didn’t solve the real problem, and without the real wound dealt with he would sooner or later go back to nicotine. Throughout most of my childhood I rarely ever saw my dad’s real self come forward. If not hidden behind cigarettes, he would hide it behind something else.) Therefore it is the wound to which we must attend to in order to find healing.
“Every man carries a wound. I have never met a man without one. No matter how good your life may have seemed to you, you live in a broken world full of broken people. Your mother and father, no matter how wonderful, couldn’t have been perfect. She is a daughter of Eve, and he a son of Adam. So there is no crossing through this country without taking a wound. And every wound, whether it’s assaultive or passive, carries with it a message. The message feels final and true, absolutely true, because it is delivered with such force. Our reaction to it shapes our personality in very significant ways. From that flows the false self. Most of the men you know are living out of a false self, a pose, which is directly related to this wound….
…The wound comes, and with it a message. From that place the boy makes a vow, chooses a way of life that gives rise to the false self. At the core of it all is a deep uncertainty. The man doesn’t live from a center. So many men feel stuck---either paralyzed and unable to move, or unable to stop moving.” (John Eldredge, Wild At Heart p. 72,74-75)
If the analogy I most relate to strongholds is that of pus sacks, the analogy I find most similar to wounds is that of ice, because one of the key identifying marks of a wound is that it keeps you stuck. In the many wounds I’ve uncovered and had to deal with in myself, they’ve all felt like something that has been there a long, long time and plans on staying forever.
“’Hell,’ says Charles Williams, ‘is an image that bears no more becoming.’ In Dante’s Inferno, Satan is set into a block of ice in the bottom rung of Hell. That is the image Charles Williams had in mind when he made this statement. Wentworth (William’s character) is now, like Satan, set in ice. For him there would be no more becoming.” (Leanne Payne, The Healing Presence p. 85)
I am continually in the process of becoming. Like a tree, if I’m not growing then I am dying. God’s plan for me is to keep growing in Him and being transformed “till Christ be formed in you” (Galatians 4:19), and it’s my personal belief that even in Heaven there will be a constant becoming we are called to. But in every part of my soul and life where I have accepted the message of the wound, the lie it contains, no more becoming is possible. That part of my soul and my life is frozen as ice. The picture I get is of people walking around, trying to live their normal lives and interact with the world around them while much of their heart is frozen in the past, incapable of freely interacting with the present.
“We experience a traumatic event at some point in our lives and a part of us becomes frozen in that event. The neural-net that encodes this event operates on an autopilot whenever triggered. In a fraction of a second it re-presents the event in a concrete, experiential fashion. And it does so from the perspective---and with the emotional meaning---we had when we originally experienced the event. While the rest of our self has moved on, this part of us did not. It is frozen in time, as it were. It is autonomous.
For this reason, whenever we encounter triggers that activate this neural-net, we do not respond in ways that reflect our maturity level. Rather, when we are experiencing the world from the perspective of this neural-net, we only have the resources that were available to us when the neural-net was first installed. If the neural-net was created when we were seven, we emotionally become a seven-year-old when it is triggered. We thus respond with the maturity level of a seven-year-old.” (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping The Matrix p. 162)
The lie is embedded as the meaning of a memory or series of memories, all frozen in time. When the memories are triggered for whatever reason, the lie they contain surfaces in them as well. Often enough the lie the wound contains is something that we would consciously reject as a lie if it ever reached the surface of our conscious mind. But they rarely surface, at least not in an easily recognizable manner. The lie was twisted in place by Satan, the father of lies (John 8:44). And as I wrote in the summer of ‘06 in my post, every lie of Satan is ultimately about one of two things: who we are and who God is. Often the lie is a mixture of both. Until we name and identify the lie as a lie and take authority over it in Jesus name and replace it with truth, it will still have power over us. And the more we agree with the lie the more layers of ice get frozen around it (thus affecting more areas of our life subconsciously in the process), the bigger the strongholds we build around it to protect it become, and the more difficult it will be to deal with it later.
“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it deep within us, so that it appears nowhere on the surface, we are implanting it. And it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago)
What I’ve written thus far about wounds is all in effort to describe what they are in our lives today: lies we believe encased in strongholds of memories that we reexperience, usually subconsciously, freezing us in our past and often leaving us feeling hopeless in regards to their content and unable to taste the freedom Christ has created us for. But to truly understand how to deal with wounds I’ve found it very helpful to understand how they got there in the first place.
Let’s start at the beginning: We live in a broken world full of wounded, rebellious, hurting people, and hurting people hurt people. A world like that is dangerous. As John Eldredge says above, “there is no crossing through this country without taking a wound.”
“The hole in creation through which evil oozes, gurgles, and putrefies everything in its wicked path is not a hole torn by an angry and distant God. It’s a hole ripped open by us: ‘But you were not willing.’ In the grip of our sin failure, it’s a hole torn by you and me. Inch by inch, generation by generation, sin by sin, and rebellion by rebellion---wider and wider the hole is torn open by a billion yous and a billion mes across the expanse of time and humanity. Like a silent crawl of consuming lava, like an avalanche roar, it grows and it grows, as does the danger it presents. Ravenous and insatiable, it swallows and destroys everything in its random and reckless path.
And may we make no mistake; may there be no illusion. Sin takes no prisoners. Horror plays no favorites. It doesn’t pick and choose who will be its next victim. It doesn’t decide who deserves all and who deserves none. It just flows and flows. It reeks and reeks. It feeds with gluttonous frenzy on anything and everything near---you, me, the good people next door---vomiting disease, desolation, and tragedy all the more.
Cancer strikes; drunkenness flows. Dad has heart disease; Mom doesn’t hear like she used to. Two cars collide; a family writhes in divorce. A gunshot splits a big-city night; a child is stolen on a small-town day. An airplane hits a building; Jesus weeps before His friend’s grave…
...People making day-to-day choices in their day-to-day freedom to make their own choices. And oh, what a terrible price is paid for that privilege---what tragedy, what pain and loss, what brokenness.
It is a price born by the chooser and, willfully or otherwise, imposed on everyone in the chooser’s path. It’s imposed on every life and heart, every child and grownup, every stranger and stranger’s family who just happens to be in the vicinity when the horrific choice is made…
…All of it is the fallout, the by-product, the putrid refuse of sin. It infiltrates, cripples, and rots the very creation of which you and I are a part. It can never be said too often or strongly enough: Not a pin-drop of it did He ever want to be!” (Jesus Wept, Bruce Marchiano p.43-44,47)
“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” (John 3:19)
“The fact of the matter is that in this fallen world we are perpetually bombarded with messages in the form of vivid experiences and images that contain lies. In principle, every word spoken to us, every deed done to us, everything we’ve ever heard, seen, or felt could under the right circumstances get locked in as a deceptive message that will be vividly replicated under the right circumstances. (Greg Boyd, Seeing Is Believing p.78)
In addition to that (as if that wasn’t enough…), we have an enemy who hates us and wants to destroy us. (1 Peter 5:8) Our enemy, the father of lies, is the one who takes these wounding events in life and twists a lie into them and into us as deeply as he can.
“That’s what happens in war---you get shot at. Have you forgotten? We were born into a world at war. This scene we’re living in is no sitcom; it’s a bloody battle. Haven’t you noticed with what deadly accuracy the wound was given? These blows you’ve taken---they were not random accidents at all. They hit dead center…
…The wound is too well aimed and far too consistent to be accidental. It was an attempt to take you out; to cripple or destroy your strength and get you out of the action. The wounds we’ve taken were leveled against us with stunning accuracy. Hopefully you’re getting the picture. Do you know why there’s been such an assault? The enemy fears you. You are dangerous big-time. If you ever really got your strength back, lived from it with courage, you would be a huge problem to him. You would do a lot of damage…on the side of good. Remember how valiant and effective God has been in the history of the world? You are a stem of that victorious stock.” (John Eldredge, Wild At Heart p. 86-87)
An event happens, maybe minor or maybe major, and you assign a meaning to it in your soul. The event hurts, and you wonder what to do with the pain. At that moment, just as you decide what meaning an event has, you can choose to accept the lie a fallen world and Satan would have you believe about that event (and he has many for you to choose from), or you can choose to find God’s perspective on that event and believe that, thereby assigning that as the meaning of the event. It is your choice. And you do have a choice! It is to that moment of the wounds you have received that you must return and change the decision you made then about what the wound meant if you wish to be free from the power of that wound and that memory.
Remember the questions I started this post off with? “Did Jesus ever have a wounded heart? If so, when and how? And if not, why not? And if not, then why should we have them? If not, what was He doing that kept His heart from being wounded? Can a heart that is hidden in Christ ever be wounded by the stones of this world? If a heart has been broken by God can it still be wounded by men?”
Here’s the answer I gave my friend at the time:
“A heart hidden in Christ cannot be wounded because it responds exactly the same way as Christ’s heart does, and Christ’s heart cannot be wounded by sin (unlike His physical body). Why Not? Because it is already broken by the exact same sin! A broken heart and a wounded heart both got that way in response to the same thing: sin. Can a heart be both wounded and broken by the same thing at the same time? I don’t think so, but if you can think of an example to the contrary, let me know.
If Christ’s heart cannot be wounded because it responds instead by breaking, what does that tell us about the places in our hearts that are wounded?”
I didn’t hear back from her and wondered why; finally I decided to call her. She was hurt and angry with me and I learned an important lesson: Never treat someone’s wounds lightly. I hadn’t meant to and didn’t think I was, but she felt I was. She had received my last question as an accusation saying that if she was wounded, then she wasn’t in the center of God’s will. I, on the other hand, had meant it as exiting news that wounded though our hearts may be, they didn’t have to stay that way! Freedom from them was possible! If Christ’s heart cannot be wounded because it responds instead by breaking, and my spirit is united with His Spirit, then shouldn’t it be possible for me to learn how to change my ways of responding to the wound to that of Christ’s, thereby being set free from the power of the wound over my life? If the answer to the first question is yes it is possible, then I think that’s incredibly good news. It means, among other things, that actual, lasting transformation is truly possible.
Learning how to be broken by sin rather than wounded by it is, to me, the crux of everything I’ve learned about healing this past year, and therefore everything I’ve written in this post. But first there is one more huge topic I had to come to define and understand before I could truly begin to step into the healing I so desperately needed, thereby also stepping into the life God had created me for and called me to.
I had to deal with pain.
Pain
“’How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include tooth decay in His divine system of creation? Why in the world did He ever create pain?’
‘Pain?’ Lieutenant Shiesskopf’s wife pounced on the word victoriously. Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.’
‘And who created the dangers?’ Yossarian demanded. ‘Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead?’
‘People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads.’
‘They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony, don’t they?’” (Joseph Heller, as quoted in In The Likeness Of God by Yancey and Brand p.461)
Why is changing our response to the wound so difficult? Why is it so hard to go back and change the message of the memory from a lie to the truth? Why have we built strongholds to protect it? I’ve come to believe the answer is very simple: We don’t know how to deal with pain properly.
In a dangerous world as this, pain is inevitable. If wounds are inescapable in this world, then so is pain, because pain accompanies every wound we receive. It is the pain we run from in our wounds, both when they were received and now. It is because of pain that we freeze our wounds in time, attempting to freeze the pain in time as well to free ourselves from it. And when this fails and pain seeps back into our life from the edges of our frozen wound, we often choose to freeze it again, thereby enlarging the wound and its subconscious impact on our conscious lives. Eventually, if we continue to deal with pain in this manner, we will no longer be able to hide it in our subconscious and will have to try a new method. Repression, anger, depression, addiction, passivity, and busyness are all common reactions to conscious pain. There are many, many others, all with one thing in common: none of them work. They may appear to be working for a while, years or decades, even, many people even die while still running from their pain, but they don’t work, not even in the least bit; the pain is still always there.
I am very cautious to write of pain, remembering how I hurt my friend by glossing over this subject thoughtlessly. Obviously pain is a sensitive subject with people. Pain is also something you can’t quite put a measure on. I appreciate the way Henri Nouwen puts it:
“Our brokenness is always lived and experienced as highly personal, intimate and unique. I am deeply convinced that each human being suffers in a way that no other human being suffers. No doubt, we can make comparisons; we can talk about more or less suffering, but, in the final analysis, your pain and my pain are so deeply personal that comparing them can bring scarcely any consolation or comfort. In fact, I am more grateful for a person who can acknowledge that I am very alone in my pain than for someone who tries to tell me that there are many others who have a similar or worse pain.” (Henri Nouwen, Life Of The Beloved p.87-88)
My merely writing about pain will not make any of yours go away, though it may help me to get it out. And the moment I start to think it will, I’m in trouble. The same goes with all words, whether written or spoken.
“Just when you think
you know how to soothe the world’s weeping,
your words will taste like ash,
your wisdom will turn an empty husk.”
(Phil Eaton, in Today 55 [September 1985])
But being silent doesn’t necessarily help either, though listening does probably more than anything else does. But since I can’t listen with my writing, and I truly have learned a lot about pain that has helped me face it with much less fear because I understand it and its purpose better, I want to share some of that here.
So what is pain? Or rather, what is inner pain? Emotional, spiritual, intellectual, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it pain? I’ve had a tough time finding a definition anywhere, let alone a definition I like. Everything I’ve heard seems to define inner pain as “pain that is inside,” which really isn’t very helpful, because most people don’t define pain itself either. This has left me to wonder if the entire concept of “inner pain” is simply a metaphor or an analogy, taken from the world of physical pain, a way of attempting to explain what’s going on inside by what’s going on outside. Why might that be? Possibly, as my Pastor suggests in an old sermon, because all the stuff that causes inner pain is stuff we were never designed to deal with.
“Act two is the fall, where hope is lost. Genesis Chapter two verses 16 and 17 says it this way: ‘And the Lord God commanded the man saying ‘From any tree of the garden you may freely eat, but from the tree of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you will surely die.’’ Don’t eat that fruit. It looks good, but it’s poison fruit, and I am trying to spare you. In Genesis 3 verse 4, however, Satan came and did what he does so well. He lied and began to deceive. ‘You’re not gonna die.’ He said to Eve. ‘Surely you shall not die.’ See, God’s holding out on you, Eve, Adam. By the way that’s one of the lies he tells us now. He lies all the time. God’s holding out on you. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and God doesn’t want your eyes to be opened. He likes the fact that you’re kind of in the dark. And here’s the real deal about God---this is what’s underneath the lie---He can’t be trusted; He isn’t good; He doesn’t have your best in mind. So when He says to live a certain way or avoid a certain thing, don’t be paying attention to Him. He can’t be trusted, He isn’t good, and He doesn’t care about you. But if you pay attention to me, you will be enlightened, and you will have your eyes opened.
And you know the story. As the story goes: they listened to the liar, they were deceived by the deceiver, so they did what He said and when they did guess what, their eyes were opened. So in some sense the liar, the deceiver was telling them the truth, but what they saw was not life, and what they saw was not glory, and what they saw that they had never seen before---in fact, they were not wired, they were not created by God to know how to handle what they were about to see---what they finally did see when they disobeyed God, they saw for the first time: sin. And they saw for the first time: death. And they were never created for that; they had no way of handling that. That’s what they saw. And after they saw sin and death what they felt was naked---never felt that before. And what they felt in addition to that was ashamed, they had never felt that before. In addition to that they felt guilty. In addition to that they felt despair. They had never felt despair, only hope. But that was gone.
What they did as a result of their despair, and their shame, and their guilt was they did what you and I do, ‘cause we’ve been doing it ever since: they hid. First of all they hid from God, and then they began to learn how to hide from each other with masks and manipulations and power games. Before you know it they were even able to hide from themselves, coming to a point where they didn’t even know who they were. Never before had a despairing thought ever entered their mind, but now they would never be free from despairing thoughts. They would spend their entire lives trying to find ways to relieve themselves of despairing thoughts, and no daughter or son of Adam and Eve would ever be able to fix it….They were designed to be able to bring this world into its full potential, but now it’s broken and if there’s anything clear to them now: they can’t fix it.” (Dave Johnson, 04/20/03 Celebrating Kingdom Hope)
When God created man he gave him a wonderful physical body with a nervous system intricately designed to protect man and enable him to enjoy and interact with the world around him. As a part of that system, He designed our bodies with marvelous healing abilities based on the dangers and challenges we would face in the course of interacting with the world around us. But we were never designed to have to face dangers to the soul. That was never part of God’s plan and purpose for us. Now that we do face them, we’ve learned how to cope with them in many ways, but we have no way to heal them. At least, not until we receive a recreated spirit from God at the cross.
With all that said, almost everything I’ve learned about pain and what it is and therefore how to deal with has come from learning about physical pain, what it does and how to deal with it. Of all the books I’ve read on pain, none have helped me more than three books co-written by Phillip Yancey and Paul Brand, so it’s from them I will be sharing here. Many of you know who Phillip Yancey is, so I won’t describe who he is to you, but few people have ever heard of Paul Brand, and the books are written from his perspective. Brand was a world-renowned hand surgeon and an expert on leprosy, a recipient of many coveted medical awards and honors. It was his work and research on leprosy that has transformed worldwide countless beliefs and prejudices about leprosy, as well as the medical treatments and mindset around it. The books he co-wrote with Yancey are fantastic; I highly recommend them to anybody.
What is pain?
“At its most basic level pain serves as a signal that something is wrong, like a smoke alarm that goes off with a loud noise whenever the danger of fire reaches a certain level.…Besides this warning aspect, pain offers a related contribution that often gets overlooked: it unifies the body…A body only possesses unity to the degree that it possesses pain. An infected toenail proves to me that the toe is important; it is mine; it needs attention. Hair---yes, that matters, but we see it as a decoration. It can be bleached, shaped, ironed, and even cut off without pain. But what is indispensably mine is defined by pain.” (Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, In The Likeness Of God p.475)
“If one part suffers, every part suffers with it.” (1 Cor. 12:26)
Pain, I’ve come to believe, is a wonderful thing! Though we commonly despise, dread, or fear it, still it faithfully protects us day and night from dangers known and unknown. The story of how Paul Brand came to appreciate God’s gift of pain to us is a wonderful one, and it involved becoming deeply involved with people who experience exactly what many of us wish for---a world without pain. We call many of those type of people by another, more commonly known name: lepers. Far from being a wonderful world, their painless world is terrifying and extremely destructive. To illustrate this, here’s a very graphic true story that you may want to skip over if you’re squeamish---I’ll alert you when the squeamish parts are over---but it portrays very vividly what a world without pain is like, as is a reality for somebody with leprosy.
“Tanya was a four-year-old patient with dark flashing eyes, curly hair, and an impish smile. I examined her at the national leprosy hospital in Carville, Louisiana, where her mother had brought her for a diagnosis. A cloud of tension hung in the air between the little girl and her mother, but I noticed Tanya seemed eerily unafraid. She sat on the edge of the padded table and watched impassively as I began to remove blood-soiled bandages from her feet.
Testing her swollen left ankle, I found that the foot rotated freely, the sign of a fully dislocated ankle. I winced at the unnatural movement, but Tanya did not. I resumed unwrapping the bandages. ‘Are you sure you want these sores healed, young lady?’ I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere in the room. ‘You might have to start wearing shoes again.’ Tanya laughed, and I thought it odd that she did not flinch or whimper as I removed the dressings next to her skin. She looked around the room with an expression of faint boredom.
