Be with me

It has taken a very long time for me to get my head around the idea of being pregnant. 

I do not think I am even remotely close to being there yet, but I am certainly closer than I was. In my head, pregnancy was equated with a kind of fear of missing out. That is a ridiculous, and horrible, thing to say. Especially in light of many of my friends who long to have a child and cannot. It is an awful thing to think that the gift of a tiny baby would be an inconvenience, but I am trying to be honest, and that is, for a long time, what I thought. I feared that having a baby would be a stop to all kinds of things. No more adventures. No more spontaneity. No more selfishness in being able to decide when and how I do things. If I was going to have a baby then it was going to be entirely on my terms. When I was ready. When I wanted.

I am unbelievably selfish. 

A couple of weeks after I found out I was pregnant, my friends Xanna and Chris came to stay with their beautiful baby, Zephaniah. On the Saturday morning, I got up to look after Zeph so his exhausted parents could have a lie in, and I sat and watched him play and sleep and be. As I looked at him, I prayed that God would prepare my heart to be a Mum. That I would slow down, and stop and be quietened by the gift that He had chosen to give to me.  None of those things come particularly easily to my character. I am not a very slowed down person. Nor am I a very quiet person. Nor do I like to be restricted by someone else's schedule. And yet, as I watched Zeph, I knew that God was asking me to trust him about who I needed to be in order to be a mother. 

As Zeph slept, I read Henry Nouwen, Adam: God's Beloved. Nouwen describes the impact of living in a community of people with severe disabilities, and, in particular, his friendship with a young man called Adam, who he was charged with looking after. Adam could not walk or talk, and initially Nouwen tells of his frustration in not knowing what it meant to even be with this man. What did it mean to have a friendship with someone who couldn't communicate in any of the usual ways? And yet, over months of routine, of washing, and changing, and eating, and sitting, Nouwen started to understand what Adam was trying to say to him:

"Adam was communicating with me, and he was consistent in reminding me that he wanted and needed me to be with him unhurriedly and gently. He was clearly asking me if I was willing to follow his rhythm and adapt my ways to his needs. I found myself beginning to understand a new language, Adam's language." 

As I read these words, listening to Zeph's quiet snuffles and breaths, I sensed something of what God was trying to communicate with me. Adam's need was for Henri to be with him. To simply be present and to so be present that it didn't feel like he secretly wanted to be elsewhere. How many times am I guilty of such behaviour? Guilty of half-listening, half-being present in the midst of a conversation but actually being elsewhere; of rushing a meeting with someone, or mumbling a quick hello in the street because I have somewhere else, a more important somewhere else, that I think I need to be. I do not see this in Jesus. I do see intentionality. I do see deliberateness in knowing where he is going and what His Father is asking of him. But I do not see hurriedness. I do not see a refusal to genuinely engage with people because other people and places are deemed to be more worthy of his time. This is what the disciples expect from him, but time and time again Jesus is the one who stops simply so that he can be with a particular person for a particular moment. And when he is with them you get the impression that, in that moment, there is no one else. In that moment, Jesus exists to love that unique individual, be they an old lady suffering from a chronic illness, a blind beggar cast aside by society, a child seeking to sit on his lap. Jesus knew how to stop. (Matthew 20:32). He calls his followers to do the same. 

John Ortberg recounts a conversation with a wise friend of his who he was asking for some spiritual advice. After describing the somewhat hectic and rushed patterns and rhythms of his life, his friend said, "You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life." Ortberg describes wanting some kind of other golden nugget of wisdom but his friend simply repeated the same advice again: "There is nothing else. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life." 

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry. 

Be with me. 

As his relationship with Adam grew, Nouwen realised that Adam was a gift to him much more than he was a gift to Adam: "His life invited me to receive his unique gift, wrapped in weakness but given for my transformation." 

