"But you will not leave in haste or go in flight; for the Lord will go before you, the God of Israel will be your rear guard," Isaiah 52:12.
Webster Online defines rear guard as a military attachment designed to protect the back side of a main force. Beautiful imagery as Oswald has applied it -- to the end of one year and the beginning of the next.
Yesterday. "Our present enjoyment of God's grace is apt to be checked by the memory of yesterday's sins and blunders." Yes and yes again. I am inclined to replay my mistakes over and over as evidence to myself that hope is not warranted, that my spirit needs to remain firmly tied to the ground, that the other shoe will drop. My error is that, while "God reminds us of the past lest we get into a shallow security in the present," I let my lack of faith in myself transfer to a lack of faith in God. I cannot create a resume of my past successes and build my hope on it. I can, however, build a resume of God's successes -- his interventions in my life even -- and build my hope on him.
"Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ." -- Oswald Tomorrow. God leads me into the New Year. He has a plan. He has gone before me. No part of what happens in 2010 will be a surprise to him. He knows my frailty. Hear and believe your own words, Barbara: He loves me and wants what is best for me.
Today. I have this moment only. I will not clench my fists or cover my heart. I will not cringe in anticipation of my own failure. I will be open to the goodness of God.
Well worn ruts of habitual sin crisscross my soul, and yesterday on my way home from work, I followed one of them into despair. I did not perform well. I did not prove my worth. No one acknowledged my worth. I must be worth-less. And what did I do when I got to that pit? Pedaled harder and faster -- with look! no hands! no feet! no bike! -- just me screaming, Pick me! Pick me! from the bottom of a pit.
"All my fresh springs shall be in Thee." What beautiful words of promise. I live like the psalmist in a dry and weary land where there's no water, and my wells have all gone dry. That doesn't stop me from returning to them again and again in search of what they cannot provide. My soul thirsts for God, but I will, like Oswald describes, "cling to the natural virtues."
I am a writer. If I'm good at something, this is it. My heart thrills to every response my writing evokes. I look at this blog at least twice a day to see if anyone has posted any comments. I get excited by little thumbs-up signs on my Facebook posts. My writing is one of my wells, but it cannot quench my thirst. I'm not sure if I possess this talent by nature of heredity or education and practice, but thank God he is not in the business of patching it up. I have turned to my writing again and again to prove my worth, and it is not up to the task.
Oswald: "Watch how God will wither up your confidence in natural virtues after sanctification, and in any power you have, until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if you are going through a drying-up experience."
Well, then. Thank you, God. My wells are dry. All my fresh springs shall be in You.
In John 6, Jesus has been talking about the Bread of Life. Then he says, "This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world . . . I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you . . . For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him."
Not surprisingly, his followers reply, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?" And Jesus asks them, "Does this offend you?" Then comes today's verse: "Many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him."
A hard teaching? That's a bit of an understatement, isn't it? This is beyond the craziness of tearing down the temple and rebuilding it in three days. This is beyond death and resurrection, which someone might be able to accept on a theoretical level. This is cannibalism. "Eat my flesh. Drink my blood." And Jesus doesn't say, "Don't panic. I'm speaking figuratively here." Rather, he says something along the lines of, "You think this is tough? Wait until you see what's coming." He then turns to the twelve and asks if they want to leave too. I love Peter's response here, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God." It might sound like craziness to us, but we're all in. We've put all our eggs in your basket. Where else can we go?
I want to make this personal, but I also want to be careful -- perhaps too careful. I think I may have, at times in the past, heard God's Spirit speaking to me or felt him nudging me but chosen to ignore those communications because they were not rational. The words were not Scripture, nor were they clearly aligned with what I believed to be my prescribed roles as a Christian woman. Rather, they aligned very closely with my deepest longings -- to write, to create, to teach. Therefore, I distrusted them. I did not leap to follow but rather pursued with renewed vigor what I believed to be my duty. I returned to the law when the Spirit was calling.
Our 21st century sensibilities put a lot of stock in what is rational. Maybe too much.
"We deify independence and willfulness and call them by the wrong name. What God looks on as obstinate weakness, we call strength."
How often do we get it 180 degrees backwards? "For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God," I Cor. 3:19. "And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment," Isaiah 64:6. "For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness," Matt. 23:27.
Wisdom. Strength. Beauty. Righteousness. We are inclined to get it wrong on each count. Therefore, vigilance is required in our daily lives. When I have been going with the flow for a period of time -- a week, a few hours, a year -- without apparent obstacles or grievous errors, I need to stop, look and listen for God. The flow is powered by conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is not God's wisdom. With amazing subtlety the world has infiltrated my mind and heart and eased me into false beliefs about my worth, the way forward, success.
God values humility. "Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven," Matt. 18:4. Oswald emphasizes that this is not a one-time event. I can, I must, come to God again and again, admit my weakness, my failures, my insecurities, my fear, and my dependence on him.
