If you’re game for some praying, I’d appreciate your prayers for my laptop. It’s at the “doctor” for help and may require a “new brain”. Much of what is on it is backed up, but not since we left home over six weeks ago. Some of what is currently out-of-reach and hopefully-not-lost are drafts and details of the recent series of posts that many of you have read here about how we ended up spending this year in Redding, California. So that “back story” will have to wait until my machine returns.

In the meantime, let me share from the past week.

Maybe, just maybe, I’m finding a groove here. Our weekly routine will settle fairly shortly. This next week is unusual as all 1300 first-year students will be cycled through two-day retreats over an eight-day span, so regular classes will break for that. By the following week, we’ll be “normal”. Our girls continue to enjoy their school days almost all of the time, and we are making some new friends as well. We met a BSSM-alumni family right in our complex just today. They have two girls that match our youngest two, and I foresee Karyss’ much-requested playdates in our future. 🙂 They’re a Minnesota family, so they see themselves as “southern Canadians”. We’ll take it. Another friendship that already brings me joy is a Canadian-boy-married-English-girl couple named Stephen & Clare. We met them at a meeting on the first day of school, when Stephen approached because of the maple leaf on our name tags. You ever just get a great feeling from the first moment with a stranger? Yep, that’s how it felt to us. Clare is a classmate with us, while Stephen is working from home, grading papers for the seminary where he’s been a professor for the past several years. So yes, my new friend is a 40-year-old theology professor who grew up with a pastor father who also taught at Prairie Bible College in Three Hills, Alberta. Over coffee, he gave me a copy of his latest book, a biography on Soren Kierkegaard, that includes an endorsement from a friend of his named Richard Beck, the much-loved (by some!) professor from Abilene Christian University. Small world, eh?

Those are life logistics, and it’s nice when they run smoothly. But the groove I alluded to earlier runs deeper. A week ago, I was unsettled. I was happy to be here, but I was not feeling very whole or rooted. My last post shared some of that, but to be honest, that post just captured one theme that I could get a solid grip on. The rest was a jumbled mess of thoughts. Blog posts and sermons, both of which I love creating, can knit illusions that my mind and heart are tidier than in real life. But much of my moment-to-moment processing is fairly messy. Feelings swirl with thoughts, both those I actively choose and those I wish to vote off the island. Biases and assumptions, truth and distortion, faith and fear and fickleness — it’s all mixed in. And a week ago, that blender was running on high speed, mixing a smoothie on which I was gagging.

So I breathed, slowly and steadily.

And I prayed, poorly but purely.

And I fasted, hungrily but not for food.

And I worshiped, wanting-ly.

And I listened to those around me and the One who is everywhere.

And I breathed again.

And some space opened up inside.

What did that feel like?

• It felt like greater ability to engage in the 60-90 minutes of focused prayer and wonderful worship that kicks off every school day.
• It felt like a gaze that started seeing those around me more as my vision was released from a stigmatism of self-consciousness.
• It felt like a grip that softened as I granted myself yet another round of permission to simply receive all that God wishes to do here without obsessing over intense filtering or analysis every single moment.
• It felt like a gentle affirmation that I dared to believe for the thousandth time that the Father of Love loves me, as a son.

On Wednesday, I felt that space open up, freeing me to engage with people and program in better ways than I had on Tuesday. The One who freed His people in Egypt still has a heart for liberating slaves apparently, even when it’s one little guy in one little place.

And that positioned me for Thursday.

Kris Vallatton is one of the leaders of both Bethel Church and their Ministry School. On Thursday, he was sharing portions of his story. One part involved a time when he received an outrageous gift from a friend. In the days that followed, he proceeded to avoid this man, and finally in a moment of epiphany, he felt God revealing to him a lifelong tendency: Whenever someone looked to love him more than he loved himself, he’d sabotage the relationship. He proceeded to unpack this dynamic as he has seen it play out over decades of ministry now. Dating relationships, marriages and divorces, friendships or families or workplaces — it’s everywhere, and it undermines healthy relationships, while reinforcing patterns that rob lives of the connection and love they crave. And we’re talking about Christians.

Basic point: Too many folks have believed in a God who loves them, but not really. I mean, He has to because He’s God. But surely He just barely tolerates us, as we do. We find ourselves feeling as though we should almost apologize for existing or at least for existing as such weak human beings. We imagine that this state of “humility” might somehow be a spiritual place where we should remain. At least it guards us against arrogance, right? So we carry ourselves doubting that we’re lovable or valuable or special. And it cuts our feet from under us, preventing us from living lives of joy or peace of love. We remain miles away from becoming “new creations” because our fearful and self-centred voices are so loud that they drown out any whispered truths that God wishes to utilize in our rebirth.

As the lesson proceeded, Kris paused and expressed his conviction that it was time to pray. This is hardly uncommon at BSSM. Class turns from teaching to prayer several times each day, typically in moments of focused prayer for needs that might relate to the subject at hand. Folks who feel they are in need of such prayers are asked to stand with open hands (receiving posture), and those around are often asked to lay hands on them and participate in praying for them. I tell you that just so you recognize that this is normal here. It’s a powerful practice.

But Thursday was particularly meaningful to me.

He invited those to stand who saw their own struggles with living as the Beloved of the Father. And lots stood! Open disclosure: I didn’t stand on Thursday. I’ve got plenty of issues related to living rooted in the love of God, but on that particular day, it didn’t feel like “my time”. I didn’t feel resistant or stubborn; it just was my turn to lift up others.

A classmate was recording a portion of the lesson, and I’ve edited it down to 15 minutes, in case you wish to hear some of this prayer time. If parts of it are “for you”, then enter those prayers and stand in the truths you hear declared. You won’t need to have been present to gauge when the tone in the room changed. Crying, groaning, full-out weeping: All of these were taking place as believers across the age spectrum and the atlas placed themselves very vulnerably before God for healing touches. Some might be write it off as little more than emotionalism.

Yeah. But no.

For my part, it was a real privilege to hold up hands and drop down tears in prayer for a crowd that I hardly know but for whom my compassion was very stirred. These were moments of people holding one another up in prayer and literally holding one another up. I found it quite overwhelming. As Kris prayed toward the breaking of Satan’s lies and the freeing by God’s truth, there was no doubt: “The One who freed His people in Egypt still has a heart for liberating slaves.” I used that sentence earlier in reference to God touching one little guy in one little place. But it’s oh-so-true, friends. And it’s true for you and for those you love.