Thus, as I sat and looked at Zeph and thought about the tiny gift wrapped in weakness growing inside me, I started to pray:

Father, I want to receive the gift of our baby, given for my transformation, given that I will know you and encounter you more deeply because I am forced to simply be rather than do, given that I will learn to be selfless, given that I will learn to love and be loved. 

Our poverties touching each other

A peculiar title for this post. The phrase is coined from Henri Nouwen's book "Adam: God's beloved" which tells the story of Nouwen's time at the L'Arche community, Daybreak, caring for a young man called Adam Arnett. Nouwen's tale is one of what it means to love, and be loved by, someone with a disability, someone who might be labelled by society as burdensome and useless. It is a beautiful, and painful, read; a challenge to us in our determination to be independent and self-sufficient, to ignore our own weaknesses, and to busy ourselves with doing so that we need not focus on what it means to be.

Nouwen writes with brutal honesty about his own transformation as he lived with and loved Adam, and about how, being confronted with Adam's total vulnerability forced him to face up to his own weakness, his own need to be loved, to be accepted for being himself rather than for anything he could do or offer or give.

As I read this morning, I was reminded of an encounter that took place many years ago with a young woman called Judith, Annie to her friends. The evening we first met Annie was one of those hot lazy summer evenings that follow long sunny Cambridge days. Students were still lounging on the grass of Jesus Green and the smell of just bought bargain barbeques drifted across to where we were sitting on the pavilion. As had become our routine, we were feasting on cheese and ham sandwiches and slurping hot (very sugary) tea with some of the homeless people we had got to know. Annie was a new addition.

Annie was incredibly funny, quick to laugh. Her sense of humour dangerously dry. She seemed to immediately erase that awkwardness of talking to someone who isn’t quite the same as you. She was wearing those strange Nike trainers that look like camel’s hooves and we had a long conversation about how cool it was that they were pink before discussing at length potential outfits for a fancy dress party she was going to. After debating the pros and cons of bumble bee stripes we settled on a rabbit: Annie Rabbit.

As we chatted, our friend Ben came bounding across the grass and flopped down beside us. He had just been to fetch a packet of strepsils for Annie, and some sun cream for her somewhat burnt companions. Annie, continuing the animal theme of the evening, instantly re-dubbed him as “The Gazelle”. Many months later it was with these words, stuttered out in confusion, that she greeted Hamish and I as we visited her in hospital. 

We were tentative. Unsure of what to say. Stumbling over words that we couldn't quite find to explain why we had come and how we had found out she was in hospital. As ever, it was Annie who dispelled the awkwardness. Despite her obvious pain, a pain that was etched into her worn out face, Annie remained beautifully alive. Her body was a mess: she could hardly walk on swollen legs; her stomach was distended, yet she looked so small and so thin; the dye was nearly gone from her limp hair but it remained defiantly tied back in a ponytail with a sparkling butterfly clasp. That clasp was a reminder of the woman we had met, but it was not the only one:  she knew all the names of the staff, and all the patients on the ward and, in the same way that she had with us on that first day, had overcome their barriers with laughter. She was even plotting an elaborate Halloween ward round delivering midnight goodies to the children’s beds and scaring them with a makeshift costume of a green wig made from hospital pyjamas! She was quite remarkable.

Nouwen writes that Adam, by his life, his need, his presence, invited him to "receive his unique gift, wrapped in weakness but given [to Nouwen] for his transformation." Adam's life was a gift to Nouwen through which he would be changed, through which the roles of carer and cared for would be reversed and Adam would become his guide, his teacher, his friend. Annie's life was a gift to me in the same way. 

As I sat by Annie's bed, God started to teach me that same lesson: the lesson of learning to trust the still, small voice of the Father which whispers, "You, yes you, are my beloved child. With you I am well pleased." As Adam was God's gift to Nouwen to teach him that beautiful truth, so Annie was a precious gift to me. She, perhaps more than anyone else in my life, taught me that God loves me when I'm not doing anything, that God is not impressed by the standards of the world, by our aspirations and plans, our riches and our fame. He is our Father. 

