So yesterday (Friday) clearly had a significant degree of Jesus on it, but I’m at a bit of a loss to put it into the current context. Maybe somebody else will find a connection that I’m missing.
For the record, I did get another Charlotte yesterday. As I walked into the convention center that I’ll talk about in a moment, I glanced at a TV that was playing in the lobby. The banner at the bottom read: Special Bulletin: Charlotte, NC. It was up there for maybe half a second and in the moment it took me to do a double-take they had moved on to something else. So for the 0.75 seconds that I, the guy who’s been pounded by this ‘coincidence’ for weeks now, took to cross the threshold of this hotel, God shows up with just another small signpost. Go figure. :)
Signs...that threatens to pull off onto a wide and potent tangent...suffice it to say that the topic of signs is a separate (?) thread that God has been pulling at lately. How we perceive them and what their nature is. Perhaps I’ll go there later, but or now I’ll drop this in, a quote form The Silver Chair:
“Remember, remember, remember the Signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the Signs . . . Take great care [the Narnian air] does not confuse your mind. And the Signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. This is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the Signs and believe the Signs. Nothing else matters.”
...Now onward.
Several months ago a friend who publishes a paper called Christian News Northwest asked if I would be a workshop speaker at some kind of conference thingy for a group I’d never heard of, the Evangelical Press Association. I agreed, frankly without praying or even really thinking about it, and almost instantly regretted it. It’s not that I objected to the cause or anything it just felt like at least one too many things on my plate and I was at least mildly irritated at myself for committing myself so recklessly. And as the weeks and months ticked by I was only more irritated. And what’s worse is that I found it near impossible to generate any interest at all in the event. I probably replied to a third of any correspondence that came my way for things like speaker bios or even a title for what I was going to talk about. What was also happening, which seems somewhat diabolical now in hindsight, was a way of thinking about this event that significantly demeaned it. Thoughts like ‘...that penny-ante reporter thing’ and ‘...waste of my time’ and ‘...I should just go [to N.C.] and let them figure it out.’ were all over my mind. So it comes up to Thursday evening and I haven’t been able to really commit more than 5 minutes at a go to even look at the schedule. Honestly, up until 8:00 the night before I didn’t even know when I was supposed to speak or where the event was, even though that had been on my calendar for six months.
As that evening grew older I was thinking more and more about the lesson in all of this and I thought about how I had committed myself to this without giving God even a passing glance and how it made a certain sense that God wouldn’t assent to my breaking my word even for this cool thing in Charlotte. Now that may in fact be a valid and important lesson to learn, but I no longer think that it was really the main thing going on here.
I went to bed that night, with still exactly zero plan for the next day beyond getting up a little early so I could go get breakfast and squeeze an outline out of forty-five minutes and a cup of coffee at J’s. But that said, I was in a significantly more peaceful state of mind when I turned back the sheets and talking to God about what might be going on here.
I slept pretty poorly that night – BUT – that’s not to say the night sucked. In fact, as I first drifted off I asked God, “Please help me here. I know I should be prepared and I don’t want to let these people down, but I can’t muster any interest at all. What should I talk about tomorrow?” And boy did he answer. I spent most of the night in this half-asleep / vivid dream state where I had the next day’s speech basically drilled into my head, then rehearsed several times. Not in a word-for-word kind of pattern, more like several key phrases, and a lot of topical exploration. What’s more is that it was right along the same lines as I’ve been talking about here and in other places – specifically the critical importance of story. The crux of the speech was really how the division between fact and story rides the division between the language of the mind and the language of the heart. It’s our stories, and especially the ways in which our stories intertwine with God’s larger story, that communicates meaning. Without story, we forgo meaning for dry and lifeless information...a particularly germane topic for a bunch of news hounds don’t you think?
Anyway, I show up and...um...wow. This is not what I had in mind (to say nothing or the Charlotte on the TV). This is several hundred people from all around the country, this is huge banquet rooms and suits and ties and the guy who is speaking before me...oh, nobody important... just the president of George Fox University. Honestly, it’s a good thing I don’t really get stage fright or I’d have bolted. Dream or not, I instantly felt WAY in over my head. But there was a worship service going on when I arrived and what was the piano player talking about between songs? Story. What did Mr. Baker talk about (among other things)? Story. So anyway, I’m sitting there feeling really good like I got the good scent in this dream and I’m really encouraged to see it through.
And the speech goes really well. Several people took the time to come up and remark on how it was the same thing that had been on their mind or how it spoke to something they were going through. Not like I changed the world or anything, but it was just another place where I was both unprepared, unequipped, and or the most part unwilling, but God took a simple little prayer and used it to minister to folks...not the least of which was me. What’s more, I wound up running into a gal, who ALSO dropped a line about the power of story to heal, who runs a ministry focused on women who have dealt with significant trauma. Right now, I really don’t know what that's about or where it would go, but I’m certain the meeting was planned by the Lion so I’m interested to see what fruit it bears.
So I reckon that’s the story of yesterday. I think without the Charlotte I’d just say it was an ordained chain of events, but mostly unrelated to everything that’s going on. But I’m not quite ready to close that book. There may yet be something here that ties in with the rest...time will tell.
10 May 2008
And now for something completely different
Just a quick note on how easy it can be to screw this walking with God thing up.
I was a few key strokes away from reporting another ‘sign’ here that had to do with the space heater in Odin’s room. In short, I was suddenly struck yesterday by the name on the heater, ‘Lakeland.’ And how, in God’s inimitable way, Lakeland is the city in Florida where the HS breakout that I’ve been talking about in NC actually started. Admittedly a minor sign, but again interesting given all that’s been going on.
However...
On second look as I wanted to double check my facts, the heater does NOT say Lakeland, but Lakewood.
What point am I trying to make here?
It is incredibly, INCREDIBLY, easy to get caught up into what God is doing and find ourselves tempted to fudge the facts. Whether that is to force a ‘sign’ where there really isn’t one, to ‘claim’ a healing that really hasn’t happened, or to give a ‘courtesy fall’ because the folks around you are all being slain in the Spirit and you don’t want to be left out.
There is a very fine line here between healthy skepticism, where we are commanded to ‘test the spirits’ on the one side and the command not to ‘quench the spirit’ on he other hand...cynicism.
So I’d encourage folks to be wide open to God where he can sweep you up, but be extremely cautious not to ‘fake it ‘til you make it.’ Likewise, double-checking with God is always a good idea. Triple-checking is appropriate when the stakes are high, quadruple checking is likely to let the blessing pas on by without you...
I was a few key strokes away from reporting another ‘sign’ here that had to do with the space heater in Odin’s room. In short, I was suddenly struck yesterday by the name on the heater, ‘Lakeland.’ And how, in God’s inimitable way, Lakeland is the city in Florida where the HS breakout that I’ve been talking about in NC actually started. Admittedly a minor sign, but again interesting given all that’s been going on.
However...
On second look as I wanted to double check my facts, the heater does NOT say Lakeland, but Lakewood.
What point am I trying to make here?
It is incredibly, INCREDIBLY, easy to get caught up into what God is doing and find ourselves tempted to fudge the facts. Whether that is to force a ‘sign’ where there really isn’t one, to ‘claim’ a healing that really hasn’t happened, or to give a ‘courtesy fall’ because the folks around you are all being slain in the Spirit and you don’t want to be left out.
There is a very fine line here between healthy skepticism, where we are commanded to ‘test the spirits’ on the one side and the command not to ‘quench the spirit’ on he other hand...cynicism.
So I’d encourage folks to be wide open to God where he can sweep you up, but be extremely cautious not to ‘fake it ‘til you make it.’ Likewise, double-checking with God is always a good idea. Triple-checking is appropriate when the stakes are high, quadruple checking is likely to let the blessing pas on by without you...
From a recent email...
On 5/9/08 8:34 PM, Ken wrote:
------ End of Forwarded Message
Dude - I gotta tell you.
JB will back me up on this I’m pretty sure, but in the period between roughly a week before camp and now (so it’s ongoing) we’ve had more spiritual ‘chatter’ on the line then I’ve ever seen. Really – more than ever, and by a long shot, and by no means is that limited to BCNW. There is huge stuff going on all over the country right now and in many different ministries. And let me clear, it’s primarily positive chatter, not warfare stuff for the most part, but ‘Aslan is on the move’ stuff. Something huge is afoot as we speak we right now...but I’m a long way from understanding what it’s about.
I should tell you that I am convinced that a major part of what’s happening right now, and how far or how long it goes on, hinges on the willingness of folks to spread the word. It’s a little like Holy Spirit telephone. As you sat down to tell me about your part of the story, it suddenly made me aware of connections to my story that were hidden up to that point. I responded with additional stories which has come to where we are now.
This is the pattern I’m seeing a lot of right now. I’m sure it’s a big principle anyway, but particularly at this moment (maybe up to May 17th?) we must deliberately fight the impulse to internalize the ways that God is speaking to us – we must be very purposeful not to hide our light under a bushel. It’s these CONNECTIONS that are moving this chatter forward and upward.
So in the spirit of my own advice, here’s a link to my blog which will let you in on a story that has been developing in my life over the last week or two:
the-m-blog.blogspot.com/
Probably go back to a post called ‘waiting’ and read forward from there to get the feel for what’s been happening.
Strength and honor my friend!
Chris,
Yeah, something bigger I believe is around the corner, and what you are saying definitely makes sense. Yes, you may share my story with the group.
The next part of the journey that God is calling me to, is another prayer journey on May 17. I would hope to have the BCNW team members be in prayer over what God's plan is in this, and if possible during the morning of the 17th. Since I've been home the story has taken a new turn and all the more God has been confirming in my heart that May 17th is the day to come before Him and pray for the release of the captives and to drive out the "midianites" (Judges 6) out of King County, and sound the alarm.. It involves a mt top hike near my home that over looks the county. Early April I sensed that the time for me to go was May 17th. Many of the events of the retreat prepared me, for the days that are leading up to the 17th, including our chat about the angels. As I mentioned I wrestled for two years over when I was suppose to go on this journey, sometimes I thought I missed the opportunity to go. Now I beleive! that God has given me the go ahead for this day, confirmed through prayer, many events, and circumstances that only God can orchestrate.
The story is deeper and more detailed than I had time to share with you at the retreat. It began with repentance, healing, my new name and I believe a mission
Appreciate your prayers and the others too. If there are any questions please call. Also this weekend their is a prayer event going on locally/globally. More air war. You can forward this email to the others if you want, I'll leave it up to your discernment. Jim Z. might be going with me I haven't heard back from him yet.
