From Pops' Workshop

Category: In Pops’ Workshop

  • Chapter 23: Endings And Beginnings

    My time in My Pops’ Workshop was ending. I would still see it in visions from time to time for another year or so, but those were less times of transformation and more times of illumination and encouragement. I continued, for a time to be taught and coached by the Lord through visions, but that season too came to end.

    As I reflect on all that transpired in my Pops’ Workshop and all the healing that was begun there, I am literally awestruck. Looking through the lens of spiritual formation, drawing on what I learned when studying to be director and my on-going education and reading, I see three movements in play: Identity, Healing and Purpose.

    Identity

    My time in Pops’ Workshop started with identity. Who was God to me? Who am I to God? What was Father like? What about Jesus, could I understand him as a human and not just as part of the Godhead? And just what does the Holy Spirit do? More importantly, could I find, somewhere in the trinity, love and acceptance?

    Father

    I found a Father who loves me, whether I am covered in glory or covered in shame and who was was always ready to be with me. One of the unexpected aspects of my time in my Pops’ Workshop was the exposure of hurts I did not know I carried in my soul. My earthly father was neither the best nor the worst of fathers, but I never felt anything approaching unconditional love. That I knew. I had not realized that I had also carried a belief that I was a bother and my dad would rather that I not engage with him except on his terms and timing. As I spent time with my Pops, I was surprised that he always has time for me; if he was “busy,” he always dropped what he was doing to attend to me. When I am with him, I am the only things that mattered; he thinks of nothing but me and there is nothing else he needs to attend to. This was an incredibly freeing healing. I am not loved grudgingly or out of obligation. I am a dearly beloved son of the Father.

    Son

    I had experienced Jesus’ love for me even before my time in Pops’ workshop. Yet here again my soul was marked by hurts I did not know I was carrying. Without realizing it, I had come to believe that I was too damaged and broken to ever be of much Kingdom use. But I found Jesus accepting me and inviting me to join him in his redemptive work from “day one,” before we undertook any of my much needed inner work.

    I came into Pops’ Workshop believing that while Jesus loved me, he would love me better or differently if I cleaned myself up and got my act together. Seriously, I didn’t even like myself all that much, so how could Jesus? I didn’t expect that he would stand in the slime and muck of my fouled inner life and gladly take from me all the things that were polluting my soul. And I certainly didn’t expect him to take on my sin of pride.

    Holy Spirit

    The third person of the trinity remains mysterious for me. Holy Spirit was not readily visible, and my interactions with him were the hardest to understand and to unpack. This does not surprise me. We are born of the Spirit that Jesus compares to the wind, we hear it and feel it, but we do not know where it comes from or where it is going. My encounter with Holy Spirit was healing, humbling, empowering, confusing, and enlightening all at the same time. I remain awestruck that I glimpsed the inner work of the Holy Spirit.

    Healing

    The second moment of my time in My Pops’ Workshop was healing. I was healed spiritually and emotionally. The Greek word usually translated as “save” is sozo, and means to be rescued, healed, and made whole. By that definition I was saved in my time in the Workshop.

    With a better sense of who God is and who I am to him, I was able to let myself be known more fully to God, opening the door to healing and wholeness.

    Purpose

    One of the unexpected changes that flows out of healing and wholeness is a redirection of our hearts. Before I was in my Pops’ Workshop, I was my biggest concern. How could I get what I wanted?1 My number one question was, “what about me?”

    Slowly but surely, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were about their work of replacing my heart of stone with one of flesh and blood,2 my focus shifted to God and to others. It began a shift away from being largely indifferent to others and to genuinely caring for and about others. I moved from asking, “How can I get what I want?” to wondering how I can love others as Jesus loves them. How can I help them find their way to the healing God wants for them? How can I be a responsible subject in the Kingdom of the Heavens?

    Endless Iteration

    These movements are neither discrete nor linear. And they certainly are not a “once and done.” They frequently overlapped each other and I have iterated through each many times. I find this picture a helpful visualization.

    Three movements in my spiritual formation

    Even now, years later, I revisit my identity and my view of God. I learn anew and at a deeper level that my identity is rooted not in what I think, do, say, earn, or achieve but in in the reality that I am a dearly beloved child of the Father.

    My spiritual and emotional healing is also an ongoing project. Of all the interior ills that beset me, I cannot identify a single one that is completely cured. Those ills have been attenuated, some to a remarkable degree and some not nearly as much as I would hope, but they are all still there to some degree. I have heard testimonies from people whose particular addiction or interior corruption was instantaneously healed. I have no reason to doubt those accounts, but that experience is foreign to me. My mystic prayer experiences, profound though they were, began but did not complete inner healing. My time in my Pop’s Workshop laid a strong foundation but did not make me “all right.”

    Finally, my sense of calling and kingdom purpose continues to evolve and be refreshed. The broad outlines of what I am to be about seem to be well-established, but how I am to walk that out shifts over time. I write blog posts, not books. I preach much more often than I could have expected. I sit with others, offering them spiritual direction, but not in the numbers I thought I would. God is using the skills and knowledge I learned as a team and management coach in the information technology sector to help church leadership teams learn and grow. I am being used for kingdom purposes in ways that I would not have imagined ten years ago.

    Formation Boot Camp

    What Jesus was doing, I now know, was attending to my spiritual formation. My time in the workshop was a spiritual formation boot camp. Robert Mulholland defines Spiritual Formation as “a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.”3 It is only after the fact, looking back that I can see that was exactly what was happening in my Pops’ Workshop. I was being lovingly restored and healed to uncover the image of Christ in me, for the sake of others. The work was not completed, but the foundations were laid. A boot camp is the beginning of training, not the end; my time in my Pops’ Workshop was intensive and extensive, and it marked a beginning. I am still learning, being healed, and made new, ever closer to the image of Christ we each carry.