When I unwrapped the last bandage, I found grossly infected ulcers on the soles of both feet. Ever so gently I probed the wounds, glancing at Tanya’s face for some reaction. She showed none. The probe pushed easily through soft, necrotic tissue, and I could even the white gleam of bare bone. Still no reaction from Tanya.
As I puzzled over the girl’s injuries, her mother told me Tanya’s story. ‘She seemed fine as an infant. A little high-spirited maybe, but perfectly normal. I’ll never forget the first time I realized she had a serious problem. Tanya was seventeen or eighteen months old. Usually I kept her in the same room with me, but that day I left her alone in her playpen while I went to answer the phone. She stayed quiet, and so I decided to begin dinner. For a change she was playing happily by herself. I could hear her laughing and cooing. I smiled to myself, wondering what new mischief she had gotten into.
‘A few minutes later I went into Tanya’s room and found her sitting on the floor of her playpen, fingerpainting red swirls on the white plastic sheet. I didn’t grasp the situation at first, but when I got closer I screamed. It was horrible. The tip of Tanya’s finger was mangled and bleeding, and it was her own blood she was using to make those designs on the sheets.
‘I yelled, ‘Tanya, what happened!’ She grinned at me, and that’s when I saw the streaks of blood on her teeth. She had bitten off the teeth of her finger and was playing in the blood.’
Over the next few months, Tanya’s mother told me, she and her husband tried in vain to convince their daughter that fingers must not be bitten. The toddler laughed at spankings and other physical threats, and indeed seemed immune to all punishment. To get her way she merely had to lift a finger to her teeth and pretend to bite, and her parents capitulated at once. The parents’ horror turned to despair as wounds mysteriously appeared on one of Tanya’s fingers after another.
Tanya’s mother recounted this story in a flat, unemotional voice, as if she had resigned herself to the perverse plight of rearing a child with no instincts of self-preservation. To complicate matters, she was now a single mother: after a year of trying to cope with Tanya, her husband had deserted the family. ‘If you insist on keeping Tanya at home, then I quit,’ he had announced. ‘We’ve begotten a monster.’
Tanya certainly didn’t look like a monster. Apart from the sores on her feet and her shortened fingers she looked like a healthy four-year-old child. I asked about the foot injuries. ‘They began as soon as she learned how to walk,’ her mother replied. ‘She’d step on a nail or thumbtack and not bother to pull it out. Now I check her feet at the end of every day, and often I discover a new wound or open sore. If she twists an ankle, she doesn’t limp. And so it twists again and again. An orthopedic specialist told me she’s permanently damaged the joint. If we wrap her feet for protection, sometimes in a fit of anger she’ll tear off the bandages. Once she ripped open a plaster cast with her bare fingers.’
Tanya’s mother had come to me on the orthopedists recommendation. ‘I’ve heard your leprosy patients have foot problems like this,’ she said. ‘Does my daughter have leprosy? Can you heal her hands and feet?’ She wore the helpless, plaintive expression I had often seen on the parents of young patients, the expression that tugs at a doctor’s heart. I sat down and gently tried to explain Tanya’s condition.
Alas, I could offer little hope or comfort. I would do further tests, but it seemed apparent that Tanya suffered from a rare genetic defect known informally as ‘congenital indifference to pain.’ She was healthy in every respect but one: she did not feel pain. Nerves in her hands and feet transmitted messages about changes in pressure or temperature---she felt a kind of tingling when she burned herself or bit a finger---but these carried no hint of unpleasantness. Tanya lacked any mental construct of pain. She rather enjoyed the tingling sensations, especially when they produced such dramatic reactions in others.
‘We can get these wounds healed,’ I said, ‘but Tanya has no built-in warning system to defend her from further injury. Nothing will improve until Tanya understands the problem and consciously begins to protect herself.’
Seven years later, I received a telephone call from Tanya’s mother in St. Louis. Tanya, now eleven, was living a pathetic existence in an institution. She had lost both legs to amputation: she had refused to wear proper shoes and that, coupled with her failure to limp or to shift weight when standing (because she felt no discomfort), had eventually put intolerable pressure on her joints. Tanya had also lost most of her fingers. Her elbows were constantly dislocated. She suffered the effects of chronic sepsis from ulcers on her hands and amputation stumps. Her tongue was lacerated and badly scarred from her nervous habit of chewing it.
A monster, her father had called her. Tanya was no monster, only an extreme example---a human metaphor, really---of life without pain.
Tanya’s particular problem occurs rarely, but such conditions as leprosy, diabetes, alcoholism, multiple sclerosis, nerve disorders, and spinal cord injury can also bring about the strangely hazardous state of insensitivity to pain. Ironically, while most of us seek out pharmacists and doctors in search of relief from pain, these people live in constant peril due to pain’s absence.
I first learned about painlessness while working with leprosy, a disease that inflicts more than 12 million people worldwide. Leprosy has long provoked a fear bordering on hysteria, mainly because of the horrible disfigurement that may result if it goes untreated. The noses of leprosy patients shrink away, their earlobes swell, and over time they lose fingers and toes, then hands and feet. Many also go blind.
After working for a while with patients in India, I began to question the medical presumption that leprosy caused this disfigurement directly. Did patients’ flesh simply rot away? Or might their problems, like Tanya’s, trace back to the underlying cause of sensitivity of pain? Perhaps leprosy patients were destroying themselves unwittingly for the simple reason that they too lacked a system to warn them of danger. Still researching this theory, I visited a large leprosy hospital in New Guinea where I observed two grim scenes that have stayed with me ever since.
A woman in a village near the leprosarium was roasting yams over a charcoal brazier. She pierced one yam with a sharp stick and held it over the fire, slowly twirling the stick between her fingers like a barbecue spit. The yam fell off the stick, however, and I watched as she unsuccessfully tried to spear it, each jab driving the yam farther underneath the red hot coals. Finally, she shrugged and looked over to an old man squatting a few feet away. At her gesture, obviously knowing what was expected of him, he shambled over to the fire, reached in, pushed aside the hot coals to retrieve the yam, and returned to his seat.
As a surgeon specializing in human hands, I was appalled. Everything had happened too fast for me to intervene, but I went immediately to examine the old man’s hands. He had no finger’s left, only gnarled stubs covered with leaking blisters and the scars of old wounds. Clearly, this was not the first time he had stuck his hand into a fire. I lectured him on the need to care for his hands, but his apathetic response gave me little confidence that he had listened.
A few days later I conducted a group clinic at the neighborhood leprosarium. My visit had been announced in advance, and at the scheduled time the administrators rang a loud bell to summon patients. I stood with other staff in an open courtyard, and as soon as the bell rang a crowd of people emerged from the individual huts and barrackslike wards and began to move toward us.
An eager young patient caught my eye as he struggled across the edge of the courtyard on crutches, holding his bandaged left leg clear off the ground. Although he did his awkward best to hurry, the nimbler patients soon overtook him. As I watched, this man tucked his crutches under his arm and began to run on both feet with a very lopsided gait, waving wildly to get our attention. He ended up near the head of the line, where he stood panting, leaning on his crutches, wearing a smile of triumph.I could tell from the man’s gait, though, that something was badly wrong. Walking toward him, I saw that the bandages were wet with blood and his left foot flopped freely from side to side. By running on an already dislocated ankle, he had put far too much force on the end of his leg bone, and the skin had broken under the stress. He was walking on the end of his tibia, and with every step that naked bone dug into the ground. Nurses scolded the man sharply, but he seemed quite proud of himself for having run so fast. I knelt beside him and found that small stones and twigs had jammed through the end of the bone into the marrow cavity. I had no choice but to amputate the leg below the knee.
Those two scenes long haunted me. Closing my eyes, I can still see the two facial expressions: the weary indifference of the old man who plucked the yam from the fire, the ebullient joy of the young man who ran across the courtyard. One eventually lost his hand, the other his leg; they had in common an utter nonchalance toward self-destruction” Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, The Gift Nobody Wants p. 3-7)
*****END SQUEAMISH PART*****
“For the painless, danger lurks everywhere. A larynx that never feels a tickle does not trigger the cough reflex that relocates phlegm from the lungs to the pharynx, and a person who never coughs runs the risk of developing pneumonia. The bone joints of insensitive people deteriorate because there are no whispers of pain encouraging a shift in position, and soon bone grinds against bone. Strep throat, appendicitis, heart attack, stroke---the body has no way to announce these threats to the painless person. Often the attending physician gets the first clue to the cause of death at the time of autopsy.” (Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, The Gift Nobody Wants p. 185-186)
“Tanya, James, and others like them dramatically reinforced what we had already learned from leprosy patients: pain is not the enemy, but the loyal scout announcing the enemy. And yet---here is the central paradox of my life---after spending a lifetime among people who destroy themselves for lack of pain, I still find it difficult to communicate an appreciation for pain to people who have no such defect. Pain truly is the gift nobody wants. I can think of nothing more precious for those who suffer from congenital painlessness, leprosy, diabetes, and other nerve disorders. But people who already own this gift rarely value it. Usually, they resist it.
My esteem for pain runs so counter to the common attitude that I sometimes feel like a subversive, especially in modern Western countries. On my travels I have observed an ironic law of reversal at work: as a society gains the ability to limit suffering, it loses the ability to cope with what suffering remains. (It is the philosophers, theologians, and writers of the affluent West, not the Third World, who worry obsessively about ‘the problem of pain,’ and point an accusing finger at God.)…In the modern view, pain is an enemy, a sinister invader that must be expelled. And if Product X removes pain thirty seconds faster, all the better. This approach has a crucial, dangerous flaw: once regarded as an enemy, not a warning signal, pain loses its power to instruct. Silencing pain without considering its message is like disconnecting a ringing fire alarm to avoid receiving bad news.” (Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, The Gift Nobody Wants p.187-188)
Pain, as Brand and Yancey note elsewhere, is directional. It hurts for a purpose, and its goal is not to hurt but to warn. But as Tanya’s and millions of other similar stories warn us, without the hurt the warning will not often be heeded. And without heeding the warning we open ourselves up to dangers most people take for granted they are protected from. For example, even walking a few miles on perfectly healthy feet can leave a leper with an ugly ulcer on his foot by the end of the walk. How could that be? Because, unbeknownst to most of us, our body monitors our stride and distributes the stress evenly amongst the foot throughout the trip by adjusting the stride as needed, and this almost always takes place subconsciously. A leper has no such protection, and will not adjust his stride to distribute the stress, so the same parts of the foot will take in all the pressure of every step of those few miles, swelling, blistering, and eventually bursting into ulcers in response to the unrelenting pounding. That leper may be perfectly healthy in every manner but the ability to feel pain, but by the end of that walk---that you or I could undertake easily and without fear---his foot will be wounded. He may even find a nail or something stuck in his foot when he takes his shoes off.
Trying to find a solution for such dangers, in the early 1970’s, Paul Brand applied for a grant to create “a practical substitute for pain” from the American government. Upon receiving it, he and his colleagues set to work to recreate the nervous system, or at least its pain-warning system for those who lacked an effective one. It proved to be an utterly impossible task, and more than a million dollars later they gave up.
“I learned a fundamental distinction: a person who never feels pain is task-oriented, whereas a person who has an intact pain system is self-oriented. The painless person may know by a signal that a certain action is harmful, but if he really wants to, he does it anyway. The pain-sensitive person, no matter how much he wants to do something, will stop for pain, because deep in his psyche he knows that preserving his own self is more significant than anything he might want to do….I never fulfilled my dream of ‘a practical substitute for pain,’ but the process did at last set to rest the two questions that had long haunted me. Why must pain be unpleasant? Why must pain persist? Our system failed for the precise reason that we could not effectively reproduce those two qualities of pain. The mysterious power of the human brain can force a person to STOP!---something I could never accomplish with my substitute systems. And ‘natural’ pain will persist as long as danger threatens, whether we want it to or not; unlike my substitute system, it cannot be switched off.
As I worked on the substitute system, I sometimes thought of my rheumatoid arthritis patients who yearned for just the sort of on-off switch we were installing. If rheumatoid patients had a switch or wire they could disconnect, most would destroy their hands in days or weeks. How fortunate, I thought, that for most of us the pain switch will always remain out of reach.” (Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, The Gift Nobody Wants p.195-196)
“Human beings have an efficient reflex system that forcibly withdraws a hand from a sharp or hot object even before nerve messages reach the brain. Why, then, must pain include the toxin the unpleasantness? My ‘substitute pain’ project answered the question on one level: pain supplies the compulsion to respond to warnings of danger. But could not such warnings be handled as a reflex, without involving the conscious brain? In other words, why does there need to be a third stage of pain at all?
Nobel Laureate Sir John Eccles worried over this issue, and even performed experiments on decerebrated animals to see how they would respond to pain. He found that a brainless frog still pulls its foot from an acid solution and a decerebrated dog still scratches flea bites. After much study Eccles concluded that, although the reflex system does provide a layer of protection, the higher brain becomes involved for two reasons.
First, the hurt of pain forces the entire being to attend to the danger. Once aware of the cut on my finger, I forget all about my crowded schedule and the long line of patients available---I run for a bandage. Pain ignores, even mocks all other priorities.
It astounds me that a coded bit of datum in the brain can induce such a feeling of compulsion. The tiniest object---a hair down the trachea, a speck in the eye---can commandeer the whole of a human being’s consciousness. A distinguished poet who has just received a literary reward returns to her seat, bows demurely to acknowledge the applause, gracefully arranges her skirt, bends to sit, and then gracelessly shoots up with a howl. She has landed on a jagged edge of the chair and her brain, flouting all decorum, attends solely to the distress signals emanating from the lowly lamina of her bottom. An operatic tenor whose career depends upon critical reception of this evening’s performance runs from the stage for a glass of water to calm the tickle in his throat. A basketball player writhes on the floor in front of a television audience of 20 million; the pain system cares not at all about the trivia of decorum and shame. By indulging the higher brain so prominently, the response of self-protection overwhelms all others.
The second advantage of higher brain involvement, Eccles said, is that unpleasantness sears into memory, thus protecting us in the future. When I burn myself handling a hot pot, I determine from then on to use a glove or a hot pad. The very unpleasantness of pain---the part we detest---makes it effective across time.
Pain is unique among sensations. Other senses tend to habituate, or lessen over time: the strongest cheeses seem virtually odorless after eight minutes; touch sensors adjust quickly to coarse clothing; an absent-minded professor searches in vain for his glasses, no longer feeling their weight on his head. In contrast, pain sensors do not habituate, but report incessantly to the conscious brain as long as danger remains. A bullet penetrates for a second and exits; the resulting pain may linger a year or more.
Oddly, though, this sensation that eclipses all others is hardest to remember once it fades. How many women have sworn after a difficult childbirth, ‘Never again will I go through that’? How many receive the news of another pregnancy with joy? I can close my eyes and summon up a constellation of scenes and faces from the past. Through sheer mental effort I can nearly replicate the smell of an Indian village or the taste of chicken curry. I can mentally replay familiar motifs from hymns, symphonies, and popular songs. But only weakly can I recall excruciating pain. Gallbladder attacks, agony from a ruptured disc, an airplane crash---my memories come to me stripped of the unpleasantness.
All these characteristics of pain serve its ultimate end: to galvanize the entire body. Pain shrinks time to the present moment. There is no need for the sensation to linger once the danger has passed; and it dare not habituate while danger remains. What matters to the pain system is that you feel miserable enough to stop whatever you’re doing and pay attention right now.
In the words of Elaine Scarry, pain ‘unmakes a person’s world.’ Try carrying on a conversation with a woman in the final stages of childbirth, she suggests. Pain can overrule the values we cherish most, a fact which torturers know all too well: they use physical pain to wrench from a person information which a moment before he had held precious and even sacred. Few can transcend the urgency of pain---and that is its intent, precisely.” (Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, The Gift Nobody Wants p.216-217)
Going back to inner pain, if the goal of physical pain is to get my attention so I can protect myself, doing whatever it deems necessary to be successful at that, what might that mean for the inner pain I’ve been running from for years?
“People who view pain as the enemy, I have noted, instinctively respond with vengeance or bitterness---Why me? I don’t deserve this! It’s not fair! ---which has the vicious-circle effect of making their pain even worse. ‘Think of pain as a speech you body is delivering to you about a subject of vital importance to you,’ I tell my patients. ‘From the very first twinge, pause and listen to the pain and, yes, try to be grateful. The body is using the language of pain because that’s the most effective way to get your attention.’ I call this approach ‘befriending pain’: to take what is ordinarily seen as an enemy and to disarm and then welcome it.” (Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, The Gift Nobody Wants p.222)
I’ll leave you to draw what correlations you see fit between physical pain and inner pain, but I’ve come to believe they are more alike than they are different . For myself, I’ve come to appreciate pain more than I ever had before. Just like I discovered a stronghold itself (not the wound or the lie) to be, pain itself is a natural, very wonderful thing. That’s not saying I want to feel pain, but that when I do, rather than fearing and running from it or hiding and burying it, I stop and listen to what it is saying to me, what message it has for me. I am learning to befriend pain.
“The first response, then, to our brokenness is to face it squarely and befriend it. This may seem quite unnatural. Our first, most spontaneous response to pain and suffering is to avoid it, to keep it at arms length; to ignore, circumvent, or deny it. Suffering---be it physical, mental, or emotional---is almost always experienced as an unwelcome intrusion into our lives, something that should not be there. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see anything positive in suffering; it must be avoided at all costs…
…Still, my own pain in life has taught me that the first step to healing is not a step away from the pain, but a step toward it.…I am convinced that healing is often so difficult because we don’t want to know the pain….But I know now, at least, that attempting to avoid, repress, or escape the pain is like cutting off a limb that could be healed with proper attention.” Henri Nouwen, Life Of The Beloved p.92-93,95)
Loneliness:
Going back to my own journey, the pain I was finally getting in touch with in the second wound, finally facing, was that of loneliness. As I kept digging into the story and stories behind the wound, the more I was realizing what I was dealing with was loneliness. In an effort to get this pain out, I wrote this post on my xanga on March 6th, 2007:
“Every self-defense mechanism I've built in my life tells me not to write this post. They tell me not to bring any of this to the surface or I'll wound people...just like before. They tell me it is better to hide and hurt than to feel and risk lashing out in anger...like my dad. That it is better to hide and hope for help rather than to unveil and feel and either have my cries heard and ignored or be responded to and helped out of compulsion, only to be left alone as soon as the "problem" is "dealt with." They tell me that a third response, that someone will respond not out of compulsion but out of love, is impossible, because if it were then it would have happened already. And it points not to any logic but to my experience as proof. I really don't want to write this post.
Which is exactly why I have to write it.
After the schoolyear of my Junior year of high school, a year in which God completely changed the course of my life and stamped an inescapable call on my life (I chose it, as well), I found that call leading me into places in life I really didn't want to go. Over the course of the following summer a few various factors brought me to a place where I refused to go any further with God's plan for my life. I wasn't openly rebelling; I wasn't directly turning from His path for my life into sin, but I wasn't any longer walking with Him either. I was stuck, which I am learning now may be closer to hell than open rebellion is (in the same way that hate is not the opposite of love, but a twisted form of it; indifference is more like an opposite to love than hate is). No longer working with God though not visibly falling away from Him, I disengaged from real life and fell into a state of passivity, a position of strength or potential rotting away locked inside pain or fear. I lived there for almost two and a half years, until I was absolutely dying on the inside and knew it. Unwilling to live in death any longer, I was able to initiate some changes and slowly come out of that state. Some of the changes I made were instrumental in bringing about the radical change I went through in the year 2006.
