From Pops' Workshop

Author: dhammerslag

  • Chapter 22: The Lake

    Chapter 22: The Lake

    “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
    John 4:13-14 (ESV)

    Another thread that I find woven through my experiences in my Pops’ Workshop is water. Those experiences culminated in a vast lake that lies beneath my Pops’ Workshop and which became the scene of a powerful vision.

    Water, Water, Everywhere

    I am not surprised that water was an important element of my time in my Pops’ Workshop; it is a common motif in the Bible. Begining with Genesis, where river flows out of Eden to water the garden,1 water is woven through Israel’s history: Moses is drawn up out of the waters of the Nile;2 the Red Sea is parted to allow Israel’s escape from Egyptian bondage, and it rushes back to crush Pharaoh’s pursuing Army;3 God provides a miracle of water from a rock in the wilderness;4 and the Jordan river is miraculously parted to allow Israel to cross.5

    The psalmist tells us that a man who delights in the Lord’s instruction is like a tree planted by streams of water,6 and Ezekiel’s exilic vision of the new temple describes a miraculous flow of water from the temple that brings life and abundance wherever it flows.7

    The image of water continues in the New Testament. Jesus’s messianic destiny is revealed as the Spirit descends on him at his baptism in the waters of the Jordan River.8 Jesus describes the water he gives as a spring of water welling up to eternal life,9 and he promises that if we believe in him, rivers of living water will flow out of our hearts.10 The final chapter of the bible describes a river of life that flows out of the throne of God.11

    The Water motif has already been central to my time in the workshop and the healing and renewing that my Pops was unfolding in my life. When I was warned, in the vision of venomous snakes, that the enemy would strike me, I was also shown a stream of healing water.12 Water was a central image of the inner healing I didn’t even know I needed. The stream below the workshop, which should have been a torrent of God’s love, was barely a trickle until Jesus guided me to bring my real self and my whole self to him for healing.13 That stream was also the home of my nemesis, “Pride Rock.”14 And, finally, the stream running through the meadow behind the workshop.15

    Even with all those water images and references, there was one more yet to come.

    The Lake

    I was in a season of learning that seeking the workshop, or any other particular expression of God, is usually not productive; seeking the Lord is. When we chase after a particular expression of God, we are looking for something to scratch our spiritual itch. God is not generally in the business of scratching our itches. He wants us, and I find that usually means that when we approach God for what we can get from him, materially, emotionally, or spiritually, we are likely to be disappointed. It is when we approach him empty-handed and offer ourselves to his care that we are most likely to experience his presence, often in surprising ways!

    In that season, after futilely seeking an experience of the workshop, I instead simply waited on the Lord, surrendering myself to his presence. Unexpectedly, I found myself back in the well — that is, down the hole at the back of the workshop, where I had experienced so much healing.

    The stream there was now flowing, no longer obstructed and fouled. I had never thought about it before, but now it occurred to me to follow it to see where it went. I don’t know how long I followed it, but eventually I came to the mouth of the stream. It emptied into a sea or vast lake. Due to darkness or the size of the lake, I could not see the far shore. The shore where I stood was rocky, and the “beach” was smooth stones. I could not see the sky, and I had the impression that I was still underground, in a vast cave. The water was calm and sparkled beautifully with reflected light. I had the impression of moonlight, but couldn’t reconcile that with the feeling that I was in a cave.

    The lake had no immediate meaning for me, except to underscore that I couldn’t expect that everything in the Workshop made sense as it would in a physical world. That was not the purpose of the visions I was experiencing in prayer. It made no sense that a stream running through a cave under an old workshop deep in the woods would empty out into a vast sea, perpetually bathed in moonlight. The purpose of this vision was to catch my curiosity, to make me wonder about this vast body of water that was somehow connected to God’s stream of live giving water.

    Part of the answer came to me in the writing of C. S. Lewis, where he talked about going to the sea, but only dabbling in the shallows, being careful to stay anchored to the land.

    This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea…and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal…Our temptation [in Christian discipleship] is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We approve of an income tax in principle… We are very careful to pay no more than is necessary. And we hope — we very ardently hope — that after we have paid it there will still be enough left to live on…There is no parallel [in our life with God] to paying taxes and living on the remainder. For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves…He will be infinitely merciful to our repeated failures; I know no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise. For He has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but Himself; and He can give that only insofar as our self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls .16

    God does not intend for us to give only so much of ourselves; the way of life is to give him all.

    Months later, the imagery of the lake was still very much with me when I found myself praying about swimming and diving down deeper and deeper in the water, so deep that return to the surface would be impossible. This was not suicidal ideation; it was praying about what it could be like to join God in total surrender, reserving nothing for myself.17 In that time of prayer, my thoughts turned to the lake in the cave under Pop’s Workshop.

    I realized that swimming out, away from shore, would have the same effect as swimming down. If you swam out, away from shore, not stopping until you were utterly exhausted, you would have reached a point of no return. You would have nothing left to give.

    So, in that time of imaginative prayer, I swam out, under the starlit sky in the dark, cool water lake. As I reached that point, where I really couldn’t go any further, I saw a “hole” in the water. Like so many things in the workshop it defied the rules of logic and nature. It was not a whirlpool. It was more like swimming up to the edge of a waterfall, except the edge was circular. From every point water flowed down into the hole. I realized that I could swim “down” the waterfall, which I did. Soon I realized that I didn’t need to swim anymore. The force of the water carried me down. I did need my own strength. I stopped swimming and could be carried to where God wanted me to be.

    I have since learned that is how it is with God. He does his best work when we surrender, when we cut the lifeline that holds us to all the things that would pull us away from him.

    We like to say that we are “all in,” but we aren’t. We hedge our bets:

    • “Certainly God doesn’t care about consumerism; I tithe, that is good enough.”
    • Or, “Jesus could not have had my neighbor in mind when he said, ‘love your neighbor.’”
    • Or, “Sure, I lose my temper and say somethings I shouldn’t, but I never hurt anyone, so that’s okay.”
    • Or, “God doesn’t expect me to be perfect,18 that isn’t realistic.”

    We exhaust ourselves trying to make sure we are “good enough,” and realize the folly of trying to simultaneously be who we want to be and who we think God wants us to be. When we stop rationalizing and finally let go and let God have his way with us the real transformation happens. God’s indwelling Spirit can do his truly miraculous work. He can remold us from the inside so that we care about consumerism, we love even the vilest neighbor, are filled with God’s peace, and, yes, he loves us enough to perfect us.

