presence

I all but ran through the dark night, climbing the hill toward the little church with an urgency that could only be fueled by desperation. Thankful for the desolation of life in rural South Dakota, I began to pray out loud, begging God for His presence.  It was such a beautiful night, but so dark.  My heart was beating and breaking all at the same time.  I needed Him like I had never needed him before.  I needed to know that He was there through the mess.  I entered the empty sanctuary, pleading with God for wisdom, face to the floor.

In the stillness, He came.

~~~

I all but broke out of the ranger station, desperate to walk out to the campground, so thankful for the excuse to listen to my iPod and pray even while at work.  For a few days I had felt what seemed like the absence of God so keenly.  I had, rightfully or not, felt alienated from my brothers and sisters in Christ, I had thought myself the outcast as a result of the things I view differently.  As I slipped to the fringes of my church ideologically and socially, I felt my faith slipping, too.  God seemed distant in a way that He hadn't since the dark time of doubt I faced in college.  I pleaded with Him to make himself known to me.

And He came.

~~~

He came in the stillness.

He whispered into the darkness of my heart.  Hope. Peace. Reconciliation. Acceptance.  Forgiveness.  Identity as His beloved.

The presence of God was to me life and breath.  The presence of God reminded me that I am wholly loved.

The presence of God changed me.

~~~

It is when I remember who I am that I am saved.  I am a child of God.  I am loved extravagantly.  I am chosen.

I am loved.

the call and the fall

I couldn't stop thinking about the disciples.

Pastor Mike was talking about the flogging of Jesus the day he was crucified, encouraging us to imagine the brutality of the hours leading up to the long walk to Golgotha.

I couldn't stop thinking about those hiding in the wings.  Jesus' disciples.  I considered their call.  Their betrayal.  The shame and fear they must have felt.

It had started years earlier, at the booth of the tax collector, at the edge of the Sea of Galilee - the call: "Follow me."  "Take up your cross and follow me."

I wonder if on the day of the crucifixion, those words rang in their ears to the cadence of the scourging.  "Take up your cross..."  "Follow me..."

And they hid.
He died.
And they hid.
The women cared for the body.

Jesus called them to follow Him, even to take up their crosses, and instead self-preservation kicked in at full force.  They denied ever knowing the Savior to whom they had pledged their lives and future.

Doubt, sorrow, confusion, fear and shame; all must have mingled in a rich mixture of emotion.

I imagine it started at Passover, only hours before.  While commemorating the Exodus, Jesus identified himself as the lamb whose blood would be spilled for the firstborn children of Israel.  He asked them to eat and drink in remembrance of Him, he told them betrayal would come from among them.  In the shock and confusion of his words, they stumbled over themselves to declare their allegiance.  Not twenty-four hours later, Jesus was indeed betrayed by one of his own.

And then the real choice begin.  "Am I really willing to stake my life on Jesus' preposterous claim to be the Messiah?  He's going to be killed, he's gonna need me to stay alive by whatever means possible so I can continue advancing the kingdom of heaven.  So I'll lay low for a while, tell people what they want to hear, deny Jesus; it's for a greater good, I swear it!"

And so, much like Judas, the remaining eleven disciples too betrayed the one they knew to be the Messiah.

And he died.

And, in the midst of incredible sorrow and doubt that he was who he claimed to be, the disciples felt justified in their decision to hunker down.

And then three days later, they received word from the women.

"He is risen!"

And they stumbled over themselves to declare their allegiance.

And it began again.

the weight of not knowing

As I discussed in my last post, I have often struggled with the role of emotion in worship, wondering when the "feeling" I get in church is more a matter of an emotional high than a true case of God being present.  This struggle is one I have mostly put behind me, although every once in a while doubts pay me a visit.