"If you will return, O Israel," declares the Lord, "Then you should return to Me." Jeremiah 4:1
At the time of Jeremiah, the ten northern tribes of Israel have already been taken into captivity, and Jeremiah prophecies a similar fate for Judah if she persists in her waywardness. The word "return" in 4:1, therefore, holds a double meaning: If you want to return home, return to me. Home for the Israelites might mean a number of things: the promised land, freedom, a return to a certain way of life, the end of being strangers in a strange land, normalcy -- things for which they might be willing to fight quite apart from God.
Home, for me, means being comfortable in my own skin -- a sense of peace within me, a sense of being loved and accepted as I am, freedom to be and not to act. According to my Hebrew dictionary, the word used for "return" in this verse does not necessarily imply a return to the starting point but rather a retreat from the current pursuit -- turning back, turning away. If you want to go home -- even if you have never been, if you were born in a foreign land and have never known the sense of belonging you seek -- return to God.
Exile for the Israelites -- whether impending or certain -- created the type of climax of which Oswald writes: "Every now and again, not often, but sometimes, God brings us to a point of climax." And what we choose at that climax, according to Oswald, sends us down one of two paths: a marginalized existence or a meaning-filled existence where we "become more and more ablaze for the glory of God -- My Utmost for His Highest."
Oswald also seems to be dealing with the issue of private versus public faith and the importance of fighting our battles before God first. Again, the emphasis seems to be on relationship. My efforts against abortion, homelessness, the disintegration of family, or sin of any kind must stem from a solid understanding between God and me. Otherwise, my efforts are mine alone and of little lasting value.
If I understand I John 1 and Oswald correctly, there is great comfort here. An awareness of our sin, the very existence of a struggle within us, is evidence of the Holy Spirit's presence in our lives. Oswald wrote, "The evidence that I am delivered from sin is that I know the real nature of sin in me." If I was comfortable with my own righteousness, that would be a bad sign: "If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us," I John 1:8.
Walking in the darkness means hiding our sin, looking for a way to cover it up, pretending we "have it all together." Walking in the light means exposing our sin, confessing it, and looking to Christ's blood to cleanse us from it. And I can almost begin to understand the use of the adjective "easy" in this context. Covering up requires tricks, mirrors, lies, quick moves and heavy make-up, whereas the unfolding of which Oswald writes in the last paragraph indicates the opposite. Rather than rush around cleaning my house, stuffing things in closets, I allow Jesus to move freely within my life, humbly acknowledging the mess.
Oswald's first line is difficult for me to decipher: "To mistake conscious freedom from sin for deliverance from sin by the Atonement is a great error." But from the next line, "No man knows what sin is until he is born again," and the rest of the entry, I believe he is saying that this side of heaven, our lives will not be free from sin. Nonetheless, we are delivered from its power. When we see it in ourselves and in the world, we hate it. Thus, the very nature of the inner struggle.
Sitting here, writing this, I feel a real measure of the peace I am seeking, and I am deeply grateful.
I am really starting to wish I could meet this man, sit down over dinner, and pose a few questions. I would like to understand his temperament. Again today, he uses the word "easy" in reference to living the Christian life: "If we are born again, it is the easiest thing to live in right relationship to God and the most difficult thing to go wrong, if only we will heed God's warnings and keep in the light." (Emphasis mine. That's a pretty big "if.")
Maybe it's a matter of semantics, but nothing in life seems easy to me -- and I know that by the world's standards I live a charmed life. Just getting out of bed can be difficult some days, let alone going to work, getting along with prickly people, loving and serving my family, doing the menial tasks of everyday life, exercising, graciously accepting criticism, choosing to be grateful, choosing peace when you're running late, choosing forgiveness when someone cuts you off in traffic.
Today's reading is so distant from my experience as to make me question the legitimacy of my faith. "When you really see Jesus, I defy you to doubt Him." Well, Oswald, if Jesus were sitting here next to me, I'm sure you're right, but what do you mean when I really see Jesus?
"When He says -- 'Let not your heart be troubled,' if you see Him I defy you to trouble your mind, it is a moral impossibility to doubt when He is there." I doubt all the time. My heart is troubled all the time. I am a worrier. I have four children. I worry about whether they will make the right choices, study hard, remain pure . . . I'm not excusing the behavior. I know I must fight against those tendencies, but it is a fight.
If you have ever been to a wrestling match, you know there is nothing easy about the sport. How can Oswald use wrestling as a metaphor for the Christian life (see December 16th entry) and call it easy?
I want to "get into personal contact with Jesus." I want the peace that Oswald describes: "a peace all over from the crown of the head to the sole of the feet, an irrepressible confidence." Again, the question: what am I doing wrong?
A side note: My friend Elizabeth posted a note on yesterday's entry that is worth reading. She wrote that Oswald suffered from depression for an extended period of time and suffered despair. I have struggled with depression for years myself, so this only makes Oswald more interesting to me. My assignment: research Oswald's life.
Atonement, according to my Bible dictionary, means "a making at one," and is used in theology to "denote the work of Christ in dealing with the problem posed by the sin of man, and in bringing sinners into right relation with God."