    The lake was a picture of the refreshing vastness of God, and it became an invitation to let go of my old life so that God could give me my real life.

    1. Genesis 2:10 ↩︎
    2. Exodus 2:4-10 ↩︎
    3. Exodus 14:21-29 ↩︎
    4. Numbers 20:11 ↩︎
    5. Joshua 3:14-17 ↩︎
    6. Psalm 1:1-3 ↩︎
    7. Ezekial 47:1-12 ↩︎
    8. Matthew 3:13-17 ↩︎
    9. John 4:14 ↩︎
    10. John 7:37-38 ↩︎
    11. Revelation 22:1-2 ↩︎
    12. The Promise of Peace. ↩︎
    13. Down a Hole ↩︎
    14. Pride ↩︎
    15. A Place of Rest ↩︎
    16. Lewis, C. S.. “A Slip of the Tongue” in Weight of Glory (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 188-190). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
    17. This thought of swimming in water being a metaphor for union with God was also explored in my post, “Swimming.” ↩︎
    18. Matthew 4:48 ↩︎

  • When God Breaks In

    God will break in on your life. You may not understand it, you may not recognize it for what it is, but he will break in on your life. God is an ardent lover, and, as such, he pursues us relentlessly. He never tires of making himself known, in hopes that we will turn to him and be saved. When God’s love does break into our lives, when he gets in past the noise, clutter, hurry, and anxiety of our lives, what do we do? We usually respond in one of three ways. We can ignore it and simply carry on as before, acting as if there is nothing noteworthy happening; we can recognize God and try our best to accommodate him in our lives, trying to work out what it is we are to do in response; or we can embrace God with all we have, abandon all we have and all we are in our pursuit of him.

    Ignore

    If we ignore God’s action in our lives, we are on the easiest and least disruptive track. We will also have a lot of company. Winston Churchill once said of his opponent that he would sometimes stumble over the truth, pick himself up, and hurry off as if nothing had happened. That is an apt picture of how many of us react when the power and beauty of God’s love finds a chink in our armor and breaks through to us. We can brush it off, hurrying back to our “real” lives, convinced that nothing really happened. We can rationalize or explain away what does not fit into our understanding of how the world works. We are like Ebenezer Scrooge, who attributed his experience of Marley’s ghost to indigestion: “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”

    If we fail in our attempts to convince ourselves that nothing happened, we will tell ourselves that our experience of God has no lasting importance. Yes, something out of the ordinary happened, but it was a blip, an anomaly, a glitch in the matrix, if you will. Like the experience of deja vu, it is interesting and perhaps momentarily disconcerting, but it certainly has no bearing on real life.

    Our all-too-common response of hurrying past or explaining away God’s presence in our lives heads us down a dangerous path. If we repeatedly dismiss and ignore God’s invitations to us, we become numb to them over time, barely noticing them. If we do notice, we have become masters of rationalizing the experience and tossing it aside like the junk mail we don’t even bother to open. Eventually, we can become functionally blind and deaf — for all practical purposes, unable to see or hear God in any but the most extraordinary moments.

    God does not give up on us. He will continue trying to break in and break through with his love for us, no matter how often we brush him off and snub his overtures. But we may so harden ourselves that we are no longer awake to his activity.

    Accommodate

    The second choice is accommodation. When we experience God’s loving kindness, we recognize it for what it is: divine care and love breaking into our lives. We understand that this is not a flight of fancy and is not to be ignored. As we learn a bit more about God, perhaps from our friends or online resources, we realize that we have a part to play in this budding relationship. So we do our level best to accommodate God in our lives. We carve out a niche for God. Between friends and family, work and leisure, and social media and entertainment, we set aside some time for God. We work him into our busy lives as best as we can.

    This sounds like a hopeful direction, but it seldom turns out well. We give God his due, or at least we try our best. We become, as C. S. Lewis put it, like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We think of God’s call on our lives as a tax to be paid. We pay what we believe is required, and hold back everything else. We don’t want to cheat God; we will pay him what he is due and continue on with our “real” lives. We want to continue to enjoy the life we have been living. We do not realize that God is due everything.1 The divine tax rate is 100%. Our ignorance of this fact is the point on which this choice falters. We think we are on the right track, racing along to the end of the line. We may be on the right track, but we have not yet left the station.

    We acknowledge God, and we are genuinely grateful. But we continue on with our lives, consigning God to the slim margins of our overscheduled lives. Over time, our memory of what we once thought of as a life-changing God encounter fades. Any claim or call we might have felt God has on our lives becomes distant, smaller, and less important. Most of our time, passion, and energy remain devoted to the incessant demands of the world, and so any zeal or passion we may have felt fades away. God’s invitation to give ourselves to him fades into the background, drowned out by all the world demands and has to offer. At the worst, we may slip back to door number one and simply ignore what we originally sensed as important.

    However, most of the time, we end up going through the motions of honoring God, but nothing much has really changed. I used to live that way, and I was often in a cycle of being inspired, fixing my will on change, and failing. Eventually, I started to wonder if it wasn’t all a hoax. I would promise God, myself, and others that I was going to change. I was going to be a new man. I really intended to reform myself. I was that new man for weeks or sometimes only days before, without realizing that it was happening, I slipped back to my old ways. When we whip ourselves through this cycle enough times, it is easy to doubt the reality of God’s promised new, full life for those who love him.

    But there is good news here! We are not ignoring God, and he does not give up on us, even when our response to him turns out to be fleeting or half-hearted. He honors any attempt to respond to him. He does not wait for us to be perfect; perfecting us is the Holy Spirit’s job. Even as we struggle to accommodate God into our lives, the door is open for us to move from accommodating him to embracing him.

    Yet there are dangers here, too. We may be satisfied with whatever meager progress toward God we have been able to make, thinking that is all he wants of and for us. Then, when God breaks in and we again meet the love of God, we may reject it, thinking, “I go to church. I’ve (mostly) reined in (some of) my more egregious sins; I am not a bad person. I drank the Kool-Aid and said the prayer; I should now be free to live my life as I see fit.” Or, tragically, when God again breaks in, we may treat that as confirmation that we are doing “the right stuff,” and think God asks nothing more of us when, in fact, he is inviting us to go further up and farther in.

    Or, if we have been, as I was, in a sin-repent-repeat cycle, we may despair of even trying again. We have spent years trying to accommodate God in our lives, and we become frustrated by the lack of real change; we can become jaded. “I’ve been down this road before, and nothing is going to change. Yes, God. I hear you. I’ve tried and tried, but this just isn’t getting us anywhere.. Let’s just leave well enough alone and stay the course.”