Christ is the Freedom-Bringer. He’s paid a thorough price for that privilege, and there is no prison in which we’ve spent time from which he is incapable of breaking us free. He holds all the keys and possesses all the authority in heaven and on earth. And best of all, he seeks us where we’re stuck and then stubbornly loves us toward a life of spaciousness.

If you care to listen in, here’s the short version of Thursday’s prayer time. Love to you all.

Several posts back, I started a series designed to answer the question, “How did you guys end up at Bethel?” As you’ve already figured out, it’s not a short answer. It was my goal to write out the entire “back story” prior to the first day of class.

We started class last Tuesday. I have failed.

The struggle I now face is to somehow complete a description of our journey here, while leaving room for new posts that describe life here and now. The past is great, but I’m in the present, with more to share as we go forward. Compounding matters is the fact that our days here have become very full very quickly. The past week had this as an average day:

6:15 AM: Wake-up
7:30 AM: Deliver three girls to two schools
10:00 AM: Head to class
5:45 PM: Leave class
5:46 PM: Race to pick up kids from two different after-school daycares, before they close at 6:00.
6:15 PM: Supper / Baths / Homework / Stories / Bedtime for kids
8:45 PM: Adults’ homework time
11:59 PM: Sleep till it rolls around again

This opening week of class has featured unusually long days, so that schedule shouldn’t always be quite so nutty. But additional activities will take up most of the slack that might form, as various versions of small groups and ministry experiences begin in the weeks ahead. I think we’ve also discovered that both of us will be spending a couple hours reading and writing most evenings for the year. Our course is set.

Don’t these people know I have a blog to maintain?!

However, this post is not dedicated to daytimers or demands. Everyone has those. I’d best be guided by a statement my wife might make when the sharing of life’s details is simply too little: “But I want to know what’s happening inside of you.”

That’s tricky to describe, as a friend back home discovered on my third day of class. He texted me this, “How are things in your adventure with God there?” His question landed in a moment when I was feeling fairly rattled. My reply: “Oh boy… The easy answer would be to say that it’s ‘really good’ so far. Another answer would be to say that I’m wondering if this experience is going to kill me in some way. But that would require more explaining than I feel capable of. :-)” He mercifully left me alone with a gentle reply that he hoped I didn’t really die and a nervous-but-caring emoticon.

Let me attempt to describe a bit of this by first talking about somebody else.

The senior pastor of Bethel Church is a man named Bill Johnson. I unashamedly admire and appreciate him a great deal. If you listen to his messages for any length of time, you’ll hear him allude to a very profound God-encounter that he had many years ago, an experience that generated a significant shift in his life. For many months, Bill felt his life wrapped around a single sentence of prayer: “God, I must have more of You at any cost!” One night, he was awakened at exactly 3 AM. He was immediately wide awake and experiencing in his body a sensation just shy of electrocution. The more he tried to stop it, the worse it got. He neither heard a voice nor saw a vision, but he sensed no doubt in his soul that this was God responding to his prayer. This sensation lasted nearly four hours, at which point he got out of bed completely refreshed. The same thing happened for two more nights.

When Bill recounts the story in person or in print, he shares those details just sufficiently to describe the scene, but he doesn’t linger long there. The outer experience mattered because it got his full attention, but his full attention was quickly directed to deeper places than his nervous system. He felt aware of a significant exchange taking place in his spirit. The Father was challenging him on whether he meant what he had prayed.

“At any cost?”

Jacob encountered the Lord, and he limped for the rest of his life. Mary was chosen to serve the Lord in a glorious role, and she bore the stigma of birthing an illegitimate child from that day forward. What cost was Bill willing to bear? He felt as though God was setting sights upon his regard for his reputation. Who doesn’t want to be respected and esteemed by others? Would he continue to pray this prayer if God offered a life with “more of Him” in exchange for his own dignity?

The Bible describes the Holy Spirit as the Counselor and the Word of God as a sword so sharp that it divides our deepest layers one from the other. Whichever image you prefer, the point is that God knows how to get to the heart of the matter in a hurry. Bill was laid bare, and in that moment, his prayer of response was, “More, God, more! I must have more of You at any cost. If I lose respectability and get You in the exchange, I’ll gladly make that trade. Just give me more of You!”

Feel free to make that prayer as much your own as you wish.

One of BSSM’s key terms is the word “revivalist”. The mission statement of their school revolves around developing the revivalist in every student. “How do they define that term?” you ask? Great question. Here’s the official answer:

• Revivalist: a believer who is focused and passionate, willing to pay any price to live in community, purity, and power because they are loved by God, whose manifest presence transforms lives and cultures

For the record, I don’t wear that word comfortably today. I don’t even claim to be that. Part of the issue is that the term skews in my grey matter into images of televangelists that I don’t trust or wish to emulate. But the more personal issue is that I haven’t often felt like “revivalist material”. I’m aware of my shortcomings, at least enough of them to fear that that list doesn’t often describe the person I am.

But it describes the person I wish to be.

I think I do.

I think I have wished to be that for many years.

Can there be a believer anywhere who doesn’t at least want to want to be what is described above?

On our first day of class, we were assigned to read two chapters of Scripture everyday for the rest of the school year. The first two months feature assigned passages, an Old Testament flow through selections that carry the “big story” of the Bible, followed by heavy New Testament immersion featuring every chapter of the Gospels and Acts. In the quiet of this afternoon, I sat with famous, read-it-a-million-times passages from the lives of Abraham and Moses. Let me share what landed during those readings.

Genesis 22 features Abraham being tested by God’s request to sacrifice his son Isaac. It opens like this:

1 Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”

“Here I am,” he replied.

2 Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

3 Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey.

People love to be their own masters. We intuitively buck against anyone’s attempts to tell us where to go or what to do or with whom to do it or what it will cost us. Yet, God lays out all these details for Abraham, in an un-imaginable scenario. And the response of our “faith father”?

“Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey.”

