I sat
stone-like
for days –
maybe weeks –
death still hanging out
smoking a cigarette
waiting for the chance
to conquer and suck
life from my defenseless body
now I realize the wings
I kept hearing
were not birds
as I thought
they were the wings of the
angels keeping watch
protecting
me
as my armor lay in a pile
I sat
staring
absorbing the carnage
wondering
how?
why?
it seemed impossible
I was still alive
AL 1/24/13
The divine in you is not the power to conquer wrong
but simply the passion to be good news,
to open eyes, to set free.
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
We want glory. We want joy. We want life to bring us good things and shiny happiness for every moment. With glory, joy, goodness and happiness defined by our own internal vision of what that means. We want God to be our cookie jar and deliver what we pray for in the way we pray for it. Anything less is a disappointment. I’m not judging anyone – it’s how I’ve lived as well. With expectations of what I want just waiting to be delivered, and when it isn’t I get disappointed.
The past 5 months I have gone on a pilgrimage with God. It has been a very, very difficult path to w
alk and it has taken me into places of darkness and danger which I did not know existed in my physical living and within my soul. As I continue on this path, it seems, like Buttercup in The Princess Bride, I have made it through the “fire swamp” and definitely through the “pit of despair” and sometimes I get weak knee’d wondering what is ahead. How will I get through any more of this? I am way too tired, weak, afraid and like Wesley(TPB), “I have been mostly dead all day”.
The truly amazing revelations which I have experienced over these past months are new revelations of the magnitude of God. Our faith is all about personal experience and my experiences have been vivid and dramatically life-changing. I have felt the heart of Jesus as he ached to show and share with Jerusalem (and the world) his love with his cry, ‘O Jerusalem, how often…but you would not”; I have experienced the heart of Mary as she stepped out-of-the-way and said, “Do to me what you have said”; I have connected to the truth of the Psalmist as he wrote, “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence”?; I have lain on the ash heap with Job as God spoke and said, “Where were you when I laid the foundations?” and I have found the truth of the faith that is pleasing to God, which is obedience. It is not about giving God things that I want. It is about the path that goes where I would not go myself, only from a heart of unconditional, passionate and unlimited love, and staying there in these hard places out of obedience, because of that love.
I have found that commitment and my obedience are my “reasonable service”. I have had no place to go and God has been in that non-place with me. I have never been alone and I have not gotten safely through because I am so brave and strong. God has brought me every breath.
As this New Year gets into full swing, my prayer is for God’s wisdom. Everything I knew before has been upset like the proverbial apple cart, and I am undone. I am weak and tired. I am humbled and I am open to what God has prepared for me to do, as I continue to be obedient and offer my life as a love song.
| The Wise Ask God for Wisdom by Rick Warren |
| “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.” (James 1:5 NIV)
Need wisdom? We all do. And the good news is that God wants to give it to you. He is eager to do so. Just like it pleased God when Solomon asked for wisdom (1 Kings 3:7-14), it pleases God when we ask for wisdom. It’s God’s nature to give. He is a giving God. The Bible says in James 1:5, “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.” (NIV) This verse says three things about how God gives wisdom. He does so:
|
The past 5 months have been some of the toughest I have ever experienced – and I have been through some tough times over these past 23 years – but the past 5 months have been brutal. They have worn me down and out. My faith has been strong and I have had miracles and amazing people come into my life to help me in every way possible, but there is something about day after day of this type of faith – walking for months in extremely difficult living, months of having no money, pain and grief from loss. Living with no relief for months on end, not knowing where you will eat or sleep next – which wears you out and drains your resources to the very last drop.
And then one day, after 127 days of this, I woke up and it was the day I had known could happen. The day I had feared would come. The day I had dreaded and tried to keep from coming. It was upon me. I woke up with no hope and all was dark. I’ve had a few such days, weeks, even months over these past years and they are some of the hardest, bleakest of times I have ever experienced. I shudder when I think about them. I wasn’t able to write, or share during those times. I would completely shut myself off and not even talk to people for the most part. When I have gone into the dark, it has been me, alone, locked into the darkness struggling to find God, to find my way forward, my way out, wrestling with the questions which have no answer. I am always concerned I won’t make it, I won’t recover, I won’t come out, I won’t have the strength to make this next choice I need to make – I will finally just give up and stay there. Everything I have hoped for, and struggled so hard for, will never be accomplished and I will die of my brokenness. This time was different, this time I had no defense and there was no more fight, no more struggle.
Somehow in the darkest of my days, I am always given some thin thread of hope. Sometimes just a whisper. A glimpse of God working. When I can’t. God does. Every time. I have found that I am never alone. God is always in the dark with me, and that is why my faith has taken over my life. I have found the love of God to be so transformative I have nothing else I can do but to remove my will so that God can, hopefully, be seen more and more –
Union with God means every bit of our human nature transfigured in Christ, woven up into his creative life and activity, into his redeeming purpose, heart soul, mind and strength. Each time it happens it means that one of God’s creatures has achieved its destiny. – Evelyn Underhill
As I move through this darness I am more and more aware of the magnitude of God. I am finding glimpses of devastating grace and am learning how little I know about the mystery and magnitude of God.