    The gospels promise us a new life, one that is full and abundant; we are reborn. In Romans Paul declares that the gospel is the power of God for our salvation. We are saved from the power of sin and death, and we are rescued, restored, and healed of the ills that vex our souls. It was not until I believed these promises to the point of being dissatisfied with the shallow surface improvements I had managed to make to my old life that God could step in and offer true transformation. It was then that I could be transformed by the renewing of my mind.4

    What About You?

    What do you want? Are you unwilling to settle for a tidied up, somewhat improved version of your old life? Do you want a vibrant, spirit-filled new life? One of the hardest things for us to do is to trust that God is really who he says he is and that he really cares about and for us the way he says he does. I invite you to take the first small sip of trusting God, whatever that looks like for you. My journey began with sitting in stillness, trusting that God really did love me and would show me an expression of his love. That journey has taken me places I could not have imagined.

    How will your journey begin? Mostly likely with silence, solitude, and patient waiting. Perhaps you will be accompanied by a pastor, soul friend, or spiritual director who can help you spot the road signs along the way. One thing is certain: God has more in store for each of us than we could ever dare imagine and he is waiting for us to be with him so that he can bless us with new, full life.

    I pray that you will find the starting point of your journey. God will do the rest!

    1. Even though I didn’t know what I wanted! ↩︎
    2. Ezekiel 36:26 ↩︎
    3. M. Robert Mulholland Jr.. Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation (Kindle Locations 158-159). Kindle Edition. ↩︎
    4. Romans 12:2 ↩︎
  • 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 ↩︎
  • 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 ↩︎

  • 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 ↩︎
  • 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 ↩︎
  • 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.

  • Workshop Chapter 17: Pride

    Workshop Chapter 17: Pride

    Pride goeth before destruction,
    and an haughty spirit before a fall.

    Proverbs 16:18 (KJV)

    My experience in My Pops’ Workshop began in late February. It was now the end of May; I was three months into this mystic journey. Praying on what was the morning of Pentecost Sunday, I returned to the workshop. Jesus and Pops were both quite busy, seemingly hard at work. I thought this odd since it was the Sabbath, I would have expected them to be at rest. Looking back on it, it shouldn’t have seemed odd since Jesus often healed on the Sabbath, and I was coming to the understanding that my time in my Pops’ Workshop was a time of healing.

    Pops’ workshop was beginning to feel comfortable. I should have felt comfortable because I was in the hands of Love; that was not the case. I was becoming comfortable because I believed that I understood the workshop. Even worse, I was starting to think that I could manage what happened there. I imagined I could come and go as I pleased and encounter God when I wanted to and on my terms. Thinking that we can somehow manage God and his actions is patently absurd and is the height of vanity.

    Nonetheless, that is where I found myself that Sunday, in the Workshop with my own agenda: I was hoping to just hang out with God. I aimlessly lounged around a bit and started getting uncomfortable. As my Pops continued his work, I felt awkward and out of place, like someone who blundered into the wrong meeting. After a short while, Pops broke the awkward silence, “Don’t you have some work to do with Jesus?”

    Doing “work” with Jesus was not on my agenda; I was there to chill with the creator, redeemer, and sustainer of all that is. But my Pops’ tone of voice was firm, and his meaning was clear. I was not in charge of this situation, and I had not been given the grace to once again return to the Workshop so that I could lol around and expect to have God on my terms. He was not asking; he was telling me that I had more work to do.

    Called to my senses, I dutifully headed back to where Jesus was busy sanding. He, too, seemed too busy for idle conversation. As I watched Jesus’ careful and attentive work, I started to get a slightly giddy feeling; I was starting to sense this would not be the casual workshop encounter I had hoped for. I was there for a purpose.

    In my prayer, I asked Jesus to teach me to sand; I gave the Holy Spirit permission to have my mind, thoughts, tongue, and ears, and I thanked him for the work he was doing in me. Reviewing this encounter now, years later, I am struck by my own lack of activity. My Pops had just told me I had work to do, and yet, in my prayer, I sought to be a passive recipient of who knows what. That attitude belies a truth about spiritual formation and transformation. It isn’t something that happens to us while we sit passively doing nothing. God’s transforming grace is, in fact, all grace; we can do nothing to cause it to happen outside of God’s action, but we must be active participants. We show up, and we cooperate. We engage in practices that open us to his grace and power. Paradoxically, it is all God’s grace, and we have work to do. Our effort, puny though it be, is necessary.

    Back Down the Hole

    After my prayer for passive assistance, as I sat in the workshop, I knew why I was there. I was supposed to go back through the hole in the floor, down into the well. I resisted and, for a while, pretended I didn’t know what I was there for. Eventually, I surrendered, and down I went.

    I was surprised to see the subterranean stream. When I last saw it, it had been barely a trickle—more like a seep. Now it was flowing—it really was a stream. Not only was the water starting to flow in earnest, but much of the muck and slime that had coated everything on the floor of the “well” had been washed away. I was astonished by this improvement, but I shouldn’t have been. The water, God’s love, the water of new life, was washing away the pollutants that tainted my inner life. This was yet another depiction of the changes God was making in my inner being.

    I had resisted returning to the well, dreading the unpleasant work of confronting my brokenness. But now that I was there, I could see one of the reasons I was called back down: to receive encouragement. I had already made noticeable progress in unclogging the flow, and I may not have as much muck to clean up as I had feared. That encouragement was welcome. As I looked around a bit, I literally saw the other reason I had been summoned back down the hole and what my Pops had meant when he said, “Don’t you have some work to do with Jesus?”

