Closer

I shared this piece with my church family on Sunday June 26,2016

"I find myself looking back

on a year filled with

unspeakable pain

haunting questions and doubts

complete hopelessness

a nightmarish desire to quit

raging anger

torturous thoughts.

The deepest, darkest days of my existence.

And yet, if I had to fight the battle

all over again...

I wouldn't change one moment.

Because out here on the battlefield,

battered and bruised, alone and despairing,

I fell in love with a God

who will not live in a box

and who lovingly and tenderly

lifted me out of my own box

so I could share the untold riches of intimacy with Him.

I find myself looking ahead

to an unknown, blank-slated future;

but one thing I know with all my heart...

Closer to You

is where I want to be."

I penned those words almost 11 years ago.  I was in a seemingly endless season of depression and one

which drove me to God...a God who allowed intense suffering without explanation--a God whose presence at times was like a blanket of comfort, but whose seeming absence at other times left me weeping in anguish and fear.  

I am deeply grateful to have had an abundance of health and hope restored.  Those years of darkness have been a part of shaping who I am today in both healthy and unhealthy ways.

I am at a crossroads in life for various reasons.  I continue to intentionally pursue God and yet there is also a sense of Him pursuing me even more.  Everywhere I turn He is unearthing the rocks of an earthly kingdom which I constructed.

You see, for the majority of my life, I've lived with clenched hands.  I hold tightly to that which is most precious to me.  In both tangible and intangible ways, I play it safe, control, and guard life as it swirls around me.  Why?  Because there's this corner of my heart where I don't fully trust God.

Sometimes life unfolds in ways which knock the wind out of us and leave us gasping for air--for a very long time.  I know all the right answers as to why life falls apart.  The sovereignty of God, our finite ability to understand an infinite God , the brokenness of this planet earth--I know these truths inside out.  Yet somehow, being at peace with His ways in my own life and fully trusting His character is always just slightly out of reach.

This past January, my Spiritual Director approached me about joining a group of other men and women to write our Spiritual Autobiography under her direction.  God is using pen and paper as a pathway to a deeper level of spiritual transformation.

It's time.

To be honest, I'm tired.  I'm weary of years and years of clenched hands.  There's this growing, almost desperate desire to live with open hands.  It won't happen with ease or overnight.  When God dismantles an earthly kingdom it's painstaking work; His work and mine.

Psalm 139:23,24 reads like this--

"Search me, O God, and know my heart;

Try me and know my anxious thoughts;

And see if there be any hurtful way in me,

And lead me in the everlasting way."

I'm giving God permission to do this.  I'm inviting Him to do this-- 

But it will involve time in  His presence with less words and more listening.  Scheduled times of solitude and silence and postures of prayer which involve simply "being" in His presence is where I am starting.

John Bunyan talks about a time when he began to grasp the magnitude of God's love.  He was reading Song of Solomon, the first verse of Chapter 4--where Christ essentially says--'you are my love."

Did you hear that?  Christ says, "you are my love!"

I can't help but  but believe that to open my soul to the depth of these words will also begin to open my hands to living life with a spirit of  peace and trust and security.

Christ says I am His love.