Some of you have heard this story before. I do not hide it. I do not fear its unveiling. There is nothing there but facts. This, however, I fear to mention, as it appears to level an accusation at all who knew me during that time: I have no doubt that those two plus years could have been cut short if somebody had seen what was going on, the disengaging I had done, and had been willing to call me on it and stuck with me while I came out of it. But no one did, and eventually God brought me to a place where I had to learn to drag myself out.
The worst part of it all was that no one even knew, or if they did were brave enough to do something about it. I was so successful at hiding that no one even knew I was hiding, and no one ever came to find me, which hurt worse than all the other pains combined. No one knew my true face well enough to call it forth when it disappeared, so I was free to run from it (and into death) without any accountability. That freedom to walk in death knowing no one will call me back into life is quite possibly the scariest thing I have ever experienced. It is a horrid feeling of power...and invisibility. To know one could disappear without it being noticed is like walking a tightrope with no net below. You're on your own.
I write this all not to blame anyone for what happened, for I know I've done the same thing to countless others through selfish ambitions, but to break the pattern of silence.
It has been happening again. I have been disengaged for about a month now and no one knows it but me, and if I didn't do something to break the silence (like this post, or something similar), I don't doubt it could continue for a long while yet. Once again I find myself called to something that will be wonderfully transforming that I'm shrinking from, but nobody is calling me on it.”
"Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work: If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up! Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not easily broken." (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12)
That day I also put posted some phrases representative of all the churning thoughts and emotions in my soul.
“I have buried my intensity for far too long.
‘Why are you running from me? I am your strength.’
I fear if I truly come to life, the intensity of that life will hurt people, though I desperately try not to, just like before.
Surely it is better to sit in silence and rot away inside than to open up and wound others.
Being a Wentworth seems to come so naturally for me.
How does one find the proper channels to pour strength into?
I am sick of dying but I don't know how to live.”
Feeling the pain of loneliness wasn’t anything new for me, but for the first time that I could remember I had stopped running from it. I had stopped burying deep within me, pretending it didn’t exist or didn’t matter. At least, as funny as it sounds, I knew I wasn’t alone in my loneliness. It was a universal pain I was dealing with, and knowing that was enough to begin to face it. As Henri Nouwen said above, the first step toward healing is not a step away from the pain, but a step toward it. I was (and still am) slowly learning to receive my loneliness pangs as a signal to spend some time with God.
“I once heard a wise and scholarly man say, ‘If we know ourselves at all, it is with the greatest difficulty.’ He spoke the truth. To know ourselves at all is to begin to be healed of the effects of the Fall, for it involves coming into a listening-speaking relationship to God. It is to recapture at least to some extent the Edenic situation. It is to realize more perfectly or union and communion with God. No small thing, indeed, but it is our inheritance (and a neglected one) as Christians. It is the healing of our primal loneliness.
‘We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness,’ as C.S. Lewis has said. Born lonely, we try hard to fit in, to be the kind of person that will cause others to like us. Craving and needing very much the affirmation of others, we compromise, put on any face, or many faces; we do even those things we do not like to do in order to fit in. We are bent (to use Lewis’s imagery) toward the creature, attempting to find our identity in him. Slowly and compulsively, the false self closes its hard, brittle shell around us, and our loneliness remains.” Leanne Payne, The Broken Image p.124)
Like pain, or rather as a type of pain, I have always found loneliness to be directional, even if I don’t always want to go the direction it is leading, and the direction I’ve always found it to lead to is toward God. I’ve struggled to accept that over the years, trying to soothe that ache I call loneliness with anything but Him, but if those wells I’ve drank from gave living water, one drink would have satisfied. But they don’t, they can’t. They can only tantalize, and even that for only so long. And always, when I’m sick of the ash and emptiness I’ve been gorging myself on, when I turn back to Him He welcomes me with open arms and I can taste joy again.
John and Stasi Eldredge, speaking specifically of and to women, but I think applying equally to both men and women (it’s just more pronounced in women) have written a wonderful passage that speaks exactly what I mean by this.
“Why did God curse Eve with loneliness and heartache, an emptiness that nothing would be able to fill? Wasn’t her life going to be hard enough out there in the world, banished from the garden that was her true home, her only home, never able to return? It seems unkind. Cruel, even.
He did it to save her. For as we all know personally, something in Eve’s heart shifted at the Fall. Something sent its roots down deep into her soul---and ours---that mistrust of God’s heart, that resolution to find life on our own terms. So God has to thwart her. In love, He has to block her attempts until, wounded and aching, she turns to Him and Him alone for her rescue.
‘Therefore I will block her path with thornbrushes;
I will wall her in so she cannot find her way.
She will chase after her lovers but will not catch them;
she will look for them but will not find’ (Hosea 2:6-7).
Jesus has to thwart us too---thwart our self-redemptive plans, our controlling and our hiding, thwart the ways we are seeking to fill the ache within us. Otherwise, we would never fully turn to Him for our rescue. Oh, we might turn to Him for our ‘salvation,’ for a ticket to heaven when we die. We might turn to Him even in the form of Christian service, regular church attendance, a moral life. But inside, our hearts remain broken and captive and far from the One who can help us…
…Wherever it is we have sought life apart from Him, He disrupts our plans, our ‘way of life’ which is not life at all.” (John and Stasi Eldredge, Captivating p.96)
I remember early on in my struggles with loneliness, somewhere in my senior high years, when I was mad at God about the unfairness of it all, He told me something I’ve never forgotten that has forever affected the way I view loneliness. I no longer remember the exact words, but in essence He told me that the longings I called loneliness were longings He had as well. For me. That as much as I longed for someone to care about who I am deep down inside and to come searching for that part of me, for someone to truly want to know me, He longed for the same thing. Even deeper, the reason I longed for that was because I was made in His image, and created to be in relationship with Him.
“What is it that God wants from you?
He wants the same thing that you want. He wants to be loved. He wants to be known as only lovers can know each other. He wants intimacy with you. Yes, yes, He wants obedience, but only when it flows out of a heart filled with love for Him. ‘Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves Me’ (John 14:21). Following hard after Jesus is the heart’s natural response when it has been captured and has fallen deeply in love with Him.
Reading George MacDonald several years ago, I came across an astounding thought. You’ve probably heard that in every human heart there is a place that God alone can fill. (Lord knows we’ve tried to fill it with everything else, to our utter dismay.) But what the old poet was saying was that there is also in God’s heart a place that you alone can fill. ‘It follows that there is also a chamber in God Himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual.’ You. You are meant to fill a place in the heart of God no one and nothing else can fill. Whoa. He longs for you.
You are the one that overwhelms His heart with just ‘one glance of your eyes’ (Song 4:9b). You are the one He sings over with delight and longs to dance with across mountaintops and ballroom floors (Zeph. 3:17). You are the one who takes His breath away by your beautiful heart that, against all odds, hopes in Him. Let that be true for a moment. Let it be true of you.” (John and Stasi Eldredge, Captivating p.120-121)
“Not only does God long for us, but He longs to be loved by us. Oh, how we’ve missed this. How many of you see God as longing to be loved by you? We see Him as strong and powerful, but not as needing us, vulnerable to us, yearning to be desired…
…Can there be any doubt God wants to be sought after? The first and greatest of all commandments is to love Him (Mark 12:29-30, Matthew 22:36-38). He wants us to love Him. To seek Him with all our hearts. A woman longs to be sought after, too, with the whole heart of her pursuer. God longs to be desired. Just as a woman longs to be desired. This is not some weakness or insecurity on the part of a woman, that deep yearning to be desired. ‘Take me for longing,’ Allison Krauss sings, ‘or leave me behind.’ God feels the same way. Remember the story of Mary and Martha? Mary chose God, and Jesus said that is what He wanted. ‘Mary has chosen what is better’ (Luke 10:42). She chose Me.” (John and Stasi Eldredge, Captivating p.28-29)
“Eve and all her daughters are also ‘a stem of that victorious stock,’ but in a wonderfully different way. As a counselor and a friend, and especially as a husband, I’ve been honored to be welcomed into the deep heart of Eve. Often when I am with a woman, I find myself quietly wondering, What is she telling me about God? I know He wants to say something to the world through Eve---what is it? And after years of hearing the heart-cry of women, I am convinced beyond a doubt of this: God wants to be loved. He wants to be a priority to someone. How could we have missed this? From beginning to end, the cry of God’s heart is, ‘why won’t you choose me?’ It is amazing to see how humble, how vulnerable God is on this point. ‘You will…find Me,’ says the Lord, ‘when you seek me with all your heart’ (Jeremiah 29:13). In other words, ‘Look for Me, pursue Me---I want you to pursue Me.’ Amazing. As Tozer says, ‘God waits to be wanted.’” (John Eldredge, Wild At Heart p.36)
Even though this will offend some people theologically, I believe that God is lonely. Not because by any means He has to be or can’t help it, but because He has chosen to be. Not because I’ve earned it, deserved it, or have lived a life worthy of it, but because He created me and loves me and chose me before the foundation of the world, there is a place in His heart only I can fill. I was created for it. And until that day comes when we are united in full, that ache will remain in His heart as well as mine. This is why loneliness is a universal pain: to remind the world what they were created for.
One of the principal names for our God is Elohim, and we find Him thus referred to 2,701 times in the scriptures. Elohim, a Hebrew word, indicates the relation of God to man as Creator. The healing of man---and his loneliness---has to do with acknowledging himself to be a creature, created, and in looking up and away from himself, from self-worship to the worship of Elohim, Creator of all that is: time, space, mass, myself. It is in this worship that our one true face appears, displacing the old false faces. It is in this honest and open speaking relationship that our true self bursts forth, cracking the shell of the old false self; and our old bondages and compulsions fall away with it.” Leanne Payne, The Broken Image p.125)
As a reminder of what we were created for, loneliness is not to be feared but embraced. In that place of embracing it and practicing the Presence of God we discover our true self, who God created us to be, and we begin to accept and rejoice in that self.
“The act of self-acceptance is the root of all things. I must agree to be the person who I am. Agree to have the qualifications which I have. Agree to live within the limitations set for me…The clarity and the courageousness of this acceptance is the foundation of all existence.” (Romano Guardini, The Acceptance of Oneself, as quoted on p.31 of Leanne Payne’s book Restoring The Christian Soul)
From that place of embracing our loneliness and finding our true self there, we can cease relating to others out of any and all of our many false selves and now begin to reach out to others in their loneliness with our true self. We now have something to offer them.
“Each one of us, not just the ones with early deprivations such as Lana and the others suffered, has to gain the courage and determination to face the inner loneliness and there begin to hear God and our own truest selves. The necessity to do this is only more urgent for the Lanas and the Lisas. In Henri Houwen’s wonderful imagery, we must convert the ‘desert of loneliness’ within each of us into a ‘garden of solitude’ where spiritual life begins and blossons. ‘Instead of running away from our loneliness and trying to forget or deny it, we have to protect it and turn it into a fruitful solitude.’ This is a vital part of what it means to practice the Presence, of what it means to come into that vertical relationship to God.
Lana’s strangest inclination was to avoid facing her own inner loneliness, and indeed to fear it. To fear and run from it was to fear and run from her own true self. She had to learn (through dogged discipline at first) to protect the very thing she had always feared the most, her own loneliness, and to find that it was indeed ‘hiding unknown beauty.’” (Leanne Payne, The Broken Image p.106)
As long as I am looking for my loneliness to be healed, or even just assuaged, I am looking in the wrong direction, because loneliness was never meant to be healed on this side of heaven. But when I take my loneliness and use it as a catalyst to help transform me, with every pang of loneliness reminding me to seek God just as hunger pangs remind me to seek food, then I am finally on the right track. Then loneliness, while still painful, becomes a thing of beauty because it leads me to the Beautiful One.
God’s Pain
“’I see everything,’ he cried, ‘everything there is. Why does each thing on earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist….So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, ‘You lie!’ No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, “We also have suffered.”…’
He had turned his eyes so as to see suddenly the great face of Sunday, which wore a strange smile.
‘Have you,’ he cried in a dreadful voice, ‘have you ever suffered?’
As he gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, ‘Can ye drink the cup that I drink of?’” (G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday)
“As the divine Head, He is the nerve-centre of all the body. He is indeed today living a life of intercession for us. Prayer for others is as it were the very breath of our Lord’s life in Heaven.” (E.G. Carre, Praying Hyde p.22)
In my journey of healing I’ve seemingly gone backwards, with every answer leading to five more questions. But in retrospect, while it felt like I was going backwards, I was just going deeper. I was trying to find the root, because “you can only get out of a thing what is in its root” (Rees Howells). Through the whole process of digging deeper that I’ve tried to chronicle here, and of being led into sometimes expected, sometimes unexpected directions, I always trusted that I would actually find the root if I dug long enough, that there would be an actual root I could find.
All of this I would never have embarked upon in the first place, would never have had the courage to attempt to face my pain, had I not been assured of God’s presence with me throughout the whole process. If I didn’t know that even in these wounded places I feared to enter, He was already there. As painful as they were, He understood and was with me in them. I knew I didn’t have to face them alone, and that was enough to begin the process and enough to keep me going in the hardest and most painful parts of my journey.
I didn’t have to face pain alone.
“If the message of pain is directional, a call for us to link up compassionately with those who suffer, how then does the Head of the Body relate to such suffering? How does God ‘feel’ about those who are abused or divorced or alcoholic or unemployed or homosexual, about the needy in Africa and Central America and everywhere? The scope of this book does not permit me to address the ‘why’ questions of causation. But at least I must consider how God views the suffering of creatures. Does it affect God?
A common theme has surfaced throughout this book: that God has undergone a series of self-humiliations---in the Creation, the covenants, the failed monarchy, the Exile, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and finally as Head of a very human church. And, I have said, in the role of Head Christ can truly---not just figuratively or analogously---feel our pain. Yet, having made that assertion, I cannot ignore certain important questions about the nature of infinite God. Perhaps they have lurked uncomfortably in your mind as you have read about God’s self-limitations. Is not God changeless, eternal? Can our pain truly affect an essentially changeless God? Can God hurt? Did God in any sympathetic way share the gallows with the child in Buna? These are good questions, inescapable questions.
Such careful documents as the Anglican Communion and Westminster Confession declare that God is ‘without body, parts or passions.’ Can a God without passions feel our pain? Admittedly, theologians over the centuries have largely concluded that God does not feel passion or suffering. (Clement, for example, urged people to strive toward freedom from passion, becoming like an impassible God. Purge yourselves of courage, fear, cheerfulness, anger, envy, and love for creatures, he said. A similar prejudice against passion and emotions continued through philosophy and theology up until the Romantic movement. Spinoza called emotions ‘confused ideas,’ and Kant urged ‘duty for duty’s sake.’) Early Christian theology, thrashed out in a Greek intellectual environment, held that such qualities as movement, change, and suffering distinguish humans from gods. God is apathos, or apathetic, with no disturbing emotions whatever. Bible passages describing God as angry or grieved or rejoicing were dismissed as anthropomorphic or metaphorical.
Yet, here is the strange thing: if someone with no background in philosophy and theology simply picked up the Bible and started reading it, he or she would find a startlingly different picture. The Bible gives overwhelming emphasis to God’s passionate involvement with creation. It is virtually a catalogue of God’s emotions in relating to humanity. From creation onward, God places Himself in the position of an anxious Father whose children run free.
Each key event in the Old Testament tells of God sharing the pain (or, less frequently, triumph) of His people. He heard the cry of the captives in Egypt. For thirty-eight years God pitched His tent among the shifting tents in Sinai, joining Israel in their punishment by tabernacling among them. ‘In all their distress He too was distressed,’ concludes the prophet Isaiah (63:9).
The prophets seem to compete in describing the depths of God’s emotional attachment to His people. The books of Jeremiah and Hosea swell with the cry of a wounded God. ‘Is not Ephraim My dear son, the child in whom I delight?’ God asks (Jeremiah 31:20). ‘Though I often speak against him, I still remember him. Therefore, My heart yearns for him; I have great compassion for him.’ (Luther translates that penultimate phrase, ‘My heart is broken.’)
In Hosea God declares, ‘My heart is changed within Me; all My compassion is aroused’ (11:8). ‘Why did you forsake me?’ God asks often. ‘My people have forgotten me,’ He laments. In Isaiah the boldest figure of speech used by any prophet compares God to a woman undergoing labor:
‘For a long time I have kept silent,
I have been quiet and held myself back.
But now, like a woman in childbirth,
I cry out, I gasp and pant.’ (42:14)
Clearly, events arouse in God either joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath. The Old Testament portrays a God who is not ‘wholly other’ or remote, but One involved with creation. God goes with His people into exile, into captivity, into the fiery furnace, into the grave. A phrase like ‘My heart is broken’ is metaphorical, to be sure---when applied to God or to a human being. But a writer employs a metaphor to point to a truth, not its opposite. Abraham Heschel, a Jewish theologian, concludes, ‘The statements about pathos are not a compromise---ways of accommodating higher meanings to the lower level of human understanding. They are rather the accommodations of words to higher meanings.’
Could it be that the church Fathers, so intent on protecting God from any deficiency of being, missed an obvious possibility: that God voluntarily put Himself in the position of being affected by creation? Love involves giving, and God, self-complete, has only Himself to give. God surely does not suffer out of some deficiency of being, as His creatures do, but from the love that overflows from being. That is, in fact, how the Gospels define love: ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.’” (Paul Brand)
What kind of a God would do something like that, to have a heart like that? What kind of God would allow Himself to be vulnerable, to feel pain when He didn’t and doesn’t have to? Our God is like that!
“We struggle to imagine it: a perfect heart within a perfect God within a perfect man breaking---in any circumstance. We mistakenly interpret that word perfect to mean invulnerable. We think of a heart that’s so ‘together,’ it’s beyond being bruised. But isn’t it quite the opposite? A heart never moved is called hard and dysfunctional. A man who can’t cry is to be pitied above all. But a soft, sensitive, supple heart---one that is open and feels deeply---that’s a good heart. It’s a heart that loves in all of love’s fullness and in spite of love’s costs.” (Bruce Marchiano, Jesus Wept p.37)
In all our distress, He too is distressed. He shares our pain. And the proof of this is in His incarnation, in the time He shed the glories of heaven for the limitations of this earth, the limitations you and I face every day. He became one of us and lived among us. As The Message by Eugene Peterson paraphrases John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.”
“Since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death---that is, the devil---and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels He helps but Abraham’s descendents. For this reason He had to be made like His brothers in every way, in order that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that He might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because He Himself suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted.” (Hebrews 2:14-18)
“Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are---yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Hebrews 4:14-16)
Bruce Marchiano illustrates this wonderfully:
A few years ago I sat in a South African prison chapel, waiting for a Matthew film clip to finish before I addressed the inmates. It was Victor Verster Prison, one of the two places where Nelson Mandela was housed following his Robin Island years. At that point, prisons were a whole new ballgame to me, and I was somewhat intimidated. There was no threat from the prisoners themselves, but my life experience was so vastly removed from theirs I couldn't imagine how I could possible relate to them.
There was only one hope, and I knew it--pray! So there I sat, silently begging the Lord to give me something to say to these men. "Lord, what can I say to these guys? I don't know them!" I will never forget the response that rose in my heart.
"You don't need to know them, Bruce--I know them.
I know every name, every struggle, every hurt, every hope, every dream...
I know them."