    Pride Rock

    In the middle of the stream stood an enormous rock. I had not noticed it when I had been down the hole before, but much was clearer to me now. The “cave” under the workshop seemed brighter. I was certainly less ominous and oppressive. But this large rock was both ominous and oppressive. There was nothing encouraging about it. Other rocks I had encountered in the hole were about the size of a basketball or a little bigger. Big and heavy, but something I could manage to pick up and bring to Jesus. This rock was three or four feet tall. It had a broad base and came to a wicked spike at the end. I asked the Holy Spirit what this rock was, and after a short while, I heard a single word, “pride.”

    This rock, Pride, was so striking and seemed so important to me that I sketched it in my journal. Here is a reproduction of that sketch.1

    “Pride rock” was a new challenge. Unlike the other rocks I had encountered, it resisted all efforts to shift it out of the stream. I tried several times to lift it, and when that failed, I tried to push it over and out of the stream. It wouldn’t budge. This Pride, which stood blocking the flow of water, was intractable.

    I shouldn’t have been surprised that the biggest, most ominous, hardest-to-move rock would be Pride. I had previously started clearing the rocks of fear, doubt, inadequacy, and shame by bringing those parts of me to Jesus. But pride was foundational to my being. Feelings of fear, doubt, and inadequacy were potent because they threatened my Pride; Pride empowered and activated those unhealthy feelings. If you had known me, you might have guessed that I had a fragile ego. So fragile, in fact, that fear, doubt, and feelings of inadequacy could not be tolerated. A large, immovable Pride was needed to protect myself. When any of the intolerable feelings arose and were metaphorically chucked down into the well, my Pride grew and swelled, vainly hoping to protect me from the next onslaught of insecurity.

    It is hard to open the Bible without finding an admonition or warning against pride or encouragement to pride’s opposite, humility:

    • You rescue the humble, but you humiliate the proud.2
    • Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.3
    • Pride ends in humiliation, while humility brings honor.4
    • Human pride will be brought down, and human arrogance will be humbled. Only the LORD will be exalted on that day of judgment.5
    • His mighty arm has done tremendous things! He has scattered the proud and haughty ones. He has brought down princes from their thrones and exalted the humble.6
    • Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.7
    • For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.8

    This should not surprise us. Pride is at the root of most of our other sins. We lie, cheat, become angry, covet, steal, dishonor others, and even kill to protect our egos and our pride. We think we deserve whatever we want simply because we are “us” and want it.

    In his masterwork of apologetics, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis devoted an entire chapter to “The Great Sin,” pride. He begins his treatise on pride by calling out its primacy.

    According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

    Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics) (pp. 121-122). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

    He calls Pride a spiritual cancer that “eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”9 Pride is essentially competitive. We want to believe we are, in some dimension, better than our neighbor. We aren’t satisfied with just a good car that provides safe and reliable transportation. We want a car better than our neighbor’s. We want a car that will show others how rich, up-to-date, or clever we are. If cars aren’t your thing, we can just as easily substitute house, vacation, income, spouse, children, etc. We feel good about ourselves when we believe we are better than others, and they know it. We feel dissatisfied knowing that others are better than us.10

    Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.

    Lewis, Mere Christianity (p. 122).

    We see this sense of competition coming into play in the earliest instances of pride, which, not coincidentally, is also when sin entered the human condition. In the account of the fall of humankind told in Genesis,11 the enemy of our souls appeals to our pride to inspire the mother of all other sins. Adam and Eve are told that they are missing out; God is holding out on them. They are not getting what they should have. God has something you don’t have. What is it besides pride that leads us to say, “Yes, even though that is forbidden to me, I want it, and therefore, I shall have it?” Pride is at the root of our separation from God and at the root of all our sin.

    Happily, there is an antidote or counterpart to Pride: Humility. We often think of humility as “not thinking too highly of one’s self; of having a proper perspective of our place.” That is not a bad way to think of it, but Lewis offers a helpful amplification, telling us that a truly humble person “will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.”12

    If pride is the root of all sin, is its counterpart, humility, the root of all virtue? Our first thought may be: “Is it not true that Love is the most important virtue?” The answer is yes. Jesus affirms the Old Testament’s teaching that “to love God is the greatest and first commandment.”13 In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul intimates that the greatest virtue is Love.14 God is Love15, and Jesus gives his followers a new commandment, to love one another.16 How, then, could Humility be greater than Love?

    There is a Latin phrase, incurvatus in se, which means to be curved inward on oneself. That is not a bad way to think about pride. The proud man thinks only about himself, and the humble man thinks only of others. It is not just our attention and thoughts that can become distorted to curve back on ourselves. Love, too, can be bent in the wrong direction. We find ourselves loving ourselves where we should love God and our neighbors. We are made in love to love others, but in our sinful pride, our love is curved inward and we become the object of our own love.17 Pride deflects our love; humility sets it back on its proper path.

    In the workshop on that Pentecost morning, I was still faced with the enormous problem that I now knew to be my pride. I had tried to move it but failed utterly. I asked Jesus to move it for me and, unsurprisingly, saw that he was down in the well with me. I was embarrassed to have him in my muck (my pride was showing), but he didn’t mind it all. It seemed as if he had been waiting for me to ask for his help. He did not offer to take this rock away, as had done for the other, smaller and now seemingly inconsequential rocks; He offered to smash the rock of pride into tiny pieces.

    Immediately, I remembered a friend’s Holy Spirit experience. He had been completely overwhelmed by the spirit in a very public way such that he could do nothing but lay on the floor and yell “FIRE.” Is that what Jesus was offering me: what seemed like a public humiliation? It could have been the enemy trying to dissuade me, but I think this memory was a loving reminder to make sure I knew what the offer to smash my pride could entail. Jesus hadn’t offered to gently break the rock into manageable pieces. His offer was to smash my pride.

