Yeah... Sorry, Readers! I've had a heck of a time in the last two months.
There has been quite a delay in writing to you. But what follows is a small glimpse of what God has been showing me in this time. Enjoy!
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Isaiah 26:3 (AMP)
“You will guard him and keep him in perfect and constant peace
whose mind [both its inclination and its character] is stayed on You,
because he commits himself to You,
leans on You,
and hopes confidently in You.”
About a mile away from my house, there’s a dingy little playground with a grassy area behind it. Circling round the grass, there is a concrete path that looks something like a suburban attempt at Hayward Field. It’s about a third of a mile long, and every morning I spend time walking around this little circle. If anyone out there has a morning walking routine, you’ll understand what I’m about to say. There comes a point where you simply forget that you’re walking. Before you know it, you look around and realize that you’ve ended up somewhere quite different from where you began. The funny thing about my walk this morning is that I had spent a pretty good chunk of time meandering around the circle, when, as I was just finishing my very last lap around, I saw the sun.
You’d think, logically, that having left in the dark and walked in the grim cloudiness that is Oregon for nearly an hour, I would’ve noticed when the sun arose. But I was actually taken completely by surprise when, glancing up past the tree line, I was nearly blinded. I literally stopped and stared, mouth agape, until the dog started pulling at me to get a move on. How long had I been walking? How long had the sun been beckoning to me to behold its glory while I mindlessly marched around in circles? It gets even better.
While I was walking on the road home, I noticed that one of the larger buildings in my neighborhood was completely and utterly bathed in golden light. It was so weird! All the houses around it were the greyish color of the rest of the cloudy sky, but this one looked like some giant’s spotlight was fixed upon it. Like a moron, I started looking around for the source of the light. (Yeah, not kidding here…) It was so direct—how on earth could that be sunlight shining on one particular building?! Then, just as before, I looked up to the sky and saw that, peeking out from behind another large building on the other side of the road was, indeed, the sun. What on earth did I think I was going to find? A 20-foot Maglite? I’m not sure, but I almost had to laugh at the sheer idiot I had shown myself to be in that moment.
That’s when it hit me. The sun is always shining. Not just on summer days, not just at sunrise, and not just when you see it. Even at night! The sun, simply because it is the sun, is in a continual state of shining. By its very nature, the sun is a great burning sphere which burns at such unfathomably hot temperatures and produces such great light that, even as far away as we are, we catch glimpses of it and can even feel it. Have you ever thought about this? Maybe I’m still being an idiot here, but hear me out. How often do we wish for sunshine when it’s raining? Or long for the sun when we’re in darkness? More or less, our words come out something like, “I wish it would just be sunny,” or “If only the sun would come out today,” or “I’m so sick of these overcast skies—I want the sun!”
What if we re-worked that line of thought? Think about your life. Think about where you are, especially in terms of your thought life. Have you ever felt the same way about God? “God, I wish you would come here and do something!” “If God were real I would see Him” or how about, “I don’t know if I really believe God’s involved in my life—how could my life look like this if he were?” Imagine if we followed that line of thinking with sunshine. If you heard someone lamenting the death of sunshine at 2 in the morning, we’d laugh—of course you can’t see the sun at 2 in the morning! That’s nighttime! It hasn’t changed a thing about the sun, it just means that because of where you are positioned, you cannot physically see or feel the sun.
You see, we are so darn sure that the sun will rise. I don’t know of anyone that has gone to bed biting his nails about whether or not he will walk in utter darkness the rest of his days. We in the States re-arrange our entire time system based on the sun’s predictable patterns, for crying out loud! We know that when the sun seems to fall into the abyss of our horizon it is simply participating in what we call “sunset” and will assuredly still be the sun the following day. We do not lose faith in the “sun-ness” (if there is such a term) of the sun at sunset.
So why do we loose faith in God so easily?