I'm not sure how that strikes anyone else, but for me, that's as profound as it gets--He knows. I told the prisoners that, and we all sat there for a few minutes, dumbfounded. When raw truth hits, there's not much anyone can say. Eventually, though, I went on to talk of things that had never before occurred to me. It went something like this:
You think you had it rough as a kid? This Guy was born in a barn. His first bed was a feed trough. He wasn't even two years old and people were trying to kill Him. He had to hide out with His mom and dad--on the run, and just a baby. And that went on His entire life. Folks were always plotting to kill Him--eventually they did.
Did you grow up being laughed at and kicked around? Imagine Jesus hearing the laughs about His mom being pregnant before she was married, getting teased and spit at by other kids because of it.
Did you grow up without a father or a mother? Divorce, death, or maybe one just walked out on you? You know, Joseph is never mentioned after Jesus is 12. Nobody knows for sure what happened to him, but most experts figure he must have died while Jesus was just a kid. Yeah, guys, Jesus knows that heartbreak. Imagine Him standing at His dad's grave. and as the eldest son, He'd have to carry on and support the family. See Him in His dad's workshop that first day, reaching for His father's tools, tears streaming down His face--and just a kid.
Ever had no place to sleep? "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head"--the words of Jesus. He even knows what it's like to have no place to live--sleeping around campfires or on people's floors.
Ever had your face beat in? You guessed it--the Bible says they beat Jesus so badly you couldn't even tell He was a human being.
Friends run out on you? Jesus had a couple choice buddies named Judas and Peter.
And He even knows what it's like to be in a place like this. He knows because they locked Him up once.
Yeah, Jesus knows, guys. He knows every struggle, every heartache. And not just because He's God and God knows everything; but because when He was a man, He went through the same things you and I go through and more. He knows because He lived it. He's been there.
That's the story as best I can remember, and the reason I've added it is because I've seen it mean a lot to folks over the past couple years of telling it. It's an incredible proposition when you stop and think about it. With all that's going on, no matter who you are or what it may be: He knows.
(Bruce Marchiano, In The Footsteps Of Jesus p.137-139)
“The incarnation made possible one further aspect of the pain of God, one that has direct bearing on our analogy of the human body. I think of my futile attempts to develop an artificial pain system. All my patients intellectually understood pain, acknowledged its value as a warning signal, and abhorred the injuries and wounds on their painless hands and feet. Yet until they ‘felt’ pain for themselves, inside their own brains, they had not suffered.
It seems inappropriate to think of a ‘developing awareness’ within God, but something like a progression did occur as implied in the mysterious phrase in Hebrews 2:10, ‘made perfect through suffering.’ Imagining pain is one thing---God as designer had surely understood its physiological values and limitations. Grieving in response to pain, feeling with His people, suffering with humanity---all these, too, link God and man. Still, something was missing.
Until God took on the soft tissue of flesh along with its pain cells just as accurate and subject to abuse as ours, God had not truly experienced pain. By sending the Son to earth, God learned to feel pain in the same way we feel pain. Our prayers and cries of suffering take on greater meaning because we now know them to be understood by God. Instinctively, we want a God who not only knows about pain, but shares in it and is affected by our own. By looking at Jesus, we realize we have such a God. He took on the limitations of time and space and family and pain and sorrow. (It would have been far easier and more pleasant for God simply to abolish pain rather than to share it. Pain exists not as a proof of God’s lack of concern, but because it has a place in creation significant enough that it cannot be removed without great loss. I, of course, see the effects of that loss every day in my leprosy patients. For this reason, if I held in my hand the ability to eliminate human pain, I would not exercise the right. Pain’s value is too great. Rather, I lend my energies to doing all I can to help when that pain turns into suffering.)
Christ has now ascended, and in the new role of Head receives messages of pain reporting in from all over His Body. My brain does not feel pain inflicted on its own cells---protected in a skull of bone, it needs no such warning cells. Yet it desperately feels the pain of other cells in the body. In that sense, Jesus has now placed Himself at the receiving end of our pain, with actual consciousness of the pain we endure….
…In two profoundly suggestive passages, Christ identifies with suffering people so completely that He fills their place and bears their pain. Matthew 25:35-40 shows Him accepting ministry to the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the naked, the vagrants, the prisoners, as though it were done to Him. In Acts 9:4, during Saul’s blinding epiphany en route to Damascus, Jesus asks, ‘Saul, why do you persecute Me?’ The whips and stones directed against persecuted Christians had fallen on Jesus Himself. In these cases, at least, it seems inappropriate to ask, ‘Why does God allow their suffering?’ ‘Why does God allow Himself to suffer?’ would be closer. God’s identification with our pain is that complete.”” (Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, In The Likeness Of God p.523-526)
All throughout this healing journey, as my answers kept leading me to more questions and deeper understanding, as I moved from feeling and fearing pain through the whole process of gaining understanding into the roots of that pain that I’ve chronicled thus far, to finally feeling and befriending that pain by beginning to listen to it, I always knew where my journey would ultimately lead me.
It lead me to the cross.
If through the incarnation we learn that God shares our pain, then through the cross we watch as God takes our pain. Though I haven’t written much of the cross up till now, the cross was never absent from any of my life as I learned all that I’ve written here. Indeed, it was and is central to every step of transformation, every ounce of healing that I’ve been blessed with, as it also is with anybody else’s. One result of this led a song of the cross to dig so deeply into me during that time that its chorus became the theme song of my heart. Now I can rarely hear the cross even mentioned without singing this chorus inside me; I feel as if it has worked its way into the very fiber of my being.
“The cross is my treasure,
Your blood has joined us together,
Your greatness, Your splendor,
Has stained me forever.”
(Among Thorns, I Could Not Love You More)
For just as we were borne on the cross by Christ, so our pain was borne on the cross by Christ, and we need no longer carry it. The cross is where pain finally finds its meaning.
Pain dies, just as we do, with Christ on the cross. Truly, the cross is my treasure
“But may none of us be cheated by a lukewarm or casual consideration. That day on Golgotha two thousand years ago was a…day unlike any day before or after. ‘The wages of sin is death’ (Romans 6:23), and ‘The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all’ (Isaiah 53:6). Those may be very familiar words to some of us, and they may sound philosophical and theological to others; but if, for just a moment, we were to step back and stare down the black hole of exactly what they mean…
He was pierced…he was crushed…it was the Lord’s will to crush him.
Sin. Iniquity. Death. And not just death death, if you know what I mean; but the death that takes place in life too---death in broken families and broken hearts, broken bodies and broken trust, broken circumstances and shattered hopes.
Yes, death takes many forms and enjoys a multitude of layers and degrees. And in the middle of it all, at the end of it all, the fallout and by-product of it all, the bottom line and culmination of it all: pain. Oh, such pain! Phenomenal, incomprehensible, immeasurable across generation upon generation and upon nation after nation. Pain, pain, and more pain---‘and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.’
JESUS
Can any one of us even begin to imagine? All of the pain, all of the brokenness, all of the horror, all of the loss, all of your grief, and all of mine---all of it that all of us put together have ever known and ever will know, and then some---borne on Golgotha by the Son of God. Every killing and every rape. Every war and every genocide. Every act of slavery, imprisonment, and greed. Every wife who’s ever been slapped, every child who’s been molested. Every pencil that’s been stolen, every automobile that ever slammed into a tree. Every father left abandoned, every mother cheated on. Every cancer, every disease, every Third World starvation. Every shame, every betrayal, every fear and frustration…
He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people He was stricken.
It goes on and on---human history from day one to beyond, written in sin and painted in all the agony that is its result. And every inch of it---every cry ever uttered, every tear ever wept, every drop of blood ever spilled---descends and caves in on Him, all on that Golgotha day. It swallows Him from below. It chews on His soul. It beats and batters and grinds His Person, all in one incomprehensible…moment of one incomprehensible Golgotha day.
My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?
That’s the ‘debt’ Jesus paid. That’s the price, the ‘wage’ He relinquished for our sin. That’s the ‘race’ He bled to complete. He abandoned Himself to hell in its ultimate degree. He invited it to do with Him whatever it would please. ‘The punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed’ (Is. 53:5).
JESUS
A long, long time ago a man and woman ate fruit from a tree they knew they shouldn’t touch. Their nakedness turned to shame, and all of creation writhed in its very first agony. Centuries later, the Son of the living God hangs exposed from a tree He need never have known, children spit on His nakedness. Their laughter paints Him with shame as He writhes in the vice grip of Creation’s same agony.
Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!
Not so long ago---perhaps today, as I write this and you read it---a father and mother make a decision to end their son’s life. A surgeon’s tool intrudes into the woman’s womb. ‘Mommy, daddy, why have you forsaken me?’ The killing begins and the son is no more. Two thousand years earlier, another Father makes a decision to end His Son’s life. He turns His back---oh, what it costs Him to turn His back!---and all of hell intrudes. ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Psalm 22:1). The killing begins, and the Son is no more.
The Lord makes His life a guilt offering.
It is Sept 11, 2001. A fireman rushes into a tower built of concrete and steel to save people he doesn’t know. The tower will fall; and, heroism beyond heroism, heartbreak beyond heartbreak, the fireman will become one of those he sought to save. It is Golgotha, somewhere around 30 A.D. The Son of the living God rushes into a tower built of sin and all of hell’s horror to save people He longs to know. The tower will fall; and, heroism beyond heroism, heartbreak beyond heartbreak, the Son of the living God will fling His arms wide and welcome its collapse upon Himself, all for those He will now have a chance to know.
What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.
There is pain out there in this thing we call the world---very real, very crushing, not-to-be-thought-of-lightly pain. It is my hope that you have somehow been spared the worst of it. At the same time, I’m very aware that you may now it heart-breakingly well. But in all sensitivity, just for a moment, please allow me to suggest and allow yourself to consider: there is no pain that can even come close to the pain of Jesus. Take all of your pain and all of the pain of everyone around you, multiply it times a billion times a billion times a billion---and you’ve got that day. You’ve got Golgotha. You’ve got, ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son’ (John 3:16). Yes, you’ve got Jesus.
‘Roaring lions…open their mouths wide against me. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death…they have pierced my hands and my feet.’ (Psalm 22:13-16)
JESUS
We ask the question, ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ And there in the middle of that question hangs Jesus. We ask, ‘If God is so good, why is there so much pain in the world?’ And there in the middle of that cry, taking on Himself every inch and every moment of all the pain in all the world, hangs Jesus. We ask, ‘Why doesn’t God do something?’ And with every drop of His precious Son’s blood, He looks up from the pool of His tears---tears upon tears---and answers us all: ‘I did do something. See? There hangs my Jesus.’
And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, He gave up His spirit.
JESUS
(Bruce Marchiano, Jesus Wept p.87-93)
Why did Christ keep His scars? He could have had a perfect body, or no body, when He returned to splendor in heaven. Instead He carried with Him remembrances of His visit to earth. For a reminder of His time here, He chose scars. That is why I say God hears and understands our pain, and even absorbs it into Himself---because He kept those scars as a lasting image of wounded humanity. God has been here and has borne the sentence. The pain of humanity has become the pain of God.” (Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, In The Likeness Of God p.529)
As wonderful as it is to know that I am not alone in my pain, that it is shared, even borne by my Creator, I still want to be healed from it. As valuable as it is to befriend pain, it is not a friendship I want to last forever. I now understand pain to be valuable; I still do not find it desirable. If my pain was borne on the cross by Christ two thousand years ago, what then becomes of that same pain in my life right now as I offer it up to God on the cross?
If you were hoping the answer was that it disappears, then I’m sorry to disappoint you. Though it dies, it doesn’t disappear. Sometimes, in fact, it intensifies.
But it is transformed.
“Christ did not, however, stop at identification and shared experience. I have focused on the cross, but in the resurrection that followed He transformed the nature of pain. He overthrew the powers of this world by first allowing sin to do its worst, then transmuting that act into His best. The most meaningless of acts, His own innocent death, became the most meaningful.
The apostle Paul explored this change in a hymn at the end of Romans 8. No one can condemn us, he says, because of Christ Jesus who died and was raised to life and is now present with the Father. Now, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, not the pains of trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword. No, he concludes, we are all more than conquerors through him who loved us. And then this summing-up: ‘For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future [time], nor any powers, neither height nor depth [space], nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’
This, then, is the conclusion of pain. God takes the Great Pain of the Son’s death and uses it to blot up into Himself all the minor pains of our own confinement on earth. Meaningless pain is absorbed.
Jesus had told His followers to ‘take up a cross’ and follow Him and to ‘drink of the cup’ that He drinks. Paul went even further, alluding to ‘the fellowship of His sufferings’ and to a process of filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Philippians 3:10; Colossians 1:24). He seldom missed a chance to refer too such terms as crucifixion with Christ, union with His death, sharing in His sufferings. In one passage he said explicitly, ‘We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body’ (2 Corinthians 4:10). All these fragments of mystery speak to me of the miracle that has taken place. God absorbs our pain so that what we endure becomes a part of what He suffered and will become a part of what is resurrected in triumph and transformed into good. Following a similar train of thought, the apostle Peter concludes buoyantly, ‘Even angels long to look into these things’ (1 Peter 1:12). (Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey, In The Likeness Of God p.525-526)
I’ve differed several times in this post between a wounded heart and a broken heart without ever really defining what I see as the difference between them, and all for good reason, because the difference I offer doesn’t make much sense until this part of the post anyway.
I believe, and even wrote this at the beginning of my journey in those e-mails with my friend that started all this, that the only difference between a wounded heart and a broken heart is in who it trusts with its pain. A wounded heart trusts in itself to handle pain best. When it encounters the sin and pain this world is rife with, it takes it upon itself to protect itself, enfolding itself over and over around the wound, creating strongholds around it and freezing it so that it can never be wounded again. It will not, even cannot, ever let itself be vulnerable again. I’ve already written in depth on wounded hearts earlier in this post, but what about a broken heart? As I asked on my xanga when revisiting this question at the very end of December 2006:
“Can a heart hidden in Christ ever be wounded? Or can it only be broken? If it can’t be wounded but still is, is it still truly hidden in Christ? What happens to a wounded heart when it comes into contact with the broken heart of God over the same issue the wound came from?”
What does a heart hidden in Christ do when it is faced with pain? What does it look like? How does it respond?
And how do I get one?
“Before the cross in prayer, I could ask God all the questions those who suffer ask. ‘Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong?’ (Habakkuk 1:3). One day in prayer, I was reminded that Jesus on the cross also asked God a why question: ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?’ (Mark 15:34). It was then I realized that the Father did not answer Jesus’ question (nor did God answer Habakkuk’s). But three days later God responded by resurrecting Jesus from the dead. We may not receive the answers to our why questions, but we shall receive comfort for our pain through the resurrection power of Jesus, available to us in prayer.
In the end, I learned to concentrate on the remedy and ask the more important questions. ‘How in this circumstance, Lord Jesus, can I apply the healing power of the cross?’ The answer was to look up and out of myself, in the midst of my pain, and hurt with my eyes fixed on Christ, risen from the dead, victorious over sin and evil.” Mario Bergner, Setting Love In Order p.45)
The Healing Presence
Remember the definition given earlier for the heart? It is a metaphor referring to both my spirit and soul together, so let’s be more specific here: what is it that we’re hiding in Christ? Colossians 3:3 says it is our life that has been hidden with Christ in God. The word for life there in the original Greek is Zoe. According to W.E Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, Zoe speaks of “life as a principle, life in the absolute sense, life as God has it, that which the Father has in Himself, and which He gave to the Incarnate Son to have in Himself (John 5:26), and which the Son manifested in the world (1 John 1:2).” Zoe is contrasted with Bios, also translated into English as “life,” which is “used in three respects (a) of the period or duration of life (Luke 8:14), (2 Tim. 2:4); (b) of the manner of life, life in regard to its moral conduct (1 Tim. 2:2), (1 John 2:16); (c) of the means of life, livelihood, maintenance, living (Mark 12:44), (Luke 8:43, 15:12, 15:30, and 21:4), (1 John 3:17). In comparison, “In bios, used as a manner of life, there is an ethical sense often inhering which, in classical Greek at least, zoe does not possess. In Scripture, zoe is the nobler word, expressing as it continually does, all of the highest and best which the saints possess in God.”
It is this life (Zoe), currently hidden in Christ, that Christ came so that we might have (John 10:10), and it is a life that we as believers have already passed from death into (John 5:24). Christ Himself is this life, our life (Col. 3:4). So as we receive Him we receive life (Zoe). As I quoted from Mario Bergner near the beginning of this post, “To the Christian, all becoming is incarnational---it is a life that is poured into us from on high. That Life is Jesus.” That life, according to the definitions I used earlier, is the life of the Spirit, that part of me in union with Christ. When we live our lives (Bios) out of that centered place, Christ Himself lives His life (Zoe) through us. It is that continual choice to live out of that centered place in Christ that hides our hearts in Christ, because it places our soul in submission to our spirit and therefore the Spirit of God as well.
When our soul is in submission to Christ’s zoe in our spirit, it is hidden in Christ, because the events of the outside world, whatever they may be, are filtered through the spirit before they ever reach the soul. The spirit (united with Christ, the healthy, holy place within every believer) is the first responder to the world, not the soul (thoughts, emotions, memories, beliefs, habits, attitudes, and so on). When a heart (spirit and soul together) is hidden in Christ, the pain and message of any event facing it has to go through Jesus’ heart to get to that heart, and to get through His heart it has to go through the cross with Him, where it is transformed. Nothing in this world looks the same when you view it through the cross. While our pain doesn’t disappear, when it finally reaches us through Him we no longer look at it from the same perspective we once did, the message it contains is radically different. The answer to any potentially wounding event in this world is a heart hidden in Christ.
“All stories of healing in the Scriptures, when imaged by the mind, are incarnational. Grace is channeled into us. God sends His Word and heals us. The Healing Presence descends into us and does it….We alone have a Savior of the deep mind and heart, One who descends into it and becomes its righteousness, its sanctification, its holiness. Faith, knowledge, love, moral conduct, apostolic courage, hope, prayer, completion: all we have to do with Christ in us. This is the way it really is, and the imagery with which our hearts perceive this reality is crucial.” Leanne Payne, The Healing Presence p.135)
What does this process of submitting the soul to Christ’s Spirit, of hiding our hearts in His look like? Mario Bergner, early on in his journey of healing from homosexuality, writes of a crisis weekend in which he learned precisely how to do this.
“After receiving so much help from Pastor Brown, from Leanne’s class, and from repenting and being filled with the Holy Spirit, I had a most incredible experience with God one weekend. It was Thursday afternoon, and classes were canceled for Friday. Three long nights and two empty days awaited me before Sunday morning came and fellowship with other Christians. Sitting in my comfortable little apartment in Ohio, I began to feel the dread of being alone for such a long time. The sexual arousal linked to this anxiety resulted in overwhelming temptations. I knew full well that if I left my apartment, I would surely have a sexual fall.
Deciding to stay at home that evening, I watched a little television and did some reading. When Friday morning came, again deep anxiety and overwhelming homosexual temptation gripped me the moment I awakened. Except now the feelings seemed to have grown worse over the night. That morning during my devotions, I heard God say to me, ‘I love you, Mario.’ At the end of that prayer session a deep God-given assurance filled me: If I could make it through until Sunday morning without a sexual fall, then never again would my body be devoured with homosexual temptation like this. I just knew it. Aligning my will with God’s will and deciding that a sexual fall was out of the question, I took out a Band-Aid and placed it over the inside of my front door and the molding around it. Then I promised God I would not break that seal until Sunday morning came, no matter how anxious or sexually tempted I became.