    I was not sure I was willing to have a “FIRE” experience.18 However, I was sure that I wanted Pride Rock gone and that I couldn’t shift it myself. As I closed my prayer time on that Pentecost Sunday, I gave the Holy Spirit permission to do whatever was necessary to shift the rock of my pride out of the flow of Jesus’ love. That left me feeling uneasy and more than a bit nervous. “Whatever” is a very big word.

    Another Side of Pride

    I was soon to encounter my “Pride rock” again. It was exactly two weeks later, again on a Sunday morning. I had been noticing a pattern of God speaking to me through corporate confession in church.  That is what happened that day.  As we paused for silent reflection during our corporate confession, the word “Selfish” was being impressed upon me.  This was not a gentle suggestion.  It was an insistent, almost shrill voice, ringing over and over in my mind: “Selfish.”

    This certainly got my attention. As I considered 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 wanted what I wanted without thinking about what others might want or need, and I was sulking and feeling sorry for myself when I didn’t get my way.

    I hadn’t really thought much about my experience with Pride Rock, but now, my thoughts jumped back to it.  I was again down in that subterranean space, seeing that frightful rock. As I watched, it was lifted up, and I could see the underside of it, where the word “selfish” was written.  I hadn’t considered selfishness as another aspect of pride, but now I had to confront it.

    One aspect of pride is that of the preening peacock, caring too much about what others think of you and desiring to look good in the eyes of others. That is inherently a selfish desire. It has no value except to make you feel good about yourself.  Another aspect of pride was being brought to my attention. In my pride, I cared only for myself. My incurvatus in se, was on full display. I was turned completely inward, neglecting my obligation to love my neighbors as myself. That was a needful reminder I need to hear most days.

    During a session with my spiritual director, I remembered how I almost exhausted myself trying to move “pride rock” before I asked Jesus to help me with it, and then I was anxious about what that help might look like.  As my director and I waited in silence, Jesus made me an offer that shocked me.  He suggested that I go hang out in the meadow, just enjoying the long grass, warm sun, and cool breeze, while he goes down in the hole and takes care of “pride rock.”  There was no angst, no sense of me having to endure anything or be embarrassed.  He would simply take care of it.

    I do not know what might have happened had I given unambiguous permission for Jesus to “smash” my pride. At that stage in my journey, I did not yet trust the Lord’s goodness. Jesus is, and has been, slowly “taking care” of my pride. But my pride is still with me. If I saw Pride Rock today, I imagine it would be smaller, certainly less sharp, and perhaps pushed a bit to the side, blocking less of the flow of life-giving water. My struggle with pride is ongoing and will continue to the end of my days. However, knowing that I am prideful is the best antidote and is the beginning of humility.

    A Postscript

    This “chapter” was extraordinarily hard to write. It stopped my progress on this book for years. I often worked on it then put it back down, not really knowing what to do with it.

    It was hard for at least three reasons. The first reason is simply pragmatic. My time under the workshop was, in some ways, a pivot point. Much of what happened before was to prime me for my interior work and much of what was to come flowed out of it. That realization nearly always gave me pause.

    Second, it is a very personal account and in many ways I find it embarrassing. I do not say it is right that I should feel embarrassment about my struggle with pride; ironically, it is pride rearing back up that makes writing about my pride difficult!

    The third reason this chapter kept stopping my progress is that it is a reminder that the work begun below the workshop, nearly 10 years ago now, is still far from over. That, too, is embarrassing, to how much work I still have to do. I still stuff emotions and disappointment, finding it easier to ignore my feelings than to understand them and, when needed, sit with Jesus with them. Pride remains with me; less commanding and less prominent but still a part of who I am.

    As hard as this chapter was to write, I hope it was not so hard to read.

    1. I really like the AI-generated version used as the featured image of this post, but nonetheless, this simple drawing is closer to what was in my journal that day. ↩︎
    2. Psalms 18:27 (NLT) ↩︎
    3. Proverbs 16:18 (ESV) ↩︎
    4. Proverbs 29:23 (NLT) ↩︎
    5. Isaiah 2:11 (NLT) ↩︎
    6. Luke 1:51-52 (NLT) ↩︎
    7. Matthew 5:3 (ESV) ↩︎
    8. Luke 14:11 (NLT) ↩︎
    9. Lewis, Mere Christianity (p. 125). ↩︎
    10. It is worth noting here that there is nothing inherently wrong with having a nice car, home, income, etc. It is a problem if we value those things because they feed our pride by making us feel that we are somehow better or more deserving than others who have less (of material things). ↩︎
    11. Genesis 3:1-7 ↩︎
    12. Lewis. Mere Christianity (p. 128) ↩︎
    13. Mat 22:37 ↩︎
    14. 1 Cor. 13:13 ↩︎
    15. 1 John 4:16 ↩︎
    16. John 13:34 ↩︎
    17. Michael Reeves gives an excellent exposition of this thought in chapter 3 of his book, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith. ↩︎
    18. The person who had the “FIRE” experience did not, to my knowledge, ask for it or grant permission. ↩︎

  • In Pop’s Workshop Table of Contents

  • Workshop Chapter 16: Who Does God Love?

    “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. ”

    C. S. Lewis, “Four Loves” 

    Spiritual direction is vital to my spiritual formation. I do not intend this “book” to be a tribute to the practice of spiritual direction. Nonetheless, my spiritual journey was continually shaped and guided by the excellent questions asked and keen insights offered by my spiritual director. One of those observations illuminated something that would permanently shift how I think about God and how I understand his relationship with me — a hinge point of my journey. 

