Mountains and Valleys

I usually hate “Mountain top – Valley” or “Desert – Promised Land” analogies, because I think they obscure more than they reveal. It is absolutely true that in life we walk through times when things are going our way and we feel unstoppable, and times when we feel unnoticed or trapped in impossible circumstances….thus the mountain top and the valley. While they can accurately describe the external reality, I feel like this metaphor can be used to normalize situations that are not supposed to be normal.

Did Israel’s desert season really have to be a desert? I mean, they were being led by God, he was miraculously providing for all of their needs and leading them into the promised land. Doesn’t sound like a desert to me! Sounds like a beautiful time to encounter God and enjoy his provision! Why do people hate deserts? Because they are cold at night, hot in the day, and it’s hard to find food and water. With the Israelites, God led them by a cloud in the day (providing shelter from the heat) a pillar of fire by night (warming them in the cool nights) and caused food to drop from heaven and water to spring up from rocks! So all of the reasons that people hate deserts were not actual factors in this desert. God had made this desert a place of provision, and if they had eyes to see it, a pleasant oasis even! The only desert that existed was in the minds of the people journeying!

In terms of feeling the presence of God, there can be valleys and mountain tops too.  In one particularly difficult season of my life, I had spent a long time in the valley and was doing everything I knew to get back to the mountain top (including going to a catholic hermitage for 5 days of solitude and prayer). It didn’t work.  In frustration and depression, I called out to God, saying “I can’t feel you!!!” Then I heard in my spirit (still void of any supernatural warmth) a voice that said, “but I’m here”. Suddenly it clicked for me that I was going by my feelings to determine if God was there or not….but in reality, he was there the whole time! This gave me a deep level of peace that freed me from all of my efforts to get back to the mountain top.

When God is silent, it doesn’t mean he is absent, or even that he is teaching us some hard lesson. Sometimes he is inviting us to be quiet with him. Sometimes he just wants for us to rest and enjoy that he is, and that we are. When we discover the God who is there even when we don’t feel like he is, suddenly there is no more valley or mountaintop, only times that have lots of communication and experience, and times that are about resting in silence and peace. Interestingly, the revelation that I don’t need to chase what I already have, and that I don’t need to search for encounters, ushered me into a lot of encounters!

There is no more desert and there is no more valley. When we learn that God is trustworthy beyond our immediate physical senses, we can find the mountaintop and the promised land wherever we are, because wherever we are, He is there too!

 

Heartbreak

Here’s an old journal entry I recently stumbled across.  I don’t remember the specifics of the situation, but obviously I was hurting pretty bad!  I’m sure I was only writing to try and process the pain, but what came out was an anchor for the brokenhearted.  I hope it encourages you!

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Heartbreak. This is the hardest state that I know of. In almost every other state good advice would be to “follow your heart”…but when your heart is torn into multiple pieces, all crying out for some sort of extreme action, what do you do? Do you bury things? Or do you let everything come out and wound the people around you? Do you cry, or find funny things to laugh at? What do you do when it hurts? This has been an enigma for me. My standard reaction to heartbreak is to withdraw and embrace self-destructive behavior. But what am I going to do now? What is the answer for a broken heart?

Acceptance. I accept that what happened, happened. I accept that what happened is not ok. I accept that I don’t know what to do, and I accept that I am perfectly acceptable in this place. This is where religion will destroy you, but God will lift you up…because if there is any distance that needs to be spanned in order to meet God, he might as well be a million miles away. When my heart is broken, I don’t need guilt, shame, or to analyze what portion of the blame I should be assigned. I don’t need to wonder if God is angry at me, or have any insecurity in that relationship. I need the God who is here.

I accept that God is here. In the midst of the chaos and the pain, and the rush of contradictory and violent emotions that flood through my being, I know that He is here, and His heart is big enough to hold me when my own cannot. So it’s not about what I do. It’s not about whether I shout or I cry, isolate myself or find comforters, lash out at others or numb myself and move on. When my heart is broken it is not about what I do, it is the knowledge that who I am is acceptable, that He sees me, He knows me, and He permits no dark cloud to hide me from his affection. Even the darkness is as noon to Him, and it is He that holds my days as well as my nights. I am allowed to feel what I feel without guilt because these feelings are just passing through. They are just temporary sounds that cannot silence the symphony of love that surrounds me.