    The truth is that where we are is not well enough, and God will not accept our attempts to break up with him. He loves us too much to leave us alone.

    It really isn’t possible to live with one foot in the Kingdom of the Heavens and the other in the kingdoms of the world. God’s soft and gentle call is too easily drowned out by the demanding din of the world. We can stay in this middle ground for a long, long time, or we can slip back into a “Nothing to See Here” posture.

    But there is a third way. It is both harder and easier.

    3. Embrace

    The third way is to go all in, giving up any claim to career, status, wealth, security, and even our very lives. To follow this third way, we must set aside our earthly, temporal desires and put our pursuit of God above all else. Ignatius of Loyola summed up this idea nearly five hundred years ago.

    We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to
    our life in God. Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God’s deepening his life
    in me.

    Ignatius of Loyola, First Principle and Foundation

    For those of us who nursed at the bosom of Western consumerism and self-determination, this sounds like folly. It also sounds impossible. Jesus knew how hard this would be even for his contemporaries. He used crucifixion, a horrible, brutal, shameful, and excruciating execution method, as a picture of what we must do, explaining that if we would live, we must give up our lives. He tells his followers to take up their crosses and follow him.2

    Following this way is extraordinarily hard to do, but it is also easy. It is certainly easier than trying to accommodate God while still clinging to the ways of the world and enduring the constant struggle of trying to balance between them. Imagine the difficulty of trying to keep one foot on the dock and the other on a boat that is pulling away. It is so much easier to just get both feet on the boat. It is tempting to think that the “ignore” option must be easier than casting everything aside for God, but it is not so. When we ignore God and cast our lot with the world, we find that the best the world has to offer is never enough; we are ever seeking the next thrill, the next affirmation, the next rung on the social or economic ladder. We are always seeking but never satisfied. God is the one thing that can satisfy us at the deepest levels of our being.

    This giving up of our lives is anything but a “once and done” event. It is like a lifetime commitment to regular exercise and a healthy diet, not a crash diet. And if you ever try to genuinely change, to “put to death” the old life to take up the new, you will find it all but impossible. And by our own strength, cunning, and will, it is impossible. But with God, it is not only possible, it is all but certain, as long as we do what we can and trust in God for the real change. If we press into the Ignatian First Principle and Foundation, asking God to make it so with us, he will.

    Coda

    It was only after I was about half way through with this piece that I realized I was really just riffing on the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20): The seed that falls on the path is “Ignore;” the seed on stony soil and the seed among the thorns is “Accomodate;” land the seed in good soil is “Embrace.” If I am inspired (even without realizing it) by Jesus’ teaching, that can’t be a bad thing! “He who has ears, let him hear.”

    1. Neither do we realize that when we abandon our “old” life, we are given a life that is better in every dimension that matters. ↩︎
    2. Luke 9:23-24 ↩︎
  • What Does God Smell Like?

    What Does God Smell Like?

    We often picture God in our mind’s eye. Many of us hear God’s voice. But in a recent prayer time, I wondered, “What does God smell like?” Even as I write that, it feels like a weird question. Yet science tells us that our sense of smell is uniquely tied to our emotions and memories.1 So I sat with the question of what does God smell like.

    God smells like
         Incense and candles
              Grandfather's pipe
                   Grandmother's floral perfume
                        A lonely dirt road
                             The forest after a rain
                                  Honest sweat
                                       A new-born baby
                                            An approaching thunderstorm
                                                 Freshly fallen snow
                                                      Baking bread
                                                 A springtime meadow
                                            A field after the harvest
                                       Freshly cut grass
                                  A mountain waterfall
                             Freshly turned loamy soil
                        Autumn Leaves
                   Citrus in bloom
              The first thaw of spring
         Shed Blood

    What does God smell like to you?

    1. See, for example, https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/connections-between-smell-memory-and-health ↩︎
  • Chapter 21: Grace and Peace

    Chapter 21: Grace and Peace

    “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you”
    John 14:27

    The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness
    Exodus 34:6

    Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
    Romans 1:7

    As I sift through my remaining journal entries from my time in my Pops’ Workshop, I find some entries that don’t “move the story along” but are nonetheless important to understanding how God was moving in my life at that time. Sometimes I see themes that grow in importance over time. Two Hebrew words fall into that category

    When I experienced visions of “My Place,” I came to know that the Hebrew words shalom (שָׁלוֹם) and hesed (חֶסֶד) are foundational to it, and therefore to my offering of spiritual direction. When I would see My Place while praying or thinking about it and pondering what the Lord might have in store for me, those words would come to mind and demand my attention. God was once again trading on my innate (and sometimes obsessive) curiosity. I spent a lot of time wondering about these words. Exactly how the words are significant took a while to unpack.  

    One day, my regular Bible reading took me to 1 Kings 7, where, as part of building the temple, Solomon constructs two towering pillars which he named Boaz (in him is strength) and Jachin (he will establish). The instant I read that passage, it dropped into my mind that shalom and hesed would be the doorposts for My Place. I have never understood how Solomon’s towering pillars triggered a thought about what frames the entry to My Place, but understanding hesed and shalom helps me understand God’s character. That, in turn, helps to understand and anchor the healing and restoration I experienced in my Pops’ Workshop, and it grounds my practice of spiritual direction. It makes perfect sense that hesed and shalom, or grace and peace, should be the hallmarks of my ministry of spiritual direction.

    Grace

    The first of those two words, hesed (חֶסֶד), had come to my attention years before my time in my Pops’ Workshop. I was reading in the Psalms and kept seeing “steadfast love” pop up over and over again. Why did those words in particular catch my attention? The only explanation I can offer is that it was a nudge from the Holy Spirit. God reaches each of us in whatever way He can; He uses my natural curiosity to get me to think about something important that I should pay attention to. In this case, he nudged me toward learning about hesed.

    The meaning of hesed is multi-faceted and nuanced; it does not readily translate directly into English. Depending on the translation you use, you will find hesed rendered as lovingkindness, mercy, love, steadfast love, faithful love, or loyal love. Yet none of those fully capture the meaning of this word that God uses to describe himself. The meaning of hesed is so deep and rich that Michael Card spent ten years writing a book about this one word. In the aptly titled “Inexpressible,” Card gives us his working definition of hesed: “When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.”1

    Hesed is foundational to who God is. When he passes before Moses on Mount Sinai, God declares that he is “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in [hesed] and faithfulness, keeping [hesed] for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin…”2 Hesed overflows the Psalms, often highlighting God’s hesed as something that makes him different from any other god; He is love, and he cannot not love, that is the nature of his hesed. Other gods may (temporarily) be pleased with us or with our actions, but the God of heaven loves us. Our thoughts or actions do not enter into a worthiness calculation. In fact, there is no calculation; we are loved and nothing we say, or think, or do can change that.

