Wading through life

What an awesome picture of what happens as we set out on a quest to pursue the heart of our Father:

5 What joy for those whose strength comes from the Lord,
who have set their minds on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
6 When they walk through the Valley of Weeping,
it will become a place of refreshing springs.
The autumn rains will clothe it with blessings.
7 They will continue to grow stronger,
and each of them will appear before God in Jerusalem.

We need to have a heart for pilgrimage—we have to commit to the journey and process it takes to develop a relationship with the most complex being we’ll ever encounter. To think we could solve the riddle that is our Lord with a quick devotional meditation each day and a 30 minute sermon on the weekend must be a huge insult to God.

One of my Focus on the Family professors spent much of our first class teaching us that the discipleship process is a journey and not a trip. There were a lot of semantic distinctions he made, but among those I remember were that journeys are long and unpredictable. We don’t necessarily know the destination when we set out on a journey, nor do we necessarily know how long it will take to arrive at that destination. They’re dangerous, too, with all sorts of unexpected obstacles cropping up. Trips… well, they’re all mapped out, you packed all the supplies you’ll need (and then some) and you know precisely how many days you have to take off work. They’re very domestic and not at all wild.

God is not domestic. Nor is our journey into Christlikeness.

But when we finally do set out on that pilgrimage to Jerusalem, look what happens: the places that used to stir up weeping… they become refreshing springs. And we’ll continue to grow stronger… we’ll pick up momentum as we go. It just gets better!

What motivates a person to finally set out on the journey… the pilgrimage that will ultimately take the rest of his/her life?

1 How lovely is your dwelling place,
O Lord of Heaven’s Armies.
2 I long, yes, I faint with longing
to enter the courts of the Lord…
10 A single day in your courts
is better than a thousand anywhere else!
I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of my God
than live the good life in the homes of the wicked.

He’s got to grip your heart. He has to become your obsession. But the thing is, you can’t make it happen. You can only make your heart accessible to Him. And then He takes over. If you try to muster and create passion for the Lord, it will only be perverted and likely turned into ugly religion or emotionalism.

But when you really get to a point where you desire Him… where you heart aches to experience intimacy with Him like you read about in Scripture. And when you commit to pursuing His heart and agree to do so on His terms, that gives Him something to work with.

Soft clay in the hands of a Master Potter is a beautiful thing. And beautiful things result.

In The Sacred Romance, Eldredge quotes and then reflects on a piece from Frederick Buechner’s Telling Secrets:

“Starting with the rather too pretty young woman and the charming but rather unstable young man, who together know no more about being parents than they do the far side of the moon, the world sets in to making us what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it apparently did the selves we originally were. That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us hardly end up living out of it at all. Instead, we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”

Think about the part you find yourself playing, the self you put on like a costume. Who cast you in this role? Most of us are living out a script that someone else has written for us. We’ve not been invited to live from our heart, to be who we truly are, so we put on these false selves hoping to offer something more acceptable to the world, something functional. We learn our roles starting very young and we learn them well.

If God’s current role in our lives is anything, it’s Restorer. His pursuit after us has the goal of restoring the relationship to what it was in Eden. A fringe benefit of this is of course eternal life; what makes this intimate relationship possible is forgiveness of sins; a proper response from us is holy and obedient living. But all of those stem from His great desire for fellowship and intimacy with His lovers.

And when we get that, our mourning is turned to dancing. Our weeping is turned to laughing. Our sadness is turned to joy. The stress and pressure lift and performance is no longer necessary. For where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. In His presence is fullness of joy and at His right hand are pleasures forever more.

And that, my friends, is why laughter breaks out when a bunch of Jesus-obsessed crazies get together to fellowship and worship God.

Ah, I hear my lover coming!
He is leaping over the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
My lover is like a swift gazelle
or a young stag.
Look, there he is behind the wall,
looking through the window,
peering into the room.

My lover said to me,
“Rise up, my darling!
Come away with me, my fair one!
Look, the winter is past,
and the rains are over and gone.
The flowers are springing up,
the season of singing birds has come,
and the cooing of turtledoves fills the air.
The fig trees are forming young fruit,
and the fragrant grapevines are blossoming.
Rise up, my darling!
Come away with me, my fair one!”

— Song of Solomon 2:8-13

This, from ESPN’s Jemele Hill: God’s quarterback turning everyone into believers

…

Some fancy Kitna as a religious zealot, but if having strong faith is the worst thing we can say about a professional athlete, maybe we’re the ones who need to reevaluate our priorities.

To Kitna, this is all God’s will, right on down to the part you think he’s crazy for proclaiming a miracle, crazy for saying God told him months before the conclusion of his final season in Cincinnati that he’d be a Lion, and forecasting the resurrection of a franchise that, well, only Jesus could muster.

“Don’t worry, some other things will be spoken of when the time comes,” Kitna says mysteriously.

Only there will be a lot fewer nonbelievers this time around.

The whole article is really good and worth a read. I just quoted the end because it cut to the heart of the matter.

I love Kitna’s zeal for the Lord. I see him as a prophetic evangelist. I listened to a message he spoke at Kensington Community Church a while back and was very impressed. He brought the Word. Hard. I think I’ll listen to another one today (go to Kensington’s message search page and select Jon Kitna from the drop-down. The original one I listed to is not on there, though.).

His last quote in the article just cracks me up because it’s exactly the type of thing you see Jesus saying in the Gospels (“I have much more to tell you, but you can’t bear it now…”). Kitna seems pretty real and straight-forward on one hand (like Jesus), but far-off and mysterious on another (like Jesus). He seems to know how to operate in the spiritual and natural without missing a beat (like Jesus). And we’re all called to be like that (like Jesus).

There’s no doubt in my mind that the Lord sent him to the Lions for a number of reasons, among them being that the team and the city needed a great spiritual leader. And guys on the Lions needed to hear the Gospel. I really appreciate what he’s invested in our team and state.

I think I just might send him a letter to tell him that.

So, a rouge portion of our corporate intranet, which hasn’t rolled its information into our content management system, has a little slogan atop the home page.

“Quality matters” it says.

I’m assuming they’re referring to the services they offer as a department. They certainly couldn’t be referring to their atrocious Web presence… could they?