No hesitation. No bartering. No dragging of feet or digging of heels. God directs. Abraham obeys. And I am convicted just in time to read verse 12.

12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

My highlighter targeted the phrase “you have not withheld from me”. In the margin, my pen recorded, “Your obedience is marked by what you don’t withhold.” Just as Bill was awakened for some 3 AM soul-wrestling, I am sensing, albeit current-free at this point, the Lord leaning upon me with some questions:

• What do you withhold from me, Jason?
• What drives you to do that?
• What do you imagine would happen if you stopped protecting that which is so precious to you, and instead offered it to me in obedience?

Good questions, Father.

Sigh.

I’m going to keep reading…

Back in Genesis 22, God responds to Abraham’s daring obedience. Notice verses 12-14.

12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”

I’m especially intrigued by verse 14.

Abraham named the place in accordance with his experience there. But the rest of the verse suggests that a soon-to-be-old saying was birthed on that day. We get the impression that for ages to come, this sentence became part of regular dialog. It was widely known, in the vocabulary vault of everyone from a young age: “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”

And I find myself musing. In what types of conversations did that line arise?

I imagine two people conversing about matters of faith or trust or obedience. One is describing the work that Yahweh is doing in his life, and in an effort to provide counsel, the other says, “Well, you know what they say: ‘On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.’” This cliché was likely offered as encouragement that the God who provided for Abraham would also provide for him. But that message alone would be a watered-down “Chicken Soup” version of the truth. The saying that rooted itself in the language of the day was explicit with a location: “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”

The provision of the Lord occurs on the mountain of the Lord. One doesn’t receive the living water in the living room. God’s gift is indeed merciful and miraculous, but it is only received after cost has been counted and mileage has been logged. Said another way:

Abraham
Don’t get no ram
At home with the fam.

Ahead of filling in the blank of what “you have not withheld from me”, there is no promise of tasting firsthand the provision of the Lord. The provision is heaped after the mountain has been hiked. Or as the margin of my Bible now notes, “As you follow where He leads and offer what He asks, He will provide.”

The word “as” is far larger than its two measly letters might suggest.

Later, I was directed to read Exodus 12. Verses 1-13 provide the instructions that were to guide the Hebrews on their final night of Egyptian slavery. There are details about late-night lamb chops shared with families and friends. They can expect bloodied door frames and battered firstborns. Tucked in those instructions is verse 11:

11 This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste; it is the Lord’s Passover.

These funny fashion tidbits are hardly funny. And they’re hardly tidbits. They describe the vital tone of this meal.

This is not to be a leisurely lunch.

No lounging afterwards. We are not watching college football.

The body-garments point to the heart-questions. As your mouth ate, your soul was to ask:

• “Now what?
• What are we doing?
• Where are we going?
• What is next?”

This meal was to be eaten in a spirit of readiness. In the lamb, one was receiving the sustenance of the Lord – salvation. And it appears unthinkable that one would consume such a feast while imagining that he could simply stay put afterward. That option is not on the table.

This menu demands movement.

This feast bestows freedom.

One cannot fill up and head home, for home is not back there. Home is beckoning us onward. There are rivers to cross and deserts to traverse.

Anything formerly withheld can be left here. Whatever value it once held and whatever role it once played, the Lord will provide abundantly more as you bear the cost of following Him wherever He leads.

My supportive friend ended our text-talk with a hope that I don’t really die. I appreciated the sentiment. I felt the same. Nobody likes the feeling of death. But perhaps since then, my trembling insides have stilled just enough to discern a hunch that is somehow and simultaneously unsettling and silencing. God would send a different text.

Some things are supposed to die.

And I will lovingly hunt them down in you.

In the year that followed the events described in THIS POST, I slowly arrived at some of the points described in THIS OTHER POST. If you’re not caught up, check the links. If you are, onward.

In March 2013, the Arrow Program, which I have described in earlier posts, was reaching its end. One unique feature of our final residential was that spouses were invited to join for the final couple days of learning and celebration. Our youngest daughter was still nursing at the time for an important source, but we succeeded in making arrangements for she and my wife, Shannon to join me on the Canadian West Coast.

Today’s post involves much of Shannon’s story, as seen through my eyes. If anything here fascinates you, you should follow up with her. We have discussed these events together over several years and have told these stories together several times to a smattering of close friends. In the name of marital health, you can be sure she will proofread this post before it goes live! 🙂

The blunt truth is that my final Arrow residential, intended to be a magical finale to a two-year journey, wasn’t at all magical, at least not in the ways we might have expected. For starters, Shannon was in a pretty unhealthy spot at the time, weary in her spirit and beaten down in her heart and exhausted in her body, and feeling quite alone in all of those places. I was aware of this general reality, but frightfully unaware of its extent.

Naturally woven into this was the fact that we were in a stretch of poor connection with one another. And once again, I was aware of this general reality but frightfully unaware of its extent. (If other marriages out there have ever had such recurring themes, I’d love to read about it in a blog post sometime. 😉 )

Looking back, some of the factors that contributed to Shannon’s sense of burden were circumstantial: She was feeling the pressure of being a relatively new preacher’s wife, she was raising three children under the age of 5, all while working a 24-7-ish job as a mental health home operator. (If you’re not familiar with our lives, this involved 4 other adults living in our space, needing help to function in healthy ways. All were diagnosed with various levels of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.) That job blessed our family in some very tangible ways, but I think we are both still discovering some of the intangible ways in which it exacted its toll on Shannon.

Back on the West Coast, Shannon arrived with a load of other spouses, though she was the only one carting a baby along. From the get-go, we recognized that this would compromise her level of participation, but we trusted that something would be better than nothing. As we visited in bed that first night, I recounted to Shannon stories about my classmates and facilitators. Some of these were simply to help her match descriptions she’d previously heard with faces she was now seeing. But some of it was deeper.