    The Hebrew word “hesed” is, of course, absent from the New Testament, which was written in Greek, but that does not mean that we cannot see God’s hesed there. Scholars tell us that the closest to hesed we get in the New Testament is “Charis,” nearly always translated as “Grace,” meaning unmerited favor. That is an awful lot like Card’s summary of hesed: “When the person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.” When Luther translated the Bible into German, he used the German word for “grace” to translate both “hesed” and “charis”, explicitly linking them.

    The gospel, the central message of Christianity, turns on God’s hesed. Jesus’s life and sacrificial, redemptive death are the ultimate expression of hesed. We are saved, redeemed, and brought into new life even though we have done nothing to deserve it. (And most of us have done a LOT that should disqualify us from receiving it!)

    When my children were young, my wife and I wanted to give them a concrete understanding of Grace. We had fairly early on taken away the option of dessert following dinner; we were exhausted from arguing with them about whether or not they had eaten enough of their meal to merit or “earn” dessert. Then it struck us: Sunday became Grace day. You got dessert even if you didn’t eat a single bite of your dinner; you got dessert on Sunday by grace, by charis, by hesed.

    Peace

    We have already met Shalom (שָׁלוֹם) in Chapter 8, when the Lord invited (or commanded3) me to “speak peace” over a seeming multitude. Shalom is usually translated as “peace,” but like hesed, its meaning is much richer and more profound than can be expressed in a single English word. We usually think of peace as a freedom from hostilities, either earthly strife or between God and man. Shalom can mean that, but it also conveys prosperity, well-being, health, and completeness. To wish someone shalom is to wish them all those things.

    Living in God’s Peace

    We are intended to live our lives in the embrace of God’s shalom. It is what we are designed for and what we are meant to experience. If you have hung around many churches, you have likely heard this blessing many times: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you [shalom].”4,5 That blessing is prescribed by God; he commands the priests to bless the people with that particular blessing, calling forth God’s shalom for the people.

    God plans for us to live in his shalom: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for [shalom] and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”6 God wants us to experience his peace, and he is delighted when we do. “Great is the LORD, who delights in the [shalom] of his servant!”7

    We have a dysfunctional relationship with God’s rules for his people. We approach his instruction as if it were the criminal code, which we must obey or face punishment; that is not the case. He gives his people instructions for living, not because he wants to force compliance with his way, not because he is the consummate micromanager or a control freak, but because he wants us to experience his shalom. “Oh that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your [shalom] would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea.”8

    Following God’s commandments yields shalom like a well-tended tree yields fruit; not as a payment or reward, but as a natural consequence. C. S. Lewis reminds us that we are meant to “run on” God.9 Following God’s instruction is then just common sense.

    When we understand the fullness of shalom, we glimpse the beauty of life in God’s kingdom. As is the case with hesed, we do not find shalom in the New Testament. But shalom’s Greek counterpart, eirēnē, is there some ninety-two times. This should hardly surprise us. The prophet Isaiah declared that one of the names of the messiah would be “Prince of Peace.”10

    The Prince of Peace

    From beginning to end, peace accompanies Jesus. An angelic declaration of peace heralds Christ’s birth: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”11 At the close of his earthly ministry, Jesus bestows his peace on his followers: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”12 And the resurrected Jesus blesses his followers with peace: “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’”13

    Paul, Peter, John, and Jude all greet or bless their readers with the Peace of Christ. To experience the peace of God, which Paul reminds us “surpasses all understanding,”14 and to live in his shalom, is to partake of the life we were designed to enjoy.

    Grace and Peace, Hesed and Shalom: whether in Hebrew or English, those words are central to understanding who God is and how he thinks and feels about us. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are enactments of God’s hesed and shalom. It is little wonder that God would impress upon me the need to frame my ministry of spiritual direction with grace and peace; hesed and shalom.

    1. Card, Michael. Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of God’s Lovingkindness (p. 5). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
    2. Exodus 34:6-7 (ESV) ↩︎
    3. Invited or commanded? I like to think it was an invitation – something I could accept or not. But I know in my heart that it was a command and that command is something I still struggle with nearly a decade later. ↩︎
    4. Depending on the translation you use, you will find shalom behind words other than peace. Here, and in what follows, I have taken the liberty of replacing the translator’s choice with the Hebrew shalom. ↩︎
    5. Numbers 6:24-26 ↩︎
    6. Jeremiah 29:11 ↩︎
    7. Psalms 35:27 ↩︎
    8. Isaiah 48:18 ↩︎
    9. See Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics) (p. 50). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
    10. Isaiah 9:6 ↩︎
    11. Luke 2:14 ↩︎
    12. John 14:27 ↩︎
    13. John 20:19 ↩︎
    14. Philippians 4:7 ↩︎

  • The Unlooked-For Good

    The Unlooked-For Good

    Christmas is nearly here. This year, the approach of Christmas leaves me with mixed emotions. I long for a Norman Rockwell Christmas: a loving family gathering around a fragrant balsam, feasting, good-natured ribbing, games, laughter, making new memories, and sharing remembrances of Christmases past.

    That fantasized Christmas is rarely, if ever, anyone’s reality. I have come close to it a few times. But the truth is that our dream of the perfect family Christmas, a wistful melange of Rockwell, Hallmark, and Hollywood Christmas classics, is not likely to be realized. Nonetheless, we look for it, we hope for it, and we may even convince ourselves that it is”normal” and anything else is a letdown.

    This Christmas, it will be just my wife and me at home, as it was last year. This is not a bad thing. Our children are grown, with their own families and busy schedules. They should be building their own traditions and their own memories. But the truth remains: our Christmas will look nothing like my idealized version of the Holiday.

    The massive gap between what we expect and what we get can become a hazardous space. We can be like a child who had his heart set on a pony for Christmas and, when he doesn’t get it, angrily rejects the gifts he did receive, gifts which would have delighted him had he not been consumed by the wrath that came from not getting his desired pony.

    This phenomenon is not limited to our holiday experiences; it can infect our spiritual lives as well. We can set our hearts on one particular good, which we eagerly await, straining to discern its advent. Focused on that one Good, we run the risk of not noticing the good that God does offer us. Or even if we do notice it we may reject it because we are too busy chasing the good we want and expect or because we are sulking and angry that we didn’t get what we wanted.