I visited her in hospital on her own one day. Without Hamish, I was fearful. Worried of not knowing what to say, stopping in the corridor to gather my thoughts. I was afraid of getting it wrong. I was also scared because I knew that Annie was sick. Really sick. I knew that her body was broken and fragile, her face darkly discoloured by bruises and jaundice. I knew that she might not live much longer. Feeling awkward and foolish, I sat beside her bed. Annie's liver was failing. Her jeans were soaked with a liquidy pus that wept from her legs and the material clung painfully to her legs. She asked me to help her change and I did, not knowing where to look, and frightened by the brokenness of her young body. That day, Annie was tired. Worm out by her sickness and, I think, by life. I brushed her hair for her and she curled up on the hospital bed. Within minutes, she was sound asleep. She was tiny, drowned by sterilised sheets. I sat still for a long time and watched her. 

In that moment I knew, irrevocably, that I loved her. I was surprised by the depth and suddenness of the emotion as it came. I did not love Annie because of anything she could do for me - in that moment she could do nothing - I loved her for herself, for her presence, for the gift of her company, for the fact that she had allowed me into her life and her story. I loved her because she was Annie. And in that moment, God spoke to me. That is how I love you, he said. I love you like you love Annie. Not because you can do anything for me, not because you need to give anything to me, or prove yourself, or earn my love but because I am God and you are Nic and you are my beloved.

Beside that hospital bed, my poverty, my brokenness, my need to be loved, met Annie's. We were the same, equally loved by our creator, equally poor in ourselves, equally rich in the bestowal of his abundant grace. Nouwen writes that being friends with Adam changed him; it forced him to encounter his own poorness of spirit, his own frailty: "It was as if the planks that had covered my emotional abyss had been taken away and I was left looking into a canyon full of wild animals waiting to devour me. I found myself overwhelmed by intense feelings of abandonment, rejection, neediness, dependence, despair...I was going into the deep human struggle to believe in my belovedness even when I had nothing to be proud of." 

Annie died a few months later. 

We knocked on the door of the flat she shared with her partner, Paul, to be told that we had better come up. We went to her funeral and sat with our friends to grieve together. My life and Annie's only intersected for a couple of years; we met perhaps a dozen times but that moment beside her bed changed me. She did not know it, but in being my friend, in sharing her story, in letting me see her at her most vulnerable, in laughing together, in crying together, Annie gave me an incredible gift: she gave the gift of herself and it was, like Adam's gift to Henri, a gift of transformation. 

In the ditch

About this time last year, I had a phone conversation with a friend of mine whose wife had given birth to twins 15 weeks early. Jack and Emily were born on 28th February 2014 weighing in at just over a pound each. At that time, my friend and his wife had been living in intensive care for over two months still not really knowing whether their children would live. It was awful. I had no idea what to say over the phone. No words could possibly be adequate.

I was reminded of this incident yesterday by two things: the first was something posted on Facebook showing a series of cards that have been specifically designed to give to people upon the news of their cancer diagnosis. My favourite is the one that says: "There is no good card for this. (I'm so sorry)" As I looked at the cards, I thought to myself that us Christians have a lot to learn about what to say and when to say it. Sometimes it is impossible to find the words and yet we still strive to say something, anything, rather than sit there in a horribly silent void. Even though that horribly silent void is probably preferable to a glib assertion that we are praying. 

The second was a conversation over dinner with my beautiful friend, Jax, who has been struggling with a chronic degenerative back problem for many years. Her back has not been healed. Despite the prayers and the crying out to God and the anguish, it has not been healed. Nor does it show any sign of miraculously being healed any time soon. 