For His Kingdom,
Ken
P.S. May 17th is National Armed Forces Day. No coincidence.
------ End of Forwarded Message
Dude - I gotta tell you.
JB will back me up on this I’m pretty sure, but in the period between roughly a week before camp and now (so it’s ongoing) we’ve had more spiritual ‘chatter’ on the line then I’ve ever seen. Really – more than ever, and by a long shot, and by no means is that limited to BCNW. There is huge stuff going on all over the country right now and in many different ministries. And let me clear, it’s primarily positive chatter, not warfare stuff for the most part, but ‘Aslan is on the move’ stuff. Something huge is afoot as we speak we right now...but I’m a long way from understanding what it’s about.
I should tell you that I am convinced that a major part of what’s happening right now, and how far or how long it goes on, hinges on the willingness of folks to spread the word. It’s a little like Holy Spirit telephone. As you sat down to tell me about your part of the story, it suddenly made me aware of connections to my story that were hidden up to that point. I responded with additional stories which has come to where we are now.
This is the pattern I’m seeing a lot of right now. I’m sure it’s a big principle anyway, but particularly at this moment (maybe up to May 17th?) we must deliberately fight the impulse to internalize the ways that God is speaking to us – we must be very purposeful not to hide our light under a bushel. It’s these CONNECTIONS that are moving this chatter forward and upward.
So in the spirit of my own advice, here’s a link to my blog which will let you in on a story that has been developing in my life over the last week or two:
the-m-blog.blogspot.com/
Probably go back to a post called ‘waiting’ and read forward from there to get the feel for what’s been happening.
Strength and honor my friend!
Now it's spreading...
I dropped a quick line in here a few days ago that a friend of mine from BCNW, Rick Randal, felt moved by the story here to go out to Charlotte himself and check out what was going on there.
Rick has a great sense of what a given situation is on the spiritual plane and so I’m very interested in his impressions.
Check out his blog here:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=46138339&blogID=392501579
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=46138339&blogID=392518756
This also REALLY brings something to the front on my mind here. I’ve had a lot of folks either call or write to me with various reactions or impulses on this story – thanks! It helps a lot to know I’m not totally loosing it. :)
But people, if anything I’m saying here rings, let it be this: for some reason God wants this to be a story we tell together. It’s a community event. So don’t call me, post a comment here. Or...call me AND post a comment, that would be cool. Sluss Jr, - don’t tell me you’re glued to the blog – log your own reactions to the story, here or on your own blog (but if you do that, let me know so I can link to it).
OK - ‘nother post coming but I wanted to get this one live.
Rick has a great sense of what a given situation is on the spiritual plane and so I’m very interested in his impressions.
Check out his blog here:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=46138339&blogID=392501579
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=46138339&blogID=392518756
This also REALLY brings something to the front on my mind here. I’ve had a lot of folks either call or write to me with various reactions or impulses on this story – thanks! It helps a lot to know I’m not totally loosing it. :)
But people, if anything I’m saying here rings, let it be this: for some reason God wants this to be a story we tell together. It’s a community event. So don’t call me, post a comment here. Or...call me AND post a comment, that would be cool. Sluss Jr, - don’t tell me you’re glued to the blog – log your own reactions to the story, here or on your own blog (but if you do that, let me know so I can link to it).
OK - ‘nother post coming but I wanted to get this one live.
08 May 2008
The Story, Part two
...Can I just say I wish there was a way to reorganize these posts to fall in opposite order. As it is, it’s like a viewer stumbles by and starts at the end of the current thread...if that’s you, go back to http://the-m-blog.blogspot.com/2008/04/waiting.html and read up from there.
OK – so in our last installment, our hero had his bag packed and was getting ready to drive to the airport and see what God did...
With that cliffhanger in the air, let me bring in another thread here that I hinted at earlier, but needs a bit more explanation. I’ve been involved with Boot Camp Northwest for about 3.5 years now. As that effort has moved along and I’ve been on this crazy ride with God, I’ve had this increasingly vexing thought. If part of the Wild at Heart message is that we men have ‘a beauty to rescue’ as one of our core motivators, what does that really look like. Setting aside the fact that the principle rings quite strongly for both Rebekah and I, I’m teaching sessions at an all men event in the ‘wilderness’ of Wild Horse Canyon. How can Rebekah be a part of that? And it’s not just Re. All of the guys have been increasingly aware of this inconsistency (dare I say hypocrisy?) but we have been totally at a loss to untangle the Gordian knot. Despite several long and heartfelt (and presumably spirit led) conversations on the matter, none of us have come up with anything that felt like an answer...just ongoing awareness of the problem. She can write her own thoughts on the matter if she wishes, but suffice it to say that as I was headed for the door on this new (again) adventure with God she was feeling left out.
I confess that at first I felt pretty miffed at that. I was thinking, “God is moving here and you’re letting petty jealousy get in the way of His divine purpose.”
OK, just in case the sarcastic tone got lost in the blog there, I want to be totally clear. That was a totally unfair way for me to see what was going on. The truth was that she was completely right.
I was leaving her out.
I had been leaving her out for a while.
And it was contrary to what God had in mind.
Now at the same time, I don’t want to be too self-flagellating here. It wasn’t as if I didn’t WANT Rebekah to be apart of what was going on, I just never saw how it was supposed to fit together. In fact, Re and I have had several conversations on exactly the same line – how could she be a part of what was happening – and she didn’t see it either. So it’s not as if I was deliberately excluding her or even thoughtlessly neglecting her. This leads me to a conclusion that I find profound but too big and new to explore right now. Neither of us saw what was to come to next because the door wasn’t open yet. It wasn’t time yet for this to happen – it had to be opened by God first...
But I’m getting ahead of myself. That Wed. night it seemed wiser to stay home and be with my wife than to go off chasing the goose. But not two hours after that door was closed (by me) God was back in my face with another ‘Charlotte.’ So I took that to mean the trail hadn’t gone cold...
A few days later, just like I had done after the last conference I had missed, I went to the Morning Star website and intended to download the audio again. However, I was drawn to he article I mentioned earlier (http://www.morningstarministries.org/Publisher/Article.aspx?id=1000031456) and some of the video on the website. I read about how something remarkable was going on over in Charlotte.
More specifically, at the Worship and Warfare conference (you know, the one I was supposed to be at six months ago) the whole thing had been kinda interrupted by God with a big move of the Spirit. What’s more, the same thing, only bigger, was now happening at the OTHER conference God wanted me to attend a few days ago.
You know, I can get pretty passionate about God and I am a ‘hand raiser’ in worship, but I’m not at all a Holy Roller. To be really honest, at lot of that video coming from Morning Star makes me decidedly uncomfortable. But when I was reading that article, especially the parts about fatherhood and dreams, I was overcome with the Spirit in a way that I’ve never felt before (or least not in a long time). I was shaking and caught somewhere between crying and giggling and I just started to freak out.
It was awesome!
It was frightening!
I want more!
That afternoon, I dropped by my church on a business errand and had a chance to bring Bill along for a brief drive. As I shared the story with him, particularly my only deepening dilemma regarding Rebekah, he said the simplest of things – ‘Maybe you should invite her?’
Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that when Captivating says that a woman wants to be invited into the adventure (not to BE the adventure) that I can just, you know, INVITE her? I swear it seems so stupid and obvious now but that exceedingly simple answer was totally hidden form me prior to that moment. That night I took Re out to a nice dinner...trying to buy her off in case it was un uncomfortable conversation. :) But in all honesty it was a very good and basically obvious conversation and she said yes – she’d love to go.
It was then (or maybe earlier that day, I don’t remember now or sure) that I decided to start putting all of this on my blog.
One of the other strong and recurring themes here has been the community aspect of this process. For better or for worse, and whether I’m excited about the idea of being all transparent or not, I’m convinced that God wants this...whatever it is...to be out in the open, or you dear reader to see as it unfolds. Of course a part of that is just the power of testimony and of story. But I’m convinced there is also something here about sharing in whatever blessing God has in store on he other side of the country. He’s told me that I have to sit and let His provision ‘come to me like a child’ a phrase I’ve had repeated to me often in the last few weeks (though not as often as ‘Charlotte’).
So that’s what the whole donation thing is about. I’m convinced that he wants me to invite anybody who wants, anybody who is thirsty, to be a part of this...this...thing. Sort of a highways and hedges bit (Mat 22), which may turn out to be a far more accurate metaphor that I really meant it to be when I first used it. Other people have prepared me for this, but I must say I’ve been surprised (and to be honest disappointed in some cases) about where the actual financial support for this has been rising from. I’ve been on the other end of fundraising and I certainly know what that’s like but this is my first time where I feel God asking me to put my hat out, it’s an odd experience, rife with emotion. But enough for that.
I reckon that about brings me the story up the current moment if you include the few additional notes I’ve added in other posts. I know at least one fellow from BCNW was fired up enough to go over there himself and Rick – go get ‘em tiger. Hopefully Re and I will join you. With that, I’ll log off and let you all know what happens next.
OK – so in our last installment, our hero had his bag packed and was getting ready to drive to the airport and see what God did...
With that cliffhanger in the air, let me bring in another thread here that I hinted at earlier, but needs a bit more explanation. I’ve been involved with Boot Camp Northwest for about 3.5 years now. As that effort has moved along and I’ve been on this crazy ride with God, I’ve had this increasingly vexing thought. If part of the Wild at Heart message is that we men have ‘a beauty to rescue’ as one of our core motivators, what does that really look like. Setting aside the fact that the principle rings quite strongly for both Rebekah and I, I’m teaching sessions at an all men event in the ‘wilderness’ of Wild Horse Canyon. How can Rebekah be a part of that? And it’s not just Re. All of the guys have been increasingly aware of this inconsistency (dare I say hypocrisy?) but we have been totally at a loss to untangle the Gordian knot. Despite several long and heartfelt (and presumably spirit led) conversations on the matter, none of us have come up with anything that felt like an answer...just ongoing awareness of the problem. She can write her own thoughts on the matter if she wishes, but suffice it to say that as I was headed for the door on this new (again) adventure with God she was feeling left out.
I confess that at first I felt pretty miffed at that. I was thinking, “God is moving here and you’re letting petty jealousy get in the way of His divine purpose.”
