waking up

So here it is.

After a long time (as far as it seems to me), I have been wanting God to speak. And it is only then that I be able to speak about anything worthwhile.

***

You see, I was drowning… Well, not totally drowning but as if you were holding your breath for a while, knowing you’re going to drown if you don’t get air sometime soon. And when you’re being swept away, submerged under the waves and the breakers, every second seems longer.

At the moment you really are fine, yet sometimes the fear that you might never come up for air successfully, seizes you. Of course, you just took a breath before you were plunged, and it’s obvious because you have enough to sustain you in the moment, and at least for a short while. Yet that it might even have you forget, for a brief moment in that fear, that you need air.

You would be believing a lie, and you would sink deeper, paralyzed by it, to where less light could reach you. But the air is so near you swear you could even taste it in the water. If only you were able to take all the air in and forget your fears!

***

So it was, my life without God’s voice. I knew I needed it to live, but I just couldn’t hear it. I begged for it, at times even doubted it would ever come, and at other times, I would just wait to see if maybe I was just permanently deaf.

Not so. At the very moment I write this, I am learning about an idea that God sometimes speaks very slowly.

Sure, it would be nice for God to tell us something that we would like to know, for the sake of a fighting the good fight for Him, and living the good life in Him. But no, He doesn’t always do that. You see, it would take very little faith for it to be that way.

(I’ve been asking for more faith too, and even as I type, spiritual light bulbs are going off in my heart.)

So to build our faith, sometimes God simply speaks at length. It could be a single, simple concept. But when He speaks, oh, He speaks so deeply. Just like He does in the Word.

The Bible really does not say: “Take in a whole bunch of the Word as fast as you can and get full.” You would come out full all right, but more like a spiritually-stuffed person who just ate Prime Rib microwave-style. It wouldn’t taste like what it was really meant to taste. As Matt Redman says, “God’s into marinating.” I fully believe that. So you can’t read a ton of the Word like you would a textbook, memorize it, and then expect to do well in life. Sure, some of the stuff will come up on the test, but hey, isn’t the best method for success getting to know the essentials found within a deeper level of critical reading into the subject at hand?

In the same way, I am learning now that God sometimes speaks into the heart in a very similar manner. Through circumstance, surrounding reflection of circumstances, perhaps even through reflection on attitudes towards circumstances, God plants little bits of what fruit He’s trying to cultivate in us. Sometimes it might seem like the fruit of patience. Sometimes the fruit of joy. All in all, it’s the fruit of the Spirit that encompasses and exists as all of these things. At the moment, mine seems to be focused in on faithfulness.

So what has God been telling me? He says be a child again. And in all the ways we might conceive of children, there may be good reason Jesus chose this metaphor for us. What children are in the natural, we are/should be in the spiritual.

We are children in the sense that we don’t (and can’t) know everything the Father knows.

We are children in the sense that we cannot do anything (of significance) without help.

We are children in the sense that we cannot provide for ourselves.

We are children in the sense that we might do the silliest, most natural and thus, “childish” things… and still the Father would delight in them.

We are children in the sense that, in our deepest emotional moments, we are at our innermost honesty.

We are children in the sense that we are base, lacking the higher qualities of the mind (in our case, lofty spiritual wisdom and knowledge).

We are children in the sense that we gladly yield our affections to what is most appealing.

We are children in the sense that we are indeed wretched, poor, dirty, and needy.

And God wants those things in us. God wants that in me. I do, too.

This has been stirring for a long while, sometimes it seemed too long since my last real revelatory experience. I see now that I wouldn’t have it any other way. May it yield great fruit in its time.

P.S. Shane & Shane was great. I might blog about it. Too much for now, though it did contribute a good amount to this episode of spiritual catharsis.