    C. S. Lewis noted this tendency.

    “It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life – in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience – we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. And of course we don’t get that. You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good.”
    ― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

    The same sentiment found its way into Lewis’ novel “Perelandra,” where a pre-fall “Eve” contemplates the temptation of wanting what we expected and despising what we received.

    One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before that at the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or a setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.”
    ― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra.

    I find myself in this state more often than I like to admit. I have decided what is good for me, what will make me happy, or how God will come through if he really loves me. And when I don’t get what I want or expect, I miss the good I am being given.

    When my Christmas does not meet the Norman Rockwell/Hallmark fantasy I carry in my imagination, can I set aside my disappointment and embrace the good I am being given? Or am I like those in Jesus’ day who were expecting and looking for a liberating King and so missed the presence of Love incarnate?1

    What are you looking for? What is the good you are expecting? How do you want God to show up in your life? Now, in the Christmas season, and always, when you expect a particular good, and when your cherished dreams don’t materialize, look for the good that is given, even as you lament the good you were expecting. Quiet your soul, take your lament to God in prayer, then ask him, “What is the real good you are giving me now?”

    1. Thanks to Torrie Sorge for this inspiration on Threads. ↩︎

  • Chapter 20: The Mother of All Sin

    Chapter 20: The Mother of All Sin

    Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer…. An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician.

    C.S. Lewis: Family letters 1905-1931 (ed. 2000)

    It had not been very long since I had encountered Pride Rock; only a few weeks had passed. I was content, knowing that my pride was well and properly dealt with and was now safely part of the foundation of my place. I was also wrong. The Lord was far from done with me and my pride.

    Another Side of Pride: Selfishness

    During my time in Pops’ Workshop, I noticed a pattern of God speaking to me through corporate confession in church. At my church, like at many other churches around the world, we often have a liturgy of corporate confession that includes time for silent reflection. It was during those times that I would hear from the Lord.

    It makes sense that we would hear more readily in those times. He is always speaking. When we are full of ourselves and our ideas, we crowd our minds with our grand thoughts and don’t leave much space for other voices, making it harder to hear what the Lord is speaking. When we confess our sinful thoughts, actions, and desires, we empty ourselves or ourselves, making it easier for the voice of God to break through.

    During a Sunday worship service, as we paused for silent reflection during our corporate confession, I heard the word “Selfish.” More than just hearing that word, it was being thrust upon me. There was no gentle suggestion or Holy Spirit “nudge.” It was more of a siren than a word, an in-my-face, insistent, almost shrill voice repeating over and over again, “Selfish, Selfish, Selfish!” That got my attention. It could not be ignored any more than a ten-foot-tall flashing neon sign placed directly in your path could be ignored. As I sat with that “word,” I became aware of several areas of my life where I was being very selfish indeed.

    I had been in a funk because things were not turning out the way I wanted. I was in an in-between space. I was being healed but not whole, being called to ministry but still in a grueling “day job,” seeing how much I had changed and was changing but having those closest to me tell me I must be “faking it.” I wanted to be on the other side of healing. I wanted to be able to focus on ministry. I wanted my loved ones to acknowledge the depth of the change God was working in me.

    Those are reasonable frustrations and reasonable wants. It was not selfish of me to want those things. However, I wanted what I wanted without considering what others might want or need. I was thinking about only one person: myself! And, to make it worse, I was sulking and withdrawing when I didn’t get my way. That is why the warning klaxon, “Selfish,” sounded for me that Sunday morning.

    I wasn’t thinking about Pride or even the Workshop, but unexpectedly, my thoughts jumped back to Pride Rock. I saw it once again standing upright. As I watched, it was lifted up, and I could see its underside. Carved there, where it was otherwise invisible, was the word “Selfish.” The Lord was directing me to recognize my selfishness as another side of Pride.

    I am sure that many readers are right now saying, “Well, duh!” of course, they are related. But I hadn’t ever thought about that,1 and it makes sense. What, besides Pride, thinking we are really something special, leads us to believe that we should have whatever we decide we want. What, aside from a pride-fueled sense of entitlement, makes us think we should have our wishes granted as soon as we wish them? What, besides Pride and conceit, leads us to believe that our needs, wants, and desires are, without question, more important than anyone and everyone else’s needs, wants, and desires?

    Pride need not look boastful and preening. It can also appear selfish and demanding. Clearly, God was not yet done with me and my pride. My pride was more pernicious and more toxic than I had imagined, and I was about to learn yet another lesson about pride and selfishness.

    Even Another Side of Pride: Discontent

    The more time you spend being attentive to what God may be saying, the more often you’ll find him “breaking in” to your everyday activities. That can lead to getting revelation in the oddest times. I was still a road warrior, flying across the country most weeks of the year. While boarding a flight to Virginia, I thought about how hard it was for me to exercise and tend to my diet while on the road. Suddenly, an image of the exterior of my Pops’ Workshop flashed in my mind. It was as if the Lord was saying, “Pay attention, this is me.” Instantly, I saw with bitter clarity that not exercising and eating poorly were other manifestations of selfishness.

    They really had nothing to do with my travel schedule; they had to do with me wanting to eat what I wanted and to do (or not do) what I wanted and when I wanted to do it. If I didn’t feel like exercising, I shouldn’t have to. I deserved to spend my time the way wanted to, not how I “should.” If I wanted to have a seconds at dinner or have fries instead of a vegetable, why shouldn’t I have it? I deserved to have what I wanted!2

    The hits just kept on coming, and next, the Lord spoke to me about dissatisfaction. Earlier that morning, as I was walking from my car to the airport terminal, I was feeling a bit depressed at having to leave home again after a very short weekend home. I had returned home on Friday, a day later than usual, and on Sunday, I was already headed back to the airport. I felt stuck, despising my life on the road, and feeling anything but contented.

    Back on the jet bridge, waiting to get on the plane for Virginia, I realized that my discontent was yet another side of pride. Discontent: a “lack of satisfaction with one’s possessions, status, or situation; a sense of grievance; dissatisfaction.”3 Pride-born selfishness is the progenitor of discontent and the enemy of contentment. It says, “I should have my life how I want it. It is unfair, unjust, and unacceptable for me not to have things my way.” How dare the world not deliver life on my terms? But as a Christian, am I not really saying, “God, not your will be done, but mine?” In my discontent, I am, in effect, saying to God, “I know what is needed in my life better than you do.”