OK, just in case the sarcastic tone got lost in the blog there, I want to be totally clear. That was a totally unfair way for me to see what was going on. The truth was that she was completely right.
I was leaving her out.
I had been leaving her out for a while.
And it was contrary to what God had in mind.
Now at the same time, I don’t want to be too self-flagellating here. It wasn’t as if I didn’t WANT Rebekah to be apart of what was going on, I just never saw how it was supposed to fit together. In fact, Re and I have had several conversations on exactly the same line – how could she be a part of what was happening – and she didn’t see it either. So it’s not as if I was deliberately excluding her or even thoughtlessly neglecting her. This leads me to a conclusion that I find profound but too big and new to explore right now. Neither of us saw what was to come to next because the door wasn’t open yet. It wasn’t time yet for this to happen – it had to be opened by God first...
But I’m getting ahead of myself. That Wed. night it seemed wiser to stay home and be with my wife than to go off chasing the goose. But not two hours after that door was closed (by me) God was back in my face with another ‘Charlotte.’ So I took that to mean the trail hadn’t gone cold...
A few days later, just like I had done after the last conference I had missed, I went to the Morning Star website and intended to download the audio again. However, I was drawn to he article I mentioned earlier (http://www.morningstarministries.org/Publisher/Article.aspx?id=1000031456) and some of the video on the website. I read about how something remarkable was going on over in Charlotte.
More specifically, at the Worship and Warfare conference (you know, the one I was supposed to be at six months ago) the whole thing had been kinda interrupted by God with a big move of the Spirit. What’s more, the same thing, only bigger, was now happening at the OTHER conference God wanted me to attend a few days ago.
You know, I can get pretty passionate about God and I am a ‘hand raiser’ in worship, but I’m not at all a Holy Roller. To be really honest, at lot of that video coming from Morning Star makes me decidedly uncomfortable. But when I was reading that article, especially the parts about fatherhood and dreams, I was overcome with the Spirit in a way that I’ve never felt before (or least not in a long time). I was shaking and caught somewhere between crying and giggling and I just started to freak out.
It was awesome!
It was frightening!
I want more!
That afternoon, I dropped by my church on a business errand and had a chance to bring Bill along for a brief drive. As I shared the story with him, particularly my only deepening dilemma regarding Rebekah, he said the simplest of things – ‘Maybe you should invite her?’
Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that when Captivating says that a woman wants to be invited into the adventure (not to BE the adventure) that I can just, you know, INVITE her? I swear it seems so stupid and obvious now but that exceedingly simple answer was totally hidden form me prior to that moment. That night I took Re out to a nice dinner...trying to buy her off in case it was un uncomfortable conversation. :) But in all honesty it was a very good and basically obvious conversation and she said yes – she’d love to go.
It was then (or maybe earlier that day, I don’t remember now or sure) that I decided to start putting all of this on my blog.
One of the other strong and recurring themes here has been the community aspect of this process. For better or for worse, and whether I’m excited about the idea of being all transparent or not, I’m convinced that God wants this...whatever it is...to be out in the open, or you dear reader to see as it unfolds. Of course a part of that is just the power of testimony and of story. But I’m convinced there is also something here about sharing in whatever blessing God has in store on he other side of the country. He’s told me that I have to sit and let His provision ‘come to me like a child’ a phrase I’ve had repeated to me often in the last few weeks (though not as often as ‘Charlotte’).
So that’s what the whole donation thing is about. I’m convinced that he wants me to invite anybody who wants, anybody who is thirsty, to be a part of this...this...thing. Sort of a highways and hedges bit (Mat 22), which may turn out to be a far more accurate metaphor that I really meant it to be when I first used it. Other people have prepared me for this, but I must say I’ve been surprised (and to be honest disappointed in some cases) about where the actual financial support for this has been rising from. I’ve been on the other end of fundraising and I certainly know what that’s like but this is my first time where I feel God asking me to put my hat out, it’s an odd experience, rife with emotion. But enough for that.
I reckon that about brings me the story up the current moment if you include the few additional notes I’ve added in other posts. I know at least one fellow from BCNW was fired up enough to go over there himself and Rick – go get ‘em tiger. Hopefully Re and I will join you. With that, I’ll log off and let you all know what happens next.
The Story
OK – I promised to tell the story that got me to this point and I reckon my lunch break is a good time to do that.
Once upon a time...
Sometime in 2007, and frankly I forget the circumstances now, I became convinced that God wanted me to attend a conference at Morningstar Ministries called the Worship and Warfare conference (which was in late October). I should make it clear that I was powerfully convinced of this as I was certain that God had spoken plainly and repeatedly about it. But every time I would move to put that together, specifically to buy a plane ticket, He would check me. There was no small amount of emotional and intellectual conflict in all of this, a real war between the conflicting things I was hearing and I was left hoping that he would open some kind of door...perhaps very similar to the way he got me to Boston a few years back. But the day came and went with no miraculous plane ticket, although there was a very intriguing bump at the last minute that I have now come to see as a temptation, not an opportunity.
All during the lead up to that non-event I told many people my feelings about that coming weekend. I felt strongly that God was calling me there not to attend a conference, but to meet somebody. Like the conference was just an excuse – it was some kind of connection that was the real purpose of the trip. What really rang my bell was when I downloaded the audio sessions from that conference a few days later and the very first thing out of Rick Joyner’s mouth was something along he lines of , ‘You think you’re here for a conference, but you’re not. You’re here to meet somebody.’ [Insert V8 style head-smack here]
With that behind me, I was pretty mixed up about the whole thing. Did I hear God right? Did I hear Him at all? Did I miss something? Was something set against me? I really didn’t know what to think and still haven’t come to any conclusions on the matter.
Fast forward 2.5 months to our BCNW Advanced Camp...
While we were putting on the advanced camp that winter (thanks for coming Matt and Mike), God was all up in my face about Charlotte, NC. He didn’t say Morningstar, or conference or anything like that. It was Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. I must have been thumped a dozen times that weekend about Charlotte. “OK, God. Message received...don’t know what you’re saying but I got the Charlotte part.” Now I might have failed to mention that Worship and Warfare conference noted above was held just outside of Charlotte, NC and I can’t deny that I had a suspicion this new message was somehow related to that.
Maybe three weeks later, again I forget exactly how and when this happened, I was convinced that He wanted me in Charlotte for a different Morningstar conference – May 1-3 (Business in the Kingdom). But again, I kept getting checked when it came to actually booking a ticket. He just wouldn’t let me do it. This was now doubly frustrating. Here I was at least partly feeling like I had failed to apprehend the plan God had called me to a few months back and here I was being given a second chance in some way and He won’t LET me apprehend it. ACK! C’mon man...just let me buy a plane ticket...pleeeeeease....!
When Wednesday rolls around (the day I need to be on a plane), there is still no open door. I go to pour my daily cup of coffee and He says, ‘Chris – Go to Coffee Cottage.’ - That sounded a lot like, ‘Chris, go to Borders.’ from my previous trip to Boston so I took my empty cup and headed out. When I roll in the first thing I see is the ‘quote of the day’ which is a chalkboard that reads, ‘God provides the wind, but we must raise our sails’ For a number of reasons that are too arcane to explain, that spoke strongly to me that I was on the right track. SO feeling like I had arrived...I tried as hard as a could to keep my sails high and waited for a breeze. I spent that whole day in cottage waiting (hence the post with that title). I had some beautiful conversations that day, really cool stuff, but no answer to what seemed to me like the obvious question: How do I get to NC for that thing you told to be at?...but no answer. On the prayerfully considered advice of the infamous John Bergquist, I decided I should double down and simply head for the airport. Try to play this out as far as it could go.
At this point in the story, I need to refill my coffee...
Once upon a time...
Sometime in 2007, and frankly I forget the circumstances now, I became convinced that God wanted me to attend a conference at Morningstar Ministries called the Worship and Warfare conference (which was in late October). I should make it clear that I was powerfully convinced of this as I was certain that God had spoken plainly and repeatedly about it. But every time I would move to put that together, specifically to buy a plane ticket, He would check me. There was no small amount of emotional and intellectual conflict in all of this, a real war between the conflicting things I was hearing and I was left hoping that he would open some kind of door...perhaps very similar to the way he got me to Boston a few years back. But the day came and went with no miraculous plane ticket, although there was a very intriguing bump at the last minute that I have now come to see as a temptation, not an opportunity.
All during the lead up to that non-event I told many people my feelings about that coming weekend. I felt strongly that God was calling me there not to attend a conference, but to meet somebody. Like the conference was just an excuse – it was some kind of connection that was the real purpose of the trip. What really rang my bell was when I downloaded the audio sessions from that conference a few days later and the very first thing out of Rick Joyner’s mouth was something along he lines of , ‘You think you’re here for a conference, but you’re not. You’re here to meet somebody.’ [Insert V8 style head-smack here]
With that behind me, I was pretty mixed up about the whole thing. Did I hear God right? Did I hear Him at all? Did I miss something? Was something set against me? I really didn’t know what to think and still haven’t come to any conclusions on the matter.
Fast forward 2.5 months to our BCNW Advanced Camp...
While we were putting on the advanced camp that winter (thanks for coming Matt and Mike), God was all up in my face about Charlotte, NC. He didn’t say Morningstar, or conference or anything like that. It was Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte. I must have been thumped a dozen times that weekend about Charlotte. “OK, God. Message received...don’t know what you’re saying but I got the Charlotte part.” Now I might have failed to mention that Worship and Warfare conference noted above was held just outside of Charlotte, NC and I can’t deny that I had a suspicion this new message was somehow related to that.
Maybe three weeks later, again I forget exactly how and when this happened, I was convinced that He wanted me in Charlotte for a different Morningstar conference – May 1-3 (Business in the Kingdom). But again, I kept getting checked when it came to actually booking a ticket. He just wouldn’t let me do it. This was now doubly frustrating. Here I was at least partly feeling like I had failed to apprehend the plan God had called me to a few months back and here I was being given a second chance in some way and He won’t LET me apprehend it. ACK! C’mon man...just let me buy a plane ticket...pleeeeeease....!