It is God who gives life to my heart, and when it is healthy, it is my hearts beat that moves me to the rhythms of his grace. But when it is broken and no longer able to lead, I let my heart go on bypass and let his heart fill my veins. His heart is worthy to the task!

God’s Righteousness Revealed

What follows is an entry from my journal.  I delayed sharing it because I thought it might be too controversial.  It is hard enough for us to accept God’s forgiveness, but to accept ourselves as perfect (in biblical language: righteous) feels like dangerous heresy!  But as scandalous as it may appear, by his own actions, God has declared us righteous.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” -2 Corinthians 5:21

“For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.  Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” -Romans 5:17-19

This is not a polished blog post, just honest thoughts. I hope it inspires your own mediation on your redeemed perfection!

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I am at home with who I am! Matters of the heart can take years to resolve, and the mind can have long since accepted something that the heart continues to ignore. I knew that I was forgiven. I got that. But now to see that I am perfect….wow! I am perfect. And so are you! There is no fatal flaw, no bug, no mistake in our beings. We are as we were meant to be, and we were meant to be godlike! I am safe because I am known and trusted. I’m trusted not based on my past behavior, but based on my true nature. Who I am is trustworthy! Who I am fits into who he is with perfect ease. There is no need to try to shove a square peg in a round hole, and no need for Jesus to pretend he’s us so that the Father can tolerate us. We are not righteous by a shell game, or by some substitutionary trick…we are righteous first by design, and second by redemption.

At creation, God made man and woman, and said that we were “very good”. He said that we were made in His image. We were his children. Yet at the fall we get this sense that there must be some mistake. The fact that Adam and Eve sinned means they must have had some flaw. Then Adam and Eve had children who had children who had children who had children, down through the line this sense of inadequacy continued. We believed ourselves to be inadequate, we acted badly, and then used our bad actions to prove our inadequacy, thus trapping us in the sinner’s catch-22. A good metaphor would be the common racist attitudes that many white people had (and perhaps still have) towards black people. We enslaved them because we decided they were subhuman, didn’t educate them because they weren’t worth it, and didn’t empower them because they were not smart enough. Then when these uneducated, unequipped people acted uneducated and unequipped, we used that as proof of the inferiority of their race. What many whites did to many blacks is what the cycle of sin has done to all of humanity. We sin because we believe we are damaged, imperfect, only human, then use the fact that we sinned as evidence of being damaged, imperfect, and only human. Our belief produces an action that proves the belief…but does that make it true?

With Jesus, we finally get some clarity! At the cross we see all of mankind failing Jesus.  In killing Jesus religion sacrificed love to maintain control, politics did the necessary evil to maintain the status quo, the crowds who worshiped a hero gladly crucified a villain, and the radicals — the Jesus lovers, the sold out believers — ran and hid for cover. At the cross is the utter failure of humanity to do anything right! Surely, if nothing else, it once again proves our belief that we are inadequate, imperfect, broken? Surely this proves God made a mistake? And yet in our worst showing of all time, when humanity condemned our hope to death on a cross, the words “forgive them” and “it is finished” preceded a resurrection from the dead! And what did the resurrected hope do? He found his friends, empowered them, and let them loose to declare the forgiveness of sins and redemption of mankind to the ends of the earth! It turns out that even at our worst, God counts us worthy of the precious blood of Jesus! It turns out that while the fall distorted our understanding and distanced us in our hearts from knowing God, sin did not have the same affect on God! Even while our hearts and minds were in hiding because of our guilt and shame, God was ever loving us and valuing us according to the incredible worth he gave us at creation! If we were perfect then, we are perfect now! Sin did not change our nature, it only darkened our understanding!

In beginning to see this and accept this, I am finding freedom from self-suspicion. While religion promotes ruthless self-analysis as a means of rooting out sin, it turns out that finding oneself forgiven and redeemed restores innocence, and innocence is a much stronger power than self-suspicion! Forgiveness frees us from guilt so that we can enjoy God instead of hiding….and this is good! Discovering that there is nothing wrong with you enables you to make no more excuses, and to no longer assume the worst of yourself. Sin is not a fruit of my nature, only a fruit of a darkened mindset! As I feast on my true nature and the perfect fellowship I share with Jesus, I am unwittingly inoculating myself from the dangers of temptation. Childlike innocence is the greatest defense!