    If we are attentive, we may notice moments that have been called a “shock of grace.” Those shocks come when we are suddenly, unexpectedly, and, often, dramatically made aware of the superabundance of God’s love for us and the lengths he goes to shower us with grace. What happened next in my Pops’ workshop was a “shock of grace’ for me.

    Shortly after Jesus spoke to me about the need to be known, the very next day, in fact,  I was once again with my spiritual director.  As our time drew to a close, Danny suggested that perhaps, just maybe, I might eventually find myself among the pieces of wood in the workshop. I do not know if Danny’s insight was natural or God-given. In the end, it doesn’t matter. As soon he made that suggestion, my mind flashed back to that mysterious, nearly incomprehensible “trip” inside a piece of wood with Holy Spirit.  Suddenly awareness broke over me on me like a wave: I was the piece of wood Holy Spirit had been smoothing, straightening and correcting from the inside out. I had somehow, for some reason, been shown the work Holy Spirit was doing inside me as he did it. It was hard to comprehend: the vision of Holy Spirit reforming the wood was not a lesson in theology.  It was a “hands-on” demonstration of what he was doing in a real person at that time.  Even more, it was not some hypothetical “everyman” being transformed.  It was me!  I had the incomprehensible privilege of witnessing a physical representaiton Holy Spirit’s sanctifying action in my life.1

    It took me a while to recover from this revelation; I was a bit nervous about what might be coming next. Nonetheless, later that day,  I asked Jesus if it was me that he was sanding that very first time I was in Pops’ workshop.

    Once again, we were in Pops’ workshop, and once again, Jesus was at work carefully, slowly, lovingly sanding a beautiful piece of wood.  He did not answer my question, he only paused briefly, blew the fine dust from sanding off the wood, and smiled at me.  It was a smile of warmth and compassion, not mirth. I knew at once the answer to my question was “yes, that was me he was sanding.”

    As I watched Jesus sanding, a new reality began to sink in.  I remembered my first visit to Pops’ workshop and seeing Jesus sanding the block of wood that I now knew was me.  His words from that day were again in my ears: “You know, if you want something to be perfect you have to love it.” That piece of wood that had drawn my attention, captivating me with how beautiful it was in his hands, that he lavished loving attention on, that piece of wood was me.  I am the thing that Jesus loves and wants to be perfect! I was undone, sobbing as this new reality of God’s love me sank into my soul: I am formed by the father, straightened and aligned by Holy Spirit, and made beautiful by Jesus.  It really is me he cares about. 

    Having walked this journey with me, you may think I was slow to come to this awareness. And perhaps I was slow. I now understand many things about the transformation God was working that I did not know as it was happening.  I know that it was all him.  My role in his reclamation project was receiver, observer, and chronicler. This transformation was not something I was asking for or expecting. I had asked only to taste his love. I had certainly didn’t know I was volunteering for the all the rest! My only contribution was to stay in the game. I could have backed away from the process, saying in effect, “Never mind, God – you are not what I am looking for.” 

    The Lord could have dealt with me directly instead of in oblique and mysterious visions.  Why didn’t he tell me right off the bat what I had now come to know? On my first visit to Pops’ Workshop, he could have said, “David, I want you to know how much I love you. I love you enough to want to perfect you, just as I am perfecting this block of wood, which is you, by the way.”  Why make me wait weeks and weeks, blindly groping my way to this pivotal understanding? 

    One likely reason is that the God who made us understands how we work.  We learn better when we discover something, instead of having it told to us.  Our discoveries are personal and more meaningful to us.  In my case, there is another, deeper reason. To explain that reason, I’ll have to take a small detour and introduce you to the Enneagram. 

    The Enneagram

    The Enneagram is a tool that can help us better understand ourselves and each other.  I first encountered the Enneagram as a spiritual direction student.  I was immediately suspicious of it.  In my long years in corporate America, I have encountered Meyer-Briggs, DiSC®, and other personality tests or assessments. They were generally used to either pigeonhole other people or to excuse one’s shortcomings and bad behavior. “You know Mary,” people would say, “there she goes again; she is such an INTJ!” Or perhaps I would think to myself, “I can’t be expected to work with Sam.  I am such a strong D, and he just can’t deal with that.”2 

    The Enneagram of Personality, popularly understood today, has a different flavor.3  Yes, you end up with a “label,” a number from one to nine that denotes your “type,” but the emphasis is not on a static understanding of “what you are like.” The emphasis is more on understanding what motivates your behavior and how you can become spiritually and emotionally healthier. The classification is just a jumping-off point of self-awareness and opening yourself to God’s grace to heal your inner wounds and help you move forward, becoming the beautiful person you are created to be. 

    One of the points on the Enneagram where I find myself is the “five,” variously summarized as the investigator, the observer, the thinker, or the loner.  Generally speaking, people who find affinity as an Enneagram five value and pursue knowledge, the more and the deeper, the better. An average or less healthy five can have a hard time making a decision or taking an action because we know that there is more yet to learn that may be germane to the issues at hand.  We can be intensely aware of how much we don’t know. 

    If, at the beginning of this adventure, God had come right out and said, “David, I love you and want to perfect you,” I would have likely reacted in one of two ways. Most likely, I would have thought, “I already know this.  God loves everyone, and we are to be perfect as Christ is perfect. It is good to be reminded of that.” I could have let the whole thing end there, accepting a confirmation of knowledge I already possessed.  

    On the slight chance that the Lord’s declaration of his love for me had ignited a spark, it would have lit a fire of research and investigation, certainly not one of introspection. I might have dived deeply into the various Greek words for “love.”  Was it agape love Jesus felt for me?  Or perhaps it was philia? What might it mean to be made perfect? I would have perhaps set myself on a word study of “perfection” in the scriptures or I might have researched what Christian theologians and apologists has to say about perfection. 