As Friday afternoon and evening progressed, the temptation and anxiety grew worse---something I did not think possible. I cleaned every corner of my apartment, straightened files I hadn’t looked at in years, wrote letters to old friends, made long-distance phone calls and, above all, practiced the presence of Jesus. Friday night was spent primarily tossing and turning in what seemed like the longest night of my life. The Band-Aid seal was still on the door.
Saturday morning came. Now I faced a spotless apartment, orderly files, and a stack of letters written to people I hadn’t corresponded with in years. All I could do was pray, read, and practice the presence of Jesus. Inside me the gnawing anxiety and forceful homosexual temptation still raged.
That afternoon, all alone in my living room, I read aloud and performed a one-person play, The Passion of Lady Bright, by Joe Orton, a gay playwright. The play tells the story of an aging male homosexual who is no longer young enough to attract bedfellows. His walls are covered with the signatures of all the one-night stands he has brought home over the past twenty years. As the play unfolds, he tries to remember the faces attached to the hundreds of signatures that adorn his walls. Some he remembers; while others he cannot. It is a sad play, but a truthful one, as in the end he realizes he is an aging homosexual with no one to love. In the play, Lady Bright is really a burned-out old queen living in a monologue, utterly alone and without hope.
After finishing my living room performance of this play, I fell to my knees in horror. Crying out to God, I begged, ‘Dear Lord, please don’t let me become another Lady Bright.’ At that point, I remember one of my most frightful memories from the gay lifestyle.
It was Christmas Eve, four years earlier. Several friends and I went out for a drink to one of our favorite gay bars. The city was covered with a layer of freshly fallen snow, and large flakes quietly and slowly dropped from the sky. As we walked from our car to the bar, a church bell struck midnight.
‘Hey, it’s Christmas morning,’ one of my friends said. ‘Merry Christmas.’
Just as we approached the front door of the bar, it swung open and out stumbled a drunken older homosexual man. He fell on the snow-covered sidewalk, let out a profane expletive, managed to return to an upright position, and then staggered past us. The same friend who had wished us all a Merry Christmas contemptuously sneered, ‘How would you like to be that old fag on Christmas morning?’
As he said this, a shocking stillness came over me. With piercing sincerity I spoke out the thought I knew we all feared. ‘In thirty years, I am going to be that lonely old fag on Christmas morning.’ Without a doubt, if we continued as we were, we would all one day become Lady Brights or old trolls hiding in the shadows of gay bars. What we become when we live our lives apart from God is horrible.
Although I now struggled with homosexuality, I was not alone. I was not living in the arid monologue described in Orton’s play. There but for the grace of God went I. I had entered into a living dialogue with God. I thought to myself, Better to be suffering before the cross than to end up alone and hopeless. The words of Job 13:15 rang in my ears, ‘Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him.’ Even if my present temptations never let up, I would stand before the cross and hurt, till kingdom come if necessary. Unable to form any words to pray, my painful, anxious loneliness became my prayer. There, in the midst of unbearable suffering, I resolutely decided to obey God. This is exactly what God was waiting for me to do.
Although my will was still feeble and in need of much more healing, I had exercised it in concert with God’s will. God’s presence abiding with me empowered me to do what I had previously thought impossible. With Christ, I had faced the fear of loneliness, anxiety, sexual temptation, and abandonment I never before could face. This was a turning point in my healing as I voluntarily died to my old self and identified with Christ in His suffering. When Sunday morning came and I broke the Band-Aid seal on my door, my true self, the self in union with the resurrected Christ, was firmly established as the center of my soul.
The next week I came into a powerful new realization of Christ living in me. It has changed my life. And never again did I have to face a gut-wrenching three-day weekend like that.” (Mario Bergner, Setting Love In Order p.92-94)
“God’s working in me gave me the courage to endure those first few months while I was being healed of the homosexual neurosis. Christ’s presence in me is not some feeling I must conjure up; instead it is a reality that transcends my feeling body. For that reason, while my body was being ravaged with homosexual desires, I could call on God in those moments when I did not feel Him near me. Without shame or guilt I waited in His presence until the ravaging desires passed. Eventually, the homosexual desires I had once eagerly sought to fulfill were transformed into temptations to do something I no longer wanted to do. Another lived in me. His righteousness in me, Christ in me, was transforming me from the inside out.
Now when I am tempted to sin, I immediately look up and out of myself and call on Jesus name. Then I acknowledge that though I am still a sinner, my primary identity is my true self in union with Christ. From the center of that self, where I partake of God’s nature, I exercise the power available to me to obey Him. I continue practicing the presence of God with me and within me until the temptation is over. In doing this, I’ve come to see that the duration of a temptation is limited. The more we persevere in His presence, the shorter temptations last. Never have I denied the temptations present in my body. I’ve merely come to acknowledge the greater reality: There is Another who lives within me and He will see me through this.” (Mario Bergner, Setting Love In Order p.104)
“I have learned to instruct people, as soon as temptation strikes, to invoke the Presence, saying, ‘Come, Lord Jesus,’ and then to practice the presence of God, with, within, and all about them. In this way, they immediately get themselves centered; they abide in God. They know and affirm their position in God---that they are in Christ and He in them. Then sometimes immediately, and always amazingly, the demonic force and spiritual warfare recedes. What at first seems overwhelming in its power to overshadow, slime, and hold us in its foul clutches simply fades backward, declawed and whimpering.” (Leanne Payne, Restoring The Christian Soul p.21)
A heart hidden in Christ trusts in Christ to deal with the pain it feels. As I quoted from Bruce Marchiano earlier, a broken heart is “a heart that loves in all of love’s fullness and in spite of love’s costs.” When it encounters the sin and pain this world is rife with, it immediately runs to the cross and hurts there. From there it watches as Christ takes that pain from it. It refuses to allow strongholds to form around the painful area, instead remaining open, unafraid to be hurt again if need be. It is after something greater than safety and self-preservation, so it chooses to face that evil with the open, broken heart of Christ, and overcomes that evil with good. It will remain hurting there at the cross as long as it needs to, until it receives healing.
“I explained again how it is one stands and hurts. ‘See the cross, Patsy; see yourself standing and hurting, acknowledging all these feelings, but this time let Christ take them into Himself. Let them flow into Him, just as you would sins you have confessed.’
Just as we take our place in Christ’s death, dying again with Him to our own sins, so we die to these diseased feelings by allowing Him to take them into Himself. And we learn to wait, still suffering if necessary, until relief and healing come. But we do it from our true center, not from an immature or false one…
…As we learn more about the process of healing within the soul, we often find that the power to feel the pain is itself a vital part of the healing. The sufferer has repressed this heretofore and denied it precisely because it was so painful. But now he has to get it up and out. He needs to understand that, if he will stand in the cross and hurt, there is a place for it to go, an end to the pain. This seemingly endless pain is the way he gets in touch with and names the heretofore repressed grief, fear, anger, and shame underlying his depression. In order to come out of certain types of depression, one must feel the most appalling pain and grief. It often seems that death would be easier. But repressed grief and sorrow and loss remain to afflict us in other ways until we grieve them out. It is a wonderful thing to stand in Christ, identify with His suffering for us, and grieve out our griefs and yield up our angers, naming them and forgiving others at the same time.” (Leanne Payne, Healing Presence p.205)
As it waits in Christ’s presence at the cross, it places itself in what I call “the receptive position” and listens. I won’t go in depth on how to listen to God here, largely because learning to listen to God has been a long journey for me that I have yet to find adequate words for, and as much as I’ve learned, I’m still just beginning. But listening is something that must be learned to deal properly with pain; indeed, it is vital skill needed to undergo any transformation at all.
“In two of my earlier books, The Broken Image and Crisis in Masculinity, I tell about one person after another who could live from the center because of a diseased inner vision of themselves. And they were all healed in the same way. They came into the Presence of God and listened. There illumination, forgiveness, cleansing, and healing took place. Fixing their eyes solely on Him, they climbed up and out of the old center of self and into their new center, which is His presence living in them. (Note here the practice of the Presence of God in His sovereign otherness, His objective reality. To lose that is to lose His immanent dimension.) To remain in the true center is to gain not only release from diseased attitudinal patterns, but the great virtue of self-acceptance.
Only the real ‘I,’ shedding its illusory selves, can draw nearer to God. In His Presence, my masks fall off, my false selves are revealed. I stand stripped and naked before Him. To continually abide in His presence is to have one face only---the true one. To draw near Him, therefore, is to find the real ‘I’ as well as its true home, my true center. Prior to this, I am split; I walk alongside myself, I am egocentric, I am uncentered.” (Leanne Payne, Healing Presence p.82-83)
“In learning to practice His presence, we bring every thought of our minds, every imagination of our hearts into subjection to Christ who is Lord of our lives. In listening to Him, we exchange our way of seeing and doing for His.
Isaiah, prophesying of Christ the obedient Servant who was to come, said:
‘He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.’ (Isaiah 11:3-4)
And this is exactly what Jesus did: He judged by what He heard the Father speak; in the power of the Spirit, He did only what He saw the Father doing (see John 8:28-29).
We too, even as our Lord, listen in order to be the obedient disciple, in order to do the works of God. ‘For sword, take that which the Spirit gives you---the words that come from God’ (Eph. 6:17 NEB).
Listening to God is the most effective tool we have in our ‘healing kit,’ for by it we know how to collaborate with His Spirit. Teaching others to listen is one of the most valuable lessons we as spiritual directors can give them; by this freedom to hear, they pass from immaturity (being under the Law or laws) to maturity (the walk with Christ in the Spirit), both as persons and as Christians. The Lord Himself becomes their chief counselor and guide, and our vocation is made easier.” (Leanne Payne, The Broken Image p.134)
“We are dialogical creatures; we become mature as we are spoken to and respond. We who desire healing must daily put ourselves in the responsive position, expectantly waiting before God for that word that will heal us. Once we receive it, whether it is from the Scriptures, another Christian believer, worship, a good sermon, or a prophetic word we hear from God in prayer, we then have the responsibility to act on that word. Responsibility is at the heart of becoming mature in Christ Jesus.” (Mario Bergner, Setting Love In Order p.106-107)
As we wait at the cross and listen, open to whatever He might have for us, He unfailingly (though not always at the time or in the manner we expect) sends what Leanne Payne often calls “the healing word.” This word may be in any number of forms, or it may even be a picture, video, or something non-auditory. The word He sends is always aimed at the root of the problem---the lie contained in the wound, the message we’ve swallowed that did not come from Him. After we receive it, we are then responsible to act on it, to take captive the lie and renew our minds with truth.
This is where I am now. I’ve received so much from the Lord, both this past year and in years past, things that were not meant to be kept to myself. I set aside much of my life (plans, ambitions, desires, time, focus, etc.) this past year to dive in as deeply as I could into healing and wholeness, to get at the roots of some behavior patterns and weaknesses that have long plagued me. In their place I have begun to develop strong, healthy roots, grounded in God’s truth, reality, and love. In a time of listening just recently during my guys group, the picture God gave me of myself right now is that of a flower just about to blossom. But it first has to decide if it truly wants to leave the relative comfort and safety of the stem and open up to show its face to a cold, often harsh world, performing the act it was created to do, even if God alone sees the beauty of it.
To all who have asked me what I am writing about for the many months I’ve been writing this I have told that I am writing about what I have learned this last year. But this is only partly true. The greater truth I’ve discovered along the way is that I’ve been attempting to write is who I’ve become, and to do that it is necessary to put to words what I’ve learned. This is one of the reasons why I’ve interspersed bits and pieces of my own story throughout the fabric of this post. I don’t want to just share information; I want to share me, and the information that has shaped me. You may recall that I wrote at the beginning of this post that I don’t want these words to be empty, mere conclusions I’ve reached but never really lived. And as we say in the guys group I’m a part of, I don’t want to be like Noah coming down off the mountain having already learned everything and won every victory, ready to teach all you commonfolk the way to holiness. (Sorry, inside joke.)
With all that in mind, I feel led to share with you all the third battle I’ve been fighting as well as how I’ve been learning to fight it, and, for the first time in a long time, to win it.
I have, ever since somewhere around 10th grade, struggled with pornography. At this point I cannot remember how it first began or why I first decided to pursue porn, nor does it really matter anymore, but I do remember my first thought immediately following that first time: “My eyes have just lost their virginity.” I mourned this fact for a few weeks, horrified at what I had done, but soon enough I went back for more, and then more, and then more. Over the years pornography became my Romans 7 issue, something I didn’t want but couldn’t get free from. I could refrain from it, even abhorring it for 30 days out of a month, but it always seemed that on that 31st day (always hidden somewhere differently inside that month) I would be weak and would give in. It became, to borrow a phrase from a friend describing a similar struggle, “inevitable.” I eventually lost the ability to say “no” and could only say “not now.” From tenth grade until just recently, including during this whole healing process I’ve been through, I can’t recall a time where I went for longer than a month without seeking out pornography.
As painful as it is to confess and write that, I did it for three reasons, with the first being I felt God led me to share it here and the second being what I wrote about just above this, namely that I don’t want to lead anybody to believe with my writing that I’ve conquered every battle when I haven’t yet. What I’ve learned hasn’t won any battles for me; it’s just taught me how to win battles. And that leads me to the third reason for sharing this: Since almost a week into 2008, I’ve been free from pornography! Praise God! Two big reasons for this are the guys group I’ve been a part of this past year and the fact that I know I’ll find it impossible to step into some of the actions God has called me to this summer (and beyond) if this battle wasn’t won, so it had to be won. But it’s the final main reason that has got me the most excited about my future and convinced that my days of being in bondage to pornography are over (though there will probably always be a battle involved).
I now know how to win the battle for my mind, how to renew my mind, and the answer lies in the sanctification of my imagination.
“Is your imagination stayed on God or is it starved? The starvation of the imagination is one of the most fruitful sources of exhaustion and sapping in a worker’s life. If you have never used your imagination to put yourself before God, begin to do it now. It is no use waiting for God to come; you must put your imagination away from the face of idols and look unto Him and be saved. Imagination is the greatest gift God has given us and it ought to be devoted entirely to Him.” (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, Feb. 11th)
At the root of my journey into the wounded, frozen parts of my life I found two things needing to be dealt with: lies and pain. To get to the root of the lies, which were the real problem but felt normal, I usually had to go through the pain, which felt like the real problem but was actually a gift from God to warn me of the lies hidden underneath.
Now that we know how to handle pain, it’s time to address the real issue---the lie imbedded as the meaning of a memory or series of memories underlying everything else. Remember the question I left hanging earlier of the woman who subconsciously re-experiences her past rape every time she remembers it---can she find healing? I left it unanswered on purpose, waiting until now to answer it.
Yes! Absolutely she can find healing! As can the rapist, though his journey will be very different than hers will be. Neither of them can change what has happened, but they can both change the meaning of what has happened, the message assigned to that memory, thereby addressing the lie contained in that message. To do so, they will need to learn how to re-enter that memory with Christ and rework it. And to do that they will need to learn how to reclaim their imagination.
Discovering the power of imagination this past year, but especially these last few months while I’ve been writing this, has been incredibly eye-opening. When used rightly in God’s hands, as it was meant to be, I believe imagination is one of the most powerful tools on earth. It is also one of the most often ignored, especially as a person grows older. Because of this widespread failure all across the culture to properly harness or even notice this power, and among the church to devote it to God, most people reading this will be shocked that I place the imagination on such a high pedestal. So before I can even begin to explain how I’ve been learning to renew my imagination regarding the truth about pornography and why that’s been effective for me where everything else I’ve tried has failed, I need to share what I’ve discovered about the imagination in the first place.
Reclaiming the imagination
“I believe one of the most pervasive problems in contemporary Western Christianity is that we mistakenly assume that information automatically translates into transformation. We tend to have a naïve conviction that if only we read another book or get involved in another Bible study, our lives will be significantly changed.
As a matter of fact, this is not the case at all. Indeed, contemporary Western Christians are as a whole arguably the most informed generation of Christians in all of church history. Yet no one would be so foolish as to suggest that we are the most transformed. To the contrary, research suggests that the faith of American evangelicals generally has very little effect on our day-to-day lives…
So what is the problem? There are undoubtedly a number of factors in play. Yet, as odd as it may sound, I submit that one of the most fundamental problems is that many of us Western Christians have forgotten how to use our imagination in spiritual matters. For a variety of cultural reasons, we have come to equate the imagination with fantasy and make-believe. We have come to mistrust it, especially in spiritual matters. We have come to identify imagination as something that takes us away from truth rather than something that can be useful, and indeed necessary, to enable us to experience truth.” (Greg Boyd, Seeing Is Believing p.71-72)
I’ve heard countless times that I need to renew my mind, but I can’t remember a single time anybody ever told me I needed to reclaim my imagination. But I’ve since come to believe that it is impossible to renew the mind without reclaiming the imagination in some way, shape, or form.
I write “reclaim” the imagination rather than “renew” the imagination on purpose, though renewing it is every bit as necessary. But before you can find it possible to renew it you have to value it, and too many people only equate the imagination to the imaginary, thereby relegating it to the realm of wonderful but childish things, incapable of making any real, lasting difference in our lives as adults. While the imagination is that, it is also much, much more than that. So before you can begin to renew the imagination you have to first reclaim it. And as you do, who knows? In time you may find yourself agreeing more and more with Oswald Chambers’ quote earlier: “Imagination is the greatest gift God has given us and it ought to be devoted entirely to Him.” (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest Feb. 11th)
“For most of us, the word imagination is a vague one. For many Christians, raised on the King James Bible, the word may hold distinctly negative connotations, for it was used in that translation to denote a scheming or devising mind. This may be one of the factors behind the irrational fear of the imagination which we find in some Christian circles. The imaginative faculty, like any other human faculty, can be used for good or evil. To ignore or fear it is dangerous, and is a kind of evil, just as misusing it is evil.” (Leanne Payne, Healing Presence p.163-164)
“Because we live under the influence of Enlightenment rationalism, imagination is often equated with sheer fantasy. As opposed to the physical world, the imagination is often seen consisting of what is not real. If what is really real is the external, objective, physical world, then it is assumed that what is internal simply cannot be real in the same way. As Garrett Green notes, for modern people the imagination is often equated with ‘the imaginary.’ It is the stuff of which children’s stories and dreamy wishes are made---nothing more. If God ever did try to communicate to us with an inner voice, an inner image, an inner vision, or dream (I for one believe He is always trying to do just this!), our scientific worldview would incline us to immediately censor it from our consciousness or write it off as ‘just imagination.’
What compounds the problem further is the advent of secular psychology in the last century. Modern secular psychology attempts to understand the inner world of the human psyche the same way psychical sciences attempt to understand the external world---namely, through natural causes producing natural effects. The assumption behind modern science is that everything in the world is explainable in terms of other things in the world. The world is treated like a ‘closed system.’ Appealing to supernatural causes to explain anything is inadmissible to modern science. Secular psychology is simply that branch of science that applies this closed-system principle to the mind. Whatever happens in the mind is in principle explainable by natural causes and natural effects. No supernatural influences are allowed.
The implication of secular psychology, then, is that everything imaginative that takes place in the mind is the mind’s own doing. Your voice of conscience, your internal dialogue, your dreams, and what you see with your ‘mind’s eye’ are all the products of your own mind. While most of us don’t know the details of secular psychological theories, this basic assumption has come to permeate our culture and exercises a strong influence on us. The result of this cultural influence is that we are strongly conditioned to assume that nothing in the mind has divine significance.