Our Peace

The world doesn’t need our paranoia. The world needs our peace.

When Jesus boarded a boat that was about to sail into a vicious storm, he could have done a lot of things. He could have been a prophet of approaching doom and told the disciples that they were about to enter a dangerous tempest. He could have warned them that they would need a special level of trust if they wanted to survive the ferocious waves. He could have used it as an opportunity to encourage self-reflection, to ask the disciples, “If you die tonight, do you know where you’ll be?” If he was truly clever he would have used the fearful situation for something, anything! — because we all know that fear makes for an attentive (and easily manipulated) audience. But instead, he just rested.

He slept, perhaps soaking in his Father’s love, or maybe just enjoying the dreamless sleep of the untroubled. When he was finally shaken awake by his panicking disciples, he did not abandon his rest and succumb to a fight or flight instinct. He merely looked out on the turmoil of the crashing waves and said, “Quiet! Be still.” And the waves listened. As the storm melted into tranquil seas, then and only then did Jesus proceed to teach a lesson. “Why were you so afraid? Do you not yet have faith in me?” Still trembling at what they had just witnessed, his disciples began to wonder, “Who is this, that even the wind and sea obey his voice?”

It would seem that the outbreak of peace had gotten their attention at a depth that even the fear of death could not penetrate.

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Instead of looking at the confusion and fear around us and prophesying the doom that appears so inevitable, let’s try something different. Let’s remain at peace within the love of our Father. Let’s stay there, perhaps even ignoring the chaos as it builds. And when at last we are called into action and people are looking to us for answers, let’s act from our rest. Let’s confront the darkness with light, the fear with hope, and the confusion with the peace we have been cultivating all along!

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid.” John 14:27 (NIV)

Hope for the New Year

It’s almost the new year! This is a time where many of us set goals for our lives. You may anticipate this to be the year where you finally achieve success (however you may define that word). Maybe this is the year where you finally get in shape, finally kick that bad habit, or finally learn how to enjoy life to the fullest. As seductive as it may be to idealize next year as a year of fulfillment, I have a better declaration for you for the new year.

Your new year is not about achieving a goal. You are not a factory with a quota to fill. It is not about changing yourself into someone better. The God who created you didn’t make a mistake. No, this is a year for two words.

The first word is Today, because the promises of God are not about some far off event. They are about right now. In the midst of the mundane and the exciting, the frustrating and the interesting, today is the day that God loves you. Today is the day that goodness and mercy pursue you (Psalm 23:6). Today is the day that God’s Spirit is pleased to dwell in you. Today is the day that you are his beloved child. Today is the day that He will not leave you or forsake you. God is not waiting for you in the future. He is habitating your today. Let Him find you here!

The second word is Growth. You are not a factory, and there is no quota. You are a tree, planted by the Lord. However hectic the life of farmers may be, the life of a tree is simple. Drink up the water from your roots. Enjoy the sun on your leaves. Grow. It’s not yours to figure out what sort of tree you are, or what direction you should grow in. God already built into you everything he intends you to be. If you grow slowly, enjoy it! If you grow rapidly, enjoy it! In this year you get to drink from the subterranean river of God, which your roots can taste no matter what storm or drought may mar the surface. Drink from his goodness in every season, and enjoy the days of sunshine too! Let his wisdom, his love, and his peace saturate your roots, spread through your branches and leaves, and produce fruit for the nourishment of others!

Let God find you and breathe life into your todays, and drink up his love. You will grow!

Counterintuitive

 

Many important truths are the opposite of what would seem logical. Our logic puts confidence in what it can control and distrusts freedom. Our reasoning finds comfort in what it can understand and avoids the naked wonder of the unknown. Our values see the sacrifice of a few (soldiers, refugees, the generic “others”) as being necessary for the benefit of the many.

Then a child was born. A hope dawned. And our logic was exposed for its folly. When the Son of God laid down his control in order to free those that religion and respectable society oppressed. When Jesus preached in such a way that many left confused and with more questions than they had ever had…but also found their diseases healed and their hearts touched by love. And when the One for whom and through whom all things were made chose to die at the hands of violent men rather than forge a human kingdom in the necessary sacrifice of others. At this time, all that humanity had discarded as too weak, too sentimental, too emotional, too unrealistic turned out to be the very force that overcame the darkness of the human condition.