Oswald answers the question he poses in his title: "The great privilege of discipleship is that I can sign on under His Cross, and that means death to sin." Then he emphasizes that there are only two choices: identification with Christ and therefore death to sin or allowing sin to flourish in your life.
My problem with Oswald's teaching today is the ease with which he asserts life will flow after that choice has been made: "The proof that your old man is crucified with Christ is the amazing ease with which the life of God in you enables you to obey the voice of Jesus Christ." Seriously? I don't think it is easy to hear the voice of Christ, let alone to obey it. Paul himself writes about the battle between the old man and the new man in Romans 7 and the fact that he often does what he does not want to do.
Galatians, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is a letter written by Paul to a church that has fallen victim to false teaching. The false teachers have assailed Paul's credibility, and he is forced to assert his credentials. In today's verse, Gal. 6:14, he turns from the security of those credentials to the cross of Christ. He glories only in his identification with Christ's death. The false teachers have also stressed the necessity of adhering to the Mosaic law in addition to belief in Christ's atoning sacrifice. Galatians is a book devoted to the idea that we are made right with God through identification with Christ's death -- justification by faith alone.
Oswald's final paragraph seems to extend the principle to sanctification by faith alone. Maybe the "easy" part is that Christ does the work in us, but we are still left to wrestle through all that life brings us and "work out our salvation with fear and trembling." I am willing to accept, as Oswald asserted, that God is amazingly tender, but I still see life as hard.
John 6 begins with the feeding of 5,000 men plus women and children from five barley loaves and two fish. The crowd follows Jesus, hungry for more, but he tells them they seek after the wrong food. "I am the bread of life," he says. "He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty." Wow! Food -- the acquirement of which consumed the majority of their time and energy -- in permanent supply. That had to seem like an unbelievably good deal, and since he had already delivered what seemed like an impossibility the day before, why not take him at his word?
The blessings of God are good. I would be crazy not to want them. But when I begin to covet the blessings, I am in danger of missing something infinitely better -- Jesus Christ Himself.
"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him," John 6:44. Oswald seems clearly to believe that personal revelation persists today. God draws us -- not just once but daily -- and when he draws, we need to leap in response. As I write this, a plethora of rational objections spring up, demanding consideration: Isn't that what crazy people -- like Jim Jones and his followers -- do? How could you ever possibly know that you were hearing God's voice and not your own sinful desires or worse? After all, the Bible says the heart is deceitfully wicked. You might just hear what you want to hear. That's how heresy gets started . . .
Rational objections indeed, but Oswald writes, "The hindrance is that I will not trust God, but only my mental understanding. As far as feelings go, I must stake all blindly. I must will to believe, and this can never be done without a violent effort on my part to disassociate myself from my old ways of looking at things, and by putting myself right over onto Him."
I am struck by the word "violent," which reckons back to an earlier entry on wrestling. Opposition is assumed and striving is required.
I think we each need to realize our own tendencies. Leaping without looking isn't one of mine. Indecision and inaction are. With safeguards and accountability in place, I need to listen for the voice of God and leap.
Barbara
P.S. I began my study of the Holy Spirit today by looking at Romans 8. I also read this in Tyndale's New Bible Dictionary: "Life for the believer is therefore qualitatively different from what it was prior to faith. His daily living becomes his means of responding to the Spirit's claim, enabled by the Spirit's power. This was the decisive difference between Christianity and rabbinic Judaism for Paul. The Jew lived by law, the deposit of the Spirit's revelatory work in past generations, an attitude which led inevitably to inflexibility and casuistry, since revelation from the past is not always immediately appropriate to the needs of the present. But the Spirit brought an immediacy of personal relationship with God, which fulfilled the ancient hope of Jeremiah and which made worship and obedience something much more free, vital and spontaneous." It occurred to me that I have been living more like the Jew than the Christian.
I am seeing a pattern: Oswald places premium value on relationship with Jesus Christ but rather low value on personal experience. This recurring theme both intrigues and befuddles me. What is relationship other than personal experience? I can know something about C.S. Lewis by reading his books -- by loving his books -- and by reading books about him, but I cannot say I have a relationship with him. I would like to have had such a relationship -- to have sat under his teaching, dined with him and Joy, asked him questions -- but I did not and cannot since he is dead.
Of course, there is a sharp distinction between my ability to know C.S. Lewis and my ability to know God, and it lies in the II Corinthians passage associated with today's reading. The Spirit knows the mind of God and shares his mind with us that "we may understand what God has freely given us," (II Cor. 2:12).
The Holy Spirit. The Comforter. The Counselor. The Person of the Trinity with whom I am least familiar, least comfortable, least informed. God the Father created the world and holds it in place, ordained the beginning and the end. He's the Boss, sovereign, supreme. God the Son became man, experienced the frailty of human existence, died on the cross for our sins, and rose from the dead -- Savior of the world. God the Spirit . . . what?