Tonight, though, the emotion was present long before I walked through the church doors.  Growing up, I heard a lot about the importance of one's faith not only being a "Sunday morning thing."  I was urged to read my Bible and pray every day in order to actually grow as a believer.  In many ways, tonight's emotion was like that for me.  This wasn't an emotion I felt only once the music got pumping.  This was a weight I've been carrying for some time.  Tonight only provided an opportunity to express it in a different way.

You know those times in life where it becomes impossible to shrug off the weight?  When it's too much work to pretend that all is well?  When nothing specific is wrong in life, but you can't shake the weight anyway?  That was me tonight.  Although life is uncertain future-wise and although I am dealing with some difficult "people issues," the real problem tonight was a different sort of weight.

Tonight, the weight on my heart was the weight of not knowing.  In fact, I'm not even sure how to go about telling this story, so acute is my not-knowing.  All I can do, I guess is pick up where I left off in my last post, trying to be as honest as possible.

I graduated from college in December of 2009 and moved home.  In many ways, it was a return to childhood.  I was different, sure.  But slowly I moved back into my old life and my old thought processes, particularly in terms of my faith.  God became understandable again.  I pushed away the questions and accepted that God was sovereign.  

Then, in September of 2010, I moved across the continent to Washington to go to graduate school.  And my world was rocked.  Not in a violent, jarring way; but in a slow, quiet way.  I made friends, both Christian and not.  I studied a lot of history.  I had a lot of deep philosophical conversations with atheists.  I started reading a lot of theology blogs by what could probably be labeled "progressive" Christians.

And I hid.  I passive-aggressively blogged about it from time to time, talking in vague generalities and avoiding the full extent of my change.  I went to church as one person, went to school as another, afraid to let either party know who I really was.  Afraid that if I was honest I'd find myself with no friends.  Alone in a far-away city.

It took being uprooted and flung across the country to a little edge-of-nowhere town in southeastern Georgia to truly learn what it is to live honestly.  I met friends who accepted my liberal tendencies.  Who understood my conservative tendencies.  Who loved me and listened to me even when they didn't agree.  Who reminded me again and again that my voice is valid and strong, even if it is flawed and corrupted by sin.  My heart began to heal as I lived honestly for the first time in a long time.  I began to truly seek Jesus for the first time in years.  My faith became more living than it had been since my summer-camp-Christian days.  

But it was different than the summer camp variety of belief I embraced as a 18 year old.  This new faith of mine was a stubborn trust in a God in whom I don't always believe.  This new faith was stubbornly apolitical and obstinately political all at the same time.  This new faith was simultaneously profoundly convinced and entirely unconvinced.  This new faith terrified me with the demand it placed on me, the demand to stand, to move, to never be content.

There's a weight, though, a weight that descends on me every once in a while.  A weight that is never entirely absent, but that makes itself known more acutely at some times than others.  It's the weight of not knowing.

I've always wanted answers.  I was raised in a Bible-believing church in all that term implies.  I went through the AWANA program in middle school, memorizing verses like a fiend.  High school found my Sunday School class being labeled "Bible Instruction Class."  We studied a theology textbook.  My high school youth group spent years doing a Bible study style where at the beginning of the year we'd all put questions we had about God and faith in a bucket and each week we'd answer a question.  Faith was in some ways simple, at least in the aspect that the Bible had something clear to say about every issue that we raised.

Friends, it's not that I don't believe 2 Timothy 3:16.  It's more that I don't always believe the way my brothers and sisters use the Scriptures.  Today I was reading Mark Noll's "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis," and I was somewhat blindsided when I read the nineteenth century biblical support of slavery.  If you're curious, look up Leviticus 25:45-45, Philemon, Genesis 9:25-27, Genesis 17:12, Deuteronomy 20:10-11, 1 Corinthians 7:21, Romans 13:1, 7, Colossians 3:22, 4:1, 1 Timothy 6:1-2.  Many Christians in the 1800s found Scripture to be extremely useful for teaching on the issue of slavery - clearly the Bible makes no effort toward the abolition of slavery.  The Bible accepts slavery as a matter of course.  Of course, an argument can be made that the principles of Scripture move us toward slavery's abolition.  The fact remains, though, that the theological battle surrounding slavery and abolition was real and based in real ambiguity.  How do I deal with this?  I don't know.