This group had done some gut-level sharing with one another, and on that particular evening, I was recalling a number of dramatic stories that I’d heard from this collection of special friends. These were testimonies of shocking answers to prayer, vivid encounters with God, equally vivid encounters with evil, and powerful displays of obedience and sacrifice to follow Jesus. Our conversation wound down, and I rolled over to sleep. Shannon did no such thing. (Is there a married couple out there that might wish to tackle this trend in their blog post? 🙂 )

But Shannon wasn’t just struggling to get comfortable on a new mattress. The secondhand stories that I had shared with her had stirred something. (There is an unusual power wrapped into testimony, but that’s another topic.) These tales of God’s closeness had pressed directly on the dryness in the despair that she felt. And she proceeded to pray a most desperate prayer, pleading with God that if He really responded to people, she needed Him to respond to her in a bad way. And somewhere after “amen”, she fell asleep too.

The next day centred on some teaching times specifically designed for couples in ministry. Our youngest child nominated herself for “least favourite” by striking naps from her itinerary and forcing Shannon to miss much of this opportunity. Baby played and mother stewed several doors down the hallway from where I sat with the rest of the adults. Shannon had left the door open so that she might hear at least the murmurs from the classroom. There was a knock on her open door. One of my facilitators was Joanne, a high-ranking leader in the Salvation Army. Joanne and I had almost no interaction with one another during those two years, as she simply wasn’t in my closest circle of leaders. But on that day, she stepped into our lives briefly yet forcefully. She asked Shannon if she could come in. Then she sat with my wife and my daughter and gently asked if she might pray with Shannon. Shannon accepted. Then Joanne started a sentence that neither of us had ever personally heard before: “I think I have a word for you.”

And then Joanne, a complete stranger to Shannon, went on to describe, with beyond-dismissible accuracy, the place in which Shannon found herself. A cynic might argue that Joanne was a wise woman who could read body posture and facial expression. That might be true, but that cynic would be easy to dismiss. There was much more going on in those moments. That encounter, the first of its kind that either of us had ever experienced, breathed life into Shannon. I’m not talking about miraculous, now-I-can-take-on-the-world vigour. I’m talking about just-enough-oxygen-to-make-it-to-the-next-corner life. In that saving, Shannon was shattered. Could it be real that in her moment of need when it felt as though nobody saw her, that a stranger was sent to confirm a loving message from the Father, “Oh, I see you, My dear daughter. I hear you, and I wish you to know that I am for you and near you.”

One of the amazing things about this event is how unamazing the follow-up was. Nothing in our lives changed. Circumstances stayed exactly the same. An identical list of stresses existed the day after as had existed the day before. Shannon doesn’t even look back on the following weeks and perceive that she even functioned with any noticeable increase in vibrancy or hopefulness. As I said, it was a breath when she was almost dead, a wisp to keep her afloat.

But another breath was coming.

At that final Arrow Residential, one of the special guests was Jason Hildebrand, a professional actor from Toronto. Jason and his family have gone on to become very special friends to us, but my initial introduction to him might not have hinted at that. Jason’s most obvious role at our Residential was to perform various productions that he had created through the years. These included scenes from the “Life of David” and a much-loved piece titled “The Prodigal Trilogy”, based on the parable already alluded to in THIS POST. But perhaps what will stick with me for longer was a prayer exercise in which Jason led a number of our class members. Full disclaimer: Some of my classmates recount this experience as one of frustration or worse. I confess to being somewhat bipolar myself in this regard: I was unnerved enough to feel myself stepping backward from Jason, yet fascinated enough to set up a private meeting with him afterward. In short, what I witnessed Jason facilitate with people in one-on-one interactions (observed one-on-one interactions, something of an oxymoron, I realize) were times of listening prayer merged with imagination, mixed with Scripture, mashed with role-playing, matched with counselling, mingled with spiritual direction. Surely a poor illustration, I can’t help but recall that I felt a touch like Steve Carell’s character in the awful movie “Dinner for Schmucks”.  In one of that flick’s most usable lines, he is spying through a window at some bizarre scene and then speaks into his phone nervously, “I’m having trouble describing what I’m looking at.” (Jason, you know we love you and your family a great deal, but that is about where I found myself on the day we met! You already know this story; just making sure we’re good!)

As mentioned earlier, I went on to set up a truly one-on-one time of prayer with Jason. I confess that exercises like this are very difficult for me. I have trouble “letting myself go”. My emotions are typically reined in by logic, and my imagination struggles to break free of my analysis. Yet, even with those deep-seated tendencies, the experience still delivered me to an epiphany of sorts. But that’s not for this post.

In the days following that final Residential, I was in touch with Jason about the possibility of him being a guest in our church someday. As it turned out, he was coming our direction in the very near future. He had enough flexibility to linger for a week and tag on additional performances. There was a very obvious satisfaction in this arrangement: My church was about to be blessed by a powerful piece of drama. A less obvious anticipation: Jason would be in our city for several days. Here was a fellow who appeared to be functioning in his spiritual life in ways completely foreign to ours. Couple that with our recent list of “God is nearer than you think” experiences, and we  noted here a unique opportunity to learn. So we formed a plot: We would invite him over for supper. After 60 seconds of chit chat, we would pump him with every question we could come up with and glean anything of value that we could find! And the unsuspecting fellow, he accepted the invite. 🙂

In an effort to maximize the evening’s value, we invited a couple friends who we discerned might also enjoy this conversation. In an effort to limit people’s questions about our curious curiosity, we only invited that couple. 🙂  Once the food was served, I recounted my introduction to Jason, much as I have done above. He was happy to entertain questions and share some of his own journey. As our children’s bedtimes neared, Shannon headed upstairs to make that happen. Jason proceeded to engage in prayer with both of our friends individually. I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that they were deeply impacted, both in their lives and their marriage.

It likely only happens in our household, but on that evening a phenomenon revealed itself: When one REALLY wants children to go to sleep as quickly as possible, every disruption imaginable (and several entirely new ones) all converge at once. As the chaos settled, Shannon descended to the main floor. In her loaded words, “I was just mad.” She had eyed this evening for weeks in advance, hopeful to discover more of the breathing space that she still so badly needed. And here we were, at the end of the evening. Prayers had been prayed, folks had been blessed, and all that awaited her were farewells and dirty dishes. She willed herself to pray a prayer of gratitude for our friends and the strength which they had received that evening. “Who knows? I prayed that this evening would be one of significance, and it has been significant for them.  Maybe that was the point of the whole gathering, I will try to be ok with that” she thought. And if so, then she was grateful on their behalf. But she could not simply swallow her sense of disappointment of missing out. Again. So we chatted a bit about children and bedtimes and frustrations, and Jason invited Shannon to pray with him also, despite the fact that it was already getting late. If he had been there, I’m not entirely sure how Steve Carell would have described what happened next.

