Entries in presence (23)
Monday's Meditation: Our Greatest Need
Monday, September 5, 2011 at 08:46AM 
Here’s a disturbing trend in the Christian blogosphere: we would much rather talk about other people than ourselves. When I post something about the church at large, the number of visitors to this site soars and comments pour in. Everyone rushes to the table where the state of the church is sliced, diced, and analyzed in detail. With the mere mention of a Christian celebrity I can purchase hundreds more visitors to my site.
If, however, I post something about our individual need to wait for God in silence, or our personal destiny to become conformed to his image, I get the internet equivalence of chirping crickets. Nothing. Like a busker singing at the Metro, everyone hurries by. And why not? Christianity is way more fun when we’re talking about other people. Following Jesus isn’t such a joyride if he wants to talk to me.
I am one of us as well. I would much rather pontificate on the issues facing Christendom across the continent than listen to the still small voice addressing the secrets of my heart. I would rather do significant things. I want to be a part of important conversations.
Recently I found the private notes of a world leader who longed to hear the whisper spoken to him alone. This man held a position of national significance, no, wait--historical importance. Yet he was a man who positioned himself in the quiet place and waited for his best friend to come and sit with him.
My heart is not proud, O LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore. (~ Psalm 131, a psalm of David)
God took a boy out of the shepherd’s field and put him in the palace, but not before embedding the hillside, the breeze, the night sky and the quiet times into his heart. The Biblical histories of Samuel and Chronicles will tell you the palace was a place filled with intrigue, politics, war and power--and it was. The Psalms and Proverbs will tell you that David took time to climb the stairs, shut the door, and pick up the harp.
Our greatest need--my greatest need--is the daily presence of the Holy Spirit. When David knew he had stepped over the line, claiming power and privilege as some sort of birth right, he repented before the Lord and begged that the presence would remain:
Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me. (Psalm 51: 10-11)
At the end of each day my Father won’t be impressed with my intellect or insight. He’ll be concerned with the beat of my heart. In the quiet (if there is quiet) he will want to know if I lived a whole-hearted life that day. Did my actions spring from the well of the Spirit or the treadmill of importance? He will be concerned with these questions because he knows that spiritual formation happens each day. The only question is: what have we formed?
God of the Present Moment
Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 12:28PM 
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split. ~ Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” ~ Matthew 6:34
In last Thursday’s post I imagined the financial advisor reading the words of Jesus, pushing his chair back from his desk, thinking, “Surely, he can’t be serious.” Yet there, in the Sermon on the Mount, we find Jesus recommending living one day at a time in the manner of birds and flowers.
The Father--in his divine wisdom--decreed that we should live one day at a time. His decree did not come with words, but by his actions: he created the world in such a way that it is impossible to do anything other than live one day at a time. Each person drawing breath on the planet is allotted only the present moment. Riches cannot buy anything else, nor can intelligence or imagination. We are time-bound creatures because that’s the way he wanted it to be.
The Spirit invites us to reflect on his work called “time.” What lessons can we learn from his actions? I’d like to suggest at least five life-giving benefits of grasping God’s wisdom for the march of days:
He invented life’s rhythm. “And there was evening, and there was morning.” The stanzas of the creation poem contain a rhythm which translates into any language, and a universal experience accessible to any person. Genesis is more than a report from the past. It is the pattern for the present. We were made for the straight-time of everydayness. For example, our family life flows more smoothly when school is in session, when each day is a metronome of time and task. If we move away from the rhythm of a daily schedule we are a people playing our own music, out of sync with one another.
He is aware that the days add up. There were 25 years between God’s promise to Abraham and fulfillment. That’s just over 9,000 days. 9,000 evenings Abraham rested his head on a pillow and asked, “When, Oh Lord?” 9,000 mornings he woke with anticipation, looking for the fulfillment of divine promise. Between promise and fulfillemnt lies the present: ongoing and daily. The Father knew Abraham would have to experience each day one at a time--9,000 of them--and still God chose to speak 25 years before the fact. We, too, can experience the forces which shaped Abraham into the father of faith. Every mother waiting to conceive a child understands Abraham; each single person waiting for a spouse feels the emotions Abraham must have felt; even the oppressed people of the earth awaiting justice drink from the well of Time, supplied by springs of hope in God’s goodness. In our waiting we learn to trust that he is good, even if we are empty-handed in the moment.
Each day is the Father’s antidote to worry. Prudent and responsible people plan their future, but far more of us try to secure our future through the power of our own efforts. But no amount of planning can anticipate the days ahead. It’s true: there are plenty of Bible verses about the wisdom of planning, but rare is the person who can draw up plans and then leave them on the altar of the God who holds the future. The scripture is filled with treasures extolling each moment lived in relationship with the Creator: “his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” How many of these passages find a place in our thoughts each day? Those who embrace the dew-fresh experience of God’s daily mercy are free from taskmaster of worry. Those who depend on their own plans more than they depend on the Creator of Time need to discover the treasure of time wasted with God.