I do not say these things to be sensationalist, or offensive or because of a lack of faith. I believe that both myself and Jax have the faith for God to fully heal her back, just as Chad and Steph had the faith for God to intervene into the lives of their twins. But, what do we make of the sharp, painful pause before the healing? What do we do with the in the meantime moment? What do we do as we sit in the ditch and sob and prayer remains unanswered? When there really is nothing to be said or done, when no words can comfort, and no action can suffice. 

As I spoke to my friend over the phone, I asked him how he was. A stupid question but I didn't know what else to say. He said many profound and humble things that left me with a lump in my throat and a sense of the incredible littleness and meanness of so many of my own complaints. The thing that he said that I will always remember is that he would rather be in the ditch with Jesus than without him. That somehow, in the midst of all that was happening, it was the simple knowledge of a Jesus who sat down in the ditch with him and wept alongside him that made it bearable. Jesus, the man of sorrows, the one who is familiar with pain sat in the quietness and the stillness and the mess of the ditch with my friend. 

I recounted this conversation to Jax last night as we chatted. There is such beautiful simplicity in what Chad said: that the answer is not praying (although, of course, we pray and we pray and we pray); the answer is not in attempting to fix what is broken, to make sense of what is broken, or explain how it got broke in the first place; the answer is that Jesus is. Jesus is here. Emmanuel. God with us.

At a seminar at college last weekend, Adrian Chatfield shared about a translation of the bible that struggled to cope with God's name as 'I AM.' He asked us what we would call the God who names himself 'I AM' in culture that didn't understand philosophical reasoning, a culture without a category for thinking in that way. In this particular language that he referred to the translation of 'I AM' was 'I am the God who is really really here.' 

We believe in a God who is the ever present one. We believe that Jesus took on all that it meant to be human. That he suffered alongside us and that there is no painful experience that is beyond his understanding. He chose to embrace all of our frailty fully knowing how much that would hurt and what it would look like to die rejected and abandoned, bloody and ashamed. 

Perhaps, before we stumble to find clumsy words to say, we need to remind ourselves of the One who is really really here. The solution is not that we pray and Jesus fixes; the solution is that Jesus is here in the mess and the muddle and the hurt and the pain. He sits with us in the ditch. We need to learn to do that for one another. To sit beside our dear friends in the ditch, without words, and be those who are really really there, even if we don't know what to say. 

Fully well

I have had something or other wrong with my bowels for many years. Initially, after returning from Malawi in 2005, I convinced myself that I had some kind of strange, exotic parasite that just needed to be zapped by modern medicine. Ten years later and no such parasite has materialised. My bowels have continued to niggle on and off, sometimes worse, sometimes better, but always noticeably not quite right. Most of the time, dysfunctional bowels are an embarrassment rather than a physical pain but having a digestive system that doesn’t do what it’s meant to do is pretty emotionally wearing and can often leave me feeling tired, grumpy and frustrated. The past three years, in particular, have been hard: visits to the doctor, referrals to various consultants at the hospital, endlessly having to explain and re-explain symptoms, tests, tablets, exclusion diets – and all to no real avail. And then there is the faith side of things: what to do with belief in a good God of healing when you don’t get healed; how to keep allowing people to pray for you when you stop really believing that it’s going to work; how to keep trusting in a God of both love and power when you are suffering and struggling and nothing seems to change.

I don’t have any answers.

It’s important to state that at the beginning because I know how frustrating it is when people try to give answers. It’s downright annoying. Sometimes all the well-wishing and love and good motivation in the world makes you want to hit people in the face. Sometimes when people optimistically look at you and suggest praying you have to bite back the cynicism that is itching to escape, swallow down the bitter comments busily composing themselves and begrudgingly agree to appease the other person’s naïveté.

I hate that about myself.

I hate that I have become bitter and cross and frustrated by the faith of others.

And in the midst of it all, I am trying to wrestle with what to think of God, how to talk to God, how to love Him and trust Him and believe that he is who he says he is.