It is, then, small wonder that the traditional practice of communing with God through imagination has waned in our age. In sharp contrast to Christians in the past, we are inclined to interpret dreams to be nothing more than the voice of our unconscious minds at night, visions as mere hallucinations, and imaginative dialogues in prayer as just psychological forms of self-manipulation. No matter how much we believe Jesus is with us, for example, many find the practice of envisioning Him standing before them to feel like make-believe. Yet if Jesus really is with us, isn’t a vivid image of Him being in your presence closer to truth than any image we might have of our environment that would exclude Him?
To the degree that the materialistic assumption about what is really real consciously or unconsciously makes inroads into our belief system, it will be difficult for us to sense, hear, and see the Lord the way Christians in the past did. Our imaginations will be discredited as the proper point of contact between us and God…
…Indeed, the secular view of the world and the human mind as a closed system, existing autonomous from God, is a fundamental aspect of the pattern of this world against which believers must continuously fight. To the extent that modern science influences us to see and experience ourselves and the world as though God were not an ever-present reality, it is very much part of the deception of the flesh that we must overcome if we are to be ‘transformed by the renewing of [our] minds’ (Rom. 12:2).
If we are to break this deception and open ourselves up to the Spirit’s dynamic work in our lives, we will need to intentionally and unequivocally embrace the Biblical and traditional Christian view that God can and does communicate to us ‘in [our] inner being’ (Eph. 3:16; cf. Rom. 7:22; 1 Peter 3:4). We will need to go directly against the current of our culture and begin to acknowledge the truth that our imaginations, when guided by the Holy Spirit and grounded in Scripture, can bring us into contact with a spiritual reality that is inaccessible to the physical senses. We will need to affirm that the imagination is good for more than just childhood fantasies.
The Bible, of course, does not deny that your dreams are your dreams and that your visions are your visions, but it rejects the purely secular conclusion that this means they cannot also be inspired by God. When we behold the Lord in the reflection of our mind, it is our mind that is doing the beholding---and yet Paul attributes the content of what is beheld to the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18). (The same principle is articulated in Paul’s teaching that ‘the spirits of prophets are subject to the control of prophets’ (1 Cor. 14:32 NIV). Paul tells the Corinthians how and when they should and should not exercise their supernatural gifts, though he clearly believes that the spiritual gifts come from the Lord. There is, clearly, a decisive element of human cooperation surrounding the supernatural influence of God in our lives.) What we in our age of intellectualized Christianity so desperately need to see and experience is that our imagination and God’s Spirit can work together into a concrete and dynamic relationship with the Lord. (Greg Boyd, Seeing Is Believing p. 128-131)
“It is sometimes assumed by modern readers that when believers in the Bible heard a message or saw a vision from the Lord, it was an objective experience---something people perceived with their physical ears. If anyone else had been present with these believers when they heard God speak or received their vision from the Lord, we sometimes assume they too would have heard what the recipient heard and seen what the recipient saw. Since few if any of us today hear God audibly or in any sense see God physically, we sometimes assume that the dynamic way in which God intersected with the lives of the believers in Scripture is no longer available to us today.
Now it is true, of course, that the Lord did sometimes interact with His people in a physically observable way. When Jacob wrestled with the Lord, for example, or when the Lord led the children of Israel in the wilderness, this was in all probability something anyone could have seen (Gen. 32:24-30; Exod. 13:21-22; 14:19). Yet it is crucial for us to understand that this was not the ordinary way God related to His people in Scripture.
For example, young Samuel heard the voice of the Lord, but Eli could not hear it (1 Sam. 3:2-10). When Daniel received his vision of a man by the Tigris River, he said that he ‘alone saw the vision; the people who were with me did not see the vision’ (Dan. 10:7). What is more, Daniel referred to the other visions he received as revelations that ‘passed through my mind,’ implying that they were subjective experiences (Dan. 7:1,15). He referred to the visions of Nebuchadnezzar in the same fashion (Dan. 2:28,30; 4:5).
In most instances, there is nothing to indicate that the hearing and seeing that characterized the faith of Biblical believers was of a physical sort. God’s ordinary mode of communication, both in biblical times and today, is to speak and appear to those who have the spiritual capacity to hear and see spiritual realities (cf. Ezek. 12:2; Matt. 11:15, 13:9-15; Acts 7:51). It is a spiritual hearing and seeing, and as such it is a private experience, given only to the one intended by God to receive it. In other words, it is an experience that took place in what today we would call the imagination…
…To many modern Western people, of course, saying the dreams or visions took place in the imagination sounds like I’m denying their authenticity. Therein lies the problem: we often identify the imagination with make-believe, but ancient people in general, and people in biblical times in particular, did not. Rather, they generally understood that the imagination was a means through which God could communicate with His people. God spoke to His people by inspiring ‘what passes through the mind.’ While they were asleep or while they were awake, God communicated to those who were receptive to the things He wished them to hear and see. He inspired their imaginations.” (Greg Boyd, Seeing Is Believing p.84-86)
If the imagination is only the faculty through which little kids invent and live in pretend worlds, then it is a wonderful---and often irrelevant---gift from God. But if the imagination is also the faculty through which all humans recreate and interpret all the information the five senses have and are collecting them of the real world around them, as well as a place where we can truly meet and interact with God, then it is a wonderful---and incredibly important---gift from God! And if the latter is the case, as I believe it to be, then it would be a drastic oversight (to say the least) to ignore it.
On what grounds do I make this odd claim that our loss of imagination lies at the basis of our spiritual problems?...We can begin our answer by examining how central our imagination is to all of our thought. We don’t think typically with abstract information; we think by imaginatively replicating reality in our minds. Imagination is simply the mind’s ability to evoke images of things that aren’t physically present.” (Greg Boyd, Seeing Is Believing p.72)
Since I’ve already gone into some depth on how the mind works earlier in this post you may want to go back and read that portion again right now, but just to refresh your mind, here’s what thought is: “We think by replicating sense experience on the inside. As authors Lakoff and Johnson put it, all thought is ‘embodied.’ Even our most abstract and general thoughts are metaphorically rooted in our concrete, physical experience. Whenever we think, we in some way replicate aspects of our bodily experience of the world. We think by turning our sense experience of the world inward.” (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping The Matrix)
Much of what I wrote earlier on the mind centered on the power of memories to shape our lives today, but to leave it at that would be to tell only half of the story. As the National Geographic article stated:
“The whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the massive glob of neurons that interpret it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what is about to happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Our brains are fundamentally prediction machines, and to work they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories.”
Our memories enable us to find order, to make sense of the present. Without them our world makes no sense. But our memories have power only inasmuch as they inspire our imaginations. The imagination is the realm in which we take the memory and apply it to the present or the future, whether consciously or subconsciously. It is where we make our predictions and envision different options of response. It is where we translate the memory’s meaning into the present circumstance.
“Finding out how a person got a neurochip installed is not as important as learning how the neurochip misre-presents reality in the present. The important question is not ‘why are you the way you are?’ but rather, ‘How do you do the way you are?’ Not only this, but answering the why question often takes a great deal of time, effort, and speculation, as well as money (if done in professional therapy). And even when you think you’ve found the right answer, this doesn’t help debug the neurochip. It just tells you who or what to blame for it being there! It gives you information but doesn’t itself transform you.
The question that empowers you to change is, ‘How do you do (in your mind) the way you are?’ It’s your organic computer, and you have the authority to program it.” (Greg Boyd & Al Larson, Escaping The Matrix p.101)
It’s not what has happened that affects how I live my life today; it’s what is happening in the mind in the present.
For example, most of my life I’ve been terrified of making even simple phone calls to non-friends. Usually the situation is that I need to call somebody to find out something, to ask a question of some sort, like if a store has something in stock. My first response is usually to beg and wheedle Mom to please, please make the call for me (she’s usually the one forcing me to make the call in the first place, but that’s a whole other story…). If that fails and I know I have to make the phone call, then I need to find out absolutely everything I should say beforehand, frustrating Mom to no end. During the call, if things don’t go exactly how I’ve prepared for them I get incredibly frustrated though I usually hold that in and sound calm until the call is over. After it’s over, if it went well, Mom will often comment on how simple it was, and if it didn’t go so well I will often lash out in anger and frustration, usually at her for making me go through the whole ordeal. Either way, non-personal phone calls have been very unpleasant experiences for me for most of my life.
Why is that? While I don’t know what memory or memories trigger my imagination by that situation, I do now know what gets triggered that causes such a ridiculous response to a simple phone call: a picture in my mind of me, stranded on the phone, stammering about trying to figure out what I need to say, wasting everybody’s time and eventually hanging up without finding out what I needed to know, feeling like a complete failure. Like I said, why that gets triggered I don’t know, but I don’t really need to know that to begin to deal with what gets triggered, my image of myself frozen up on the phone.
So what has happened here? A memory, in this case one I am still not aware of consciously, has been triggered as relevant to my current situation by some part of my mind. Once triggered, it reminds me of something that has happened and delivers the message I have assigned to it. That is the extent of the memory’s job and power. It has fulfilled its duty. From there my imagination takes over. It takes all the memories dredged up (for there is rarely, if ever, just one) along with their messages and assembles them into a coherent image, video, sound, etc. of what it believes will happen (freezing up on the phone). Based on what it concludes, it attaches a message of its own to the conclusion(s) it came to, and as with the message attached to the memories, the message of the imagination is emotionally laden. How powerful the emotions are depends on how important it judges the situation to be. If what it predicts to happen is something negative, it will try to protect me from this being fulfilled however it can (I was terrified and often angry at Mom; both were intended to keep me from making the phone call). Since most of the time all of this happened subconsciously and seemingly instantaneously, all I was aware of at the time (until I intentionally set out to understand what was going on underneath) was the emotional response rising within me.
Now here’s the fascinating part: If you were following along closely you’ll realize that the situation I was responding to wasn’t actually real. It was a prediction based on the best information my mind had access to. I wasn’t responding to what had happened in the past; I was responding to I thought might happen based on what had happened in the past. Therefore, the emotions I was feeling and responding to were also based on a situation that wasn’t real. They weren’t emanating from what had happened; they were coming from what might happen. And as such they were a horribly inaccurate and deceptive base to make a decision from. The same is true of all emotions.
“External events provide the occasion for our emotions, but our emotions are grounded in what we do in our brains in response to external events. More specifically, depression (or any other emotion) is grounded in the mental re-presentations we produce that provide the interpretation of external events….We can’t directly alter emotions with our willpower. But we can indirectly affect them by altering the internal re-presentations with which they are associated. Knowing what is true from God’s perspective, knowing the authority we have over our brains, and knowing something about how our brains install and modify re-presentations, we can escape emotional bondage within the Matrix.” (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping The Matrix p.188)
Knowing the emotions I’m dealing with aren’t based in truth enables me to place them to the side for a moment and become, as Greg Boyd calls it, a detective of my mind. Free from the tyranny of emotions for the time being, I can now stop and ask my soul (from my centered place in Christ) what it is doing and from there begin to change it.
I can now begin to renew my imagination by introducing Christ into it.
Renewing the imagination
“Satan’s web of deception infects our imagination, which is why it has such power to move us to perform and hide in our attempts to obtain life, with the end result being destruction. His deception is anchored in powerful, imaginative misrepresentations of reality, and until these lies are confronted with the truth in ways that are at least as vivid and powerful as the misrepresentations, the lies will continue to dominate our lives. Until this happens, our experienced self-identity, our old self, will continue to exercise a strong influence in our lives, suppressing the truth about who we are in Christ. We are new creations in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17), but if this truth is believed in the form of mere information while the old self is continually experienced in vivid, imaginative re-presentations, we will find it nearly impossible to display our new nature consistently.” (Greg Boyd, Seeing Is Believing p.79)
“It’s vitally important to understand that the patterned electrical-chemical reactions in our brains that keep us from experiencing our true identity were installed by events we experienced. The brain records events and reactivates them whenever it thinks they are significant for our interaction with our environment (that is, whenever triggered). It is our brains’ built-in way of telling us to move toward something, to move away from something, to maintain something, or to stop something.
This works as God intended when these reactivations produce positive feelings about things that are truly positive and negative feelings about things that are truly negative. But it works against us when the brain’s programming is according to the pattern of this world. For now the brain produces positive feelings about things that are in truth negative and negative feelings about things that are in truth positive.
What is true of the brains’ programming is also true of the brains’ re-programming: it requires an event. Conceptual information alone does not suffice. To get free from the Matrix, we have to fight according to the rules of the Matrix. But note, the events we are talking about are not necessarily events outside ourselves, experienced through our five physical senses. They can be events that are experienced within our brains.
What matters to the neurons in our brains is not whether an event is external or internal but only whether or not the event is experienced as real, concrete, and vivid. To debug renegade neurochips from our brains, therefore, we need to work with God to create events in our minds that communicate truth as vividly as our renegade neurochips communicate lies---as vivid as our memories and as graphic as the beer commercials we watch.
So how do we create truth-communicating events in our minds? The same way we created deception-creating events in our minds. We create events in our minds by experiencing something in our minds as though it were real. To create a truth-communicating event, therefore, we simply take a truth and embody it in our mental world with all five senses. We take a truth and mentally experience it as real…
…Don’t just recite information about how you think you’d be different. Get a picture of yourself and see how you’re different. Listen to how this God-glorifying you thinks and speaks differently from the way you presently tend to think and speak. Observe how you feel about things when you manifest the truth of who you are in Christ, and note how it’s different from the way you presently tend to feel about these things. Don’t just know about the true you; experience the true you.” (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping The Matrix p.125-126)
“Many Christians have learned that they need to ‘be transformed by the renewing of [their] minds’ (Romans 12:2) and have been taught that this involves telling themselves the truth about who they are in Christ over and over again. This is certainly a helpful and even necessary practice. But its power will be greatly enhanced if you not only give yourself true information but also routinely practice imaginatively experiencing yourself living the truth.
To illustrate, instead of merely telling yourself that you are the temple of God because His Spirit lives in you (1 Cor. 6:19), it will be helpful to imagine in vivid detail what you look, sound, and feel like when you perfectly manifest this truth. Run it through your mind like a virtual-reality movie in which you are the main actor. Experience yourself incarnating this truth ‘with all five senses .’ Ask the Holy Spirit to help you accurately and vividly play out scenarios in your mind that reflect real-life situations in which you typically feel the most empty or powerless. Only now see yourself in those situations perfectly manifesting God’s truth that you are a walking, talking version of Solomon’s temple, filled with all of God’s glory! How do you respond to difficult situations differently when you manifest the truth rather than the lies you’ve internalized from the world?
Moreover, spend time imagining, in as concrete and vivid a way as possible, using ‘all five senses,’ what you look, sound, and feel like perfectly manifesting the truth that you are filled with God’s love, peace, and joy. Imagine this in various situations in your life, especially those in which you tend to experience yourself lacking love, peace, or joy.
What do you look, sound, and feel like when you are convinced in the core of your being that you are loved with an everlasting love, like the Bible says you are? What do you look, sound, and feel like when you perfectly manifest the truth that you are God’s beloved child, seated with Christ in heavenly places, blessed with every spiritual blessing, destined to sit with him on the throne throughout eternity? How do you react to circumstances in your life differently when you think and live this way?
This is who you truly are! In running imaginative movies about yourself in this fashion, you’re simply bringing your mind into greater conformity with the true you. You’re taking every thought captive to Christ. You’ve got to be able to experience the truth of who you are vividly in your mind before you can ever hope to manifest it consistently in your actual life.
As you imaginatively rehearse truths like this over and over again, you’ll confront and overcome deceptive re-presentations you’ve inherited from the pattern of the world that keep you living beneath your calling and true nature in Christ Jesus. Consequently, as you set your mind on things above in this fashion (Col. 3:2), you’ll be in the process of transforming your experienced self-identity in the direction of the true identity you have in Christ.
Don’t worry if at first it feels like you’re pretending. This is not an uncommon initial response. It is simply the result of your cultural conditioning that imagination is merely make-believe, combined with the fact that you probably haven’t imagined yourself living like this before. It doesn’t feel real because the movies you’ve been running in your head up to this point have tabbed ‘the real you’ as the you that was defined by the pattern of this world. If we hope to be transformed, we have to allow God’s Word to have more credibility than our present feelings.
Take it on faith that the you who responds to situations in ways that manifest the truth that you are a temple of God, filled with God’s love, joy, and peace, is the real you. Commit to seeing yourself as God sees you, regardless of how it feels. In time you will likely find that this new vision of yourself ceases to feel like pretense and begins to feel natural. It is the real you. God says so!” (Greg Boyd, Seeing Is Believing p. 98-99)
It feels utterly ridiculous at times to believe that who God says I am is who I truly am. But “What a man is in the eyes of God, so much he is, and no more” (St. Francis of Assisi). It is here that we find the difference between a healthy mind and an unhealthy one, a renewed mind from an unrenewed one. The same decision that divides a wounded heart from a broken heart is what distinguishes a healthy mind from an unhealthy one---who it trusts in.
“To escape the Matrix, you must resolve to believe that what God says about you is true however much your past or present experience tells you otherwise. However real the old you seems, you must accept that it is not true. In other words, to transform our minds we must commit to ascribing more credibility to God than to our own brains. Our Matrix-conditioned brains are the problem; they therefore cannot be the foundation of the solution. We have to grasp hold of something that has more credibility than our own brains. We need to have a source of truth that doesn’t depend on our own misprogrammed, organic computer. And this source can only be God’s Word, centered upon the person of Jesus Christ.
If you are to experience freedom, therefore, God’s Word about your true identity in Christ must have more credibility to you than the word of parents, friends, other authorities in your life, and your own past and present experiences. But it’s up to you. You are free to believe it or not.” (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping The Matrix p.122-123)
When I have been trusting someone or something other than God in my mind, I am sinning and I need to repent. The word commonly used for repent in Hebrew is metanoia, and it literally means “to change one’s mind” (noia = mind, and meta when used as a composite means to change). So when God calls us to repent, He is literally calling us to turn our minds around completely, to “not conform any longer to the pattern of this world” (Rom. 12:2) but to instead “set your mind on things above” (Col. 3:2). To accomplish this repentance, Christ has given us many weapons (the sanctified imagination being one of them) with which we are to “take captive every thought” (both conscious and subconscious) and bring them to repentance. “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5).
Al Larson, the co-author of Escaping the Matrix, in a conference last year at my church said something I found fascinating about this verse. He said that we commonly think of and picture “taking captive” as a putting in prison of sorts. We attempt to isolate the bad thought and then banish it, or at least keep it contained and imprisoned where it can’t “infect” the rest of our mind. We quarantine it and leave it at that, until the next time it gets triggered and we have to fight it again. Larson, however, pointed out that the word for captive used there (aichmalotizo) denotes making someone or something a prisoner of war. The root words are aichme (a spear) and halonai (to be captured), so at its root imagery the picture is of one being led to a foreign land at the end of a spear, and that was an image that the Jewish people were quite familiar with. When used in the context of our thoughts, “taking captive every thought” is much more akin to capturing renegade thoughts and leading them on a journey to the Kingdom of God than it is to imprisoning them. Or, as Larson puts it, we are to “lead them to truth.”
Leading a thought to truth is simply creating a truth-communicating event about that thought, searching for and finding Christ’s perspective on that thought and then choosing to trust His perspective. When I trust in God over myself or anybody else, I am in essence having faith in Him. I don’t mean the religious “I believe this and this and this” kind of faith, but faith where it really matters, in the often subconscious predictions the mind makes on a second by second basis. You see, as Greg Boyd explains, faith isn’t just a religious thing, it’s a life thing.