It turns out that when love is killed, it grows. When grace is given, purity is born. Now those of us who never sought God have been found by him, and those of us who fought against him have been given the place of honor at his victory feast! Only the logic of God would benefit the vanquished as much as the victor!

So cheers to the counterintuitive hope that is ours! Today we celebrate a child that was born. Today we rejoice in the son that was given!

“…and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.” -Isaiah 9:6b-7

Are We Caught in a Cycle?

Are we just caught in a cycle? Is the suffering of yesterday a prophesy about tomorrow? Can there be an end to the logic of war that decides it is worth the deaths of our young men and women, and their young men and women, and the countless civilians who get caught in the crossfire, and the displacement of people and widespread poverty…in order to protect us from danger? As if these countless deaths aren’t a danger worth avoiding…

Is there a path out of the distrust that leads to division that leads to conflict that leads to war and death? Are we, like generations past, destined to fight and kill our brothers and sisters, just because we were born in different places under different ruling powers who can’t find a way to coexist? Is that our future?

It is easy to understand why so many Christians are fatalistic on this point. If the people with all the money and political power can’t find a path to peace, what can we do? It is easier to prophesy peace for another time when Jesus comes back. But what if he’s already here? What if we are his hands and feet? What if his Spirit has been liberally poured out on us? What if Jesus told us that we would do even greater things than he did? What if we held keys that could unlock peace? What if we are the catalyst?

You don’t have control. But you do have influence. You have friends. You know people. And those people know people. And in one way or another you are connected to people who will be pulled to the opposite side and become your enemy if worst came to worst. You are not a spectator in humanity’s unfolding drama. You are an actor. The steps you take leave footprints for others to follow. So what can you do?

When the Facebook world becomes rife with political divisions, conspiracy theories, and excuses to disconnect, choose to engage positively. Find a reason for hope. Find laughter. Find the beauty in humanity, and share it with your friends. When our communities are in conflict and racial or religious tension builds, be a bridge builder. Make friends with people from the other side. Learn about their culture. Listen to their stories, and share your own. Find the person behind the stereotype, and tell others what you find. And when fear threatens to derail your own peace and make you a prisoner to your own protective instinct, remember Jesus, who “for the joy set before him” endured the cross. Remember the man who sacrificed his own life for people who didn’t even want him. Rejected, despised, brutally beaten and crucified, his words were “forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing”. Remember that the tragedy that begot our victory was the sacrificing of the one sinless life on behalf of the sinful, not the other way around. And remember that when perfect love was finally extinguished and all hope seemed gone, it was only the opening act to a reborn love and eternal hope!

We are not bound by the cycle. We’re are not helplessly being led to destruction. Church, we have a voice! We have hands and feet! let’s use them to show love and mercy. Let’s walk in the Spirit of the one who would rather die for the many than send others to their deaths, and let’s resurrect hope in the hopeless, and peace in the confusion! Let’s use the influence we do have to establish peace, allowing God to grow it!

“Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.” -Isaiah 9:5-7a

Seeing The Face of God

Jesus is not an anomaly in the nature of God. He is the revelation of who God really is. As John said in his gospel,

“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he [Jesus] has made him known.” – John 1:18 (ESV)

Keep in mind that John said this after the Old Testament had been completed and accepted as scripture. According to John, in the entire Old Testament era, no one had ever seen God. They may have heard his booming voice or seen miracles that he had accomplished, but the face of God remained veiled. Before Jesus, man inferred who God was from incomplete information. These inferences became doctrines, and these doctrines became the litmus test against which all other ideas about God were compared.

When the face of God came and revealed himself to those with the purest doctrine, they almost unanimously condemned him. Jesus failure to affirm their religious hierarchy, his insistence on doing good at religiously improper times (the Sabbath), and his willingness to associate with those deemed “unclean” all failed the litmus test of what God was supposed to be like, so those who most diligently looked for God ended up being the ones who most viciously opposed him.

Unfortunately, bad doctrines about God continue to obscure our understanding, even within the Christian faith. The most common failure has been in our attempt to reconcile the pre-Jesus concept of God with what Jesus revealed. Instead of recognizing that who Jesus is both precedes and supersedes all other ideas about God, we turn God into a divided character, with “God” still maintaining his wrathful distance and his inability to exist in the presence of sin. In order to fix God’s problem (This God has a real conundrum. “I love them so I want to rescue them, but I’m holy so I want to destroy them…”), Jesus came to stand in-between man and God, so that God wouldn’t see nasty people he wants to destroy, but Jesus who he loves.