    I would have affirmed what I already knew or I would have acquired new knowledge.  I would have remained looking outward at the world around me, not inward at the state of my soul.  Even if, somehow, the visions had continued to unfold, I would have been a detached observer, like a scientist studying some novel phenomena. I would not have ended up sobbing, overwhelmed by my experience of God’s love for me.   

    A growth path for Enneagram Fives is to get out of our heads and get more in touch with our hearts and emotions. God, the ultimate spiritual director, knew that about me and knew how to pique my curiosity, leading me step by step to where I needed to be. I believe that God approached me with intriguing visions because he knows that I am drawn to solving puzzles and working through something I don’t understand. He kept me “on the hook” with visions to wonder about and work through. 

    Growing Strong

    One nagging doubt persisted despite my growing awareness of God’s love for me.  If God wanted me the way he was now shaping me, why did he allow me to become so twisted and bent in the first place?4  The next day, with the understanding that I was the wood that Jesus was making beautiful and I was the wood Holy Spirit still running through my head, I turned again to prayer. My thoughts returned my difficult childhood and my parents. I saw an image of a tree growing in a completely calm environment with rich soil, gentle breezes, and plenty of sunshine. As I thought about that tree, growing in a “perfect” environment with no winds and no stress, I recalled something I had learned years before. 

    When my children were young, we would take camping trips in the high desert of northern Arizona. On one of those trips, we heard a talk from a naturalist who talked about the twisting growth of the Alligator Juniper, a tree common to that area.  They are often seen with twisted or spiral trunks; the twists in the tree’s structure are a response to its growth on windy mountainsides. A tree that grows with a straight grain is much more likely to break in a strong wind or under a heavy load of snow.  The twisted junipers have the internal strength to bend and flex in the wind without breaking. A tree growing in ideal conditions would grow with a straight trunk.  Such a tree would not survive should it be subjected to strong winds.  

    Alligator Juniper
    Photo by Daniel Barthelemy (cc-by-nc)

    God wasn’t saying that he caused my childhood to be the way it was so that I might be stronger, but he was showing me that in some ways, I was stronger and more resilient as a result of my upbringing and that strength and resilience was something he could use. I still had the challenge of being strong without being hard, but it comforted me to know that even though I was not yet how the Lord intended me to be, he would leverage my strengths.  

    I already knew, as a matter of fact, that he loved me.  I needed to experience it, to live in it, to let it permeate me.  Knowing about it was not going to be good enough.  This new level of understanding was soon to come in a few days.  

    1I have never understood why I was allowed this grace.  Perhaps God, knowing me better than I will ever know myself, knew that it would take a revelation like this to finally get my attention.

    2You may rightly claim that is not how these tests and profiles are meant to be used, but in more than thirty years in the corporate world, I never saw a different, healthier pattern.

    3 In the years since I first wrote this chapter, I have been introduced to a much healthier and more helpful expression of the enneagram, the Enneagram of Christlike virtues. Whether you are new to the Enneagram or have some experience with the Enneagram of Personality, I encourage you to explore the Enneagram of Christlike Virtues from Mosaic Formation. You will find a holistic, systemic approach that illuminates the nine points of the enneagram as reflections of Christ’s virtues; we are not limited to our “number” but can and should grow in Christlikeness in all aspects of our being and in all nine Christlike virtues.

    4It is instructive to note that despite the deep and loving conversations I had with the Lord in preceding months and even years (see chapter 13, for example) I persisted in a quest of answers about justice and injustice, real and perceived, in my past.  God does not tire of our questions.  Do not be dismayed if you find yourself, as part of your journey, rewalking the same ground time and time again.

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

    Next: Chapter 17: Pride
  • Workshop Chapter 15: Being Known

    Workshop Chapter 15: Being Known

    “Our wisdom . . . consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”

    John Calvin, 1530

    Just a few days after my visit to the meadow, during a quiet time with the Lord, Jesus told me: “To know me fully, you must be fully known.” This proclamation was unexpected.  I wasn’t asking, “how can I know you better?” I wasn’t asking anything at all; I was just being still with God.

    You might think that I would pay attention all the more, given the unexpectedness of the declaration. I would like to think that about myself, but that was not so. To the contrary, my immediate reaction was: “That can’t be right! Surely Jesus already knows me fully! After all, he is omniscient. By definition, there isn’t anything he doesn’t know. I must be included in his limitless knowledge. If he knows everything, he must know me. How can he then say, ‘I must be fully known?’”

    I took my doubts about his statement back to Jesus in prayer. I sensed that he can know me but will not know more of me than I chose to reveal. I doubted that interpretation, mainly because it was not what I would do. I still valued and desired knowledge. I hoarded knowledge, taking pleasure from knowing something others didn’t know; knowledge helped me feel safe and superior. Why would Jesus choose not to know something that he could know?  How and why would that prevent me from knowing him? 

    Jesus Can’t Heal Fake 

    The linkage between knowing ourselves and knowing God is far from novel; I was “discovering” a well-known truth. Jesus was telling me a truth that has been discovered and known for centuries. John Calvin, in the sixteenth century, taught that unless we truly know ourselves, we cannot truly know God. Even earlier, around 500 CE, Augustine asked, “How can you draw close to God when you are far from your own self?” and prayed, “Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know Thee.” Benner’s The Gift of Knowing Yourself and Scazerro’s Emotionally Healthy Spirituality both teach extensively about the dynamics of how we can become detached from and lose our true selves. We construct “false” selves as we try to mold ourselves into the people we think others want or expect or as we try to be who we think we need to be to survive. Over time, the masks we wear become the only thing we see in the mirror. We lose the ability to see our true selves, the unique persons God created us to be. 