“The Bible defines faith as ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’ (Heb. 11:1 NASB). We ‘do faith’ by running previews in our minds of what we expect and by experiencing the conviction that this is what will come to pass. (Remember, all emotions, including feeling confident something will come to pass, are associated to mental re-presentations.) In fact, the word for assurance in this passage (hypostasis) literally means ‘substance’ (and is translated as such in the KJV). We could apply this to mean that faith is the substantial reality---the concrete re-presentations---we hold in our minds that brings about the confident expectation that something will come to pass.
People often think that faith is only a religious thing. On the contrary, faith is a life thing. Faith is involved in everything we experience and everything we do…
…We see that when Jesus told the blind men, ‘According to your faith will it be done to you’ (Mat. 9:29), He wasn’t giving a religious formula; He was giving a universal life principle. All other things being equal, we tend to experience what we expect to experience. What we experience as real in our minds largely determines what we experience in our lives. Hence Scripture teaches that ‘as [a person] thinks within himself, so he is’ (Proverbs 23:7 NASB)” (Greg Boyd & Al Larson, Escaping The Matrix, p. 127-9)
Remember the predictions our mind makes constantly in the imagination? Those predictions are our faith. Choosing to have faith in Christ in my current situation means aligning those predictions with the mind of Christ, something that Paul says we are already in possession of (1 Cor. 2:16). Choosing to have faith in Christ always involves repenting (changing my mind) and taking my thoughts captive (leading them to truth); both can be done only in the presence and with the assistance of the Holy Spirit. Without Him the mind may be changed, but it cannot be led to truth. Working in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, then, we are able to create a truth-communicating event in our minds and change our faith!
What does this process look like? Going back to the area of my biggest struggles on this, pornography, I want to share a passage from Escaping the Matrix in which Al Larson is in a counseling session with another man (Mark) who struggles with pornography. They are working together to help Mark find the mind of Christ concerning pornography. As a warning, however, this is a bit graphic, so feel free to skip it if you like. I include it because I’ve found it and the process it portrays of leading a thought (in this case, “pornography is what men want”) to truth very helpful.
“AL: Now I’m going to pray, and as I do I want you to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to you the truth about pornography. (Almost immediately Mark becomes visibly distressed and began to cry) What are you experiencing, Mark?
Mark: I see gremlinlike demons all around the entrance of the sex store where I buy porn tapes. They’re drooling and laughing at the men they’re trapping. One has a ring in a man’s nose and is pulling him into the store, but I can tell that the guy doesn’t know it. Another man is gazing ahead mindlessly and walking like a robot.
Al: That’s interesting, isn’t it, Mark? This doesn’t seem to be what men really want, does it? It’s what Satan and his demons want.
Mark: The men are slaves.
Al: This may be difficult, but I believe there’s more. I want you to take whatever time it takes for God to reveal His mind about “what men want” to you. I want you to experience the truth about pornography with the mind of Christ. Let’s ask God to show you more. When we are finished, the meaning of pornography and the faith you have about pornography will be totally changed. You’ll see it for what it really is. I’ll pray. You just open your heart up to truth.
At this point Mark closed his eyes for about a minute. With each passing second he seemed to become more distressed and to sob harder and harder. Then he opened his bloodshot eyes.
Mark: It’s terrible.
Al: Tell me exactly what you saw, heard, and felt.
Mark: First I was in the store. It was dim and smelly. I saw feces, blood, and vomit dripping from the videos and other sex merchandise. The demons were lapping it up and laughing. The men were blinded to it. Then I saw a montage of scenes!
Al: I want to hear about it.
Mark: Families were being torn apart. I heard a director say, ‘Cut,’ and I saw women who had been in a porn movie crying. Others looked numb, even dead. Some were raging about their miserable lives, saying they were all alone, sad, and used. Then…then I heard a little girl’s voice crying in the background, and I knew that the same kingdom that masterminds the adult porn industry masterminds child porn. And I realized…I’ve been contributing to that!
Al: This is how God sees it, because this is how it really is to Him.
Mark: No wonder it breaks His heart. At the end I saw this really odd scene. Jesus seemed like He was in a huddle with some men, like a football team. He asked the men to do a job with Him by taking a stand and fighting with Him against this evil---by fighting for the crying child. But when the men came out of the huddle they all walked over to the side of the demons, like they were friends, and joined their team! Their mascot was a terrified little girl in chains, dressed up like a prostitute. And I saw that I was one of those men!
I prayed again with Mark, thanking the Holy Spirit for revealing His thoughts to Mark. Then we continued…
…Al: This is the faith about pornography God wants you to embrace, Mark. Whenever you find yourself tempted to engage in porn, you have a very important choice to make. You can either let yourself be led by the nose by a demon and buy the illusion that ‘this is what men want,’ or you can see it as God sees it and have faith that what God says about pornography is true.
Mark: I see that.
Al: Whenever temptation arises---and it will, Mark---immediately run to the scene God just showed you. Immediately! The real choice is not to resist something you crave. The most fundamental choice is about what kind of faith you’re going to have, for this determines what you crave. You will crave pornography or be revolted by it depending on how you re-present it in your mind---depending on what faith you hold about it.” (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping the Matrix p.134-6)
As long as Mark views pornography with the mind of Christ, how much of a struggle do you think it will be for him to refrain from it? Just how enticing do you think something dripping with feces, blood, and vomit can be? Obviously it’s not enticing---it’s revolting, and if Mark trains his mind to run to that scene and those scenes automatically whenever he’s tempted to lust, I think he’s more likely to throw up than to want to keep viewing. Mark is now on his way to living in the freedom available to him in Christ.
“Freedom is not about mustering up the willpower to abstain from doing something you want to do. Rather, freedom is not wanting to do it anymore, and this is all about the faith we hold. One cannot have faith that pornography or anything else is positive and not desire it. To change one’s desire, one has to change one’s faith.” (Greg Boyd and Al Larson, Escaping the Matrix p.130)
I think that’s the whole key to freedom right there: gaining the mind of Christ on sin of any sort and running to that mind whenever temptation arises. Eventually your mind will do this enough that it begins to do it automatically and what was once a huge struggle becomes a victory and testimony of God’s grace and redeeming power in your life. Praise God!
However, I’ve found it’s important to remember that seeing sin for what it truly is is only the first step of the process of finding the mind of Christ and of renewing my mind. I now have to find the mind of Christ on holiness and desire that, for as St. Gregory the Great wrote, “If you do not delight in higher things, you most certainly will delight in lower things.” If I forget this step it is inevitable that I will either hate the sin I used to do only to inadvertently fall into another one, or I will hate the sin but fall back into it anyway. To use my Pastor’s analogy, until I quench my thirst from the well that has living water, (John 4:13-14) even if I switch from one man-made well to another, my thirst will never be quenched. I may be able to refrain from one sin, but until I fill the vacuum left behind with Christ it can’t help but be filled with something else, something I will also need deliverance from when I discover that it cannot fill me either. Only Christ can satisfy.
I have long struggled to find the right words for the imagery I have around this concept. Most of it I’ve derived from C.S. Lewis’s book The Great Divorce, which is by far my favorite book of his. The book is quite hard to describe if you’ve never read it before, but in it Lewis gives those in hell a chance to visit heaven and stay there if they wish, but most upon visiting it choose hell instead, as they have all along throughout their life. If you can remember that far back by now, (I’ve just about forgotten myself…) I also wrote some of The Great Divorce back in the section on the first wound, and the passage I typed up near the end of 2006 (that you really should read sometime) can be found here: http://www.xanga.com/cookie_monster44/547273705/the-great-divorce.html
At the end of that post I wrote what to this date has been my most successful attempt to put in words the imagery I have around this concept. Here’s what I wrote then:
“I've had a lot of fun with the ideas in this passage this past month, especially the discussion on the lens of time, but the reason I took the time to share this all with you is the mental picture I've gotten over the size of a soul that clings to Hell in the midst of Heaven. C.S. Lewis paints a wonderful picture of the comparative size and volume of Heaven vs. Hell, and the souls contained therein. Hell, which in the beginning of the book appears infinite to its inhabitants, is actually too small and ghostly to even be measurable in Heaven. The souls it contains have all shrunken around whatever they have chosen instead of Christ and his abundant life. During their lifetime, they consistently chose death in some form or another (all sin is death) rather than the life God offers them, remaining in shadows as ghostly figures they were familiar with rather than stepping into the world they were designed for, a world too full of light for shadows and too real for ghosts. . They clung to death, like the Dwarf to his chain, refusing to let go and come alive, though the choice was his.
Taking the same imagery and placing it within the bounds of time, the "picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise," I got an image of my soul shrinking slightly around something every time I chose that something to whatever I knew God had chosen for me. Every time I cling to sin in the presence of grace my soul wraps its folds closer around that sin, leaving less room for God. But every time I face that choice and choose to let go rather than cling, and instead embrace what God has for me, my soul grows stronger, solider, and larger as it expands to make room for the piece of Heaven it has chosen. And as I do so, the sin I let go of seems smaller than it did before, especially when I let go of it consistently and choose Christ instead. For a tangible example, let's use anger. I struggled with anger very much when I was younger, especially during late middle school and early junior high, much of it learned from, stemming from, and directed toward (although anger can never truly be directed solely somewhere--as it lies undealt with under the surface it erupts often when you least want it to) my dad's struggles with alcoholism. At that time in my life, anger seemed like a really big part of me. I lived in the midst of it, and it seemed really big and unconquerable. But now that I've been learning to forgive my dad and see him as he really is in Christ, the love of Christ has been entering my soul and enlarging it, crowding out the anger in there for lack of room.
You see, another thing I've learned is that you can't pull something out of your soul. I can't pull anger, bitterness, pain, self-righteousness, lust, selfishness, fear, cruelty, or anything else that has taken root in my soul, out. I may be able to, by focusing my efforts on it, shrink my anger down by keeping a close watch on it, but I can never completely control it, and the process of trying to control and remove it will leave a vacuum that something else will undoubtedly fill. So trying to pull something out never works, but it can be pushed out. The more I fill my life with Christ the less space there is for anything not of Him, and He came to give me overflowing life, so as I keep filling my soul with Him the rest of the junk in me will eventually be kicked out for lack of room as my life begins to overflow with Christ.
Do you see the difference between pushing and pulling? It's all in the focus. If I am focused on the thing itself, setting rules for myself about my conduct concerning it, the very act of focusing on it makes it impossible to remove, but if I am focused on Christ, the thing will fade away as it cannot compete with the reality of His abundant life. Elisabeth Elliot wrote with a similar thought process a quote from her book Passion and Purity that has stuck with me more than anything else she has written. About her desires for marriage to Jim and the seemingly endless waiting stage they were in, she wrote, "My heart was saying, 'Lord, take away this longing, or give me that which I long for.' The Lord was answering, 'I must teach you to long for something better'" The solution isn't in more and better rules to guard and guide my conduct, but in longing for, searching after, and clinging to Christ Himself.
Yesterday and today I have been letting go of some things I've been clinging to for too long, though, truthfully, my grip has been loosening for some time, and these past two days were just the completion in the physical realm of what had already been happening inside. It's been really good and I know I'm where I need to be right now, but I also am aware that if I leave any open space in my soul, they can quite easily enter right back in. Just like the man Jesus described in Matthew 12: 43-45, if the space isn't occupied by Christ, something else will surely occupy it.”
For my own part, in learning how to train my mind to find the mind of Christ concerning pornography, the two images I’ve run to most often are the image of the football huddle Mark mentioned at the end there and one I’ve gathered from a short passage in The Great Divorce. In this passage, Lewis is finally getting some answers to the questions he has about what he’s been seeing in heaven and the conversations he’s witnessed thus far. The visitors are all ghosts and are encountering a world more solid than anything they’d ever imagined before, so solid it hurts them terribly to even walk on the grass on account of how sharp it is to them. One ghost in particular stands out to him on account of how oblivious she is to her physical (or lack thereof) condition.
“I think the most pitiable was a female ghost. Her trouble was exactly the opposite of that which afflicted the other, the lady frightened by the Unicorns. This one seemed quite unaware of her phantasmal appearance. More than one of the Solid People tried to talk to her, and at first I was quite at a loss to understand her behaviour to them. She appeared to be contorting her all but invisible face and writhing her smokelike body in a quite meaningless fashion. At last I came to the conclusion---as incredible as it seemed---that she supposed herself still capable of attracting them and was trying to do so. She was a thing that had become incapable of conceiving conversation save as a means to that end. If a corpse already liquid with decay had arisen from the coffin, smeared its gums with lipstick, and attempted a flirtation, the result could not have been more appalling. In the end she muttered ‘Stupid creatures,’ and turned back to the bus.” (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce p.76)
Many times when I find myself struggling I have run to this picture and clung to it while I waited in Christ’s presence for the temptation to pass. I have and will literally invite Christ in to that tempted place in my heart and trust that He knows what to do in there. Then I exercise my imagination in a holy way, turning all the thoughts and images I’m struggling with into smoke and placing my heart in heaven, a place where it is secure and can find something better to delight in. Surrounded by heaven, it is no longer interested in the smoke of this earth, and the more vividly I imagine all this the less pull I find the things of earth have on me. Sometimes I will stand with Christ and together watch the things of this world turn into shadows. Or we may do something else entirely. What imagery is used doesn’t really matter; this is just what I’ve found that has been effective for me. What really matters is that I do it with Christ and we do it together.
This is why I have found the imagination to be such a powerful tool. Christ has been introduced to it and is active and present in it, sanctifying it from the inside out. Together we are discovering the lies I have long believed and been enslaved in and we are working together to lead them to truth, and all this taking place at the root level where faith springs from, my imagination.
Healing of Memories
As I wrote earlier, our memories have power only inasmuch as they inspire our imaginations, and it’s not what has happened in the past but what is currently happening in my mind that affects how I live my life today. Control over my life in the present is found in how I control my mind in the present, and the same is true for my future. But that doesn’t mean that the memories are unimportant or can safely be ignored or left buried. Indeed, even though control is found in the present and I can change my direction in life at any time in the present without regards to my past, I firmly believe that real healing, long-term, lifelong healing, is found in dealing with the past. Why? Because the imagination draws its predictions about the present and future from conclusions it has drawn from experiences in the past, and if those conclusions were poisonous lies then they will consistently be presented to your imagination in the present to be dealt with. And even if you somehow learn to control them in the present, maybe even on a consistent basis, the very act of constantly fighting them will wear you out.
Think, if you will, of memories as a water well the imagination draws from. A memory stored with a lie encoded in it will quite naturally poison the well. It may be entirely possible to purify the water at the top of the well, in the imagination, and sometimes I think there are times in our life where that’s all we can do, all we have the energy for. But in the long run, if there are impurities poisoning the water at the bottom of the well then it is highly impractical to ignore them and just hope they’ll go away. At some point you have to dive the well and eradicate the poisons at the root of the well, to re-enter the memory or memories where the wound came from that is currently a toxic to your soul. You have to find healing for your memories.
I have some good news for you all: Through Jesus, such healing is possible! Hallelujah! Amen!
“Healing of memories means forgiveness of sin. It is the heart’s experience of forgiveness of sin at the precise sore spot where it is needed, one that impacts the soul in its totality---in its emotional, feeling, intuitive, imaginative capacities as well as in its more conscious, willing, thinking capacities. This place may be at any level of consciousness or unconsciousness. Nothing illustrates God’s Healing Presence more wonderfully than His way of healing man’s deepest hurts and memories.” (Leanne Payne, Restoring The Christian Soul p.68)
We serve a wonderful God, one who knows us intimately and passionately in spite of our deepest flaws and fears and the countless times we’ve turned our back on Him. Instead of despising us for our sin, as we so often feel like we deserve, He refuses to turn His back or give up on us and instead offers hope and healing for us in those very same places we feel most ashamed of. He loves us so much that He desires to see us whole again, as we were created to be, and therefore refuses to let us wallow in our sin undisturbed. He would rather the ugliness inside of us get exposed so it can be dealt with than remain hidden where it can be ignored, and because of this He will often intentionally place us in situations where what’s truly inside of us gets revealed. As I quoted from John and Stasi Eldredge earlier:
“Jesus has to thwart us too---thwart our self-redemptive plans, our controlling and our hiding, thwart the ways we are seeking to fill the ache within us. Otherwise, we would never fully turn to Him for our rescue. Oh, we might turn to Him for our ‘salvation,’ for a ticket to heaven when we die. We might turn to Him even in the form of Christian service, regular church attendance, a moral life. But inside, our hearts remain broken and captive and far from the One who can help us…
…Wherever it is we have sought life apart from Him, He disrupts our plans, our ‘way of life’ which is not life at all.” (John and Stasi Eldredge, Captivating p.96)
As the author of Hebrews quotes from Proverbs, “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when He rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes everyone He accepts as a son.” He then goes on to write “Endure hardship as a discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in His holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” (Hebrews 12: 5-11)
Sin loves darkness, and as long as it remains safely tucked away in the hidden corners of my soul it will be impossible to remove. It is only when I do the difficult, often dirty work (because there are some difficult, dirty, ugly things hidden away inside me) of letting Christ have access to those hidden corners, of bringing His light into the midst of them and exposing them that I can even begin to deal with them. This is why Jesus said at the very beginning of His ministry, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Mat. 5:4). We’ve done a lot of teaching about this at my church, and my Pastor paraphrases this verse like this: “Blessed are those who get outside what’s really going on inside, for they are the only ones who will really receive the comfort God offers them.” That comfort is a sign of the healing taking place inside as the true mourning takes place.
All that to say this: At some point in your life you’re going to have to deal, one way or another, with the wounds you’ve been dealt in this world. I knew that at the beginning of this whole journey I’ve been on. That’s why I decided to be proactive about it, rather than letting them fester to the point where I had no choice but to deal with them because my life was in shambles. You may recall that I wrote this earlier, at the conclusion of my section on wounds (a section which it might be helpful for you to go back a re-read right now):
“An event happens, maybe minor or maybe major, and you assign a meaning to it in your soul. The event hurts, and you wonder what to do with the pain. At that moment, just as you decide what meaning an event has, you can choose to accept the lie a fallen world and Satan would have you believe about that event (and he has many for you to choose from), or you can choose to find God’s perspective on that event and believe that, thereby assigning that as the meaning of the event. It is your choice. And you do have a choice! It is to that moment of the wounds you have received that you must return and change the decision you made then about what the wound meant if you wish to be free from the power of that wound and that memory.”
Remember that the part of you that is wounded has been basically frozen in time. The lie you swallowed has kept you from maturing and becoming more and more who you are in Christ. But now it’s time to be free of the wound, to speak truth over the lie, and to do so you have to go back in time and invite truth in at the moment the lie first took root. Going back in time sounds impossible, but remember you are not going back to change what has happened (which is impossible), but the meaning of what has happened. This is indeed possible, but only because of two key components, the first being the nature of memory. As I wrote about earlier, when we remember something we don’t just remember that it happened, rather we re-experience it. As I quoted from Boyd’s explanation of this earlier:
“The same network of neurons that recorded the event are reactivated in the memory of the event. From a neurological perspective it is as though the event were happening all over again. This is essentially how all memories operate, though the network of neurons that contains the memory can in time be associated with other networks of neurons and thus morphed in the process.” (Greg Boyd, Seeing Is Believing p. 73)
Through memory our past touches the present and guides our future. And since we are constantly remembering in a sense we are also constantly going back in time. Because everybody does this, it is possible for everyone to go back and change the meaning of their memories. People do it all the time, for good or for bad, and it is a capability that people like psychologists and counselors take advantage of all the time in their professions. But there is another component that separates what we as followers of Christ can do to find healing with what the world can only attempt to do. Living inside of us is the healing Presence, Christ in us, the hope of glory. He is the Creator of time and master of it, and is therefore present to all of it right now.