Thank God (the real one!!) that the truth is much, much better than that! Because Jesus didn’t come to fix a confused God’s problem as if God was the one who needed saving!…He came to deal with man’s problem.

God has never had an issue with being around sinful men.  Do you remember in the Garden of Eden how God came out to walk with Adam and Eve, and it was Adam and Eve who hid from him?  It is mankind in our guilt who can’t stand to come before God. We just know that we’ve blown it, that we don’t measure up to all of the perfection that God represents, and the idea of approaching such perfection only reminds us of the areas that we have been imperfect. We are terrified to expose ourselves to the all-powerful God, so running and hiding is our only alternative. Believing that the intimacy we crave is hopelessly out of reach (and yet by design being incapable of being satisfied by anything less) we look for everything and anything else that promises to fulfill us. We are like a starving person who only has toxic garbage at his disposal.  He crams his mouth full with food that will alleviate his hunger for only a moment, but which leaves him vomiting, emaciated and even more desperate for food than he was before. In the self-hatred that we lavish on ourselves for being so weak as to be endlessly seduced by things that demean and never satisfy, we project our feelings onto God, imagining that he views us through the same lens that we view ourselves.

The Good News is that Jesus reveals what God is actually like…and it turns out that God values you entirely apart from your messed up behaviour! When confronted with sickness, old god would have said “you sinned, so you deserve to be sick”, but the God Jesus reveals says, “be healed!”. When a person is caught in adultery, the old god would publicly humiliate you and have you stoned to death, but the God Jesus reveals stands by you and says “I won’t condemn you. Now go and sin no more.”. When judgment time came and it was time to deal with all of the world’s sins, old god would have tortured and destroyed the guilty, but the God Jesus reveals says, “Forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing!”. And when old God would have gladly punished sin from a safe distance, the God Jesus reveals took all of mankind’s sin upon himself and died in our place! That’s what God is actually like! Jesus has shown us! He is not the magical potion that obscures us from God so that we can somehow get close, he is the Message God most urgently wants to communicate to humanity…that all of the wrong we have done has been utterly powerless to remove us from his heart. He loves us as much as he did when he first dreamed us up! While we have grown distant in our hearts and minds, he has never been far from us! We are, in fact, his temple…his favourite place to live! He is pleased to dwell in us!

I pray that your eyes will be opened to see Jesus as he is, and in seeing Jesus that your eyes will recognize the true nature of God himself! Then you will boldy approach him, enjoy him, and receive all the help you need!

Found

September 19, 2016

Today is the 9 year anniversary of my awakening. It went something like this.

I was exhausted. I didn’t fully realize how tired I was, because when tired is a lifestyle….well, it seems normal. While circumstantially my life was pretty average, my soul and mind were under torment. I was in that special corner of hell described in Romans 7. I had great desires. I had a heart that wanted to know God. I wanted to be a good Christian. I wanted to “deny myself and follow Him”. These desires meant that throughout my childhood and teen years, I actually listened to the sermons in church. It meant that I actually read the bible for myself (though never having the self-discipline to achieve read-the-bible-in-a-year status), and perhaps most strange for my age, it meant that I devoured books on theology. But my actions failed me. I was unable to live up to the standards I believed in, which led me often to “repentance”, meaning I confessed my sins a lot, asked for forgiveness, and tried to start fresh. But however pure the intentions of my heart, they still failed to bring me the victory I so needed. Instead, with every new failure, a layer was added to the condemnation that weighed heavily on my soul. Because now not only were my actions falling short of the standards I believed in, but I didn’t even believe my own repentance. How could I? I mean, it felt sincere when I was depressed, crying, begging for forgiveness, and waiting for some sense that God had forgiven me. It felt like real remorse and a real desire to change…but as I listened to preachers who had high standards for repentance, as well as the self-loathing voice that inhabited my thoughts, I decided that, however real my repentance felt, it clearly wasn’t real because no change happened. Which made me feel utterly hopeless. Not only did I fail the standard, but I also failed to take the proper steps to being forgiven. Sincerity be damned, I was clearly headed for hell.