    In the years since I first heard the Lord say, “To know me fully, you must be fully known,” my appreciation of this truth has grown. God desires that we are healed of the hurts of this world, and that we become able to enter fully into the depth of his love for us. But before we can be healed, we must understand where we are broken. As a friend’s grandma said, “Jesus can’t heal fake.”1

    Repair or Restoration?

    Why can’t Jesus just heal us, without our active participation, without us knowing our wounded and broken places? It is helpful to look at the relational rift that keeps us distant from God as a torn piece of fabric. In God’s creation, before the fall, man’s life was seamlessly integrated with God.  Man’s fall into sin created a rift between God and us, a tear in the seamless unity present in creation.  God means for our integration into his life and love to be so complete that we are like a single piece of cloth: the threads of his life interwoven with the threads of our lives. They are independent threads, his life and ours, but they are meant to be woven together into a single piece of fabric. Sin has torn and ruptured that fabric. 

    God’s goal is not to simply repair the tear, he purposes do restore the fabric. Restoration is different than repair. If we repair a torn piece of cloth, we might simply sew the two halves together, or perhaps we would sew on a patch. But a patch or a seam is not a restoration. The repaired fabric may look better, it may even be usable, but it is not restored—it is not a single, unified piece of cloth. Anyone looking at it could easily spot the repair; it has not been restored to its original state. The Lord’s goal is restoration, putting it back the way it was: our lives woven and intertwined with his.  

    No matter how carefully, how detailed a repair we could fashion, it would still not be a restoration. Even if we could, somehow, perhaps with a strong enough magnifier and tiny tweezers, tie each broken thread to its mate, there would still be a visible seam—the line of knots. It would be a repair, not the restoration the Lord desires for us.  

    The damage that flows from our sinful rebellion goes deep. In our metaphor of fabric, each thread is itself made up of spun and twisted fibers. When the fabric is torn, each thread is broken each individual fiber of each thread is also torn apart. To truly restore the damage, putting it back to how it was, each strand of fiber must somehow be twisted back together with its other end, on the other side of the tear. As the fibers are spun back together, the threads can be twisted back together, and the fabric restored. No clever job of mending here; not an artful patch, but a restoration of the fabric, woven back together to its original state. That is what the Lord wants for us. We want to be better; he wants us whole. We want to get by; he wants us perfected. We want a patch—usually a quick and easy patch; he wants us restored. Restoration is almost always a long and challenging process; shortcuts are rarely an option. 

    Being renewed in our spirits, made new again, not simply mended or repaired, is a theme of the apostle Paul:  

    • “Our inner person is being renewed day by day”2
    • “You are being renewed in the spirit of your minds”3
    • “You have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator”4 
    • “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind”5 

    In Jesus’ discourse with Nicodemus in John 3, Jesus declares, “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”6 We are not repaired; we are reborn, made new. We are promised new life, not just a cleaned-up version of our current lives (2 Cor 5:17).

    We cannot renew the fabric of our souls, but the Lord can—if we let him. We have to be willing participants in the process.  That is where being known comes in: we have to understand where those tears are, with their multitudinous broken threads and torn fibers, but we likely no longer see them and thus cannot seek the only real remedy. The tear causes pain and ache and yearnings in our souls. Not knowing who can restore the fabric, we seek our own remedies. We devise patches, things we can affix to the frayed ends of the tear. We have tied off the loose threads, attaching to them our own remedies—our ideas of what will stop the unraveling and ease our aching souls.  We push others down, hoping it will somehow lift us up and make us feel better.  We strive for the approval of others, expecting that will answer the yearning in our souls.  We medicate ourselves with sex, power, drugs, and alcohol, trying to numb our pain and distract ourselves.  Our patches for our wounded souls are varied but never effective in the long run.  We need to be restored, not patched. 

    We cannot un-tear the fabric, but God can—if we allow him to. We must expose the frayed ends of our “side” of the tear. We have covered, tied off, and patched them to protect ourselves from further damage (or so we think) and to ease our pain (or so we hope). We must now trust the Lord enough to re-expose those frayed ends of our lives. We must untie the knots to let go of the attachments. We must expose the pain and insecurities so that God can heal them. He will restore each broken fiber and each torn thread and re-weave the ruptured fabric. We must untie the knots binding us to things besides Jesus. We have to rip off the patches we have sewn over our hearts, tear off the binding we have put on the ragged edges of our souls. Our goal is to stop the tearing—to soothe a spiritual ache. God’s goal is to restore the rift—to have each one of us reunited with him in his perfection—to restore, not mend, the fabric of our souls. 

    It takes time. It is hard. It is almost always painful. The process of re-opening wounds so that they can heal properly is necessary, but that doesn’t make it easy or free of pain. Formation, as this restoration of our damaged souls is sometimes called, is not a once-and-done event. It is a lifetime of learning to see the tears, identify our attempts at patches, and peel those off so that God can heal us. The older the wounding, the more calcified the patch will be.  Wounds that are old and deep have been patched and re-patched many times as we attempt to mend our own pain. Working through all the protective layers is a long, hard, and likely painful process.  Ultimately, we need to do nothing except allow ourselves to be known by God and give him permission to heal us. 

    The attachments we have can be hard to identify. They have likely been in place for years. We come to think of them as “us;” they can become how we understand ourselves to be. Even when we have identified them, peeling them away can be challenging. They are there for a reason: they are our survival tools. If we tear away our patch, no matter how shabby or ill-fitting it is, surely we will unravel! But that is what we must risk – exposing our real, wounded, and frightened selves to the only one who can put everything right. The thing we cling most tightly to is the one thing we must let go of. 