A few months ago, I wanted to give up altogether. It was a daily battle of trying to hold on to all the seemingly conflicting parts of God’s character and each time my prayer for healing went unanswered, the doubts expanded, the bitterness soured.  A ritual recitation of what I knew to be true: God is love. God is powerful. God is love. God is powerful. God is love. God is powerful. But if he loves me then why isn’t he sorting this out. But if he’s so powerful then why can’t he fix it. Maybe he doesn’t love me. Maybe I’m being punished. Maybe it is my fault. Maybe he’s impotent. Maybe he’s not powerful at all. Maybe God doesn’t really heal today anymore. He can’t. That was a thing of the past but it doesn’t happen now.

And, of course, once you start thinking like that prayer becomes pretty much impossible. Failure to hold on to the truth of God’s love birthed a steadily growing fear of him in my heart. I was too scared to pray to him, to try and talk to him, lest he was angry, vengeful, ready to laugh at me for my belief that I mattered to him. And failure to hold on to God’s power to heal birthed doubts that started to gnaw away at me: what’s the point in praying? Prayer was a futile exercise that wasn’t going to achieve anything. The skies were empty. Or, if not empty, then occupied by a distant God who didn’t really care very much.

The writer of the Hebrews says this: “Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” (Hebrews 6:3) Somewhere along the line I had managed to sever the two halves of that verse from each other. I still had God. I still had faith but it wasn’t in the good God who rewards those who keep looking to him. It was in some slightly twisted version of God, God off kilter, God out of joint, God who either could do nothing to help me or didn’t love me.

And the continual prayers for healing weren’t helping. God doesn’t will sickness. God doesn’t want you to be ill. You need to have more faith. We just need to pray. In the name of Jesus I pronounce you well. I declare that your sickness is gone.

But it wasn’t. And I was losing grip on any frame work that could help me make sense of God and sickness.

At that point, I stumbled against Brother Lawrence. Hamish and I were on retreat in the Peak District and I had taken two books with me: The Practice of the Presence of God by Lawrence and The Pursuit of God by A.W.Tozer. Clearly God knew what he was doing in the choice: both books had been on my book shelf for months waiting to be read and I’d reluctantly grabbed them both last minute as I’d forgotten to buy anything else to take with me.

The last section of Lawrence’s book includes several letters exchanged between him and a sick friend. He writes this:

“I do not pray that you may be delivered from your pains; but I pray God earnestly that He would give you strength and patience to bear them as long as He pleases. Comfort yourself with Him who holds you fastened to the cross: He will loose you when He thinks fit. Happy those who suffer with Him: accustom yourself to suffer in that manner, and seek from Him the strength to endure as much, and as long, as He shall judge to be necessary for you. The men of the world do not comprehend these truths, nor is it to be wondered at, since they suffer like what they are, and not like Christians: they consider sickness as a pain to nature, and not as a favour from God; and seeing it only in that light, they find nothing in it but grief and distress. But those who consider sickness as coming from the hand of God, as the effects of His mercy, and the means which He employs for their salvation, commonly find in it great sweetness and sensible consolation.”

I do not offer his words as a universal answer to suffering. I do not suggest that they can be applied to any and every situation where a prayer has gone unanswered but, for me, in that moment of stumbling upon them, God provided a new paradigm inside which I could operate: it was possible to think of sickness differently. Not as punishment or spiritual attack but as a gift, a favour, something given by the one who knows what He is doing and always acts for our good.

Even as I type these words I am aware of a reaction that they will cause. I am also aware that, on most days, I do not view physical suffering and discomfort as a gift. And yet, the bible does say that suffering has a purpose. In God’s kingdom, suffering is not pointless, or random, or erratic. There is an intentionality about what God will allow his people to go through. Paul is given the thorn in the flesh and God will not remove it. (2 Corinthians 12). That does not, cannot, mean that God does not love Paul. Nor can it mean that God is powerless to help Paul. Something happens to Paul in the midst of his suffering that could not happen without him suffering.

do not understand this. But I can see something of it in my own life, and whereas I cannot continue this endless battle of doubting God’s love and his power, I can, at least in part, see how my struggle could be for my good. In one of his chapters, Tozer prays, “Thou be exalted over my comforts. Though it mean the loss of bodily comforts and the carrying of heavy crosses I shall keep my vow this day before thee.” As I prayed these words, I felt the Lord speak that he would have me fully well. Fully well. Not just physically well. He would have for me total shalom, total wellness. Not just a cure for IBS. He would have all my heart and all my mind and all my soul made well.