There are so many issues I am wrestling with.  I don't have the emotional energy to devote to all of them at the same time, so some of them are on the back-burner, waiting to be brought forward.  Regardless, though, they fester to some extent.  As I attempt to deal with these issues, it can be so tempting to let them become all-consuming.

I think that's where the weight came from tonight.

It started yesterday morning, when I woke up a half hour early for work to spend time with Jesus.  I have been failing to put aside structured time for Scripture-reading and prayer for months now.  I've been so helter-skelter about my faith, reading when in the mood or when I have to read for a Bible study.  And yesterday I realized how desperately I needed to just talk to Jesus.  To read His Word, and to meditate on who He is.  I didn't need that time to mull over controversial issues that tend to consume so much of my time.     I needed to commune with my Heavenly Father, get to know Him better.

It's so hard to find the balance.  Often I tend to have a Messiah complex.  I find myself thinking along the lines of "God is preparing me to do something great."  In fact, I almost wrote something to that effect just now.  Friends, God doesn't need me.  He walks with me, yes.  He loves me, yes.  I serve Him, yes.  But mainly, I think, He just wants to walk with me.  To hold my hand, and to lead me to something great.  To Himself.

And yet, the weight tonight came because it's so hard to feel God.  He seems so distant at this point in my life.  Not only do I not have any answers, but my relationship with God seems so distant.  I suppose it's the nature of things to some extent.  Jesus himself felt forsaken by God when he needed Him most.  Sin creates a distance between us and God.  We walk in darkness.  (Isaiah 59)

Tonight, I wrote this prayer during the worship set:

"I feel Your distance so acutely tonight, Jesus.  Tonight I am broken because I don't know how to follow.  I don't know how to serve.  All I know is profound distance.  Forgive me, God, where I sin.  I don't even always know my sin.  All I know is profound confusion."

I don't have the answer to God's distance.  Sometimes He is just not close by, at least not that we can sense.  There's no easy answer to that, just as so many things in life don't have easy answers.  I'm increasingly confident, though, that Jesus calls us to follow Him into the darkness, into the confusion and uncertainty, into a place where we walk only by faith.  Not by our certainty or by our knowledge.  By faith alone.  A blind and reckless trust that Jesus is who he says he is, and that that is enough.

a testimony to the faithfulness of my God

It was the summer after my freshman year of college, and I was returning to my favorite place on earth: summer camp.  This place had in many ways defined my childhood faith: it was the place where I had experienced almost all of my mountaintops of faith, where I had "grown up," the first place I ever lived beside home.

It was the summer of 2007.  I had just experienced a year of intense personal growth at a Christian liberal arts college in northwest Iowa.  I had been off on my own away from my family and I had made a bunch of new friends who had in a short period of time redefined how I viewed the potential of a close friendship.

This summer camp had been my "favorite place on earth," prior to college.  I loved it there, and had spent two summers at the end of high school counselling there.  I was excited to return and expected my third year to be much like the first two - a challenging and joyful time of God working in my heart.  It wasn't.  It was hard to adjust to being treated like a high school student (most of the staff were in high school).  It was hard to adjust to a "Bible camp" mentality rather than a liberal arts college mentality.  It was all such an adjustment.

Above all, though, I realized very quickly just how much I had changed in the previous year without even realizing it.

I remember that first week of camp, and how silent God was.  I remember struggling to care, struggling to feel.  I remember crying out to God to make Himself known to me.

He was silent.

This only continued into my sophomore year of college.  I began to wonder where God had gone, and why He was being so silent.  I struggled with apathy and with anger, with doubt that God loved me.  I questioned the role of emotion in worship - were we being emotional because we're emotional creatures or truly because of the working of the Holy Spirit?