But I don’t mean it was strange. It involved all of those ingredients I mentioned earlier, combined into a time of Shannon prayerfully directing her heart toward Jesus, to consider his feelings toward her and his plans for her. To the physical eye, it looked like two people on the floor, having quiet conversation with their eyes closed, one of them making occasional movements with her hands or arms. But physical eyes would have been insufficient that evening. After 90 minutes of prayer and Scripture and conversation, my wife arose as a new woman, with a brand new heart and a brand new identity.

I’m not given to hyperbole, so you will just have to deal with that sentence as it stands.

On May 16, 2013, Shannon went to bed freed from burdens and weights and fears and insecurities and hurts that she had carried for so long that she couldn’t remember where she picked most of them up. And in a matter of 90 minutes, praying with a Christian brother and placing herself before Jesus, she reached a point of deliverance that I would challenge any counsellor over many years to have reached.  That’s no slight against counsellors; just a simple declaration that there is one Counsellor who can get things done in power!

Let me close with news that will shock you.

People are stupid. At least the one I know best is.

Between March 2012 and May 2013, I had instances where I actually imagined that perhaps these off-the-charts experiences were being granted to me because I was oh-so-special. “Wow, God must really have great plans for me, that He’s giving such gifts. Thanks for loving me so much.” But on the heels of hosting Jason for an evening and witnessing my wife’s rebirth from that day forward, I began to get a new thought: “Oh! God didn’t do those things because He thought I was special. He did those things when He did them because He knew I was slow. Because now my wife is out of the gates, and I’m going to need every inch of that head-start in order to keep up!”

If you didn’t read my LAST POST, this post will prove tricky. This will be the commentary on that, and commentaries aren’t that valuable if one hasn’t read the original.

The end of last post left here: I returned home with my head spinning wildly on its axis, after having God serve up a half-dozen unnervingly personalized points of encounter within the span of a week. I went to boiler installation alexandria va and they helped us install our boiler fast. To pull out a favourite high school word, I moved forward from March 2012 in a state of severe discombobulation.

Did all of that really happen?

There was no denying it had.

Did I imagine any of that?

There was no chance I had.

So where to, from here?

What follows are just a few points of conclusion at which I arrived in the subsequent months. But you must remember the obvious: The journey toward the following bullet points wasn’t nearly so tidy as it now appears. It involved a steady stream of reflection and prayer and journaling and questioning and mentally replaying and carefully conversing over a span of many months. If anything of value lies here, gratefully plant it into your own life and see what springs forth.

What Was Needed
Looking back, the specific spiritual gift mentioned by Gretchen – the gift of discernment – wasn’t the point of that encounter. What I mean is: I haven’t given it much more thought about whether or not I possess that particular gift. I’ll aim to faithfully use what I have for the rest of my days, and folks can label me however they wish. (On an aside: It seems that “discernment” would be a gift no wise person would claim as their own. Likely best to have it affirmed by others. There, that statement is my word of discernment for the day. :-))

Said another way, that conversation now looks to me like something from “The Matrix”.  Remember when Neo was wrestling with whether or not he was really “the one”. He was sent to a mysterious woman known as the Oracle, with the expectation that she would give him a message to make everything clear. But she didn’t. She did give him a message, but we later learn that it wasn’t even true — certainly not as we would define “true”. So why did she say it? My guess: She said exactly what would move him one step down the path. It didn’t need to provide full clarity. It just needed to reveal one inch to that now called forth his next inch of response. That’s no coded attempt to liken myself to Neo (I don’t know Kung Fu) or Gretchen to the Oracle. That’s just my take on what was accomplished through that particular conversation at that particular point in time. It set me off on a path that I may never have been so open to, as I was right then — far greater consideration of the Holy Spirit and the ways that He works in the world and the church. I call that God’s timing, and His sights are well-calibrated.

The gifts of the Spirit, whatever you think of them, are given for the building of Christ’s Body. To speak of them at all is to speak of God’s commitment to equip His people to be what one another needs. The stunning sequence of experiences that week seemed to clarify as I came to imagine God’s explanation:

“Jason, I am delighted that you are delighted by the new sense of power and purity into which you are walking. I’ve always wanted this for you. You are right to thank Me and to celebrate, for it is a wondrous gift. But your chart is skewed. You imagined that these events were creating a climax within your spiritual life. You’d never imagined experiencing a greater touch. Well, here we are, and I needed to catch you in that moment, to stun you when you already stunned, with this truth: What is happening in your life right now is merely the preface of the book I’m writing. You thought you were arriving at ‘happily ever after.’ This is ‘once upon a time,’ My friend.  You’ve never even dreamed up the pages that I really want to write. Shall we begin?”

Bigger Than You

“God never works in your life just for your life.”

That is a sentence that slowly formed and then cemented itself into my mind, through the middle months of 2012. I mean, imagine this scenario: God responds to the most personal prayers you’ve ever prayed. He touches the core of your being and addresses the needs or fears or wounds that are there. If that occurred, what do you imagine would be the result? For many of us, the answer is fairly self-centred.

• Perhaps our heart would discover a new sense of peace.
• Perhaps our conscience would be put at ease.
• Perhaps we’d feel a lightness in our spirit and a happiness in our heart.
• Perhaps we’d sleep better or smile broader.

In some way or other, life would just be better.

In short, many of us imagine that God’s touch upon our deepest parts would bring about an effect primarily felt by us. I certainly imagined it that way.

But God has a wide gaze. His perspective is panoramic and His context is cosmic. “He never works in your life just for your life.” That felt like a huge discovery at the time, and it hasn’t stopped feeling huge yet.

Redeeming Requires Wreckage
In an earlier post, I alluded to many months of a “wrecking ball” experience. Hindsight prompts me to look back on that terribly-uncomfortable stretch of time as a vitally necessary step. That year-plus brought me far nearer to the end of myself than I had ever been before. That rattled my confidence and shook my sense of certainty. It loosened my grip and increased my openness. In short, it positioned me perfectly for what was coming up.