When Wednesday rolls around (the day I need to be on a plane), there is still no open door. I go to pour my daily cup of coffee and He says, ‘Chris – Go to Coffee Cottage.’ - That sounded a lot like, ‘Chris, go to Borders.’ from my previous trip to Boston so I took my empty cup and headed out. When I roll in the first thing I see is the ‘quote of the day’ which is a chalkboard that reads, ‘God provides the wind, but we must raise our sails’ For a number of reasons that are too arcane to explain, that spoke strongly to me that I was on the right track. SO feeling like I had arrived...I tried as hard as a could to keep my sails high and waited for a breeze. I spent that whole day in cottage waiting (hence the post with that title). I had some beautiful conversations that day, really cool stuff, but no answer to what seemed to me like the obvious question: How do I get to NC for that thing you told to be at?...but no answer. On the prayerfully considered advice of the infamous John Bergquist, I decided I should double down and simply head for the airport. Try to play this out as far as it could go.
At this point in the story, I need to refill my coffee...
More aftershocks...
Yeah, these are little things but they continue to speak to me that God is still moving on this one thread...
- I walk out of the bank yesterday to see a lone parked car on the long Newberg street. Where is the license plate from? North Carolina of course. (Kris, I know you’ll appreciate that one with your Newberg plate story)
- Also from the bank (hmmm...I wonder if somehow that’s germane?) They today decided that the website requires this new block of security questions. One of which is: what’s your father’s mother’s name? That’s right, her name is/was Charlotte
Playing Catch Up...
OK, In my last post I said that I owed an explanation, and I reckon but first, a couple brief amendments to this unfolding story since there continues to be action here:
So that’s the morning report (thank you Zazu...) and I’ll check back in soon.
- The breakout, or whatever you want to call it, is still going on at Morningstar. If anything, it’s increasing. So that aspect of the equation remains live.
- I’ve come to believe that Rebekah should come with me on this trip. As Beth so eloquently put it, we’re one flesh in all ways and while I swear it’s the most obvious thing in the world now that I have it in mind, I see that for some reason it just never occurred to me. Tat thread needs a lot of additional clarification by itself, and perhaps I’ll get into it a little later, but for now just know that all the members of BCNW have been wrestling with this question for most of he last 9 month or so – how do we include our wives in what God is doing? How do we invite them in? Well here’s an idea: invite her...DUH!
- Joyner makes a brief point in this article, http://www.morningstarministries.org/Publisher/article.aspx?id=1000031456, that he sees something on the horizon that focuses on motherhood and what our culture has lost there. To that end I notice that this Sunday is both Mother’s Day AND Pentecost. I can’t say that I’ve had any kind of secret knowledge there, but that mash up seems significant to me.
- Not only i the Breakout continuing at Morningstar, but God continues to ping me on the need to get there. He popped me twice yesterday with little nudges that mostly just confirm that I’m on a real scent here.
So that’s the morning report (thank you Zazu...) and I’ll check back in soon.
06 May 2008
...still waiting
I owe everybody and explanation to be sure, and I'll be getting to that, but right now I just want to make a quick post.
Last week I was pretty certain that God wanted me to be in Charlotte, NC...for something. But I didn't know what.
Just to cut to the chase, I'm convinced that God STILL wants me to get to Charlotte as soon as possible, but for reasons that I'm not entirely understanding, he want's me to ask for help. No small part of this may simply be that affording this trip would be a stretch, but I don't know that that's even a big part. I think a much bigger part is just inviting my friends to participate in something the He is orchestrating.
So I reckon I need to raise about $600 for a plane ticket and probably a little more for things like hotel room, food, etc.
Listen up: This is not a desperate plea for a collapsing bank account or anything like that. ONLY pitch in if you think God is asking you to. So PRAY first. Then, if you feel led...
Listen up: This is not a desperate plea for a collapsing bank account or anything like that. ONLY pitch in if you think God is asking you to. So PRAY first. Then, if you feel led...
Next, and as soon as possible, I will write a long and ignoble post to explain all the baggage that goes along with this story...because it IS a story, not just a weird blip on the radar. But that will take some time and right now I just need to pack...
PS: you know...while you're at it, also pray if you should COME! For me, I see something that I know God has invited me to (at the least) witness. See if that doesn't fit you as well.
30 April 2008
...waiting...
So I’m sitting here in the Coffee Cottage waiting for God to show up and provide me a way to get to Charlotte, NC where I think I’m supposed to meet somebody.
So far...no ticket.
So far...no ticket.
05 April 2008
You're a Word from Heaven
As a birthday gift, Rebekah brought me up to Seattle to see an artist I am really digging these days named Jason Upton (http://www.jasonupton.net/). Jason is part of what some people are calling prophetic worship, which I guess is as good a name as any. But if you haven’t heard him before...DO. His style is to linger on a few phrases, but ruminate on these words over and over again as if in meditation – it can be very, very powerful even on a CD and we’ve been listening to his stuff in our morning prayer time at work for something like the last nine months or so.
But live...that’s a different experience entirely.
I was totally blown away by the power of the Spirit, the engagement of he audience, and the humility of the singer. The dude is way down to earth and very centered. But he’s also aware of the gift he has, and the power and authority he wields. 3 – I thought about you a lot there. You would have loved it. The man’s talent, his passion and his heart are so akin to the things you’ve spoken about, to you own deep heart. I deeply wish you had been there or get to see him somewhere somewhere else.
Anyway, on the point of this post. The most powerful song in the set for me was a song called Sons and Daughters. The words go something like this:
Do you know you’re a Word from Heaven?
Do you know you’re a Child of God?
Do you really know?
Every word sent down from Heaven
Cannot go back up until it’s succeeded
In what it’s meant to do.
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
You
It’s a beautiful song (check it out) and singing it there with all these people was working deep magic on my heart. Deep, deep magic.
I‘ve certainly heard this idea before, the idea of how we’re princes and princesses, so I don’t mean to say that this concert suddenly made it click for me, it’s not really like that. No, the idea is one that is both too large to get all at once, and also too Old World for the mind of this modern American. And yet, as the sprouts of that seed slowly rise from the soil of my heart, beginning to show fresh new buds, I think it may be one of the most profound and powerful concepts I’ve ever come to wrestle with.
This concept is at the deepest foundation of many things that I’ve been working through in the last couple of years. From one angle it’s a profound and almost ungraspable statement of God’s love and His commitment to us. We’re not his subjects, or his pets, nor even his friends, we’re His family. And by extension family to one another. Again – of course I’ve heard that before and even said it to others, but the deep strength of that reality is hard for me to really get my hands around. From another angle though it speaks of our own strength and glory, our own royalty as it were and that cryptic passage in Hebrews about all creation groaning for the moment we come to realize who we are...that passage whispers of realities that I am simply unable to understand.
What does it really mean to say that I am an emissary of God? A son of the king on a mission to broker Heaven to this shattered and sick world? As an American, we can sometimes get a tiny glimpse of this when we travel to certain places overseas. Depending where you go, Americans are loved or hated, but we are always noticed. In most places around the world, we represent something that we are generally unable to perceive ourselves. In Kenya for instance, there was a basic assumption that I was wealthy and almost everybody there sort of politely hoped/suggested that I might share some of that wealth with them. At the time, I often resented the situation. I was in fact NOT wealthy, I was a barely-getting-by college student and some people were quite obviously sucking up in order to get something; something I didn’t have. But in hindsight, I’ve realized something – it was all very relative. My just-enough-to-survive budget of about $800/mo was like two or three YEARS of wages to most of them. While I didn’t FEEL wealthy, the objective truth was that I was way, way better off than almost anybody I met. What would I have done differently if I had that in my mind? I don’t know to be honest. But there is something there that I’m trying to understand. Something about being a representative of a higher reality and the authority that goes with that. I’m wondering to what degree I can (or should) write checks that draw on Heaven’s bank, my father’s expense account as it were. Yes, I’d hate for such a check to bounce, but how much more I fear the possibility that I have this unending resource gathering dust on my unexplored desk in the embassy. Not just a resource that I’m authorized to use, but one I’ve been commissioned to use.
A Word from Heaven?
A child of God?
Do I know?
Do I really know?
But live...that’s a different experience entirely.
I was totally blown away by the power of the Spirit, the engagement of he audience, and the humility of the singer. The dude is way down to earth and very centered. But he’s also aware of the gift he has, and the power and authority he wields. 3 – I thought about you a lot there. You would have loved it. The man’s talent, his passion and his heart are so akin to the things you’ve spoken about, to you own deep heart. I deeply wish you had been there or get to see him somewhere somewhere else.
Anyway, on the point of this post. The most powerful song in the set for me was a song called Sons and Daughters. The words go something like this:
Do you know you’re a Word from Heaven?
Do you know you’re a Child of God?
Do you really know?
Every word sent down from Heaven
Cannot go back up until it’s succeeded
In what it’s meant to do.
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
Sons and Daughters of the Living God
You
It’s a beautiful song (check it out) and singing it there with all these people was working deep magic on my heart. Deep, deep magic.
I‘ve certainly heard this idea before, the idea of how we’re princes and princesses, so I don’t mean to say that this concert suddenly made it click for me, it’s not really like that. No, the idea is one that is both too large to get all at once, and also too Old World for the mind of this modern American. And yet, as the sprouts of that seed slowly rise from the soil of my heart, beginning to show fresh new buds, I think it may be one of the most profound and powerful concepts I’ve ever come to wrestle with.
This concept is at the deepest foundation of many things that I’ve been working through in the last couple of years. From one angle it’s a profound and almost ungraspable statement of God’s love and His commitment to us. We’re not his subjects, or his pets, nor even his friends, we’re His family. And by extension family to one another. Again – of course I’ve heard that before and even said it to others, but the deep strength of that reality is hard for me to really get my hands around. From another angle though it speaks of our own strength and glory, our own royalty as it were and that cryptic passage in Hebrews about all creation groaning for the moment we come to realize who we are...that passage whispers of realities that I am simply unable to understand.
What does it really mean to say that I am an emissary of God? A son of the king on a mission to broker Heaven to this shattered and sick world? As an American, we can sometimes get a tiny glimpse of this when we travel to certain places overseas. Depending where you go, Americans are loved or hated, but we are always noticed. In most places around the world, we represent something that we are generally unable to perceive ourselves. In Kenya for instance, there was a basic assumption that I was wealthy and almost everybody there sort of politely hoped/suggested that I might share some of that wealth with them. At the time, I often resented the situation. I was in fact NOT wealthy, I was a barely-getting-by college student and some people were quite obviously sucking up in order to get something; something I didn’t have. But in hindsight, I’ve realized something – it was all very relative. My just-enough-to-survive budget of about $800/mo was like two or three YEARS of wages to most of them. While I didn’t FEEL wealthy, the objective truth was that I was way, way better off than almost anybody I met. What would I have done differently if I had that in my mind? I don’t know to be honest. But there is something there that I’m trying to understand. Something about being a representative of a higher reality and the authority that goes with that. I’m wondering to what degree I can (or should) write checks that draw on Heaven’s bank, my father’s expense account as it were. Yes, I’d hate for such a check to bounce, but how much more I fear the possibility that I have this unending resource gathering dust on my unexplored desk in the embassy. Not just a resource that I’m authorized to use, but one I’ve been commissioned to use.