    To put a little icing on the cake of discontentment, my Bible reading for that day included Philippians 4. Paul, writing to the church at Philippi, says:

    I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.
    Philippians 4:11-13 NIV

    If anyone had reason to be discontented, Paul certainly did. Scholars tell us that his letter to the Philippian church was written after he had been, at various times, threatened, arrested, beaten, stoned and left for dead, imprisoned, and shipwrecked, with most of those calamities happening more than once. Yet he was content. I was seriously put out that I had to travel for my job. I think I was missing something important.

    An Object Lesson in Selfishness

    On that travel day, now aboard the plane and en route to Virginia, I was journaling some of my reflections on selfishness and discontent when I was suddenly convicted of yet another instance of selfishness.

    I was seated next to an older woman who was traveling by herself. She had accidentally left all her reading material in her checked bag and had nothing to do except peruse the in-flight magazine.4 It was obvious that she wanted to talk to somebody. I did not want it to be me. Usually, when on a plane I was quick to put on my noise-canceling headphones and immerse myself in a book, a movie, a game, or almost anything besides engaging a seatmate in conversation. So, knowing that my neighbor was bored and wanted to talk and knowing that she was left with nothing else to do, I did what you would expect. Put on my headphones and piously and pointedly spent my time catching up on my Bible reading and praying.

    As I ended my prayer time and started journaling, with my seatmate sitting silently beside me, I finally woke up and stopped analyzing what God was saying and started actually listening to it. I put my things away and engaged my seatmate in conversation for the next two and a half hours. I had to set aside my selfish desire for solitude to ease someone else’s anxiety and boredom. I had to put a stranger’s ill-defined needs above my needs. Incidentally, but not surprisingly, it was a very pleasant conversation with a caring woman who had led a very interesting life.

    Pride: The Mother of All Sins

    Self-glorifying pride has been the mother of all manner of sin in my life. Pride births selfishness, greed, anger, discontent, impatience, jealousy, lying and deceit. That list gives us a pretty fair start on Paul’s enumeration of the works of the flesh in Galatians 5.5

    We should not be surprised by the destructive power and malignancy of Pride. It is the first sin the enemy taught our Mother and Father in the Garden of Eden. “God is holding out on you. You deserve better. Why should you be kept from having what you want? Go ahead, take it!”

    The antidote to Pride is Jesus. By knowing him and spending time with him, we begin to learn that we have been chasing the wrong things. Joy and contentment, so much greater than our desires and happiness, are ours when we know that we are known and loved by he, who is the beginning, center, and end of all things. In him, we find what our souls long for. Then, we can become lovers of others instead of prideful lovers of self.

    1. I wonder how much our spiritual health could be improved by spending time thinking about how our sin patterns overlap and intersect. ↩︎
    2. Full disclosure: Years later, I am retired, and I still struggle with getting enough exercise and eating properly. The problem was not traveling! ↩︎
    3. “Discontent.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discontent. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024. ↩︎
    4. It may seem strange to think of it, but there was no on-board WiFi at this time, and many flights had no on-board entertainment. They did have airline magazines, which most people read only as a last resort. ↩︎
    5. “Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Galatians 5:19-21, ESV ↩︎
  • Pursuing Grace

    Pursuing Grace

    My Desire is here
    just beyond my reach
    I see it
    I sense it
    I need it

    With each movement toward it, it retreats
    Like a wary bird, staying just our of reach
    A slow reach toward it,  a slow retreat
    Thrusting out my arm, a dash away
    A violent rushing grasp falls on empty air

    Ever fleeing; never leaving.
    Always returning, resting tantalizingly close.
    I want it; I need it
    A siren song I cannot ignore
    Yet every move to take it fails

    Stymied, I sit
    Watching
    Waiting
    Wondering
    Planning my next move

    In my quietude, my Desire moves ever closer
    Coming to rest on my open, outstretched hand
    My chance!
    My hand snaps closed
    To hold my treasure with an iron grip.

    My Desire, as if a vapor
    Slips through my closed fist
    Soon to perch again
    Just beyond my reach
    Ever fleeing; never leaving.

    Is this a joke; A cosmic tease?
    I cannot have what I most need?
    Shouting into the emptiness:
    "Why am I made to desire what I cannot have?"
    "Who delights in withholding what my soul yearns for?"

    My anger drains me
    Emptied of will
    Bereft of demands
    I sit again with hands outstretched
    Toward the unreachable, ungraspable

    It draws near again
    To rest again in my hands
    Exhausted and empty, I do nothing
    Sitting with my desire in my hands
    But not possessed by me

    An idea grows in my mind.
    Birthed of desperation
    Or planted there by what rests in my hands
    I draw my hands slowly to my chest
    Embracing my desire

    It does not flee
    Like a snowflake falling on water
    It melts into me
    It is gone
    But it remains

    It flows into me
    It makes its home in me
    Food for my soul
    Water of life
    I hunger and thirst no more

    At peace
    No desire to grasp or hold
    No need to possess
    I am complete
    I do not want

    Grace
    It cannot be taken, only given
    It cannot be earned, only received
    Becoming empty, I am filled
    Surrender is victory

  • Chapter 19: A Place of My Own

    Chapter 19: A Place of My Own

    The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock.
    Matthew 7:25

    Not long after my lessons on pride and selfishness, sitting with my director in prayer, I once again found myself in the Workshop. As usual, I had not sought the workshop and so had no agenda. My Pops was, as usual, working near the door. No sooner had I entered than he turned to me and said, “Shouldn’t you be building your own workshop?” My Pop’s abrupt question was a surprise but wasn’t completely unexpected. I had been picking up clues that the workshop was a place of healing, growing, and learning but not a place to dwell. It is a workshop, not a home.

    Of course, I was not to be banished from the presence of the Trinity. God makes his home in us, and he invites us to make our home him. But my particular experience of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in my Pops’ Workshop was ending. It was an intensive — a boot camp of sorts. A boot camp is not a place to dwell. We learn the basics, albeit intensely. The foundation is laid, and then it is time to move on to put into practice what we have learned while we continue to learn and grow.

    Me? Really?

    Even though I knew deep down inside that I would not always remain in the Workshop, the idea that I would build my own workshop took me aback. It seemed a very unlikely thing for me to do. I quickly came up with any number of reasons I could not “build my own workshop.” What would it even mean for me to build a workshop? After all, my Pops’s Workshop does not have a physical location. (At least I don’t think it does!) My Pops’ Workshop is his, created by him. I can’t create something on par with God. My workshop could be at best a faint shadow of his.