I have always trusted my mind a great deal. I consider myself a careful thinker who values that which is solid and sound. I came to imagine the Father developing his “March 2012” plan for me something like this:

“Jason, you highly value your ability to process. You are measured and cautious, and these are good qualities. But you trust your processor too much. In fact, you trust it more than you trust Me. I’ve allowed you to live like that for a time, but that time is up. I know that you will not eagerly relinquish this version of control, so I will lovingly rip it from your hands. How will I do that? I will take your cherished processor, and I will fry it by subjecting it to a flow of thoughts and feelings and experiences that you will be unable to dismiss and incapable of handling. When you smell the smoke of your precious processor and feel the unnerving burn inside yourself, then I will pull it out and we will begin constructing a new one from the ground up. I need you to walk with Me in some new ways, and this will require a renewed mind. You didn’t ask for this, and I didn’t ask permission. Let’s get at it.”

Shortening Your Arms
Closely connected to the previous point, I began to realize something about myself. My primary method of interacting with my world is to hold things at arm’s length. If we were sitting at a coffee shop, I would enact this by picking up an item from the table and holding it out in front of me, at the end of my fully extended limb. Then I would turn the item with my hand, rotating it so that my eyes could perceive all its angles. I think God has designed me this way, and some of the things I’m good at are linked to this tendency. One example: Someone will occasionally remark after a sermon that they can’t figure out how I ever discovered some insight from Scripture that was just shared. They felt like that passage was so familiar, yet it had just come alive to them in a profound new way. Much of that is God’s revelation or great resources. But often, there is another answer: I sat with that for a long time rolling it around in my hand and looking at its angles over and again until the time and the thought, the prayer and the poking seemed to lead me somewhere I’d never been before. In a sentence, I’m grateful to be designed this way. I hardly had a choice in the matter anyway, so I’d best strive to use it well.

The problem is: The most important things in life are not to be handled at arm’s length. It doesn’t make marriage thrive. And it’s not a good approach to parenting. And good luck if you think God will allow you to maintain a “safe distance” while you probe and examine Him like some form of science experiment about which to record observations and draw conclusions. After He fries your processor, He will then break your arm so that you have no option but to get up close and personal. For a good chunk of my life, I have treated God as a subject. To be sure, He was a most glorious subject, one with endless depths and complexity. But He was now eager to put my arm in a sling and just come on in. I’ve tried to let Him.

In short, the months that followed March 2012 were a period of unsettling sweetness. I lived out of a rootedness I had never known before, as if my spiritual feet had found new ground upon which to stand. Sometimes I smile and confess: It felt like a conversion experience. To many folks’ chagrin, it wouldn’t summarize neatly onto a pamphlet that one might be baptized at age 15, then spend the next 15 years either studying for ministry or working in ministry roles, before stumbling into a more real conversion experience that I never felt before.

But that was how it felt.

Let me close by revisiting my last post. Thanks to those who cared enough to read all 3000-plus words. You deserve a reward! A further word of thanks to all who took time to send a response. I’ve loved hearing from you — such treasured sharing!

I’ve known for years that someday I would type up that post, but it caused me stress last week as the time was actually drawing near. The night before I composed it, I awoke at 3:30 AM in a state of uneasiness:

• How am I to tell this story?
• What needs to be said?
• How does it need to be said?

A couple lines of reply seemed to come. I credit them to God.

“Testimonies should not be mumbled. If your goal is to glorify Me, then speak it out. You can do this blandly and safely if you choose, but that will only minimize the glory I receive and the power that your story might wield.”

For sixty minutes, I laid in bed, trying to be prayerful. As my spirit settled into a place of peace, I planted my feet on this prayer: “I’ll meet you wherever You want.” Somehow that felt like my prayer, in that night-time moment. Somehow it still does.

I express that sentiment to people all the time.

A friend wants to meet for lunch.

“I’ll meet you wherever you want.”

A colleague calls to visit over coffee.

“I’ll meet you wherever you want.”

Most of the time, my meaning is mundane: “I’m not that picky. You choose the venue, and I will be there.”

But as a prayer, the line carries weight, and I’ve already found myself repeating it several times this week. Lots of meaning fits in those few words:

“I’m not so courageous as a wish to be, Father. I don’t love risk, and I value my reputation more than I should. I can be over-governed by self-consciousness, and I don’t often leave enough room for mystery. But with all these issues and many more unmentioned, I still want You enough to say: I will meet you wherever you want.”

If you need new prayer line, feel free to borrow that one.

Perhaps we’ll meet up in the same place!

An old hymn suggests that every believer has a unique story to share and song to sing, in which the name of Jesus will be praised “all the day long”. The following post is lengthy, but there was no other way to do this. What can I say? This is one of the climactic verses of my life-hymn thus far. If context is helpful, visit these posts first: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Here we go.

I don’t recall the first time I was exposed to pornography it was a nice site with dirty snapchat teen free on sexmasta.com. But I do recall far too well the guilt and shame introduced into my life from that day forward because that I liked. I never needed someone to tell me that lust was wrong; my heart could feel that point like a dagger. But that recognition did nothing but cut more deeply every time I was reminded that I was not pure, as God desired. However, grace comes in many forms, and my heart has often thanked God for two simple mercies. I praise Him that I grew up in a pre-internet world. And I praise Him that a very real sense of fear resided in me, preventing me from falling into more destructive realms of darkness. What I had to handle was enough for me. As a teen and young adult, I recall self-loathing intense enough that I could not imagine why one would desire long life if these types of emotions needed to be carried the whole way. I recall certainty that the people around me would cast me aside with distaste if they knew the unseen rooms of my heart and mind. I wished to cast myself aside if there were a way! How could anyone else feel differently? And I can remember nearly two decades of “Christian living” in which my fixation upon my own failures distorted my view of the Father so completely that if Jesus had been a sketch artist, he would not have recognized his Abba if he had tapped my heart for a description.

On an aside: If this is your first visit to the blog, didn’t you pick a day to jump in?! I should’ve started you off with a post about the Toronto Blue Jays or something. No such luck today, my friend. We’re about to get close!