How often are we, the very children of God, who have tasted of His salvation and accepted his bleeding love, prone to falling in the pit of doubting Him? Why are we surprised when we do see him—as I was this morning when I saw the sun—and cynical when he’s not present to us in the same way? If we experience his presence in, say, a “mountaintop” worship service or something, that becomes our basis to believe the reality of God. But if we go to a similar service and do not feel the anointing and presence in the same way, we find a convenient way to dismiss God’s presence entirely. In those moments we label experiences with God as “emotional” or letting our “feelings get the best of us,” and hold on fast to the so-called reality of mortgage payments and the grimness of day-to-day life. But, when we are in the act of participating in one of those emotional experiences, we call them our basis for reality and condemn our day-to-day life as unspiritual!
No wonder so many Christians live in a fantasy world of anxiety and stress. Good God, our thinking doesn’t even make sense! Either God is real or He’s not. Either His presence exists or it doesn’t. We need to stop basing our truth on emotional perceptions or the desire to stifle emotion altogether. Maybe you had an awesome time at church, maybe you simply didn’t, or maybe you’re hurting and don’t feel much of anything these days. The bottom line is this: Is God alive or not? If you can stand in the middle of the blackest watch of the night and declare, “perhaps I cannot see it right now, but the sun is shining,” could it be possible to stand in the blackest watch of your life and declare that God is real?
That’s where that verse from Isaiah comes in: “You will guard him and keep him in perfect and constant peace whose mind [both its inclination and its character] is stayed on You, because he commits himself to You, leans on You, and hopes confidently in You.” I love how the Amplified Bible digs up what it means to “stay” your mind on God—to “commit,” to “lean,” and to “hope confidently” in Him. Not, mind you, to keep your mind fixed on past experiences, not on your ability to live without succumbing to emotion, and dare I say it, not even by focusing your mind on Scripture! It is God—and God alone—on whom you must commit yourself to, lean upon, and in whom you must hope confidently. The more that we work ourselves up into a theological conundrum over whether or not God’s really going to come through, whether or not He’s all that we felt he was that “one time when His presence was so strong”, or whether or not His promises are all that they’re cracked up to be—the more we lay the burden of proof on anything other than who God is—the more we position ourselves for darkness, anxiety, stress, fear, and condemnation. It’s a little tough to convince even a 5-year-old that the sun is just something he invented when he was getting too excited outside. But how tough is it for the whispers of the Enemy to tell you, “See? You really let your emotions get the best of you when you were all worked up about God’s love for you the other day. Better settle into reality and figure out what you’re going to do to fix this mess that you call you [finances, marriage, job, etc.]…”
I think you’ll have to agree with me that most of us fall into that trap.
Or maybe I’m the only one who has stood in the darkness of life and wondered if anything—good, evil, or indifferent—would rise again. Perhaps you’ve never questioned Romans 8, never wondered about whether the ash heap you call life can really be worked together for good. Perhaps you’ve never wondered if God asking you to “test him” in your tithes and offerings was a cruel joke. Maybe you’ve never asked if God meant to call someone else and you got involved by mistake.
But I have.
So forgive me for getting a little “worked up” here. But I can no more deny the reality of God than I can be persuaded by cloudy skies that the sun isn’t real. Feelings or not, God is present. Whether God has chosen to put a deposit in your bank account or not, He is still the God who owns the earth and everything in it. Whether that healing you’ve been praying for is manifest in front of you or not, God is still the Healer. Do not let the winters of life convince you that God is nothing more than a children’s story. Brothers and sisters, do not settle for what this world calls “reality”.
I walked around this morning so convinced that the sky was cloudy that I missed out on sunshine. Don’t do that with your life. Choose God. Live in the expectancy that something is about to happen, but be not moved if God’s actions are not obvious to you. Trust in who God is. Commit yourself to Him, and allow Him to guard your mind and keep you in perfect peace.
I think C.S. Lewis, as usual, says it best:
“A man can no more diminish
God's glory by refusing to worship Him
than a lunatic can put out the sun
by scribbling the word,
'darkness'
on the walls of his cell.”
"another fine bit of writing brought to you by yours truly"