    Fear or Love?

    This understanding came much later. Back in that moment, when I heard Jesus tell me that I must be fully known by him, I did not really know what he meant.  My ignorance was a blessing.  It allowed me to move forward in faith and obedience. I asked Holy Spirit to show me what I needed to reveal. What did I need to let God know about me so that I could know him better? I was fully expecting “anger” or “disappointment” but was very surprised when Holy Spirit brought “fear” to my mind instead. Disappointment and anger are just symptoms that come from holding back from God. When I hold back from him, he cannot free me and give me all he desires for me, giving rise to my disappointment and anger. It is fear that holds me back. What was I afraid of?  Mostly, it was fear of God not being there or of the whole workshop experience being an extreme case of self-delusion or, worse, a psychotic episode. I had (and have) plenty of other fears as well: fear that I would end up destitute, fear of illness, and fear of old age. But overall, I feared that my Pops was not trustworthy and reliable. I didn’t believe that when the chips were down, and I really needed him, he would be there. 

    My view of God was based on being good and following “the rules,” not on trusting in his loving-kindness. Nothing illustrates this as well as my reading of Psalm 139: 

    O LORD, you have searched me and known me! 
    You know when I sit down and when I rise up; 
    you discern my thoughts from afar. 
    You search out my path and my lying down 
    and are acquainted with all my ways. 
    Even before a word is on my tongue, 
    behold, O LORD, you know it altogether. 
    You hem me in, behind and before, 
    and lay your hand upon me. 
    Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; 
    it is high; I cannot attain it. 
    Where shall I go from your Spirit? 
    Or where shall I flee from your presence? 
    If I ascend to heaven, you are there! 
    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! 
    If I take the wings of the morning 
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
    even there your hand shall lead me, 
    and your right hand shall hold me. 
    If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, 
    and the light about me be night,” 
    even the darkness is not dark to you; 
    the night is bright as the day, 
    for darkness is as light with you. 

    Psalm 139:1-12, ESV

    When I read these words today, I hear David, the Psalmist, delighting in God’s unceasing care for him and complete knowledge of him.  That is now, some six years after the fact. Then, I did not receive this psalm with any gratefulness or pleasure. To me, it was more like God saying, “Don’t you think you can hide from me! I know what you are doing. You can’t get away with anything!” I heard a judgemental God warning me not to step out of line. I read Psalm 139 like a divine version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”:  

    He sees you when you’re sleepin’ 
    He knows when you’re a wake 
    He knows if you’ve been bad or good 
    So be good, for goodness sake 
    Oh! You better watch out, you better not cry 
    Better not pout, I’m telling you why …

    Such was the state of my soul then: I was afraid to let God know me, afraid because I didn’t trust his compassion and steadfast love. Mentally and emotionally, I never got to this part of the psalm: 

    How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! 
    How vast is the sum of them! 
    If I would count them, they are more than the sand. 
    I awake, and I am still with you.

    Psalm 139:17-18 ESV

    When I recall the circumstances of my childhood, with parents whose own struggles left them neither reliable nor dependable, it is not surprising that it was hard for me to trust God, to trust that his promises and his love were reliable and for me. But here, as I named and confessed my fears to the Lord, I encountered God’s grace and love. God was not surprised or angered by my confession.7 To the contrary, he was delighted that I could come to grips with my fears and bring them to him.

    At that moment, as I prayed, repenting of fearfulness and lack of trust, in the Workshop, my Pops took off his heavy leather apron, and he and Jesus embraced me. That one sentence says so little yet means so much. It is a simple thing: a hug. But it was an embrace I had needed most of my life. It was a touch that I longed for, without knowing my longing. I experienced the love of the one who is love.

    This was a foundational step in my healing. Foundational but in no way final. Our hiding from God sets up a vicious cycle.  We hide because we are ashamed (see Genesis 3:8-11).  Then, in turn, we are ashamed because we have hidden from God, which can lead us into deeper hiding. Knowing ourselves and allowing God to know us not only breaks that destructive cycle but also sets up the opposite: a virtuous cycle.

    As we are known, we experience God’s compassionate love and forgiveness.  Knowing his love and forgiveness gives us the confidence and courage to broaden and deepen the self-knowledge that we can share with the Lord.  As I write this, years after these encounters, I am still in those cycles.  Sometimes I slip back into hiding; the defensive habits that we relied on for years are pernicious. But more often, I find myself in the virtuous cycle of learning who I am and understanding that I am loved for who I am, not who I think I am supposed to be. 

    Without really knowing it, I was, in effect, back down in the hole, doing the work of clearing the rocks that blocked the flow of life-giving water. Understanding who I really am and bringing that self to Jesus was a remedy for my past habits of shame and hiding. I was “naming” the rocks of fear, doubt, inadequacy, and shame. Each time I “named” a rock and brought it to Jesus, I was slowly but surely letting God’s life flow more freely through me. Experiencing my Pops’ love for me, the real me, was liberating and exhilarating.  But God was about to turn my experience of him up – way up. 

    1Never underestimate the wisdom of grandmas.

    22 Corinthians 4:16b HCSB, emphasis added.

    3Ephesians 4:23b HCSB, emphasis added.

    4Colossians 3:9b-10 ESV, emphasis added.

    5Romans 12:2b ESV, emphasis added.

    6John 3:3b ESV.

    7Almost without exception, we think that God, who we acknowledge knows everything, will be surprised but some bit of news about ourselves we have been withholding from him.  What are you hiding from God?  He already knows it, so you might as well ‘fess up. 

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

    Next CHapter: Who Does God Love?