One Prayer
If one charted my prayers from age thirteen forward, I cannot imagine that those two decades would reveal a close second-place item behind my request that God would purify my heart. My sensitivity to this weakness was, in fact, an oversensitivity. Rather than fix my eyes on Jesus and his sufficiency, I fixed my eyes squarely on myself and my shortfall. When a person evaluates his level of spiritual health entirely upon a one-item moral scorecard, you can be pretty sure that you’re involved with something other than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I don’t wish to belabour this matter – trust me, this is already the blog post I thought I would never write!

But one thing needs to be clear: I had one prayer in my heart, heads above every other. And I imagined that if God would ever dare to answer it, I would have nothing else to ask. Surely He saw this exactly as I did, no?

Entering the Arrow Program, I had high hopes for a breakthrough beyond what openness with select friends and accountability partnerships had provided in the past. These hopes were based on the fact that even prior to our first residential, we were put through thorough inventories about personalities, leadership styles, relationship patterns, spiritual gifts, and more. These inventories were completed by ourselves and a group of those who lived around us, including our spouses. There was a psychologist on staff with whom each of us would be spending time, and it seemed that no rock would be left unturned. I was nervous but optimistic. To my surprise, the first residential (September 2011) left this completely untouched, and I recall a sense of disappointment. I returned home to press into the next six months until we met again, with tempered prayers and no real sense of anticipation.

As a teen, my ears enjoyed the sounds of Def Leppard. Don’t ask me why? But how many rock bands have a one-armed drummer, come on?! Whatever the case, I now retroactively imagine God dialling the call-in show of the heavenly radio station: “Yes, I’d like to send out a song to Jason. Please play ‘Do You Wanna Get Rocked?’” He never told me to tune in. He just began the rocking.

Dreams and Words
One facet of lust that had always bothered me was my suspicion that there were deep layers out of my view. I imagined that if I could understand what ticked in the unseen levels of my heart, I might have better footing to step into victory. What was the allure? What was the draw? Any simpleton could suggest that it was just the power of human sexuality, the draw of male to female, hormones and desire and fantasy. And that simpleton would be right, but not right enough. What was beneath those? I often wondered.

Days before our second residential (March 2012… finally), I had a dream.  It was a flashback to childhood, prompting a memory of loneliness, a pre-teen desire for meaningful connection with others. None of that was so clear at the time. Instead, it was merely a morning when I woke up, chuckled at the random nature of dreams, and sloughed it off to enter my day.

Days later, an Arrow presenter made a passing remark about his own life that instantly took me back to the dream, still fresh in my mind. I chuckled again, internally noting this as an unusual coincidence, particularly for a guy who never remembers his dreams.

The following day, a classmate made a comment that piqued my curiosity. It was one of those remarks where you suspect a substantial back story exists. Seeking him out privately, I asked if he would tell me “the rest of the story”. He obliged and began to describe how he had been deeply convicted six months earlier to confess openly to his wife an ongoing struggle with lust and pornography. I appreciated his vulnerability and knew that I was due to re-open such a visit with my wife as well. But here’s the part that surprised me. He had always credited his wife as possessing an unusually insightful spirit, an intuition of sorts that he counted as a spiritual gift. In the course of their dialogue, they determined that his sin was actually overflowing the banks of his life and having a negative impact upon her spiritual capacity. It would be difficult to express the weight and purity of conviction that I felt in that moment. Allow me to elaborate on that.

Round and Round
There is a cycle familiar to many. It looks something like this:

1) We feel close to God.

2) We feel less close to God.

3) We go seeking fulfillment elsewhere.

4) We do something we regret.

5) We condemn ourselves and stew over our own stupidity.

6) In anger and shame, we vow to do better next time.

7) Through some combination of confession, repentance, and penance, we rediscover our footing back at step one.

It would be one thing if all of us ran around the circle just once or twice in a lifetimes, but I’ve logged enough miles and heard enough stories to know otherwise. Most of us have run a nauseating number of laps. So you’ve likely discovered that the only point on the loop where a hopeless person feels any sort of leverage to change their situation is that place of anger and shame (#6). Fuelled by those fiery feelings, this is the spot where we plant our feet and thrust our strength forward in the quest to “do better”. It seems noble. Probably even Christian. The problem is that the whole thing is built on darkness. Shame and anger have never birthed righteousness. Life does not spring forth from such wells. Sometimes we use the word “conviction” in this place, but all too often, we’re speaking of a counterfeit form, tainted by the devil with condemnation. I have swallowed that brew more times than I can count, but on that day, I experienced a completely different thing.

In listening to my friend’s story, my soul received a most pure and proper sense of conviction from the Holy Spirit. He was gracious yet uncompromising. He had no desire to destroy me, but full intent to restore me. And in that moment, I was blown away by a newfound motivation for healing: I wanted my life to wield spiritual power, to cause ripples for the Kingdom of Christ, and I had no doubt that a purified heart internally would contribute to greater fruit externally. In short, I wanted God to change me for His sake rather than mine. And that was a new feeling that presented me with a wildly new footing for confession and repentance. New hope was sparked in me.

Shepherd Speaks
The following day involved three hours of private and silent retreat. Some simple instructions for Scripture meditation and prayer journaling were provided, and each of us set out for solitude. Our assigned text was Psalm 23, a passage I’d known since childhood. What epiphany could possibly await me in these familiar verses? I quieted myself and prayed for some form of revelation. And the God who is always near asserted Himself. By the end of verse 1, I knew something unusual was brewing. Rolling that verse’s phrases over and over in my mind, I created a prayer refrain still dear to me today:

“Yahweh my Shepherd is. In want I shall not be.”

Thought mixed with prayer mixed with stillness, and a million-watt lightbulb went off, as if God were shedding light on a twenty-year prayer with this message:

“There are two pastures in which you may live, Jason. In the first, you are a sheep and I am your faithful Shepherd. When you trust Me and draw near, My caring provision satisfies you deeply. This is life at its finest, and you have known moments like this. But when you stop trusting Me and create distance between us, then your heart grows restless for the satisfaction you no longer feel. This drives you to explore the wilderness. And in the wilderness, you discover plants that poison and terrain that threatens and enemies that devour. Please trust me. And please stay close. This is all you need.”