A bit about my spiritual upbringing: I grew up in the Baptist church -- first Southern, then American. I cried at the end of the service for weeks before I went forward at Immanuel Baptist Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I wore a pretty pink matching sweater set when I was baptized in a pool at the front of the church a few weeks later. My parents took us to Sunday school every Sunday without fail, and I learned the Bible stories well. Repeatedly at summer camp and revivals, I felt convicted of the weight of my sin and recommitted my life to Christ. I say none of that in jest. I believe my young heart was sincere.
In high school, however, I was heavily influenced by my older brother's new belief in a doctrine called election. Even though it painted God in a whole new light, I couldn't seem to refute the scriptural arguments my brother presented, and over the next fifteen years, I became progressively more and more reformed in my thinking. Looking back, I'm fairly convinced that the more reformed I became, the less I understood the work of the Holy Spirit in my life. Please don't misunderstand me: I love the beauty of the reformed tradition, and I am still solidly convinced of its truth. Somehow, however, in the beauty of those truths, I lost a sense of God's personal concern and involvement in my life.
Faith alone. Grace alone. Scripture alone. Of those three pillars of the reformed tradition, Scripture alone was paramount in my mind. God revealed himself through Scripture and through his Son. Period. Supernatural revelation ended with the closing of the Canon. At least, this was how I understood the doctrine, and so, when someone referred to God speaking to him, I was suspect. I was also suspect of supernatural healing, speaking in tongues, present-day miracles of any kind. To be honest, I am still suspect, but I have a few huge, towering questions for myself: What do you believe the Holy Spirit does? What does the reformed tradition allow that he does? What does Scripture say that he does?
Oswald writes: "Redemption has no meaning for me until it speaks the language of my conscious life. When I am born again, the Spirit of God takes me right out of myself and my experiences, and identifies me with Jesus Christ. . . My experiences are not worth anything unless they keep me at the Source, Jesus Christ. . . Faith that is sure of itself is not faith; faith that is sure of God is the only faith there is."
A faith that permeates the language of my conscious life, keeps me identified with Jesus and sure of God -- that's what I want.
"The thing that remains and deepens is the worker's simple relationship to Jesus Christ; his usefulness to God depends on that and that alone."
I am reminded of the lyrics to a song by Michael W. Smith: "I'm coming back to the heart of worship. And it's all about you. It's all about you, Jesus. I'm sorry, Lord, for the thing I've made it. When it's all about you."
I am always, always trying to make it about me -- my writing, my parenting, my friendship. I pray this Advent season that I might be able to make it about Jesus -- his birth, his death, his gift of the Holy Spirit, his relevance to every minute of every day.
"God is more tender than we can conceive." I need to concentrate on that statement. If Oswald is right, if Scripture backs up that characterization, then I need to dig a foundation in my brain, lay a concrete wall around that truth, and protect it with every fiber of my being. I am certain that it would change me. I do not currently know God as tender. I do not experience him as tender. But experience is more often than not a fickle gauge of truth.
My assignment: research God's tenderness.
The referenced passage from Matthew 10, which sounds rather more hard than tender -- "I came not to send peace, but a sword" -- follows Christ's reference to our inestimable value as compared to the sparrows and the reassurance that the very hairs on our heads are numbered. As he often does, Oswald brings to the foreground a paradox: the Prince of Peace came to drive a sharp sword to the very core of our sinfulness -- what was, for many of us, disguised as our righteousness.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis has the lion Aslan use his claws to tear away Eustace's dragon flesh, a painful process: "The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've every felt." And yet, surely, that was the most tender thing the lion could have done. Eustace did not want to live his life as a dragon.
"Cut down to the very root," Oswald writes, "or there will be no healing." To leave someone with the impression that anything less than total transformation in Jesus Christ will do is not tenderness. "Thousands of people are happy without God in this world. If I was happy and moral till Jesus came, why did he come?" Oswald answers his own question: "Jesus Christ came to send a sword through every peace that is not based on a personal relationship to Himself."
I comprehend God's righteousness, but if I do not see it in light of his tenderness, I am missing the full picture.
I attend a church that celebrates Advent. We light a new candle on the wreath each Sunday, and the liturgy centers on preparing our hearts for Christ's coming. I work at a homeless shelter where much of the energy for the past several weeks has been focused on preparing for Christmas and creating a warm sense of community for men, women and children who are homeless and often without family connection. I started this blog shortly after the beginning of Advent and hoped that it would serve the purpose of preparing my heart. So why do I feel so lousy? so Grinch-like? so not-ready-for-Christmas? My son came home from college yesterday -- three days early -- and it was a wonderful surprise but, honestly, not enough to lift my spirit from the pit in which it languishes. Why? Why am I not loyal to Jesus -- happy in anticipation of his coming?
This morning my counselor showed me a rather poorly done video with a simple message. The clip had two parts. The video portion was identical in both parts -- a journey on a short path through the rain forest to the Oregon Coast -- but each portion was set to radically different audio. The first portion was set to cheerful music, and my mind flashed to happy memories of camping along the coast when my children were younger. The second portion was accompanied by an ominous tune, "shark music," my counselor called it, and it wrecked the mood.
