I was reading the story of Jacob’s reunion with his son
Joseph. What a story teller God is. The weaving of a life that dissolves into
resolution, reconciliation and peace. One
of the phrases struck me in a very telling way shaking me to the core with the
reality of life and the putting away of the flotsam and jetsam of dreams
unreached and love unrequited. The world is full of this. As much as the
Christian denies it, there is heartbreak, lack of success and in the end we all
look back and think to ourselves ‘it could have been better.’ It is almost laughable the soap box religion
we settle for because it is easy, has a nice scent and keeps us at least in
other’s perceptions…clean. We run from
danger and tragedy and disappointment calling it the enemy and we somehow
believe if we live close enough to the God we have constructed, the plague at
the door will find some other host. How tragic to live a manufactured and
contrived life. But for God. He takes us places we would never imagine. We wade
through the things the strongest heart will shudder when it is contemplated. The cold of it is sometimes stronger than
whatever fear we might have had. We are numbed by the exposure to a life that
that has God in it. Yet in that forlorn place, the pit, the prison, the cave
and even the grave we are changed and we become something that is
extraordinary. In that place our thoughts are washed and purged and what comes
are the whispers of the Almighty. In that moment where life is the stillest and
we are closer to the abyss than perhaps the television evangelist will ever
come, we are changed. In that place we see the powerlessness and the hell that
life is and desire a better place. In that place we become a pilgrim and no
longer one that desires a kingdom here collecting people places and things and
the building of a ministry that we will pass to who? The future becomes something
where we used to dwell and we begin to live in what Erasmus called the ‘Eternal
Now’. A place where prison can be borne and forlornness offered as something we
pour out on the ground to God and whisper that we are blessed just to know
Him. In the cold we learn that God is
the hope of life and not in the circumstances this world offers like a cheap substitute.
Whatever we thought we would become and what we would do for God is seen as the
cheap rustling paper swept along some side street back alley. Now we are ready
to be used. Not because we want to do something for Him or even because HE
calls us to do it. We do it for Him. We don’t do it for others or their
expectations on us or their vicarious dreams.
It is at this moment that we become a tool in the hands of
God. It is neither our talents nor our willingness He wants. It is our
brokenness and our arrival at honesty that we will never achieve what we once
heard in the false words of others. We have put down the dreams and the words
and finally stand free of self expectation and the haunting voice of the past
is drowned out by the dirt of experience that now covers us. It is at this time
the words of the Apostles come rushing to us in hard realization: We are not of
this world. Eldon Ladd once said that we were a part of the new age to come and
after what I have been through, I believe those words. Here is the true test of
our separation to God in my opinion: our
lack of care for ourselves and our care for others. So much so, we overlook the
sin they did against us and the hell they put us through. In a way, we become thankful
for our time in the burning because what we realize in the end, there was no
stench of smoke and it was the time in our lives when God walked closest to us.
We have no need to look any further than that pitch black afternoon on Golgotha
to know that God does His greatest work in the dark.
Before Pharaoh the ancient stood. Taken to a
place and saved by a son he thought long dead. Pharaoh asks him a question ‘So
old man how old are you?’ Jacob, the man who had twelve sons, lost one, lost a
wife along the way and the one that wrestled with God on the bank of a river to
walk away forever marked. There was no waver in his voice. It was a strike for
honesty and for truth. “I am a hundred and thirty seven and evil and short have
they been….” Wow; This from a man who was perhaps one of the top vessels of God
and the holder of all that would be manifested in the world. No cotton candy religion here. No squeaky
clean ending. He took no short cuts, God did not allow it. Why do we think God
will allow them for us? He has things for us to do and what stands in the way
of it is ourselves