A Word from Heaven?
A child of God?
Do I know?
Do I really know?
01 April 2008
'Show me side-to-side...'
I think I had a genuine epiphany today.
I’ve mentioned here that a little over a year ago I had God amend my ‘name.’ Prior to our 2007 Advanced camp God had been talking to me a lot about my nature as a warrior, the symbol of which (no mystery) was a sword. But as we drove home form that camp he gave me a new picture: a sword with a snake wrapped around it. The image was specifically reminiscent of the cadducus(sp?) - you know, the symbol you see on the sides of ambulances and stuff. (Not the two snakes with wings which is the symbol for Hermes, the God of magic, but the single snake on the staff...like Moses lifted up in the desert) Anyway, the name was amended to include the aspect of being a healer and I had the sense that he was speaking specifically of physical healing as opposed to mental or spiritual healing, and specifically miraculous healing as opposed to learning to be an MD.
That journey, of pursuing that gift, learning about it, experimenting with it, has been many things: sometimes exhilarating, often frustrating, scary, disappointing...really just about every emotion possible including totally incongruous emotions like ennui and anger. But today’s epiphany wasn’t about any particular emotion but rather a sudden realization about the range of emotions. Specifically it was a sudden awareness of how powerful a topic it is, how disruptive it can be even in conversation to say nothing for practice. Miraculous healing can be incredibly polarizing as it forces a number of issues that can otherwise lay dormant in people’s lives. For example many folks are happy to pray that the doctor who is about to gut them has steady hands, but to pray that God would simply remove their gallstones freaks them out. At another level, some folks are willing to believe that a man in China had his blind-from-birth vision restored, but can’t bring themselves to seek prayer for their own near-sightedness.
Healing seems unique in that it demands attention and response in a way that not even prophecy does. For the healer, healing also carries a power and mystery with it that no other manifestation seems to. Aimee Semple Macpherson (sp?) apparently wanted to be a preacher, but when her healing ministry broke out it became almost impossible. People didn’t want to hear her speak about Jesus or salvation, they wanted to walk.
Anyway, I’m drifting...
Parallel to the healing quest, was a far calmer, and in that way less dramatic, lesson about rest. God has been speaking and teaching and showing me how to rest in Him, how to abide in Him. And I got to tell you, it is not something that comes naturally to me. I tend to be pretty gogogo and I really have to fight to make rest happen (how ironic is that). And yet I’ve come to the deep seated conclusion that it is something I MUST have. I can no longer tolerate long seasons without a DAWG day. And opposite the often confusing walk toward healing, the walk toward rest has been...well...restful. I’ve gained so much peace at times I really needed it, confidence in God’s love, and a dramatic new confidence in my ability to hear God speak to me...which is almost impossible to overstate in importance.
And that was part two of the epiphany. Seeing this other track, this parallel lesson that has been unfolding in my life over roughly the same season and how different the two experiences have been.
But the real punch in the moment was in seeing how they fit together.
As Mr. Miagi points out, the first lesson in most every martial art is how to keep your balance. In short, all the activity of blocking and striking will quickly throw you way off balance and make you profoundly vulnerable, if you fail to keep your feet under you. What he Quakers call ‘centering’ is the spiritual equivalent to ‘first learn stay dry.’ Learning how to quiet my spirit, how to retreat to what Jesus and David call the Secret Place is like learning how to take a deep earth stance...where I become the immovable rock that you will break yourself upon. Learning to snap to that secret place as a matter of habit, and to sense when balance is being lost or threatened, that’s like basic footwork.
Without that deep, deep lesson of peace and abiding, healing will be too much for me to bear emotionally or spiritually. It will do more harm than good by putting me in a position I’m not ready to handle.
I need to learn silence first.
Now that’s not to say, in any way, that I’m giving up or even slowing in my quest for that particular gift – I know what God told me and I don’t doubt that call in the slightest (not to mention, I said the experience has been often frustrating, not always frustrating. I’ve seen some pretty incredible things this last year...) But I can see right now that like most things, this is a process and I have confidence in my teacher. Ninja Phil had a few things under his black belt that he hinted at from time to time. Secret ninja techniques that he said we simply weren’t ready for. The thing is, I totally get it in that context. Even in the brief time I studied there I learned things that I would not share with just anybody and as we talk about the supernatural, how much more true might that be? I’m not leaning toward the occult/gnostic sense of God where secret knowledge becomes the goal, but I am aware that jut reading about healing has revealed pats of me that I was surprised to find; a part that lusted simply for the power of it all, a part that sought the recognition or validation, a part that was willing to judge who deserved what healing and when...nasty, petty, awful parts of me that might never have been brought to light in any other context, or at least not shown in such sharp relief.
But the thing is that now I’m OK to let it all play out in God’s time party because I suddenly see what He’s been doing.
I had that moment where I turn from the sensei in frustration, “I’m going home!” and he’s like “Chris-san! Show me ‘paint the fence’” and all of a sudden I see that He’s been teaching me all along.
I’ve mentioned here that a little over a year ago I had God amend my ‘name.’ Prior to our 2007 Advanced camp God had been talking to me a lot about my nature as a warrior, the symbol of which (no mystery) was a sword. But as we drove home form that camp he gave me a new picture: a sword with a snake wrapped around it. The image was specifically reminiscent of the cadducus(sp?) - you know, the symbol you see on the sides of ambulances and stuff. (Not the two snakes with wings which is the symbol for Hermes, the God of magic, but the single snake on the staff...like Moses lifted up in the desert) Anyway, the name was amended to include the aspect of being a healer and I had the sense that he was speaking specifically of physical healing as opposed to mental or spiritual healing, and specifically miraculous healing as opposed to learning to be an MD.
That journey, of pursuing that gift, learning about it, experimenting with it, has been many things: sometimes exhilarating, often frustrating, scary, disappointing...really just about every emotion possible including totally incongruous emotions like ennui and anger. But today’s epiphany wasn’t about any particular emotion but rather a sudden realization about the range of emotions. Specifically it was a sudden awareness of how powerful a topic it is, how disruptive it can be even in conversation to say nothing for practice. Miraculous healing can be incredibly polarizing as it forces a number of issues that can otherwise lay dormant in people’s lives. For example many folks are happy to pray that the doctor who is about to gut them has steady hands, but to pray that God would simply remove their gallstones freaks them out. At another level, some folks are willing to believe that a man in China had his blind-from-birth vision restored, but can’t bring themselves to seek prayer for their own near-sightedness.
Healing seems unique in that it demands attention and response in a way that not even prophecy does. For the healer, healing also carries a power and mystery with it that no other manifestation seems to. Aimee Semple Macpherson (sp?) apparently wanted to be a preacher, but when her healing ministry broke out it became almost impossible. People didn’t want to hear her speak about Jesus or salvation, they wanted to walk.
Anyway, I’m drifting...
Parallel to the healing quest, was a far calmer, and in that way less dramatic, lesson about rest. God has been speaking and teaching and showing me how to rest in Him, how to abide in Him. And I got to tell you, it is not something that comes naturally to me. I tend to be pretty gogogo and I really have to fight to make rest happen (how ironic is that). And yet I’ve come to the deep seated conclusion that it is something I MUST have. I can no longer tolerate long seasons without a DAWG day. And opposite the often confusing walk toward healing, the walk toward rest has been...well...restful. I’ve gained so much peace at times I really needed it, confidence in God’s love, and a dramatic new confidence in my ability to hear God speak to me...which is almost impossible to overstate in importance.
And that was part two of the epiphany. Seeing this other track, this parallel lesson that has been unfolding in my life over roughly the same season and how different the two experiences have been.
But the real punch in the moment was in seeing how they fit together.
As Mr. Miagi points out, the first lesson in most every martial art is how to keep your balance. In short, all the activity of blocking and striking will quickly throw you way off balance and make you profoundly vulnerable, if you fail to keep your feet under you. What he Quakers call ‘centering’ is the spiritual equivalent to ‘first learn stay dry.’ Learning how to quiet my spirit, how to retreat to what Jesus and David call the Secret Place is like learning how to take a deep earth stance...where I become the immovable rock that you will break yourself upon. Learning to snap to that secret place as a matter of habit, and to sense when balance is being lost or threatened, that’s like basic footwork.
Without that deep, deep lesson of peace and abiding, healing will be too much for me to bear emotionally or spiritually. It will do more harm than good by putting me in a position I’m not ready to handle.
I need to learn silence first.
Now that’s not to say, in any way, that I’m giving up or even slowing in my quest for that particular gift – I know what God told me and I don’t doubt that call in the slightest (not to mention, I said the experience has been often frustrating, not always frustrating. I’ve seen some pretty incredible things this last year...) But I can see right now that like most things, this is a process and I have confidence in my teacher. Ninja Phil had a few things under his black belt that he hinted at from time to time. Secret ninja techniques that he said we simply weren’t ready for. The thing is, I totally get it in that context. Even in the brief time I studied there I learned things that I would not share with just anybody and as we talk about the supernatural, how much more true might that be? I’m not leaning toward the occult/gnostic sense of God where secret knowledge becomes the goal, but I am aware that jut reading about healing has revealed pats of me that I was surprised to find; a part that lusted simply for the power of it all, a part that sought the recognition or validation, a part that was willing to judge who deserved what healing and when...nasty, petty, awful parts of me that might never have been brought to light in any other context, or at least not shown in such sharp relief.
But the thing is that now I’m OK to let it all play out in God’s time party because I suddenly see what He’s been doing.
I had that moment where I turn from the sensei in frustration, “I’m going home!” and he’s like “Chris-san! Show me ‘paint the fence’” and all of a sudden I see that He’s been teaching me all along.
16 March 2008
Seven Pillars of Society
I just heard this from Kris Voltron.
There are seven pillars of society:
Holy Cow.
There are seven pillars of society:
- Justice
- The law is a facilitator of justice.