And slowly but surely, my armor began to fall away.  In a very bad way.  I remember taking a class for my education major at the time in which the professor began raising moral questions in relation to homosexuality.  I remember wondering how she could consider herself a Christian and think the things she did.  I remember a serious crisis of belief as I wrestled with the seeming disconnect between her evident love for others and God and her political/moral belief system.  And before you knew it, I found myself wondering if God even existed at all.

I attended a Christian conference in Kansas City over New Years' 2008.  The worship was emotion filled, the preaching passionate, and God seemed to be working.  It sure seemed like He was working in my heart. I went home filled with hope for the first time.  Maybe God did exist.  After all, He seemed pretty obvious in the emotion of the thousands of people who surrounded me in that convention hall in Kansas City.

I wish I could tell you that things were better from that point on.  But they weren't.  The emotion died out.  The next two years were a roller coaster of emotion, belief, and doubt.  Through it all, I clung to the religious trappings I had grown up with, not having the courage to break my family's heart.

And eventually, by 2010, I realized that I was standing on the other side of my faith crisis.  I realized that I no longer questioned God.  God had brought me through an intensely difficult season of life in terms of a relationship gone wrong, and He taught me through that to trust Him to provide.

The moment when I realized that I once again believed with most of my heart was a freeing moment.  I've had that moment over and over again the past three years, where I realize the miracle of belief and what it produces in me.

My faith is not always very emotional, maybe because of my history.  But my faith is as deep and strong as it is frail.  Where I am weak, He is strong.

Above all, I learned one thing.  Through it all, God held me.  It was Him who sustained my faith.  Although I faced the choice daily to walk away or to continue to follow, Jesus never stopped calling me back to Himself.  He pursued me relentlessly.  My faith is a gift from Him.  He is good, my friends.

I have so many questions all the time, so many things I doubt.  Through it all, though, I am confident in a God who will not allow me to fall out of His hand.

God is good.

revelations on Revelation

It's been a while since I've studied Revelation.  To be sure, I've read portions of it here and there over the past ten years, but it's probably been since junior high when my pastor did a sermon series on the book that I read it in any thorough sort of way.

I tend to live my life in a pretty this-world focused sort of way.  I strive to follow Jesus every day, but rarely do I do so with the book of Revelation in my view.  It's an intimidating book, and I think even more basic than that, the subject matter is intimidating.  Life can seem so permanent, and the book of Revelation is filled with different colored horses, "seals," and trumpets.  It seems fantastical and removed from daily life.

I think this is exactly why I need to study this book.  For so long I've avoided it.  I determined a theological stance in relation to the end times and moved on with my life.  It's clearly time to consider more carefully what I believe and why.  Further, it's clearly time to start living with the reality of the end in mind.

the ostracized

The following is something I wrote a year or so ago, but it is something that is always heavy on my heart.  May we love our brothers and sisters in word and deed, may we always grant forgiveness and acceptance.

***

Some days, there are no words.

How much could be averted with just a little measure of love and acceptance?

The story is as old as the world:

She was hated.  Not for anything she did wrong, but because she didn't fit.  She laughed at different things than most, she dealt with different struggles than most, and she looked different than most.  She didn't fit.  And we ostracized her.  Laughed at her behind her back.  Left her out of our inside jokes.  Committed unspeakable cruelties out of a need to separate ourselves from her ostracization.

And we rationalized our hatred by her difference.  By the little things that she did that drove us insane.  By the way she didn't fit.  We said we didn't hate her.

But our actions said otherwise.

And then one day she proved her ostracization through an unspeakable act of evil.

And we said, "I told you so."

And consigned her to an eternity in hell.

that blessed assurance

First off, if you're new here, make sure to check THIS out.

I have a story to tell.  To be honest, though, I'm not sure how to tell it, or if I even want to.  There's a lot of fear that goes into honesty.  When Pastor Mike approached me and asked me about writing regularly about my experience of the Saturday night service, I knew it was something I need to do and something I believe I am called to do.  But, to be entirely transparent, I was also terrified.  Not necessarily because I have any qualms with being honest, but because I was afraid that being entirely honest in this place would be impossible.