Each day is God’s balm for the past. The mass of days and months gone by are a heavy burden to carry. We were not to meant to live in the past. Two small words in our thoughts can combine to form brain cancer: “if only.” If only I had chosen differently. If only they had not cheated me. If only I was not the one left behind. God does not expect us to deny or forget our past, but he knows that the weight of by-gone days is too heavy for anyone to bear. The balm for “if only” is a simple question we are free to ask every day: “what now?” To ask the Father “what now” acknowledges that we are not alone, that the promise of his presence is real to each of us each day. But we must be sure ask! The loss of loved ones, the shame of poor choices, the scars of abuse can all become part of our testimony today if we will walk with the One who is the Eternal Now. To ask what now is to recognize that we are in relationship with the One who has power and grace to redeem the past and set us on the path of life each day.
And yet, the days are gods: Annie Dillard was on to something. Our senses can be overwhelmed by the clamour of the present, demanding our full attention and even our worship. Each day I awake to a rush of light and sound that competes for my attention. The alarm calls my name. My calendar demands attention, the television tells me what is important today. The still small voice of God is always present, but it is not the only voice. The gods of Everydayness demand tribute. How should we live?
The present is only valuable when it sends us to the Father. It is an enemy if we find ourselves sucked into the urgency of now apart from the grace of the Eternal Now. Inside the husk of time is the God who exists outside of time. Each day is only valuable to us as we learn to grab the grain, break the husk, and discover the Ancient of Days inside.
The Single-File Parade
Thursday, April 28, 2011 at 10:34AM 
Last night I dreamed of a parade, and a strange affair it was. Interminably long, an odd single-file line of marchers walked past, each person a virtual twin of the one before them, yet with only the slightest differences. After a thousand or so had passed by the small changes had added up to someone who looked very different from the marchers so far ahead. On and on went the line: 25,000 long, perhaps 30,000 or more before I woke. Above each one arched the sun and the moon in their turn, casting golden--then silver, light upon each person. Some marchers danced, others wept, still others trudged in dreary sameness.
Through the night I dreamt and the parade continued by, each member ever-so slightly older than the one before. As I began the transition between sleep and wakefulness I realized I had witnessed the march of a single lifetime: 70 years, or eighty if our strength endures. I was awake, and the revelation was complete: we experience life in a single-file parade of 25,000 days or more, each one so much like the day before, yet unique as if a new creation.
Which of us has ever lived life backwards? Even Benjamin Button, who grew from old to young, lived his life in a succession of days, one after the other, never two together. The days march in line, each one connected to the previous, linked to the next, but never overlapping.
It is a quiet revelation, but no less true: God created the march of days and has ordained that each one of us will experience them in the same manner. Which of us has ever lived two days simultaneously? Or jumped from day 4,000 to day 7,000? It is beyond us to do so, though in our hearts and thoughts we may try. It may seem like a no-brainer, but we all are given the gift of life one day at a time, and our attempts to live them out of order come at great expense.
“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself,” said Jesus. Then he added one of the strangest promises found in scripture: “Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6: 34)
Yet some people are obsessed with future days. The financial advisor pushes his chair away from his desk after reading these words and thinks, surely he can’t be serious. The student facing final exams in the coming weeks wonders if Jesus has lost his mind. The family trying to find the money for the next mortgage payment are convinced he never had a bill to pay. For each of them, sleep is a fair-weather friend. Meanwhile Jesus rambles on about birds and flowers. He instructs us to seek first God’s Kingdom and everything else will be magically “added to us.” Clearly, he doesn’t get the same emails we do.
The Creator, who exists outside of time and space, has ordained that should live in a world mediated by the passage of time. God set the whole thing up: we live our lives in the succession of days one after another because he wanted it to be so. Have we ever considered the fact that God chose this manner of living for us? He designed our minds, our hearts, our bodies, and our souls to live in this moment and not any other. He demonstrates his wisdom and care for us in the passage of time: we do not have to drag the past along with us nor bear the burden of future days on our shoulders all at once.
The past can store the treasures of lessons and memories, the future can be the repository of hopes or fears, but both of them are inhospitable homes for our hearts--or his Spirit.
He is the Eternal Now. God’s presence is available to us only in the now. We cannot experience his presence in the future because we do not live there. We cannot experience his presence in the past because we have moved on. His presence is here for us today. We do not need to worry about the future because he is not bound by time. He sits in the future and awaits our arrival. He’ll be there when we get there, but wouldn’t it be a shame to miss him in the now?