On a good day, I believe that my struggle with IBS is part of this. Physical struggle is only a fraction of what is really going on. Something bigger and greater that I can imagine is happening: God is refining my faith. God is making me the woman that he would have me be; God is making me one who will lean on him without question (Song of Songs 8:5), one who will not be swayed by circumstance (Philippians 4:11-13), one whose love for him is not dependant on whether he is answering my prayer or not, one who loves him deeply and honestly in the midst of hurt and confusion. One like Peter who, despite messing it up and getting it wrong and never fully understanding, can say again and again and again, Lord, you know that I love you, and mean every word every time.

At the start of his letter, James writes, “Brothers and sisters, consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete not lacking anything.” (James 1:3-4) This is a completely ridiculous thing to say. When you are suffering, even if it is as bad as it can possibly get and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, even when all the world tells you that you are a fool to believe, you are to think of what is happening as something completely and utterly joyful. Not just a little bit of fake plastic smile to cover the reality, but real, deep down, bubbling up, unadulterated joy. How can that be true? How can it be possible to view pain with joy?

This is what Jesus did. For the joy, the charan, set before Him, he endured. He endured the cross because he knew what was coming next. James tells us that we are to do the same: we are to view trials with joy because we know, as Jesus knew, that there is a greater end result. There is something more important happening than what is seen to be happening. James says that trials are what teach us to persevere. We cannot learn perseverance any other way. And we need to learn to persevere because only once perseverance has finished all the work that it needs to do – on our character and foibles, on our tendency to wallow and self-pity, on our suddenness to doubt and look at the waves, and forget who Jesus really is – will we be complete. And, oh God, how I want to be complete. I want to be mature. I want to have a faith that is strong and sure and immovable. The word that James uses for complete here is holokleroi. It’s a bit of a strange word. Holo means whole. Kleroi means a lot, as in the kind of lot that you would cast. Thus, the combination of the two is a kind of divinely allotted wholeness. To be complete is to have all that God has assigned to you entirely as it should be. God would have us complete in every apportioned part. Mind. Body. Heart. Soul. He would have us fully well.  I believe that it will take suffering to get us there. There is no other way.

Much the same thing is said by Peter in his first epistle: “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer grief in all kinds of trails. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith –of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1 Peter 1:6-7) In the Greek, a dokimion is a trial or test that is used to determine what is genuine, much as someone might test a coin to see if it is real or counterfeit. Thus faith that is proven to be genuine is faith that is approved, faith that has been tried and tested, faith that passes the test needed to prove that it is what it says it is. This is the kind of faith that God would have for his people. Our faith is more precious than treasure to Him. God places such a worth on our faith that he will do whatever is needed to ensure that it can stand up. God’s love for us is such that he will settle for nothing less than the very best faith for us. Complete faith. Genuine faith. Faith that can only be proved through suffering.

I do not think that there is another way.

That is not to say that I do not pray for healing for my bowels. It is not to say that I do not long for my body to be well and for whatever is wrong to be righted. It is not to say that I do not plead with God to remove the suffering, that I do not rant and rage and cry and get frustrated and start to doubt and despair.

But how I long to be mature. How I long to be complete. How I long to be one whose faith is proven to be genuine. And, perhaps, this is God’s way to do it. Perhaps it is the only way to do it.

He would have me fully well.