I couldn’t fall asleep. My normal was torment, and the only rest for the tormented comes when your brain is simply too tired to entertain another frenzied thought. The gaps grew longer between my attempts at repentance, cause I really couldn’t stand the added condemnation of another failure. Anxiety, depression, hopelessness. You get the picture.

Anyway, on September 19, 2007, I sat through a class about hearing the voice of God. In a last ditch effort to take hold of the God who seemed so impossible to wrangle, I had signed up for a 5-month Christian school with YWAM that I hoped would save my soul. As the teacher went on about a life of hearing from God directly, as well as the different things that obstruct our hearing, I still didn’t have much hope. Just a glimmer.

At the end of his talk, we all had an opportunity to spend some time alone to think of the areas in our lives where we had fallen short. Great. Sounds like every day of my life until that point! But this time, there was a subtle twist. We were to write down all of the areas that we had failed, all of the sins that continued to shame our souls, and then bring them to the “sin shredder” (really just a standard paper shredder…but I guess this one was multi-purpose). And here we each shredded our record of sins…hopefully to remember them no more. While this process had a more hopeful twist than my usual efforts at repentance, it would take more than a multi-purpose shredder to unchain my heart. As I went up for prayer after shredding my sins, I had the faintest question in my mind. Could I really hear from God?

Suddenly, in the span of about one second, everything changed. I instantly found myself standing at the foot of the cross. I saw the face of Jesus. And a loud voice boomed, “It is FINISHED!”. The vision ended as quickly as it had begun. And I was left a sobbing mess.

Words can’t possibly describe that experience. After nine years, I myself haven’t even come close to grasping it. It was not just an overwhelming experience for my senses. It wasn’t just the magic of being transported in a vision to another time and another place. It was the voice. It was those eyes. And it was everything they so perfectly communicated in the blink of an eye.

I cried for a long time. Not just normal crying, but the weeping of a thousand bottled-up tears from a thousand unanswered prayers. A tear for every time I felt abandoned, for every time I felt like I was an object of wrath, for every time I longed for heaven but seemed destined for hell. I cried it all away, as hope reclaimed a weary heart. I was found! Not in some generic way, but in the most meaningful, personal way possible. I saw him. I saw love. I saw grace. I saw a deep pool of mercy. A pool which I thought I had dried up with my endless failures, as if a person could drain the Pacific with a straw. I hadn’t even tested the depths of His mercy! I was not a disappointment, I was not living under the dark glare of the Judge. I was instead captivated by the eyes that held a fathomless, unchangeable, eternal love. In the reflection of those eyes, I found myself!

Needless to say, I cried a lot after that. For at least a month after seeing Jesus, random things would bring back the tears. Someone might say “love” in a conversation, and I would start bawling. I would hear the word “Jesus”, and again the tears would fall. When I wasn’t busy crying, my face was plastered with a stupid grin. The grin of someone who is completely overwhelmed with a goodness that he knows will never leave.

The years since that eternal moment have not been easy. It turns out that when Jesus said, “It is finished”, he didn’t mean that I would never fail again. There have been seasons where I’ve found myself right back in a familiar rut. At times I even thought that I had once again fallen too far for his mercy. Surely the guy who had such a vision should be on the fast track to perfect behavior, right? How could I so scorn the grace of God as to fail to fully embrace it at all times? The accuser is very crafty! But while I have endured trying seasons, times of doubt, and circumstances that I couldn’t easily make sense of, there is a voice that resonates in the depths of my soul. Deeper than knowledge, experience, or the unstable realm of emotions, there is a timeless place within me where I simply know. I am His. He is mine. I cannot possibly outrun his mercy. I have no hope of extracting myself from his love. He loves me. It’s who He is. I am loved.

Whatever is going on around me, and whatever the status of my performance (are we still doing that? Are will still performing as if God doesn’t value us for who we are? Are we still measuring each other as if our judgment carries any weight?), I have a home. I have a place from which I will never be evicted. I have sanctuary in the heart of God, even as he makes his home in a deep part of mine. What bliss! I do not know what the rest of this life will look like, but of one thing I am certain.

“surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of God forever” –Psalm 23: 8

Truth in Tension?

Check out my video.  I talk about the idea of balancing seemingly contradictory truths. I hope you like it!