The next few days I will be sharing some insights from my place of darkness. This darkness has been a scary thing to encounter and I pray that it is the right thing to share it. This is new territory for me and I am not sure where it will lead me. My constant prayer is, ‘Help me – Not my will, but Thine be done.”
I share this to bring hope to myself, and to others who also find themselves in the darkness, it’s always easier when we walk together. Once again I have found, I do not know the answers to this mystery and we are never alone.
I am leading you along a way that is uniquely right for you. The closer to Me you grow, the more fully you become your true self – the one I designed you to be. Because you are one of a kind, the path you travel with Me diverges increasingly from that of other people. However, in my mysterious wisdom and ways, I enable you to follow this solitary path while staying in close contact with others. In fact, the more completely you devote yourself to Me, the more freely you can love people.
Marvel at the beauty of a life intertwined with My Presence. Rejoice as we journey together in intimate communion. Enjoy the adventure of finding yourself through losing yourself in Me.
2 Corinthians 5:17
Ephesians 2:10
1 John 4:7-8
John 15:4
Jesus Calling
Sarah Young
December 30
Spiritual depth, if it is true, is the working of God coming down and penetrating to the depths if our hearts, and not of our own soul’s climbing. No ladder of mysticism can ever meet or find or possess God. Faith is a power given to us. It is never simply our ability or strength of will to believe. The spiritual experience that is truly genuine is given to us by God in the coming of his Spirit, and only as we surrender our whole lives to an active expression of his will.
To put it quite simply, spiritual experience, whether it be faith, hope or love, is something we cannot manufacture, but which we can only receive.
The service of God makes the most impossible demands on us, demands which we know our strength cannot carry out, or which our hearts cannot bear. But our calling is obedience, even to the hardest demands; and we must take them up in the faith that our minds or bodies will be supported by the strength of God.
– Philip Britts
You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net than you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing love of God made present in the manger.
In 1980, the day before Christmas, Richard Ballenger’s mother in Anderson, South Carolina, was busy wrapping packages and asked her young son to shine her shoes. Soon, with a proud smile that only a seven-year-old can muster, he presented the shoes for inspection. His mother was so please, she gave him a quarter.
On Christmas morning as she put on the shoes to go to church, she noticed a lump in one shoe. She took it off and found a quarter wrapped in paper. Written on the paper in her child’s scrawl were the words, “I done it for love.”
When the curtain falls, each of us will be the sum of our choices throughout life, the sum of the appointments we kept and the appointments we didn’t keep. When interrogated as to why we hung out at a stable, why we were detained by a baby in swaddling clothes, may we answer, “We done it for love.”
– Brennan Manning
What if this is the last thing I ever write?
What if I’m gone
Tomorrow
Or even today?
What is the most important thing I have learned from my time here?
Not even hard questions for me…
God = Love
Yes, that’s it.
Sounds simple,
yet it is so much more.
We are the beloved creations of God,
never alone,
loved beyond our comprehension.
Begin to explore it.
Just glimpses of true love
will change your life.
Begin to discover the truth about what love really is,
the intimacy that is possible,
how love really acts.
(We’ve been tricked into thinking
it’s about physical attraction,
or that it’s self serving.)
Real Love has NO fear attached.
None – about anything.
We are free to be transparent.
We are always loved like this.
Hope we talk tomorrow…
but if not,
I’ve shared the best thing I know
I’m ok – either way
AL
12/16/12
It is not into a Christmas card-perfect scene
of loveliness and reverence that Jesus comes,
but into this rough world
of poverty and human trafficking,
factory fires and school shootings.
Here, in our grief and terror,
and in our secret shame
of who we human beings are,
Jesus comes to bring us God’s love,
and also to show us who we really are.
Yes, it is awful that such tragedies happen at Christmas time,
but this is the time for them;
this is the whole point of Christmas:
it is into the darkness that the light comes.
Our world is full of violence and sadness,
but no sooner do terrible things happen
than God comes among us
to be with us in our brokenness,
with healing and forgiveness,
comes as a child—
amazing, always a child—
comes saying, “I still love you,
and even in world of hurt
I will always be with you.”
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
http://www.unfoldinglight.net
To a man who lives unto God nothing is secular, everything is sacred, because the sacred has absorbed the secular. ~ Spurgeon
And what God had cleaned, she could not call common again — her there in a sacred mess of grace.
– Ann Voskamp
He is jealous for me, Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree,
Bending beneath the weight of his wind and mercy.
When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory,
And I realize just how beautiful You are,
And how great Your affections are for me.
And oh, how He loves us oh,
Oh how He loves us,
How He loves us all
And we are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes,
If His grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
And heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss,
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest,
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about, the way…
That He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.
Yeah, He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.
Yeah, He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves us,
Oh how He loves.
Lyrics David Crowder Band.
life: acoustic & amplified 