Scrappy Christians

This phrase was coined by my lovely friend Elaine today as we chatted about my recent discovery of Tozer. Scrappy Christians: those who are discontent with their current experience of God, plagued by holy dissatisfaction, always wanting more and digging their heels in until they get it; those with hearts set on God who will not be swayed from a lifelong pursuit of Him, who will lay hold of Him until they receive the blessing of knowing Him more than they currently do. Jacob was a scrappy Christian: he determined to know God. He wrestled with him in the long hours of the night. His searching left him bruised and battered, but convicted of the truth of God’s power and presence.

I want to be a scrappy Christian.

In the opening chapter of Tozer’s ‘The Pursuit of God’, which I whole-heartedly recommend with the precursor that it will leave you somewhat wrecked, Tozer mourns the current state of the church, the plight of the “too easily satisfied religionist” who does not know what he or she is missing. In contrast, he points back to those saints of the past who knew what it was to pursue God:

“Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire for God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they found him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.” (p.10)

Tozer’s critique of the church is a double edged sword: on the one hand, he mourns for those who do not believe that an intimate relationship with God is possible – who insist that walking with Jesus is a matter of cold-hearted duty and obligation removed from joy and feeling; but on the other, he despairs of the frenetic charismatic who leaps from one meeting to the next, seeking only an experience of God without being prepared to go at it for the long haul.

This is not a scrappy attitude. The scrappy Christian knows that to seek God is to fight daily to meet with Him. There are no quick fixes.

“The idea of cultivation, so dear to the saints of old, has now no common place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We demand glamour and dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer returned from afar.” (p.52)

Ouch.

Tozer is not pleasant reading. This is hard stuff. Hard because I recognise the truth of it in my own life: the box ticking which I hope will somehow feed my soul, a deep inward bankruptcy which cannot be satisfied by the perfunctory daily quiet time. I – theoretically, at least – long for closeness with God. I crave intimacy with Him and am haunted by the half-notion that there must be more than this; that it is in fact possible to have a deeper awareness of His presence and to live in closer communion with Him. But that half-notion is easily silenced. Quickly pushed to one side by the pressures of life and by the well-meaning advice of others. Such a pursuit is too time-consuming, too labour-some. There are too many things that need to be done and who do you think you are anyway? What are you trying to prove? Be satisfied with your salvation and get on with it.

But I am not satisfied. I am hungry. I am scrappy. Or at least trying to be.

“We have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others are satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another’s notions, copied one another’s lives and made one another’s experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire and grass and, worse of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed. It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to Biblical ways.” (p.53)

It will require scrappy Christians.

It will require making the Word of God the standard to which we conform.

It will require looking to the Saints of old, to Jacob, to Moses, to David, to Paul and to the way in which they pursued their God with their whole heart.

It will require setting our hearts on a vision of what could be, of what might be in ten years’ time if we put the ground work in, if we cultivate an awareness of God’s presence, if we refuse to be satisfied by anything less, if we set the Lord daily before us, if we do not take our eyes off Him.

O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire, O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee. I long to be filled with longing. I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, so that I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, “Rise up, my fair one, and come away.” Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from the misty lowland where I have wandered so long. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.  (p.14)

All quotes taken from, Tozer, A.W. The Pursuit of God. (http://www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/Tozer_Pursuit_of_God.pdf) 

People of the Presence

Hamish and I are trying to get into a bit of a rhythm of reading two psalms a day, one in the evening and one in the morning. Yesterday's evening psalm was 114, which completely stopped me in my tracks. It's one of those all-too-easy-to-skip-over psalms: neither ridiculously long (like 119) or surprisingly short (117), not usually read at weddings of funerals and about Israel's history and therefore slightly harder to do any kind of generic immediate application with. But it is an absolute gem.

When Israel went out from Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a people of strange language,
Judah became God’s sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.

The sea looked and fled;
Jordan turned back.
The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.

Why is it, O sea, that you flee?
O Jordan, that you turn back?
O mountains, that you skip like rams?
O hills, like lambs?

Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord,
at the presence of the God of Jacob,
who turns the rock into a pool of water,
the flint into a spring of water.

The Israelites were awed to have the presence of God in their midst. And yet, for them, that presence was untouchable: a huge, towering pillar of fire guiding their way (Exodus 13:21) initially and then, later, once the temple was completed, that presence dwelt in the Holy of Holies. A place of awful beauty and fear. A place where no one dare to tread, where only the high priest was allowed once a year and never without blood. (Hebrews 7:9) To look upon the face of God was to die (Exodus 33:20). To be in the presence of the living God was an unthinkable and terrifying privilege. (Isaiah 6:5)

How utterly incredible then, how almost blasphemous, would it have seemed to the disciples when Jesus told them that the presence of the living God was no longer going to dwell in a temple, but inside their very hearts? That they, and the generations after them, would be those to fulfil the prophecy of Ezekiel and be given a new heart that was able to host the Spirit of God. (Ezekiel 36:26)

"I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them...Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them." John 14:15-23

We are too quick to judge the dullness of the disciples; we join in with Jesus when he rebukes them for their lack of faith and yet surely these words from Jesus would have been entirely unpalatable to them. How could the Spirit of the living God possibly dwell inside them? Such a thing would have seemed unattainable. God did not dwell within dirty vessels. God's perfect holiness could not come into contact with the frailty of fallen humanity. 

We are of a generation that has forgotten the awesome, sacredness of this truth: we are the people of the presence. Moses was so dependant on the presence of God that he would not move without being absolutely sure that God would go with him: Do not bring us up from this place without your presence? What else will distinguish us from the peoples of the world? (Exodus 33:15-16) For Moses, he spoke of the cloud; he spoke of the fiery pillar. For us we know that God will go with us because His Spirit dwells inside us. Where we go, we take the presence with us. 

This is radical. Beautiful. Compelling. And yet terrifying. We are those who host the presence of the living God. This should make all the difference in the world. How is it possible that we so easily forget the truth of God with us? God in us? Jesus followers should be the most distinctive, most scintillating people on the planet. We should be distinct. But all too often we forget to communicate with the Spirit within us. We ignore Him. We forget about him in the midst of everyday life. We grieve him by our failure to ask his opinion. If Jesus could only do what he saw his Father doing as it was revealed to him by the Spirit (John 5:19) then surely we must ask the Spirit the same questions. Holy Spirit, what is my Father doing right now? What can I join in with? 

O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ's sake, Amen. (A.W. Tozer, 'The Pursuit of God.')

Ephesians 6.16

The shield of faith. Paul says that this particular accoutrement is to be worn 'over all'. It is faith which covers the chinks in the rest of the armour. Without it we cannot please God. Hebrews 11.6. We cannot stand and fight for him if we do not trust him. We are those who claim that the invisible has more clout than the visible. 2 Corinthians 4.18. We are blessed precisely because we do not see but keep believing. John 20.29. We press on in certainty that the unseen God is everything he says he is. Hebrews 11.1.  We do not shrink back (Hebrews 10.35-39), even though to the world, and on many days to us, our faith seems futile, our lives seen wasted away. 2 Corinthians 4.16.
And here Satan strikes. His weapon is pointed, precise, sudden, launched out of nowhere when we least expect it. The flaming tips which embed themselves in any exposed flesh and stick deep. A fire which starts small and spreads and spreads. James 3.5. A sin that starts as thought but becomes deadly deed. James 1.15. A niggling doubt that poisons the veins. The devil knows where our weak spots are. Where have we left ourselves open to attack?
And, oh, but my faith is so puny, so insignificant, so faltering. My arms are so weak that I can barely lift up my shield this morning. Take heart, says my commander. Take heart. John 16.33. A mustard seed is enough. Luke 17.6. I am praying for you. Luke 22.32. John 17.17. Hebrews 7.25.Romans 8.34.