    Even if I figured out what it would mean to build “my place,” what would be the point? In my Pops’ Workshop, I encountered the loving, healing, and transformative presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If I built a workshop, anyone who showed up hoping for something similar would be sorely disappointed. The only person they would meet in my workshop would be me! God was doing remarkable and wonderful things for me. What could I do for anyone in “my place?” Even though Jesus had directly invited me to participate in his work of restoring beauty to souls, I certainly didn’t feel up to the task.

    I had (and still have) a long way to go in trusting Jesus. He would not send me out on an impossible mission. If he calls me to something, there must be a way to accomplish it. Critically, I was forgetting that Jesus had invited me to work with him. He was not subcontracting work to me. I would not be on my own; he would be there with me.

    But don’t judge my lack of trust too harshly. I had not yet started my studies to become a spiritual director and so I had not learned that people cannot bring peace, healing, wholeness, or anything really worth something to anyone. The best we can do is hold space, listen well, and prayerfully support people as they come into the presence of the Lord. We can assist, but without Jesus, nothing happens.

    Nonetheless, at that moment, I was doubtful of building a place of my own. How often do we hear an invitation from God, and then, believing that we must do everything in our own strength, we rush for the exit, knowing that, left to our own devices, we will fail? But we are not left to our own devices and we don’t have to do everything in our own strength.

    We are invited to join God in the work he is doing, not to brush him aside and take over. He doesn’t need our help; really, he doesn’t. He is capable of doing whatever he wants without us. He does not need us, but he wants us. He wants us involved in the ongoing work of revealing his kingdom of the heavens here on Earth. By myself, I can do very little; working in alignment with God’s plans, I can let his love and power flow through me to accomplish his purposes. I don’t need to do it all, and I certainly don’t need to do it alone.

    To underscore that I don’t need to do everything, during a time of further silence, Jesus showed me that I would not have to build my workshop myself.  I saw people coming with tools and armloads of lumber to help me build my workshop.  By this time I had decided to pursue training as a director, but that training was still months off. Nonetheless, I was certain that some of the help would be from the School of Direction.1  I also believed, with my director, that there would be other help that I didn’t know about now and couldn’t foresee or expect.2 

    A Foundation God Can Build On

    A few days later, I saw a vision of my workshop “under construction.” At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing.  My Pop’s Workshop is deep in a forest, surrounded by dense woods. I had assumed that mine would be similarly situated, but I saw the top of a wind-swept knoll or hill covered with long, dry grass like you find in the high desert of Northern Arizona.  The forest around my Pops’ Workshop is lush and inviting. What I was being shown seemed dry, desolate, and lonely. It did not look inviting, like a place anyone would want to go.

    At first, I thought the hill was topped with a patch of bare dirt.  However, as I continued to look at it I could see that there was a foundation in the ground.  My natural mind assumed it would be a cement slab, but I soon knew that wasn’t right. Instead of a poured concrete slab, the foundation was made of stacked stones.  That difference was only mildly interesting until I noticed something surprising. “Pride” rock, that huge, imposing, fearsome rock that I could not shift from the stream below Pops’ Workshop, was there as part of the stone foundation.  It was laying on its side, its triangular shape helping to level the foundation where it met the slope of the hill.  The word “pride” was facing out, now written horizontally. I soon realized that, in addition to pride rock, all the other rocks I had pulled out of the well and given to Jesus were being used as the foundation of my workshop.  The entire stacked-stone foundation seemed to be made up of stones I had given to Jesus in the stream below the Workshop.

    I was puzzled. There were many more stones in the foundation than I had given to Jesus; at least more than I was aware of giving him. As I sat with that puzzle, I came to see that the foundation stones are the fruit of surrender.  Any time I have surrendered to Jesus, allowing him to know me more fully, he has added to the foundation. For many years, not just the few months I had been experiencing the Workshop, Jesus been preparing the foundation of my workshop, waiting for me to discover it and be ready for me to build on it.

    Jesus can build on the foundation of our surrender; I am confident that he can build on no other. But this feels counterintuitive to the modern, Western mind. We value strength and pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We look down on weakness and surrender or giving up. Giving up and giving Jesus the rocks of my sinfulness and brokenness is weakness.  It is an admission that I can’t do it. To be whole, I have to give up all of myself, especially the parts that my pride would rather withhold.  We must surrender our desire to be the gods of our own puny and ineffectual kingdoms if we are to enter Jesus’ kingdom of the heavens.

    Being weak to be strong is no surprise to one who reads the Bible.

    • To cling to our lives is to lose them; to find our lives we must lose them for Jesus’ sake.3
    • The first will be last and the last will be first.4
    • We must receive the kingdom like little children.5
    • Our weakness reveals God’s strength.6

    My surrender, self-exposure, and admission that I can’t do it became the place where Jesus can be strong in and through me.  Surrender is the perfect building material for a foundation.

    If you want to grow deeper in your faith, to have a personal, impactful relationship with Jesus, but can’t seem to find your way to that, it may be a good idea to spend some time with Jesus, asking about your foundation. What are you holding on to that he needs to complete the foundation he can build on? It may be a sin, shame, guilt, anger, pride, or something else. Whatever it is, pray for the strength to be weak, to let Jesus have all of it, especially the nasty and unpleasant parts. He already knows about them, you lose nothing by bringing them to him and you have everything gain.

    1. That assurance was well placed. ↩︎
    2. This proved to be true. I have found unexpected help and support from organizations like the ESDA, Mosaic Formation, the Arizona Spiritual Formation Society, and the Apprentice Institute and people associated with them. ↩︎
    3. Mt 10:39, 16:25; Mk 8:35; Luke 9:24; Jn 12:25 ↩︎
    4. Mt 19:30, 20:16; Mk 9:35, 10:31; Lk 13:30 ↩︎
    5. Mt 18:2-4; Mk 10:15; Lk 18:17 ↩︎
    6. 1Co 2:3-5; 2Co 12:9 ↩︎
  • The 23rd Psalm for the Anxious Life

    The 23rd Psalm for the Anxious Life

    Anxiety seems to be an inescapable fact of our times. The vast amount of information available, carefully curated by algorithms to keep us engaged and coming back for more, seems destined to drive up our anxiety. Nearly everything is hyperbolic. Death, destruction, danger, and peril are presented as always just around the corner.