Shark music is playing in my head all the time.
We don't have a Christmas tree yet. I haven't done my Christmas letter or sent out the Christmas cards. I'm not done shopping, but I've already spent way too much money. My house is a mess. We don't have any Christmas lights -- not even simple, tasteful ones. We don't eat dinner together as a family. My daughter's blood sugar was over 500 one morning this week. I let the free turkey I received spoil in the refrigerator. I probably shouldn't have said I would sponsor that family from the Mission because I cannot afford to buy them the kind of presents someone else could. The children's Christmas program for which I am responsible is not coming together. I will disappoint. I cannot love my children enough. I am not enough.
According to my counselor, it does not work to sit at the beach and pretend the shark music is not playing, and I know from experience that it does not work to play the idyllic version over and over in your head and berate yourself for not achieving it.
Enter Oswald. Loyalty to Jesus is not loyalty to an idyllic vision -- lights on the house, fire in the fireplace, presents under the tree, cocoa and marshmallows in mugs, homeless sheltered and tucked away out of sight. Jesus is not a means to our end. Loyalty to Jesus is not perfect performance. Loyalty to Jesus is believing that he created us and that he has ordered our circumstances.
I believe honesty is also loyalty to Jesus.
For now, I hear shark music, but I long for carols.
Within the realm of homeless shelters, we often speak of the "God-shaped hole" within people and how drugs, sex, money, alcohol and relationships often serve as futile attempts to fill that hole. What we might not emphasize enough, however, is Who created the hole in the first place. Yesterday, a pastor friend was praying for me, and he used this sentence: "Life was calculated to be too big for us." I keep thinking about that. God is not expecting me to finally rise to the occasion and get my stuff together. In fact, if I understand Oswald correctly, he's saying that God is continually creating a need within me, a need that only he can satisfy. The hope (this side of heaven) is not that I will one day be filled up and have no more need. The hope is that I will daily recognize the need and turn to the only One who can fill it. "Nothing can satisfy the need but that which created the need. This is the meaning of redemption -- it creates and it satisfies."
There is hope in the longing that characterizes my life. Good news.
Wrestling. Both my sons were high school wrestlers. My oldest wrestles in college, and my brother is a high school wrestling coach. I have sat for hours and hours on hard metal bleachers and watched hundreds of wrestling matches. "Sat" and "watched" are actually rather passive verbs for the mother of a wrestler; a match can be an excruciating six minutes, and I seldom stayed seated for the whole time.
I like wrestling as a metaphor for the Christian life because it is an all-in kind of sport. Half-way committed wrestlers do not last because no one wants to lie flat on his back with his opponent on top of him in a gym full of spectators on a regular basis. Hence, the young men I know who stick with wrestling commit themselves to hours of rigorous preparation off the mat and train themselves to focus mind and body on the mat.
I appreciate Oswald's distinction between wrestling with and wrestling before God. Although I have used the former expression, I can see the ridiculousness of it. Wrestlers are matched by weight, and even then, when one is considerably stronger and/or more experienced, the match is over within seconds. No 103-pounder is going to voluntarily walk onto the mat with a heavyweight, and the heavyweight would have little satisfaction from pinning a wrestler one-third his weight. (I'm still trying to understand the significance of Jacob's story in this context, as his example has always seemed to advocate wrestling with God; but perhaps I have underestimated the damage his hip suffered. Certainly, to walk with a limp the remainder of his life was no trifle.)
Either way, however, the message to me is clear: I am not to be a jellyfish, passively acknowledging the "will of God." I am to be a wrestler -- passionate, committed, always in training, sometimes beaten and humiliated, but never half-hearted.
"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places," Eph. 6:12.
I love this line: "Always make a practice of provoking your mind to think out what it accepts easily." How many times have I thought I understood something only to stumble around in the explanation of it? Make a practice of provoking your mind.
I am the staff writer for the Union Gospel Mission in Spokane, WA, and I recently co-wrote a magazine article with my executive director, entitled, "What I Know." He was limited to about 800 words, so we focused on about 8 things -- every man is worth understanding, it's never too late, homelessness can happen to anyone, God transforms . . . Even though we were dealing with his most closely held, time-worn beliefs, it was not an easy article to write.
What would I write if it were my article? What do I know? What do I easily accept that needs the discipline of explanation? My assignment: write my own "What I Know" article.
Oswald's final sentence describes my vocation: "The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance." Amen, brother!
"Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful," John 14:27. Jesus speaks these words to his disciples with regard to his death and the coming of the Holy Spirit. What he describes does indeed sound like Oswald's title for today's reading, "the great life."
My experience of the Christian life, however, does not mirror Oswald's assertion that obedience equals simplicity, and my life is not characterized by the peace Jesus promises. My heart is almost always troubled and frequently fearful. At the same time, I would assert that obedience has been my primary goal. Where have I gone wrong? God, honestly, make it clear to me: where have I gone wrong?