- The law only has purpose in bringing about and sustaining justice.
- When a society looses its grip on justice, the law begins to serve itself and taking on a life of its own.
- This creates a culture where peace officers become law enforcement officers and justice courts become magistrates of the law.
- Judges and juries are now charged with determining if someone broke the law, rather than if someone performed an injustice.
- Peace
- Peace is the foundation of government.
- The purpose of all government is to facilitate peace.
- When peace is removed from government, the government begins to serve itself.
- The goal of its officials becomes staying in power rather than extending the borders of peace.
- The goal of its officials becomes staying in power rather than extending the borders of peace.
- Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of wholeness.
- Love
- Love is the purpose of fatherhood.
- Fathers are facilitators of love.
- When fathers loose love, fathers become bosses and families become his subjects.
- Caring and compassion are replaced with sexual perversion and abandonment.
- Happiness is no longer the fruit of loving relationships, but instead becomes the purpose of them.
- ‘I’m not happy’ becomes the purpose of my actions.
- ‘I’m not happy’ becomes the purpose of my actions.
- Honor
- Honor is the element in society that allows people to be empowered rather than controlled.
- Honor is the responsibility of sons. They exemplify respect that results in order.
- When honor is served instead of serving, it causes leaders to demand honor even when it is incongruent with their character.
- This results in a culture of control that is manifest through fear.
- This results in a culture of control that is manifest through fear.
- Truth
- Truth is more than honesty. It is the embodiment of reality.
- The fruit of truth is life and the word of god is the facilitator of truth.
- Teachers are the stewards of truth.
- When truth is absent from a culture, the bible begins to served instead of serving.
- This consequently leads to people learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth.
- Resulting in rules of religion being exchanged for the realities of relationship.
- Resulting in rules of religion being exchanged for the realities of relationship.
- This consequently leads to people learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth.
- Righteousness
- Righteousness is more than an accumulation of good character choices.
- Righteousness is the visible expression of the habitation of an invisible yet holy god.
- Righteousness is the personification of the very nature of God being manifest in His creatures resulting in his likeness emanating through his people.
- When divinity is absent from a culture, Godliness is reduced to goodness which is attained through discipline instead of a pure heart.
- Wisdom
- Wisdom is the ability to rightly apply knowledge in a way that builds for the future that which is envisioned by the creator so that the divine ecosystem of heaven yields life.
- Rulers are the stewards of wisdom.
- They are to lead in a way that creates an environment that draws out and facilitator the destiny of people both individually and corporately.
- They are to lead in a way that creates an environment that draws out and facilitator the destiny of people both individually and corporately.
- When the definition of wisdom is reduced to the gathering and recalling of information it results in futility.
Holy Cow.
Fleeting Thought
There’s been this thing rolling around in my head recently. It’s a thought that has yet to really resolve but I really want to jot down what I have so far because I think it’s important...and God asked me to put it here instead of my journal.
In the story (in John I’m pretty sure) where Jesus is talking about how the sheep hear his voice and they follow him, he also says something to the effect that we (Christians) will ‘go in and come out and find pasture.’
It’s the in and out thing that has snagged on my gray matter. In and out of what? Well the sheepfold of course, but what does that represent and what the hell is a sheepfold anyway. Webster says it’ a shelter or pen for...wait for it...sheep. So it seems like he’s talking about our coming in and out of His shelter? Doesn’t the word talk about God’s peace being like a shelter? You know, the secret place and all of that.
The last few weeks have felt like I had stepped out of his peace in many ways, not like I was bad or anything, but there was stuff going on here and there that ruffled feathers or made me anxious or whatever. Anxiety always has a way of also making me feel more distant from God. Worship is more work, prayer seems hollow – you know what I’m talking about. And that has always made me sad. I don’t want to leave God’s presence – I like it there. I’m increasingly hungry for his spirit and his input and it bugs me when like takes me away from all of that.
But...
Maybe that’s pretty normal. Maybe ‘going out’ is either necessary to keep us from getting flabby, or just part of the almost-but-not-quite life we lead until he returns...maybe both. The Final Quest tells the story of he Christian warrior who climbs a mountain to eventually find himself in a kind of new Eden. The tree of life is there, Jesus is there, the demons can’t get in...it’s paradise. And yet Jesus tells him after a while that he can’t stay there. As important as it was for him to reach this place, it’s at least as important that he return to the front – the battle rages on and he’s needed.
I’ve noticed something over the last few years as spiritual warfare becomes more and more normal in my life. Attacks that used to take me out for weeks at a time now roll off in days or even hours. It’s like when the enemy gets a goo shot in, my recovery time has become shorter and shorter. If the kind of frustration or depression that happens in such a case is like ‘going out’, I find that I’m far better equipped these days to get back in. If chasing hard after a man’s heart is the current mission, and all the risk and warfare that it entails is another kind of ‘going out,’ I find myself more able to get back in when I need to.
It’s like this sheepfold, now that I’ve found it (and come in by the door), is never more than a twinkling of my heart away. And so it seems to me today as if I’ve been going and coming fairly regularly in the last few years but always feeling pretty crummy about the going, like I’d failed somehow to find myself outside of that garden that always renews my spirit. But I think I see it differently now – like Jesus has removed one more of those guilt arrows from my back just by reminding me that going and coming should be part of the experience...and he will always be there to show me the pasture.
Baaaa
In the story (in John I’m pretty sure) where Jesus is talking about how the sheep hear his voice and they follow him, he also says something to the effect that we (Christians) will ‘go in and come out and find pasture.’
It’s the in and out thing that has snagged on my gray matter. In and out of what? Well the sheepfold of course, but what does that represent and what the hell is a sheepfold anyway. Webster says it’ a shelter or pen for...wait for it...sheep. So it seems like he’s talking about our coming in and out of His shelter? Doesn’t the word talk about God’s peace being like a shelter? You know, the secret place and all of that.
The last few weeks have felt like I had stepped out of his peace in many ways, not like I was bad or anything, but there was stuff going on here and there that ruffled feathers or made me anxious or whatever. Anxiety always has a way of also making me feel more distant from God. Worship is more work, prayer seems hollow – you know what I’m talking about. And that has always made me sad. I don’t want to leave God’s presence – I like it there. I’m increasingly hungry for his spirit and his input and it bugs me when like takes me away from all of that.
But...
Maybe that’s pretty normal. Maybe ‘going out’ is either necessary to keep us from getting flabby, or just part of the almost-but-not-quite life we lead until he returns...maybe both. The Final Quest tells the story of he Christian warrior who climbs a mountain to eventually find himself in a kind of new Eden. The tree of life is there, Jesus is there, the demons can’t get in...it’s paradise. And yet Jesus tells him after a while that he can’t stay there. As important as it was for him to reach this place, it’s at least as important that he return to the front – the battle rages on and he’s needed.
I’ve noticed something over the last few years as spiritual warfare becomes more and more normal in my life. Attacks that used to take me out for weeks at a time now roll off in days or even hours. It’s like when the enemy gets a goo shot in, my recovery time has become shorter and shorter. If the kind of frustration or depression that happens in such a case is like ‘going out’, I find that I’m far better equipped these days to get back in. If chasing hard after a man’s heart is the current mission, and all the risk and warfare that it entails is another kind of ‘going out,’ I find myself more able to get back in when I need to.
It’s like this sheepfold, now that I’ve found it (and come in by the door), is never more than a twinkling of my heart away. And so it seems to me today as if I’ve been going and coming fairly regularly in the last few years but always feeling pretty crummy about the going, like I’d failed somehow to find myself outside of that garden that always renews my spirit. But I think I see it differently now – like Jesus has removed one more of those guilt arrows from my back just by reminding me that going and coming should be part of the experience...and he will always be there to show me the pasture.
Baaaa
14 March 2008
08 March 2008
Aurora
The following story is totally true, at least as much as I remember it. However, it’s lingered around in my drafts folder for these years because I really don’t know what to think of it...
In my life, there have been a few...um...let’s call hem mega-goals. Not mega as in particularly huge really, but mega in that I really see now real way in which they might happen. Maybe long-shot goals is a better phrase. Anyway, as I was leaving high school I got the mega-goal of going to Kenya someday and shortly after I arrived at GFU, like ten years later, I found myself thinking, “Wow. I’m really at college. Cool.” Going to college in the Pacific Northwest was another kind of goal, something genuinely challenging but achievable you know. “What would be a good goal to replace it now that I’m here.”
Before I go on, let me say that I’m not your typical goal oriented guy. I tend to have loosey-goosey goals...sometimes...but I’m not at all driven by them. So I don’t want you to picture me flipping in my day planner to October 12, 2019 and making an entry, I was just looking forward with a comfortable sense of “cool. I made it.” Anyway, as I thought about what might be next God distinctly said, “You always wanted to got to Kenya.” and I smiled. “Yeah.” I thought sort of whimsically. “Kenya would be cool.” The next day in the student paper was an offer to go to Kenya for a semester, already paid for by my tuition, which was already paid for by the Navy. I was the only person who applied.
Fast forward about 18 months and I’m again thinking about mega-goals and He says, “You’ve never seen the Aurora Borealis.” - and that’s how I get to today’s story.
I’m not certain of the date, but I’m pretty sure it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2003...give or take a year. I’m up at my mother-in-law’s house and somebody at Alice’s church realizes that the pastor wont be around on Sunday and instead of doing a potluck or something they think, “Hey, Becky’s husband seems like a nice guy. Maybe he will preach.” How this idea came to them I can only speculate, but I blame God.
At that time I don’t think I’d ever done anything even remotely like preaching and the last time I’d been on a stage was playing a wizard in a college play...not exactly preacher-man stuff. But you know, when the offer came across my bow I guess I figured what the heck. And while I was pretty nervous I think it went pretty well all things considered. And they even gave me $100 for the trouble which is interesting since I’ve never made a dime at that since then even though that was the smallest group I’ve ever ‘preached’ to...
Anyway, later that night Re and Alice and I were walking home in the dark when I noticed a faint shimmer in the sky. I stared for a moment thinking it was light from the dam reflecting off low clouds but another little shimmer told me otherwise. No these shimmers were barely visible – just dim, soft whispers of light, but I reckon I realized what I was seeing because it really couldn’t be anything else. I was seeing the far southern vestiges of the Aurora Borealis. I told Alice and Rebekah, who’d both seen the aurora before, that I’d be along later and I laid down in the sage to watch the slow, lazy waves of sun fed electrons.