    Surely we do live in fraught times. We have deep and seemingly unbridgeable chasms in our society. Politics, race, gender, and religion all seem to be pulling us apart. It is no wonder we are anxious. As real as our perils are, we amplify them in our social networks, adding to our anxiety. We are anything but peaceful, yet Jesus promised his followers peace:

    Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
    John 14:27 ESV

    Years ago, inspired by a talk from Alan Fadling, I was inspired to write a “version” of the 23rd Psalm, for the hurried life. Recently, I attended another workshop with Alan, this time on living an un-anxious life. Unexpectedly, I found myself drawn again to the 23rd Psalm, this time to adapt it for the anxious life.

    The 23rd Psalm for the Anxious Life

    Anxiety is my shepherd,
    I shall have no peace.
    It makes me distrust green meadows.
    It worries me beside still waters.
    It erodes my soul.
    It leads me in paths of destruction for no purpose.

    Even though I walk in the presence of God, I will fear every evil, forgetting he is with me; his rod and his staff fill me with dread.

    Anxiety feeds me a forecast of disasters that delights my enemies.
    It churns my mind with fear; worry overflows my life.

    Surely panic and brittleness will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the chaos of my mind forever.

    Anxiety is a part of our nature; it can serve us well. But when we find anxiety mastering us instead of serving us, we shouldn’t passively accept that. It is not God’s design for us to be mastered by anxiety. As one who lives with anxiety, I can attest that there is no silver bullet. Medication and therapy are both valuable tools.

    Practicing the presence of God is another valuable tool. It can be as simple as reminding our souls of the truth of the real 23rd Psalm, “The LORD is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack” (Psalms 23:1 HSCB). Our shepherd is the wisest, most competent, and caring shepherd. Reminding ourselves of that truth regularly can be a powerful tool in our anti-anxiety toolbox.

  • Workshop Chapter 18: Being

    Workshop Chapter 18: Being

    I did not know it beforehand, but I was reaching the beginning of the end of my time in my Pops’ Workshop. A new phase, which would be the last, was beginning. Looking back, I can see three broad movements in my time in my Pops’ Workshop: identity and invitation, healing and wholeness, and calling and sending.

    The first movement was about identity and invitation. I learned who I am to God and who God is to me. I began the long and still-ongoing process of learning to trust him and yielding myself to his will. Understanding who I am to God meant understanding that I have purposes I never would have guessed.1 I was invited to be a small part of the healing and restoration Jesus brings through the ministry of the Holy Spirit and I was invited to bring words of peace and wholeness.

    The second movement, my time with the Holy Spirit and my time below the Workshop, focused on my healing and wholeness. I had been promised both peace for my soul and attacks by the enemy, with the assurance that any hurts would be put right. I had taken an inward journey, discovering how the hurts and pain I stuffed down and tried to ignore had damaged my soul and were crippling my ability to share the life-giving waters of Christ-life. Jesus had come alongside me and invited me to bring my hurts, doubts, and sinful attitudes to him. I began the long, continuing journey toward soul wholeness.

    A third movement was now starting; It was a movement of calling and sending. In some ways this was an echo and amplification of earlier the earlier invitations to help Jesus sand and polish to reveal inner beauty, to somehow facilitate the Holy Spirit’s internal work, and make God’s promise of peace widely known.

    As this third movement unfolded, the way I experienced the workshop was also changing. Up to this point, my time in the workshop formed a fairly linear, coherent narrative, which made for easier writing. My experiences in the Workshop were becoming more like self-contained lessons, though the same lesson was often revisited. My “visits” were becoming shorter and more a distinct point. As I look over my journal entries for the remainder of my time visiting my Pops’ Workshop, it is much harder to tease out any kind of narrative. Accordingly, from this point onward, I will share my time Pops’ Workshop thematically and not necessarily share encounters in the order they happened.

    Being

    Even as the end was beginning, there were still some important lessons I needed to learn. In a direction session my director reminded me that much of what happened in the Workshop was Jesus healing, shaping, and forming me.  That seems obvious to me now, but then it was something that was not front of mind. I simply didn’t notice what had happened and what was happening, especially where my interior state was concerned. We talked at length about just “being” with emotions and thoughts. He encouraged me to set aside analysis in favor of experiencing what was happening in the moment.

    I had (and often still have) an unhealthy predilection to question and analyze my thoughts and emotions, novel ones in particular. Given the unpredictable environment of my youth that is not very surprising. I had developed a finely tuned analytical engine that had helped to protect me. Retreating inward in analysis helped me see where danger could be brewing and it also took me mentally and emotionally out of traumatic situations. I built a sturdy wall. Instead of the healthy processing of emotion, I learned avoidance. I stuffed it, either down the hole or hidden away, not to be recovered. In either case, I had learned not to be present to unpleasant and stressful situations.

    As is often the case, the defensive mechanisms we craft in our youth are not helpful to us later in life. My inward withdrawal and shutting down was not limited to unpleasant emotions or frightening situations. I had taught myself to use analysis to pull back from unpleasant and stressful situations, emotions, and thoughts. But my defense mechanism was not selective. It applied to all situations, emotions, and events, whether they were good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, sacred or profane. Every emotion, good or bad, that stirred me and every thought that came to my mind had to be understood. What did it mean? What did I need to do about it? What action was necessary?

    Focusing on critical analysis and working out the next step, usually a defensive step, kept me from being present to what was happening. I was mainly unaware of the breadth and depth of what God was doing to me, in me, and for me. Instead of receiving and being present to God’s grace, I was racing ahead to see what “it” meant and what I should do next.

    The action of analysis, the effort to try to understand and make sense of something, necessarily removes us from the experience we are seeking to understand We stop being participants and start being observers. For me, the most tragic instance of this is failing to be present to moments of transcendant joy. Rather than simply be in that moment, I would detach, taking myself out of the moment, to think about how that feeling of joy came about, how I could maintain it, and how I could get it again in the future. It was like seeing a beautiful sunset beginning to unfold and running into the house to check all the astronomical and meterogical conditions that caused to occur so that I could better understand it and vainly believe I could anticipate and “be ready” for the next one, all the while missing the beauty in front of me.

    For many things, especially the things of God, the greatest and perhaps only value, is being present in the moment. The only time we can experience God is in the present moment. We can remember how he was present in the past, but we cannot experience him in the past. We can dream and imagine how he might be present to us in the future, but we cannot experience him in the future. The only time we can be present to God is in this moment. When we take ourselves out of the present moment because we are afraid, uncomfortable, or as a learned defense, we take away the possibility of being aware of God and seeing his activity in and around us.

    My director’s advice was wise. I needed to learn to set aside analysis in favor of experiencing what was happening in the moment.