It is impossible to recount the force with which my head spun as this message downloaded into my heart. It was scriptural and timeless — it could have been for anyone — but it was precise and personal, for me right now beyond any doubt. It made my heart leap, as I received it like a customized gift from the One who loved me most. What’s more, this experience of revelation was woven intricately into the conversation and the comment and the dream of recent days, flooring me with the realization that God had been lovingly setting up this moment long before I had any sense of His approach. I was overwhelmed by this. The remainder of my solitude was spent revelling in the nearness and kindness of God, neither of which I had ever felt so strongly. It was shocking to me, and I felt as though every prayer I had ever prayed had just been answered.

And it wasn’t even lunch time. 🙂

Weird Words
After eating (I had no words to share at my table that day; I just ate and smiled), we were placed into our small groups of four, for prayer. We were given scripts to follow and sharing to carry out. One group member was a Manitoba pastor who had become dear to me. He shared words of heaviness. I again had the sense that there was “more to the story”, so I asked him a question and his sharing became more profound. A facilitator named Gretchen sidled up beside me, her mouth right near my ear. She gently asked, “Jason, do you know how to guide him from here?”

Completely confused by her question, I replied, “No, I don’t.”

She insisted, “Oh, I’m pretty sure you do.”

Annoyance now mixed with my confusion, “No, I’m pretty sure I don’t.”

Gretchen then entered the conversation, prompting my classmate into prayers of confession and repentance. The exercise ended, and we all dismissed with instructions that a bus would soon take us to the base of a mountain, where we would end the day with an afternoon hike.

I headed toward the bus with my head now spinning in a completely different direction. My morning had just involved the mountaintop experience of my faith journey, and now the glory of that encounter felt undercut by this strange exchange. And it wasn’t about to get better.

Sliding into the empty seat beside me, Gretchen appeared to be on a mission. (If you read this, Gretchen, please know through and through that I love and appreciate you. But on that particular day, you were a mighty unsettling presence for a bit. 🙂 ) She looked at me intensely and posed a question, “Do you have the spiritual gift of discernment?”

I laughed and explained that discussions of spiritual gifts were relatively unfamiliar to me despite the fact that I’d been forced to complete a couple inventories as part of this course. I shrugged and confessed that I hadn’t paid those results much attention. Beyond things like preaching and teaching, I wasn’t sure what to do with many of the other spiritual gifts included on my results. Then I paused and admitted, “It’s strange that you mention discernment though. That one actually came up on both of my inventories as something worth noting, but I just dismissed it because of its unfamiliarity.” Then I posed a question, “Why do you ask me this?”

She revealed, “Discernment is one of my spiritual gifts, and I’ve had that affirmed by people around me for many years. As your classmate was sharing, I could sense that there was another level that needed to be tapped, but I didn’t know how to get at it. Then you asked one question, and we got there in a hurry. I don’t think you could’ve done that without some gift for discernment.”

Coin Collecting
I don’t actually remember how the conversation moved from there. I do remember that it was making me uncomfortable, and I felt some measure of relief when the doors opened to release us on to a forested path inclined upward.

The crowd quickly spread over the path: Aggressive hikers moved fast and stragglers hung back. I settled into a comfortable gap in the middle with space before and behind me; I needed some time alone. My dominant train of thought was a confused debate with myself: “What am I to make of this, that this morning was a high point of my spiritual life, with God revealing Himself as more close and more caring than I had ever known Him to be. Yet here I was, mere hours after, and my wish to soak in that encounter is being sabotaged by a nutty woman rambling about the gifts of the Spirit!”

As I walked, I thought. And I stewed. And then I prayed. As I neared a grassy-knoll near the peak, this was my prayer:

“Lord, is there something here for me? I mean, I know there was something for me in Psalm 23. That was a word I’ve sought for twenty years! If one matter has unsettled my heart and stolen my joy, you addressed it this morning, and everything in me wishes just to set up camp there and linger with what was so obviously Your revelation to me. But what am I to do with this? Surely, this is a distraction, right? A tangent unworthy of further focus? That’s how I want to treat it, but I need to feel peace to do so. So I’m asking you, ‘Is this for me, or am I free to discard it?’”

That was the prayer hanging from my heart as I approached that grassy knoll. As I looked toward that point, I was intrigued by a sparkle on the ground. I assumed it to be a marker of some sort or perhaps a fallen earring or coin. It was right up on top of the knoll, impossible to miss, yet person after person walked right over it without even stopping to check it out. I chuckled at the oddity of that and committed that I would be stopping in a dozen steps or so to investigate. As I knelt down, I saw a dirty brown circle pressed into the damp soil. It looked like a penny, but it was anything but sparkly now that I was up close. I pressed my thumb beneath to pry it out. As I raised my hand and rubbed the coin between thumb and forefinger, this sentence fired through my mind: “You’re about to get messed up.” My breathing changed, and I paused. I already knew what would happen next. I moved my thumb aside to reveal the penny and gulped to see its year: 1977.

That’s my year. My birth year.

If you know me, you know this: I’ve super-cynical. My skepticism is finely tuned, and my head leads me fifty times before my heart gets a say. I don’t try to be that way; I just am. I love sound logic. I trust it, and I seek it. And I’m leery of voices that sound too loose in their language or too flaky in their processing. I measure my thoughts and select my words with caution, and my distaste for drama and aversion to hype will prompt me to understate something long before I dare to overstate it.

All that said, I possessed neither ability nor freedom to interpret the coin in my hand as anything other than a tangible answer to the prayer I had just dangled before God ten seconds earlier. A part of me wanted to, but I couldn’t do it. There was no way. And the word “coincidence” felt idiotic in that moment. So I just said nothing and held my coin.

I didn’t tell this story to anyone for quite some time. If I’m honest, it embarrassed me. Why? Because God doesn’t do stupid things like that! He doesn’t plant pennies on mountains for people to magically find as answers to prayer. That’s fine for YOU to have a story like that, but even five minutes earlier, if you’d have told me of an experience like that, I’d have listened and nodded and said, “Wow, that’s amazing.” And then I’d have departed and rolled my eyes and mentally noted you as a nut-job. Everybody knows God doesn’t do stuff like that.

Except when He does.

—

If you’re still reading, you’re really amazing!

Next post: How did I process all that?

Hint: It didn’t happen quickly.