The sky got darker and darker as it got later. The aurora got marginally brighter as my eyes adjusted to the dark and there was less of the failing sunlight to compete with and I began to see, more or less, what I expected to see. Long, sinuous filaments of pale yellow light undulating in the sky like some kind of slow motion sail in the wind. You almost never get the colors below the arctic circle so I knew this vanilla pudding yellow was the ‘right’ color. I probably laid out there for an hour and a half watching the slow dance and smiling from ear to ear. I was well aware of my five year old mega-goal and how it was being fulfilled not in some exotic locale but in my mother-in-law’s back yard and I felt deeply loved by God. I felt as if somehow this light show were a kind of ‘well done’ or ‘thanks’ for having thumped my Bible that morning and it was wonderful.
Not thrilling, but wonderful. The thrilling part comes next.
In time, I became aware of an increase in the tempo of the aurora, if I can use that word. Instead of the slowly waving sails of light, I starting seeing what looked more like thin clouds that would start near the horizon and move up toward the ‘center’ of the sky where they would dissipate. In the space of about 15 minutes, this new presentation had completely replaced the previous one and I thought, “That’s odd...maybe really odd.” I’ve seen many video clips of the aurora from Alaska websites and astronomy websites and even Art Bell’s website, but nothing I’d seen there looked like this. It was still, without question, the Aurora Borealis in its essence but it’s behavior had turned to something I’d never heard of nor seen. Still, I’m obviously the new guy so I thought it might be something that Alice had seen and anyway, I was getting cold. So it seemed like a good time to go inside, grab a coat, and grab my family.
A few minutes later the three of us are out on Alice’s deck and the sky is dancing. Now that I’m not in a dark little hollow I can see that these ‘aurora bolts’ are manifesting across the whole horizon. Every compass point is sprouting these increasingly fast moving blobs that silently cross ninety degrees of sky in a rush and it’s as if they are all racing toward a single point in the sky...directly over us. I want you to remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis open the ark and all the ghosts start floating around the scene. Not the ones that coalesce into recognizable shapes, but the more vague white spirit blobs. That’s what we were seeing, but magnified thousands of times since each sheet must have been hundreds of miles long.
We watched this frenzied show for a few minutes when Alice says, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.” with notes of both awe and anxiety. Like maybe this was cool, but also a little scary. Me, I was just having a great time. Sure, I knew this was atypical, but it was my first and to date only experience so I was just enjoying it. But Alice’s tone made me wonder...what are we seeing here? I thought about that earlier sense that somehow God was showing me this as a kind of reward or something – like a little Scooby snack for Skaggs – and now I started wondering what else might be going on here. Not scared or anything but starting to sense that might be witnessing something bigger than a light show.
As we stood there in the cold, and the spirit shapes were coming so fast there was no longer any break between them, the point at which they were all meeting was now becoming a kind of empty hole above our heads. A ring that was only perceived as a gestalt of the space never violated, the invisible line that was never crossed, and I’m not kidding you, it was almost directly over Alice’s house. Now if it were directly over our heads I would be more inclined to think it was an an optical illusion, like how fireworks always look like they are ‘facing’ the observer. But this hole, this empty zone, was ‘placed’ just slightly to the north and east, maybe directly over Mansfield which is the next town. We started commenting on this hole – this space where the otherwise ubiquitous aurora bolts, which had also increased dramatically in brightness and intensity (still no color), never went.
Then there started a kind of final movement of the sky symphony. Where the last 30 min or so were characterized by these shapes rising from random points along he horizon and racing to the hole where they broke upon its border, it all suddenly changed to where we would see multiple shapes emerge at once along the perimeter of the sky and race up in lock step to hit the border in unison. In this way the beautiful accident of swarming shapes quite suddenly changed to something regular and just outside of predictable. It was now as if the sky were pulsing or breathing, like we were somehow seeing the beat of a heart and the blood that beta pushed heavenward. It was breathtaking.
Then comes the part that suggests peyote. As we stood watching this celestial breathing we started to see light inside the ‘free zone’ and we each wondered if we were alone in seeing it. With each ‘breath’ the racing shapes would tear from the horizon to the top of the sky in about 1 and a half seconds. As something like a dozen bolts would meet at the ‘ring’ I saw other...distinct...shapes flash to life in the center of the ring. This interior shape would stay lit or just a moment, like a face lit up by a camera flash. It was just long enough for your brain to think, “Was that what I think it was?” but not long enough to be sure. But in the four or five minutes that followed, maybe it was much shorter than that, I saw a a series of explicitly Christian images: a crown, a dove, and yes a cross.
Now I’d be more than happy to conclude that the events of the day put my mind in a certain way and I saw what I was prepared to see. That would be fine with me and still be a cool story since the experience remains interesting and fun without the crown. I’d be equally willing to say that God had given me some kind of vision, albeit mysterious, for his own purpose. Again – it makes a good story and has a neat kind of Jesus spooky to it. But when the dove appeared in that hole I had a moment to say out loud, “Did anybody else just see a dove?”...and they both had. They had also both seen what I am calling a crown, a moment before but there was not a consensus on what he shape had actually been. In another moment, all of us saw the cross – as plain as day – and basically unmistakable for anything else. So with the confirming testimony of my wife and my second mother (third?) I’m forced to conclude that it really happened and probably in the physical world as opposed to some kind of group vision (other people in the following days remarked on the very unusual aurora that night, but nobody mentioned the images...including us).
And then it ended.
The whole thing mostly petered out over the next ten minutes. When I went back inside there were still lights in the sky, but they looked a lot like what I’d seen in video clips – cool, but not really comparable to what we had just seen.
Four or so years later it remains a truly wonderful experience, but it also remains profoundly enigmatic. The circumstances make my brain want to find meaning in it all but the whole thing seems to inscrutable, at least to me, and at least to date. Does something like that properly get the label of miracle or mystery?
Like I said, apart from telling a story that’s pretty neat, I’ve had basically no ability to reflect on it or draw any meaning out of it. I think I’m fine with that though. It doesn’t HAVE to have meaning. I’m OK with it just having been a really memorable event that I got to witness. And yet...there’s a part of me that can’t help but think there is something deeper there, maybe something that won’t make any sense until heaven – but still the meaning of it is in there even if imperceptible in this world. It makes me wonder about the star he magi followed. Surely other people around the word saw that star, but almost nobody recognized what they were seeing. Wise astrologers of the day probably drew all sorts of meaning from the new star...but what percentage were thinking things 180 degrees from what was really happening.
It’s such a strange story, one that seems obviously laden with...something...
In my life, there have been a few...um...let’s call hem mega-goals. Not mega as in particularly huge really, but mega in that I really see now real way in which they might happen. Maybe long-shot goals is a better phrase. Anyway, as I was leaving high school I got the mega-goal of going to Kenya someday and shortly after I arrived at GFU, like ten years later, I found myself thinking, “Wow. I’m really at college. Cool.” Going to college in the Pacific Northwest was another kind of goal, something genuinely challenging but achievable you know. “What would be a good goal to replace it now that I’m here.”
Before I go on, let me say that I’m not your typical goal oriented guy. I tend to have loosey-goosey goals...sometimes...but I’m not at all driven by them. So I don’t want you to picture me flipping in my day planner to October 12, 2019 and making an entry, I was just looking forward with a comfortable sense of “cool. I made it.” Anyway, as I thought about what might be next God distinctly said, “You always wanted to got to Kenya.” and I smiled. “Yeah.” I thought sort of whimsically. “Kenya would be cool.” The next day in the student paper was an offer to go to Kenya for a semester, already paid for by my tuition, which was already paid for by the Navy. I was the only person who applied.
Fast forward about 18 months and I’m again thinking about mega-goals and He says, “You’ve never seen the Aurora Borealis.” - and that’s how I get to today’s story.
I’m not certain of the date, but I’m pretty sure it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2003...give or take a year. I’m up at my mother-in-law’s house and somebody at Alice’s church realizes that the pastor wont be around on Sunday and instead of doing a potluck or something they think, “Hey, Becky’s husband seems like a nice guy. Maybe he will preach.” How this idea came to them I can only speculate, but I blame God.
At that time I don’t think I’d ever done anything even remotely like preaching and the last time I’d been on a stage was playing a wizard in a college play...not exactly preacher-man stuff. But you know, when the offer came across my bow I guess I figured what the heck. And while I was pretty nervous I think it went pretty well all things considered. And they even gave me $100 for the trouble which is interesting since I’ve never made a dime at that since then even though that was the smallest group I’ve ever ‘preached’ to...
Anyway, later that night Re and Alice and I were walking home in the dark when I noticed a faint shimmer in the sky. I stared for a moment thinking it was light from the dam reflecting off low clouds but another little shimmer told me otherwise. No these shimmers were barely visible – just dim, soft whispers of light, but I reckon I realized what I was seeing because it really couldn’t be anything else. I was seeing the far southern vestiges of the Aurora Borealis. I told Alice and Rebekah, who’d both seen the aurora before, that I’d be along later and I laid down in the sage to watch the slow, lazy waves of sun fed electrons.
The sky got darker and darker as it got later. The aurora got marginally brighter as my eyes adjusted to the dark and there was less of the failing sunlight to compete with and I began to see, more or less, what I expected to see. Long, sinuous filaments of pale yellow light undulating in the sky like some kind of slow motion sail in the wind. You almost never get the colors below the arctic circle so I knew this vanilla pudding yellow was the ‘right’ color. I probably laid out there for an hour and a half watching the slow dance and smiling from ear to ear. I was well aware of my five year old mega-goal and how it was being fulfilled not in some exotic locale but in my mother-in-law’s back yard and I felt deeply loved by God. I felt as if somehow this light show were a kind of ‘well done’ or ‘thanks’ for having thumped my Bible that morning and it was wonderful.
Not thrilling, but wonderful. The thrilling part comes next.
In time, I became aware of an increase in the tempo of the aurora, if I can use that word. Instead of the slowly waving sails of light, I starting seeing what looked more like thin clouds that would start near the horizon and move up toward the ‘center’ of the sky where they would dissipate. In the space of about 15 minutes, this new presentation had completely replaced the previous one and I thought, “That’s odd...maybe really odd.” I’ve seen many video clips of the aurora from Alaska websites and astronomy websites and even Art Bell’s website, but nothing I’d seen there looked like this. It was still, without question, the Aurora Borealis in its essence but it’s behavior had turned to something I’d never heard of nor seen. Still, I’m obviously the new guy so I thought it might be something that Alice had seen and anyway, I was getting cold. So it seemed like a good time to go inside, grab a coat, and grab my family.