Oswald writes, "As long as we try to serve two ends, ourselves and God, there is perplexity. The attitude must be one of complete reliance on God." I'm fairly certain that these lines point to the answer, but what does "complete reliance" look like? I have to get up in the morning, and shower, and parent, and work, and converse with people, and make decisions. I cannot wait for the Spirit to move me. Yesterday my daughter pointed out that since I've been doing this blog I've gotten kind of "lazy" about making dinner -- sushi, egg rolls and take out. She was right. I have. Life is such a terrible balancing act. What in the world does Oswald mean by "complete reliance"?
My friend Judy sent me a poem this morning by Mary Oliver. I'm not sure it has any relevance to today's post except that it awoke in me a sense of beauty and desire, a freedom and lack of striving, the simplicity of which Oswald speaks. The last two stanzas:
I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart, pumping hard, I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.
Sometimes I do not see the connection -- or I see only a distant one -- between Oswald's chosen Scripture and his text. This may result from the fact that Oswald did not write My Utmost for His Highest in this devotional format. His wife, who was an extremely accomplished stenographer, recorded his lectures and assembled this book and others after his death. I'm not sure whether the Bible passages were part of the original lectures or not, but I'm guessing that she must have had to improvise in places.
At any rate, while today's devotional entry and the companion text are both about prayer, the former is about intercession, and the later begins a parable by Jesus on persistence in prayer. My confession is somewhat tangential to both: I don't pray. Not with any kind of consistency or depth. Rather than my prayer life improving over the years, it has deteriorated. When my children were younger, we used to sit down to dinner together with regularity, and we always prayed then. Sometimes we even shared prayer requests from our day, and my husband and I consistently prayed with our children when we put them to bed. Those two physical reminders have all but disappeared. Occasionally, I pray for inspiration before I write. Occasionally, I pray for family and friends who are ill or in trouble. Occasionally.
The death of my prayer life is most likely a result of its sickly nature in the first place. I have never felt comfortable in prayer. I have never had a sense of God listening. Perhaps I should reiterate that I do firmly believe in God. I believe in an all-mighty, all-knowing God. A sovereign God who will accomplish his will in the world, as well as in my life and the lives of those around me. I do not imagine that I can move God in prayer. (Jesus' parable on persistence in Luke 18, however, would seem to contradict that notion.) So, why pray? At least part of the answer has got to be that one cannot have a relationship with God without it, but can you pray -- talk to Someone -- without an established relationship?
Over the years, I have tried a variety of recommended methods -- visualization (imagine God there in the chair next to you); following a pattern like ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication); reading written prayers; putting the Lord's prayer in my own words; praying through the Psalms -- all with varying degrees of success and failure, but ultimately failure because I just cannot believe that the God of the universe is interested in me and my life.
I found an assignment for myself in a quote by G.K. Chesterton: "You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink." I know without doubt that I have much for which to be thankful, and perhaps if I just start by saying, "thanks," more will develop from there. It is a starting place.
Finally, good news. While the meaning of Oswald's message is still a bit tangled with threads of other thoughts in my brain, I believe there is real comfort here, and even now, I am beginning to taste it.
I confess that I actually liked the quote with which I began yesterday's post. I've wanted to shout something like it on numerous occasions. The problem is I'd primarily be shouting at myself, and where's the comfort in that?
Yesterday, my counselor gave me a sheet on "core sensitivities in close relationships." I saw myself most closely mirrored in the one titled "esteem-sensitive": "We believe that who we are, just as we are, is not enough to be valued. Therefore, to protect ourselves from criticism and judgment, we continually attempt to prove that we are worthy through performance and achievement." Performance and achievement, I believe, are part of what Oswald labels individuality -- all elbows. Also terribly unreliable and remarkably short-lived.
Beneath all my blustering to be loved and accepted for who I really am, the truth is that I'm not even willing to let you see who I really am. I'm trying to distract you with my performance. Notice the word "protect" in the quote above, and remember Oswald's words from yesterday: "The shell of individuality is God's created natural covering for the protection of the personal life, but individuality must go in order that the personal life may come out and be brought into fellowship with God." Otherwise, we become isolated. My performance, my blustering, my individuality keep my personal life hidden -- protect me to some extent, yes, but prevent my fellowship with God. They do the opposite of what I desperately desire -- they keep me from being known.
"If you give up your right to yourself to God," Oswald writes, "the real true nature of your personality answers to God straight away. Jesus Christ emancipates the personality, and the individuality is transfigured (not lost); the transfiguring element is love, personal devotion to Jesus."
If what I truly want is relationship -- to be known and loved -- then the insistence upon individuality and the hiding behind performance have got to go.
"There comes a time when you have to stand up and shout: This is me, damn it! I look the way I look, think the way I think, feel the way I feel, love the way I love! I am a whole complex package. Take me . . . or leave me. Accept me or walk away! Do not try to make me feel like less of a person just because I don't fit your idea of who I should be and don't try to change me to fit your mold. If I need to change, I alone will make that decision. When you are strong enough to love yourself 100%, good and bad, you will be amazed at the opportunities that life presents you," Stacey Charter. (I googled Stacey Charter, by the way. She's a breast cancer survivor who happens to have some pretty good quotes running around the web.)