“Time too is a creature. It is created. That is a mind-blowing concept, but it is true. Jesus, the infinite One, is outside of time, and all times are present to Him.
‘To be God is to enjoy an infinite present where nothing has passed away and nothing is still to come.’ (C.S. Lewis)
This means that all our times, together with all that we are, are eternally present to God.” (Leanne Payne, Restoring The Christian Soul p.76)
“God is outside of time; all times are one with the Creator of time. This is a vital part of the Judeo-Christian truth system….It is a wonderful thing to know that God is, even now at this very moment, present to any and all trauma we have suffered. As we learn to invite Him into these places, face the darkness, loneliness, and hurt with Him, and then set our hearts to receive forgiveness, He heals and sets us free. It is a profound ministry, vitally connected to the Christian confessional, whether formal or informal.” (Leanne Payne, Restoring The Christian Soul p.94-95)
“In prayer for the healing of memories, the power of the memory to make the past present to us in a very real way is extraordinary. The reason for this, of course, is that Jesus, the Infinite One who is outside of time and to whom all times are present, enters into what for us is a past occurrence, one known only in retrospect, though we experience its consequences in the present. Here the past-present-future time sequence in which we experience existence comes together in a particularly meaningful way with the Eternal. And that which is eternal within us [our Spirit, united with Christ] and therefore not bound by time is sparked. In this way we experience past and present as one---a foretaste perhaps of a way of knowing earth-time we shall one day experience when we are no longer bound by space, mass, and time.” (Leanne Payne, The Broken Image p.23-24)
With the root memory now being re-lived in your soul, you now can invite truth in to eradicate the lie. Since Jesus is the truth (John 14:6), to uproot the lie you have to invite Him in. In my own search for healing, it was to those decisive moments that I returned, but not alone. Just like I had learned to do with my imagination, I re-entered those memories accompanied by Christ and He helped me begin to learn how to forgive and receive forgiveness.
“The essential action, that which differentiates healing of memories from psychological methodologies, is the action of the Holy Spirit pointing to the Presence of our Lord who is there. He has, as it were, walked into that darkest hell of our existence; and even in the midst of the unfolding memory drama, we look with the eyes of our heart and (as so often happens) are enabled to see Him. We receive from Him that healing word, glance, or embrace we’ve so long needed. We forgive others their darkest sins against us, and He forgives our sins, and we receive from Him who manifest the very love of God the Father the healing grace we’ve been unable to receive before. We find out that He was there all along with that action, had we only been able to look up and receive it.” (Leanne Payne, The Broken Image p.24)
I don’t know how to emphasize that last sentence strongly enough. I really don’t. But it’s one of the sentences that I have written all of this just to be able to share. Knowing that God hasn’t abandoned you, and indeed truly was present at the time you thought He was most distant is what often enables forgiveness to finally flow, both in giving and in receiving, and the forgiveness is the key to healing the wound. I wish I could go into more depth on forgiveness in this post, but I’ve sensed from the beginning that this isn’t the right time to do so, so that will have to wait until some future post. However, I will say at least this about forgiveness here: it is made possible only through Christ. Indeed, as F.B. Meyer notes, prior to Christ, the world could not even conceive of forgiveness.
“Forgiveness is the exclusive prerogative of Christianity. The schools of ancient morality had four cardinal virtues---justice in human relations, prudence in the direction of affairs, fortitude in bearing trouble or sorrow, temperance or self-restraint. But they knew nothing of mercy or forgiveness, which is not natural to the human heart. Forgiveness is an exotic, which Christ brought with Him from heaven.” (F.B. Meyer, Our Daily Walk p.142)
I think the best way to finish off this section is with a story. In my first encounter with all of this material, back when I went to Leanne Payne’s conference as a high school graduation gift from my parents in 2004, most of what was said went over my head. There were, however, a few things I caught that made the whole trip worthwhile, especially this one. It was the last day of the conference and all the attendees were preparing for our last session, the prayer for healing of memories session. I still didn’t have a solid grasp on what was going to happen and was nervous, though I knew from what I had seen all week long at the conference that God was present and active and doing wonderful things at this conference. What made me most nervous was the unpredictability of what was about to happen.
Leanne Payne would be on stage praying for all of us in her unique way; we were all to stay in our seats so as not to disturb others as God was working in them. There was nothing to do but sit there and wait on God and pray. A few days earlier at the conference I had learned (essentially for the first time in my life) how to practice the presence of God, so as I sat there I did so. As I did I received a picture blessed me and comforted me more deeply than I’ve ever been able to express with words, and it’s a picture that I’ve shared with countless people since and seen it bless them as well. God did bring a memory up that I had completely forgotten about or repressed, and with it came understanding on a lot of troubles I had been having. On the way home from the conference I attempted to put into words what had happened. Like I said I’ve shared the first part of it many, many times, but I’ve never shared the second part before, not even with my dad (when he reads this it will be his first time seeing or hearing it). I do so now because I think it’s time. Here’s what I wrote then:
“In the healing of memory session, I practiced Christ’s presence. I saw Him holding my heart with His hands. As the prayer progressed from infantile to mother to father memories, I kept asking Him to reveal anything I needed to remember, but for the longest time I had nothing and had to wait in His presence. Every time I got anxious I would see His hands enfolded around my heart. Eventually, He dredged up a memory about how my father would never let me cry if he could help it. As He showed me this, and some of its implications, I really wanted to cry, but could not. Maybe three or four minutes passed before the tears finally came.
Father, why couldn’t you let me cry? Why couldn’t you let me feel? Through your words and example you taught me how to refuse the emotional, how to build walls around my heart and protect it from anything soft. Pain brought your anger, and your anger hurt, so I couldn’t show my pain. When I needed your compassion and love, you gave me anger, yells, emotional withdrawal, and even drunkenness at times. You taught me how to think and inspired me with your mental capacity, but never balanced that out. Maybe this contributed to my struggles with introspection? I don’t know right now. You also failed to teach me many things I needed to know, things about God and His character.”
I had planned on going further and writing a full letter to him but I ran out of words there. In retrospect I’m glad I stopped. What I wrote was simply the pain I was getting in touch with; it stopped short of anger or accusations. Even though some of it looks like accusations they really aren’t. I was getting out what had been buried inside so it could be dealt with and it was a very freeing experience.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t mature enough yet to be able to forgive at that point in time, but some of the discoveries I made that day and the work I did following it paved the way for some of the forgiveness and reconciliation that would flow between Dad and I just over two years later, which I wrote about in the section on the first wound, and has made such a huge difference in my life.
“Healing of memories means forgiveness of sin. It is the heart’s experience of forgiveness of sin at the precise sore spot where it is needed, one that impacts the soul in its totality” (Leanne Payne, Restoring The Christian Soul p.68)
“Unforgiveness is like swallowing poison and then waiting for the OTHER person to die” (taken from a friend’s facebook, author unnamed).
Where I’m going
I wondered for a long time while writing this post how on earth I could possibly find a fitting conclusion. Since what I’ve written is about what I’ve been learning, and I’m always learning something new, I could conceivably keep on writing forever without being finished. Where do you find the cutting-off point? As I mentioned, I would love to write about forgiveness somewhere in here, as it’s incredibly essential to healing and I’ve written very little on it at all. I would also love to write about what I’ve learned and begun to live about what I allow into my system, as I’ve phrased it, or as my pastor phrases this concept, “What you feed your mind matters.” That’s one of the central themes to renewing the mind, and I’ve barely touched on it in my 100+ pages of writing on renewing the mind and healing. But once again I never really felt led to write about it here. It didn’t really seem to fit anywhere. Based on similar situations in the past, what I’m guessing that means is that I’ll have a chance somewhere in the future to write on it more fully, armed with more knowledge and experience and wisdom than I do now, and when the time is right God will lead me to do so. For now it’s best to wait. But I do at least want to share a few scripture verses on it so it’s not ignored entirely and because they’ve greatly helped me. (And if you want more, you can take a look at some older posts I wrote on the topic, taken straight from a couple of sermons I really appreciated from my pastor: http://www.xanga.com/cookie_monster44/462840614/item.html http://www.xanga.com/cookie_monster44/466100350/what-you-feed-your-mind-matters.html )
“No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briars. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.” (Jesus, Luke 6:43-45)
“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your heart on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” (Paul, Colossians 3:1-3)
“My son, pay attention to what I say; listen closely to my words. Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart; for they are life to those who find them and health to a man’s whole body. Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” (Proverbs 4:20-23)
“These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your homes and on your gates.” (God, Deuteronomy 6:6-9)
“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.” (Isaiah 26:3 KJV)
“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable---if anything is excellent or praiseworthy---think about such things.” (Paul, Philippians 4:8)
I’ve also found myself singing this song all the time, especially at work, to keep myself centered in Christ.
“To keep your lovely face
Ever before my eyes
This is my prayer
Make it my strong desire
That in my secret heart
No other love competes
No rival throne survives
And I serve only You.
(I Serve Only You) (I don’t know the author)
I’ve gone through this whole season of my life of healing with one main purpose. I wanted to deal with the past so that I could move freely into my future, so that all the wounds and pain I was dealing with could be dealt with once and for all and that I would learn how to deal with any future ones that I discovered. I wanted to learn how to be broken by sin, not wounded by it. Along the way I had to keep in mind something Mario Bergner wrote, that my journey and commitment was not to healing, but to Jesus. What I discovered is that while there are many things I can do to deal with wounds once and for all, there are many more that have to be done on a constant basis. It’s easy to slip back into unforgiveness and bitterness when you forget all that Christ has done for you, and it’s easy to forget if you don’t keep your mind centered on Him and instead fill it with other junk. As is always the case, it’s in practicing His presence, the healing Presence, that the solution can be found. Christ in us, the hope of glory. (Col. 1:27) Since I did this all to deal with the past so I can move on freely into my future, I can think of no better way to bring this to a finish than to share with you where I’m planning on going in my future.
Ever since I first received my call in life from God, I’ve had direction and a future. I’ve also known ever since then that what He has called me to was impossible. No man could do it, yet I had no doubt He had called me to it. Only Jesus could, and only Jesus did, so I knew that the only possible way for me to live up to my calling was for Jesus to live it through me. I also knew that since He had called me to it it was His responsibility to complete it in me; my job was only to obey. For my graduation yearbook I was given a paragraph to write a little about me in, and what I wrote then (in what was a desert period of my life) sums up well my thoughts and beliefs on this. (Also, I think I may be the only person to ever quote Winnie the Pooh in their graduation yearbook…)
“Wow! I made it! High school is finally over and now I am looking straight into---gulp---adulthood. As Winnie the Pooh would say, ‘Oh Bother!’ Still, I know He who is able to keep me from falling and to present me before His glorious presence without fault and with great joy, (Jude 24); and I know the One who calls me is faithful and He will do it, (1 Thes. 5:24). So I will not fear, though the valley of the shadow of death awaits me.
For only in death can resurrection be found.”
The call on my life has never been to any specific thing, unlike some people I know have gotten. When God called me to follow Him what He called me to was to become a different type of person. Because of that, I’ve never been concerned much since then with what I’m supposed to do; the question has always been “who do I want to be,” rather than “what do I want to do.” I figure God will take care of the “what I do” in His time, which He has thus far, guiding me one step at a time, but if I don’t continually dwell in the transformation and becoming place of dwelling in Christ then no matter what I do, it’s not going to make a difference or even make me happy (as if that were the goal). With that said, though, I do know some things about where I’m headed in life, activity-wise, and this is a good place to share some of that.
God has blessed me with a wonderful business opportunity and some life-changing mentors. I’ve put much of that to the side, as I did many things while I’ve been in this healing process so I could focus on what I knew needed to be done. But now that I’m finished with that season of my life, it’s time to get serious about my future. I’ve been working at Davannis for nearing two years now, at first because I needed a job but now more so because it was a wonderful fit for this past season of my life due mostly to the low-stress environment, flexible schedule, and good people. But I don’t really want to work there the rest of my life, obviously. So I plan on building my business up to be able to take over and improve upon my Davannis income in the near future. Also, I’ve been wanting to go to a place called the Honor Academy for a long time now, but God has kept telling me to wait every time I asked Him. As frustrating as that was at the time, obedience there (and being stuck at home) was what allowed me to go through this healing process. But ever since December I’ve been sensing that the time is right to go, and if I am accepted and raise enough money I am planning on going in mid-August. The Honor Academy, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is a yearlong spiritual discipleship program way down in Texas, focused on developing leaders for the next generation and equipping missionaries both to this country and any other. It costs $650 a month to live there, but I’m estimating that with the cost of health insurance, car insurance, and other odds and ends, I will need somewhere around $1000 a month to be ok. So that’s my goal for the summer: to make $1000+ in passive income working with my business team that will last me all year long and be something to build on when I come back. Now that’s a bit ambitious, I know, but I believe it’s possible, and I believe that Texas is where God wants me, so I’ll be working my butt off this summer to do everything I can to make it happen. I’ve been encouraged by this quote from a book one of my mentors recommended to me (The Pursuit, by Dexter Yager), “Unless you take on more than you can possibly do, you will never do all that you can.” So that’s my goal, and any and all prayers would be appreciated. If I happen to come to your mind over this summer, if you could lift up a prayer for me I’d appreciate it.
Thanks for reading all of this (unless you just skipped to the end. If you did, shame on you! You missed all the good stuff!) I would love to hear your thoughts, be they well-developed or brief. Or even if you just want to let me know you read it through, that’d be appreciated too. I’ve spent a long, long time writing this, more than I ever imagined it would take, but I think it was worth it. I’m also gladder than you’ll ever know to be done! It’s time to move on! 100+ pages is too many and wears a person out, as I now know from experience!
I’m going to conclude with three things that I think share where I’m going and who I’m becoming better than anything else I’ve yet to find or write. The first is my answer to the challenge “name five things you want to do before your life is over,” that I spent some good time pondering over and came up with some answers that resonate deep in my soul. The second is a passage from a book that I’ve shared before; it’s a passage that I’ve found very descriptive of the kind of person I want to be.
The third is something I’ve rarely shared before, but it’s something I’ve been working on for a long time now. When I first received God’s call on my life, the word I used to describe that call was “intercessor,” because that’s the only word I had at the time to describe the kind of life God had called me to. But since then I’ve discovered that the common use of intercessor among Christians doesn’t quite cover all that I really felt called to, so since I discovered that I’ve been trying to put into words pictures and phrases of the kind of life I want to lead. I originally wrote them as “I want to be” statements, but since then I’ve decided that that phrase isn’t accurate, for in Christ I already am that kind of person, so I changed it to “I am” statements. I think it’s more accurate that way, and it reminds me of who I am in Christ when I say or read them that way, but I also know that I’m still a work in progress. I am still “becoming who I am” and I remember that “To the Christian, all becoming is incarnational--it is a life that is poured into us from on high. That Life is Jesus.” (Mario Bergner, Setting Love in Order p. 100) Writing who I want to be has been very hard to do, as words don’t come easily to those kinds of things, or at least they don’t to me, but what I have been able to get and collect thus far, though incomplete, will be the third thing.
5 Things I want to do before my life is over:
I want to win her heart, live with her by my side, and father our child.
I want to spend a year living at an orphanage.
I want to sing a song with all my heart.
I want to spend an evening in prayer with Larry Winters.
I want to go on a forty day fast.
A Man of Passion
By Bruce Marchiano
From the book The Character of a Man
Passion---the grasping of life and love and all the wondrous adventure God intends for life and love to be…
A man reaches to his wife---his bride---with all that he is. He exalts and treasures her. He covers her with goodness and blankets her with blessing. He counts the “very hairs of [her] head” (Matthew 10:30) and pursues and relishes her. Taking nothing for granted, he approaches every day as if tomorrow may never come, as indeed, it very well may not.
He wakes every morning---a man who knows who he is and what his life is all about. He rises from every challenge that would steal his excitement and beat him down. He stares the enemies of his soul and life’s potential straight in the eye and says, “I’m a child of the living God, and you’re not going to crush even a moment of the thrill.”
He fights off the lukewarm and embraces the red hot. He casts down the pull that would draw him to wander from entertainment to entertainment. And a day becomes a year becomes twenty becomes a lifetime.
Refusing mediocrity, he rolls up his sleeves and dives into each day. He shakes free of fatigue and the aches and pains of life lived in a broken creation, and like an Olympic sprinter in the starting blocks, he digs his heels firmly into every responsibility and purpose God intends for him.
He explodes toward the finish line. He runs “the race” of life in such a way as to “win the prize”---the prize he’s already won in Christ Jesus (2 Timothy 4:7; Philippians 3:14).
He worships God. He falls flat on his face and thrusts his hands high in the air. Again, taking nothing for granted, he seeks with all that he is. He cries tears of joy and tears of need and cries out, “Glory, glory!” as he worships his God.
The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.
~Isaiah 9:7
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! Glory to the name of Jesus!
I am:
-A man who enters the battle determined to win or die, or both if need be.
-A man who is constantly proclaiming the victory, especially in the darkest hours.
-A man who knows what real victory is, knows where the real battle is fought, and refuses to fight with the same weapons the world uses.
-A man who remembers that real victory in God’s eyes often looks like real failure in the world’s eyes.
- A man who knows where his strength comes from and will do anything and everything he can to stay connected to that source. I will not rely on or even recognize any strength of my own.
- A man who knows that the highest honor on earth is that of serving, the highest calling on earth is that of a servant, and the greatest joys in life are found in giving.
- A man who is humble enough to allow others to serve me, too, to allow them to serve Christ as they serve me, just as I serve Christ when I serve them.
- A man who delights especially in serving and blessing those who can never hope to repay me, who never understand why I serve them, or who hate me for serving them.
- A man who believes the world is won by tired men fighting on in their weakness---men who will die before they quit.
- A man who recognizes and affirms the uniqueness and beauty and preciousness of every daughter of Eve I encounter.
-the one man in a woman or girl’s life, whether she be someone I know closely or just passed on the street and will never see again, who will not look at her with lust in his heart.
- A man who calls forth all that is feminine in Eve’s daughters.
- A man who guards Eve’s daughter’s hearts from all that would plunder, destroy, tear down, trample, deceive, humiliate, dishonor, condemn, insult, neglect, use, compare, or misname them.
-financially responsible.
-A channel through whom God can pour His resources into those in need of them.
-A man who says “let’s pray” rather than “I’ll pray for you.”
-A man who always speaks the name of Jesus with tenderness and joy.
-A vessel through whom God can affirm others.
-A gifted blesser, eager to bless.
-Able to put to words all the good I can see in others and to offer those words to them.
-The first man to the cross when there is a call for repentance. I want to be the one who unashamedly runs to the cross when I know I’ve been down the wrong path. In my repentance I want to run back with all my heart.
-A man who never speaks or hears the name of Jesus without recognizing and acknowledging the presence of Jesus.
“May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing His will, and may He work in us what is pleasing to Him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.” (Hebrews 13:20-21)
Eternally united with Christ,
ever Beloved,
Joe
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