You may be entirely confused by that statement.  But, to understand what I just said, you have to know some things about me.  And so, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm going to step back in time a few (or five) years.  

I have been a Christian for as long as I remember (I vaguely remember praying "the prayer" at two years old).  I was raised in an amazing family and an amazing church that gave me an insanely solid biblical training.   High school Sunday School class was a four year course in theology and biblical studies.  I spent three summers in high school and college as a counselor at a Bible camp.  I thought my faith was pretty sound.

Then college happened.  I attended a Christian liberal arts college in rural Iowa.  Sophomore year things started falling apart.  The last summer I worked at that summer camp was the summer before my sophomore year, and I remember being able to sense a shift even then.  I couldn't feel God anymore.  He had gone missing.  College classes only intensified things.  I started being exposed to questions I'd never asked and to potential answers to those questions I had never before been allowed to consider.  Things fell apart.  Not only was I going through a spiritual desert emotionally speaking, but I now had a whole set of academic concerns when it came to God's very existence.  

I remember sophomore and junior year of college as among the darkest of my life spiritually speaking.  Although it was up and down, it was mostly down.  God brought me through, though, with my faith intact.  I attribute that entirely to His goodness and faithfulness.  My faith was (and is) weak, but my God is strong.

Here's the thing, though.  In moving away from home to attend graduate school, I changed.  Graduate school taught me a certain way of thinking.  It created a monster in some ways.  I learned to live with constant doubt, learned to embrace cynicism.  And I learned, too, to bury my questions and doubts when around other Christians, because I was afraid of being condemned as a "liberal," which I was.

Then graduate school ended, and I moved to Georgia.  Georgia changed me, there can be no doubt about that.  I found a few people here who understood me.  I found a group of friends with whom I could grow as a follower of Christ.  I had time to devote to reading and thinking about topics beyond the degree to which Hitler considered himself and his movement "Christian" (the topic of my master's thesis).  Some of my cynicism began to wash away.  And yet, at the same time, I found peace with many of my questions.  I began to (maybe for the first time) value the intellectual/spiritual journey on which God has sent me.

I do, however, struggle a lot with how we should read the Bible.  Is it a historical document?  Is it "alive" today?  Is it both?  If so, how do we responsibly balance the two?  I am uncomfortable with quoting isolated Bible verses without giving context to that quote, because I think it robs the verse of its textual and historical context.  Any time someone quotes a verse now, I find myself madly skimming the entire context as much as possible before I decide whether or not to agree with their statement.  That doesn't even get into how the original audience would have understood that statement, though.  I could go on forever, but I won't.  My cynicism and questions aren't really the point of this.

Tonight, when I sat down for the sermon, and Pastor Mike announced he'd be preaching about eternal security (the idea that once we accept Christ, God will not abandon us), I fought the urge to tune out the whole thing.  It's not that I doubt my salvation.  I don't.  It's that I have about sixty billion other questions, mostly unrelated, and the topic of "eternal security" is simply not on my radar.  Despite my cynicism, I decided to not tune out the whole thing.

And am I ever glad I listened.

There was something, I dunno, therapeutic or something about studying a topic like assurance of salvation.  Although I have a healthy amount of cynicism regarding the topic theologically, and came into tonight ill-prepared to make any sort of argument for the idea that people can never walk away from true faith, tonight I was reminded of the importance of forming opinions based off of the Bible rather than my experience.  Pastor Mike took us through a number of Scriptures that he believes show ample Biblical support for eternal security.  Then he went through a number of objections that people have to the idea that salvation cannot be lost and answered those objections.

And he said something at the end, something that resonated deeply with me, something about how our experiences should never be more important than the Scriptures.  I think, if anything, that's what I needed to hear.  Sure, I may have a mountain of questions still to wade through in terms of how the Bible should be read and exactly how we should interpret it, balancing its status as a historical document and as the inspired Word of God.  But for tonight, God reminded me of the simple power of His words.

And that's enough.

God's Word is enough.