How American can you get, right? Land of rugged individuality that we are, non-conformity is one of our national virtues, right along with tolerance. Let me be me, and I'll let you be you. Oswald, however, describes individuality as "all elbows, it separates and isolates."
The companion Bible verse to today's reading is Matthew 16:24: "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.'" The following verse elaborates: "'For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.'"
Deny myself. Lose my life. What is Christ asking of me? Surely, he is the one who made me unique. Next to the much-touted snowflake, human beings are an infinitely grander tribute to his limitless creativity, and partly for that reason, I don't think he's asking me not to be me or to try to be somebody else. I heard a pastor once say, "When you meet God, he's not going to ask you why you weren't more like Moses or David. He's going to ask you, why weren't you more like Barbara?" Maybe I just want to believe that, but the remainder of today's entry gives me hope that the issue at stake here is not really the end of Barbara, but the beginning.
"Individuality counterfeits personality." Peeking ahead, I see that tomorrow's reading deals with personality, so until then . . .
My husband is laughing at me because I am currently surrounded by five fat books -- concordances, dictionaries and commentaries. I am most certainly not a Greek scholar, but in an attempt to understand what Oswald means by the "natural," I did a little research.
The word translated "flesh" in yesterday's passage (Gal. 5:24) is the same word Paul uses in Gal. 2:20: "The life I life in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God . . " According to my Greek dictionary, sarx, means "flesh, as stripped of the skin, i.e. (strictly) the meat of an animal (as food), or (by extension) the body (as opposed to the soul or spirit), or as the symbol of what is external, or (by implication) human nature (with its frailties and passions)." Hence, Oswald's point that Paul is not writing about sin. The body, itself, the physical, is not inherently evil.
Galatians was written as a letter to one of the churches Paul established on his missionary journeys. They were being heavily pressured to return to Jewish practices, to accept again the burden of the Mosaic law. Throughout the letter, Paul argues against this double-mindedness.
And that brings me to the central point for me in today's reading: "If we do not sacrifice the natural to the spiritual, the natural life will mock at the life of the Son of God in us and produce a continual swither. This is always the result of an undisciplined spiritual nature." Remember how Ishmael mocked Isaac? I also had to look up the word "swither," but in a common dictionary. It means to be indecisive, to dither. Immediately, I thought of the imagery in James of one tumbling about on the ocean waves: "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. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind."
Oswald uses the word "divorce" not as I initially thought -- to describe the action we should take toward our natural selves -- but rather to describe what will happen within ourselves if we do not sacrifice the natural.
I feel both tossed by the waves and split in two. I feel as though the natural within me is mocking the spiritual: You think God said what? You'll never be able to do that. The world doesn't work like that. Who are you kidding?
Sort of an odd place to stop, but I'm out of time and out of ideas. Any conclusion, at this point, would be false.
The terrain on this journey got rocky rather quickly. Give up your rights. Deny yourself. Crucify the flesh. Duty. Sacrifice. And -- "it is going to cost you everything." On first reading, I found a complete contradiction of everything I wrote yesterday. The last line, in particular, distressed me: "It is not a question of praying, but of performing." Great. The ongoing question of my life -- being vs. doing -- unavoidably in my face on day 3 of this journey with Oswald apparently coming down on the side of doing. I didn't, however, stop with a first reading, and I'm not done yet. I don't have any answers this morning, just ponderings and questions.
Today's verse -- Galatians 5:24 -- follows a recitation of the fruits of the Spirit and the sentence: "Against such things there is no law." What bearing does context have on the call to crucify the flesh? My assignment: read the whole chapter and check Matthew Henry's commentary.
I hear in this entry the echoes of conversations past -- Catholic vs. Protestant, faith vs. works, Mary vs. Martha. Oswald was a Protestant (sometimes referred to as "an evangelical mystic"), but I'm sure he would not have been a proponent of easy believism. Can I trust Oswald's words to stand alone here? Have meanings changed? Again, am I missing the larger context? My assignment: research Oswald's denominational background and theological leanings.
What does Oswald mean by the natural? He writes, "The natural life is not sinful," but also, "The higher up you get in the scale of natural virtues, the more intense is the opposition to Jesus Christ," and "The natural life is not spiritual." The NIV translation of Galatians 5:24 uses "sinful nature" in place of "flesh." My assignment: research definitions of "flesh," "nature" or "natural," and "sin."
After several readings, here's where I ended up: Maybe my ideal self is the natural -- the things that are right and noble and good that need to be sacrificed for what is best. When Oswald writes, "To discern that natural virtues antagonize surrender to God, is to bring our soul into the center of its greatest battle," maybe my soul's greatest battle centers on whether I choose God or the ideal Barbara. Perhaps if I insist upon clinging to her, I will miss the relationship with him I seek.