A Confrontation of Grace
Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 11:29AM 
What is the distance between you and God? Monday’s Meditation suggested it’s not nearly as far as we might think. Paul, speaking to a group of people in Athens who were completely alienated from God, told them God was not far from any of them. Where did he get such an idea? I’d like to suggest that Paul got this idea from his personal experience and the history of his people.
If there was ever a candidate for the wrath of God, Paul’s your man: a Jew who had missed the Messiah; a religious cop bent on dragging apostate Hebrews back to Jerusalem to face the music. Jesus took Paul’s persecution of the people of the church personally: asking, “Why have you persecuted me?” Yet when Jesus confronted Paul on the road to Damascus it was a confrontation of grace, not judgment. The good shepherd has left the ninety-nine and gone after the one who had wandered away.
Imagine Paul, struck blind, sitting alone in a strange city, forced to re-think his religious convictions. He had given his life to study the Hebrew scriptures. He was considered a rising star in Judaism. He had been taught by the best and put his faith into action as an orthodox bounty-hunter. Then, after encountering Jesus personally, he sat in darkness and wrestled with one thought: everything know is wrong. Years later, as Paul stood at the marketplace of ideas in Athens, he suggested that God is close at hand to each of us: the sensual, the cerebral, the religious, the skeptic, the clueless and the pagan. I suspect Paul could make such a statement because he had experienced the reality.
All it takes is one real encounter with Jesus to make us re-think our ideas about God. Not religious argument or philosophical persuasion, but encounter. I suspect that in the Damascus darkness Paul also began to re-interpret the history of his people as revealed in the Old Testament:
- After Adam and Eve choose to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil they discovered their nakedness and tried to hide from God. Far from rejecting them, God himself went searching for them.
- When Cain was angry with his brother, it was Yahweh who tried to talk him down from the ledge. Even after the murder of Abel, Yahweh not only heard the voice of the victim, he placed a mark of protection on the oppressor.
- When Jacob cheated his brother and lied to his father, God did not reject him--though it would have been understandable. Instead, God revealed Himself at Bethel and said, "I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go . . . I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” (Genesis 28:15)
The story of Israel goes on and on: each chapter reveals that God himself is the seeker, and his people are the sought. King David, who abused the privilege and grace of God as much as any modern politician, discovered a Faithfulness beyond human reasoning, a Presence not far from any one of us:
You have searched me, LORD,
and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
His amazing song asked:
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
David came to the conclusion:
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139)
By the time Paul had re-calibrated his understanding of God, he was able to celebrate God’s goodness and affections: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8: 38-39) Paul, the legalist, had become the Apostle--not only of God’s grace--but of his presence and goodness as well.
Paul had discovered that the Father has always wanted to be among us, and he will not allow anything to get in the way. If sin separated us from the Father, then the Father provided a remedy. It’s more than a legal transaction: the record shows that God will go to any length to be with us. If, as Isaiah says, “your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you,” (Isaiah 59: 2) it is because we are the ones in hiding. He has not gone anywhere. He is still “not far from any one of us.”
I wonder now how many of us need time and space to re-calibrate our view of the Father. How many of the events in our personal history would point to God’s desire to be with us, if only the scales would fall from our eyes? I’m determined to find out, and you’re invited on the journey, too.
Monday's Meditation: Daring His Presence
Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 11:06PM One great need among followers of Jesus is the experience of God’s tangible presence. What good is it to have a theology that asserts God’s presence is everywhere if we have no evidence of it? Has God gone on vacation? Has he left the building?
From beginning to end the Biblical narrative is filled with God’s tangible presence. The first two chapters of Genesis are marked by his personal presence: God personally forms man from the dust of the ground, he kisses the breath of life into the first man, he instructs and guides his children as he walks in the garden with them. At the end of the Bible, the book of Revelation depicts the intimate nature of God’s personal interaction with creation. “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.” (Revelation 21: 3)
From start to finish the scripture reveals the God who is present. He visits Abraham. He wrestles with Jacob. He talks with Moses face to face. He reveals his presence in the cloud and fire around the people of Israel. As Solomon dedicates the temple, God manifests in a cloud so thick with his presence that no one can remain standing or perform the duties of worship. Ezekiel saw God’s traveling throne and Isaiah saw the temple filled with God’s presence and glory.
In the New Testament the presence of God becomes something even greater: the Incarnation. “God arrived and pitched his tent among us.” (John 1:14) This marks even greater intimacy and presence: God not only interacted with the world he created, he became part of that world. And he came to stay: the final words of Matthew’s gospel are: “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28: 20) Like I said: from start to finish, God is present. Really present, actually present, tangibly present.
It’s Monday: may I suggest a meditation?
- Can I expect the same experience of God’s presence as people did in the Bible?
- Have I settled for something other than his presence?
- If I believe he is present, can I ask him to reveal his presence?
- Do I dare?