As I mentioned yesterday, I've chosen to set the tone for the year by starting with Oswald's devotional for July 28, but I will stick to the calendar beginning tomorrow.
Part of me wants to invite you to stand back and admire this entry -- like a great painting -- and part of me advises tearing it apart in a line-by-line exegetical approach. I'm going to ignore both parts and dive into something more experiential, but I can't resist quoting a few lines: "What we call the process, God calls the end. . . His purpose is that I depend on Him and on His power now. If I can stay in the middle of the turmoil calm and unperplexed, that is the end of the purpose of God."
His purpose is that I depend on him and on his power now. Sets his sights rather low, doesn't he? For a good portion of my adult life, I have seen Christianity as a sort of divine self-improvement plan, praying that God would make me the woman he wanted me to be. Nothing wrong with the prayer itself; but what I really meant was "make me the woman I want to be."
The ideal Barbara. Let me introduce you. She's much like the Proverbs 31 woman -- a value above rubies to her husband, honored by her children. She's a savvy businesswoman, managing the home's finances and bringing in money while never neglecting the critical relationships of her life. The daily responsibilities of home -- laundry, dishes, cleaning toilets -- she handles so easily as to make them inconsequential. She decorates just enough to make a warm, inviting, stimulating home environment but never enough to be seen as "house proud." She's beautiful but never remotely concerned with appearance. She stays in shape without wasting the family's valuable resources on gyms, diet plans, and exercise equipment. She walks, makes great meals (both healthy and delicious), loves sex, teaches her children at home and motivates them toward service by her own fine example of visiting the elderly and volunteering at the rescue mission. She's well read, a great friend and listener (never too busy to listen), and of course, she walks with God daily. Oh, and she has an incredibly green thumb. Everything she touches blossoms and bears fruit.
I seldom think of the ideal Barbara as a whole entity. The standards are more like individual competitions where I look around at all the other women who seem to be winning. All pulled together, I can see the ridiculousness of her, but she still sings a sweet siren song. I long to be admired, to be worthy of admiration. The ideal Barbara is my idea of success. Oswald says, "We must never put our dreams of success as God's purpose for us; His purpose may be exactly the opposite." The opposite?
The opposite of an ideal Barbara is what? The real Barbara, I guess. The ideal Barbara walks with God "of course," but there is no "of course" for the real Barbara. And God's end -- that I depend on him and his power now -- becomes a moment by moment choice. Something like a relationship.
"God's end (and my ultimate end for this blog) is to enable me to see that He can walk on the chaos of my life just now."
I confess upfront that what I am about to undertake is primarily a selfish, mid-life, is-this-all-there-is kind of journey, but I hope, in following Oswald through a year of his devotional thoughts in My Utmost for His Highest, he will lead me to the treasure that supersedes such folly. Additionally, I hope fellow pilgrims will join me along the way -- making the journey both richer and a little less about me.
A seeming aside before I've even really begun: My daughter's cat, Boo, insists upon sitting atop my journal (I tend to write longhand before coming to the computer). It's hard to get irritated with that desire for closeness -- so bold, so clear in his demands: "I just want to be with you. Not across the room, not in the chair next to you, but here -- just off your shoulder, lying across the open book in which you are writing." He wants to be near me. Selfish? Undoubtedly. He doesn't care whether I accomplish my task, i.e. write this blog. It's irrelevant to him. He's thinking solely of his wants, his need, but rather than make me angry, he has endeared himself to me.
Here's the deal: I have been a Christian most of my life. It is essential to who I am. I have a clear set of beliefs. I know the Bible stories. And my convictions about what is right and what is wrong are drawn from what I believe the very Word of God to say. I can even recite the spiel about the uniqueness of Christianity being a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The rub is that I'm not sure I have any idea what that means. Even worse, I have no experience of it. It is that personal relationship with the God-Man of the Bible that I seek. That is the purpose of my pilgrimage.
I could have chosen to study the writings of one of a number of authors who both seem to have made sense of the Christian life and to "get me"(without ever meeting or knowing me) -- Henri Nouwen, Kathleen Norris, Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, John Eldredge or John Piper. I chose Oswald primarily because his work comes in a devotional form, his writings have stood the test of time, and again and again, when my husband and I have come to him over the past 26 years, his words have promoted life in the moment, the ordinary, the mundane.
The plan is to write daily -- exploring the devotional entry for that day. December 7 might seem like an odd place to begin. Why not wait until January 1? The answer is simply that I am a supreme procrastinator. If I wait until January 1, I might not begin at all. That said, I'm going to begin with an exception. My first entry will deal with July 28 for two reasons: 1) On July 28, 2010, I will turn 50 -- no doubt a motivator for this journey; and 2) the message seems amazingly appropriate. Hereafter, I will adhere to a strict calendar format. My days and Oswald's will flow together. I will walk alongside the great teacher, as his wife wrote in the foreword, "with the prayer that day by day the messages may continue to bring the quickening life and inspiration of the Holy Spirit." On the top right-hand side of this blog, you'll find a link to an online version of My Utmost for His Highest. I hope you'll join me.