A few minutes later the three of us are out on Alice’s deck and the sky is dancing. Now that I’m not in a dark little hollow I can see that these ‘aurora bolts’ are manifesting across the whole horizon. Every compass point is sprouting these increasingly fast moving blobs that silently cross ninety degrees of sky in a rush and it’s as if they are all racing toward a single point in the sky...directly over us. I want you to remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Nazis open the ark and all the ghosts start floating around the scene. Not the ones that coalesce into recognizable shapes, but the more vague white spirit blobs. That’s what we were seeing, but magnified thousands of times since each sheet must have been hundreds of miles long.
We watched this frenzied show for a few minutes when Alice says, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.” with notes of both awe and anxiety. Like maybe this was cool, but also a little scary. Me, I was just having a great time. Sure, I knew this was atypical, but it was my first and to date only experience so I was just enjoying it. But Alice’s tone made me wonder...what are we seeing here? I thought about that earlier sense that somehow God was showing me this as a kind of reward or something – like a little Scooby snack for Skaggs – and now I started wondering what else might be going on here. Not scared or anything but starting to sense that might be witnessing something bigger than a light show.
As we stood there in the cold, and the spirit shapes were coming so fast there was no longer any break between them, the point at which they were all meeting was now becoming a kind of empty hole above our heads. A ring that was only perceived as a gestalt of the space never violated, the invisible line that was never crossed, and I’m not kidding you, it was almost directly over Alice’s house. Now if it were directly over our heads I would be more inclined to think it was an an optical illusion, like how fireworks always look like they are ‘facing’ the observer. But this hole, this empty zone, was ‘placed’ just slightly to the north and east, maybe directly over Mansfield which is the next town. We started commenting on this hole – this space where the otherwise ubiquitous aurora bolts, which had also increased dramatically in brightness and intensity (still no color), never went.
Then there started a kind of final movement of the sky symphony. Where the last 30 min or so were characterized by these shapes rising from random points along he horizon and racing to the hole where they broke upon its border, it all suddenly changed to where we would see multiple shapes emerge at once along the perimeter of the sky and race up in lock step to hit the border in unison. In this way the beautiful accident of swarming shapes quite suddenly changed to something regular and just outside of predictable. It was now as if the sky were pulsing or breathing, like we were somehow seeing the beat of a heart and the blood that beta pushed heavenward. It was breathtaking.
Then comes the part that suggests peyote. As we stood watching this celestial breathing we started to see light inside the ‘free zone’ and we each wondered if we were alone in seeing it. With each ‘breath’ the racing shapes would tear from the horizon to the top of the sky in about 1 and a half seconds. As something like a dozen bolts would meet at the ‘ring’ I saw other...distinct...shapes flash to life in the center of the ring. This interior shape would stay lit or just a moment, like a face lit up by a camera flash. It was just long enough for your brain to think, “Was that what I think it was?” but not long enough to be sure. But in the four or five minutes that followed, maybe it was much shorter than that, I saw a a series of explicitly Christian images: a crown, a dove, and yes a cross.
Now I’d be more than happy to conclude that the events of the day put my mind in a certain way and I saw what I was prepared to see. That would be fine with me and still be a cool story since the experience remains interesting and fun without the crown. I’d be equally willing to say that God had given me some kind of vision, albeit mysterious, for his own purpose. Again – it makes a good story and has a neat kind of Jesus spooky to it. But when the dove appeared in that hole I had a moment to say out loud, “Did anybody else just see a dove?”...and they both had. They had also both seen what I am calling a crown, a moment before but there was not a consensus on what he shape had actually been. In another moment, all of us saw the cross – as plain as day – and basically unmistakable for anything else. So with the confirming testimony of my wife and my second mother (third?) I’m forced to conclude that it really happened and probably in the physical world as opposed to some kind of group vision (other people in the following days remarked on the very unusual aurora that night, but nobody mentioned the images...including us).
And then it ended.
The whole thing mostly petered out over the next ten minutes. When I went back inside there were still lights in the sky, but they looked a lot like what I’d seen in video clips – cool, but not really comparable to what we had just seen.
Four or so years later it remains a truly wonderful experience, but it also remains profoundly enigmatic. The circumstances make my brain want to find meaning in it all but the whole thing seems to inscrutable, at least to me, and at least to date. Does something like that properly get the label of miracle or mystery?
Like I said, apart from telling a story that’s pretty neat, I’ve had basically no ability to reflect on it or draw any meaning out of it. I think I’m fine with that though. It doesn’t HAVE to have meaning. I’m OK with it just having been a really memorable event that I got to witness. And yet...there’s a part of me that can’t help but think there is something deeper there, maybe something that won’t make any sense until heaven – but still the meaning of it is in there even if imperceptible in this world. It makes me wonder about the star he magi followed. Surely other people around the word saw that star, but almost nobody recognized what they were seeing. Wise astrologers of the day probably drew all sorts of meaning from the new star...but what percentage were thinking things 180 degrees from what was really happening.
It’s such a strange story, one that seems obviously laden with...something...
02 March 2008
Disappointment
Several nights ago now Odin had the distinct pleasure of eating sausage for dinner - one of his favorite things. And by the time it was over he was crying in great heaving sobs.
Allow me to ‘splain.
I had made the mistake of cutting up roughly half a sausage into bite size bits and placing the small pile of meat on the high chair in front of him. In what is a relatively new behavior, he started playing a pork filled version of chubby bunny - stuffing bits of sausage into his gob as fast as he could without bothering to chew or swallow. Seeing the approaching problem I put my hand between his and the additional meat, effectively stopping him from choking, but also breaking his heart.
The incident would be sort of laughable except for the very real pain Odin suffered through the misunderstanding. In his mind I had put a good thing before him (what's better than sausage?) and then arbitrarily kept him from enjoying it. In his mind I had taunted and betrayed him in that moment. He didn't understand that I was protecting him. He didn't know his zeal was leading him rapidly toward the Heimlich maneuver. He just saw the sausage that he wanted and me stopping him from eating it.
I quickly recognized what had happened and tried to tell him 'slow down' as I lifted my blocking hand, but that only caused him to dive into the pile with renewed vigor as if it might all disappear entirely in a moment - which caused me to intervene again - which lead him to burst into bitter tears...and start to choke on the first raft of meat he still hadn't bothered to chew. Now he's sobbing, and choking and Rebekah is there looking at me like 'what's going on here?' and I'm both trying to keep him from still more sausage as I try to comfort his clearly wounded heart and none of it is working. I barked at Rebekah, glared at Odin, and dropped things all over the floor. It was horrible.
Eventually he calmed down and in an ill advised effort to salvage the moment I set his food back before him. But now he looked at it and me with a kind of suspicion that I've never seen on his face. It was like for the first time in his life, my son didn't trust me. He'd asked for bread bread and I'd given him a scorpion so to speak...at least that's the way he saw it. He reached tentatively toward the sausages again as I nodded in encouragement, but once he got one in his mouth his hell bent mission to get every stinking piece in his mouth simultaneously resumed at double speed. Needles to say, I had to intervene again and dinner ended with Odin wailing in emotional misery, deeply wounded by my efforts to save his life from himself.
Between this incident and a discussion with #5 I've been thinking about disappointment and God. Yes, there is an obvious object lesson here in how we can sometimes find ourselves deeply resenting the hand that acts to save us from ourselves, totally missing the help and only seeing that something we want desperately has been striped from us, but that's not really what I wanted to talk about here. Yeah, Odin misunderstood what was happening - but he's 18 months old, that's to be expected and it happens every day. What really got me churning was the distrust that rose up later - the fear if I can use that word - fear of being hurt again by his daddy.
A while back I was musing on how I had started to glimpse how powerful fear is but at the time I was thinking in he context of how fear can stop us from stepping out when God’s invites us forward. What if He doesn’t catch me? What if something goes wrong? What if I didn’t really hear His voice? It’s that ‘what if’ fear that paralyzes us and turns faith to inaction. This incident with Odin was in many ways the converse of that. It reminded me of how fear can also drive us to rash action. In Odin’s case you can see that urge we get when things look dire and feel compelled to grasp at something for fear of losing out. This would be like Satan’s first temptation for Christ in the wilderness. “You’re starving to death. Provide for yourself. Take what you can because clearly God is holding out on you.” Poor Odin got scared that I would take his precious sausage away again when in fact I wanted nothing more than for him to eat it, but his fear and mistrust literally put his life at risk and in the end he was unable to have what he most wanted because of that fear.
Needless to say, the other place we se this is when fear drives us to ‘get to safety’ as quickly as possible. It’s the fear of abandonment when we find ourselves in unknown and threatening territory. “God has forsaken me. I’m on my own. I must find whatever safety I can...anywhere but here.” It’s the brand of fear that makes us quit school or a job, the kind that makes us turn from relationships that cause us pain...come to think of it, maybe it’s best understood as the fear that makes pain intolerable, unendurable. We can endure great bolshie buckets of pain, physical and emotional, so long as we believe there’s a point to it. But when this kind of fear creeps in it whispers that MacBeth was right – life is just a tale full of sound and fury...signifying nothing. And from that precipice, devoid of any larger purpose, we feel like getting away from pain is indeed the highest and most natural calling.
I recently heard a pastor say that the largest barrier stopping folks from experiencing a deep and powerful walk with God lay in unresolved disappointment. The thought punched me in the gut as I started to ponder the implications. In essence, we all experience things in our life that feel as if God has let us down – a prayer for healing that never happens, a personal tragedy, or just the daily erosion of minor disappointments from tension in our marriage to the promotion that never comes. Of course we deal with things in several ways but if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that at least some of those linger long after. I may be unwilling to openly accuse God of failing, but my mind returns over and over to wondering why Odin’s throat wasn’t healed when I prayed my hardest prayer. I think that unless we make a very deliberate effort to settle those kinds of things in our deep hearts, that disappointment can’t help but morph into a kind of subtle fear.
It’s not to suggest that God abandons us when we fear, by no means! I certainly won’t abandon or chide my son the first time he backs away from a diving board...or the second time. But it’s when our trust in God is undermined by those disappointments, especially by long patterns of disappointment, we can turn away in fear from the very best things God has for us – and we learn over time to be satisfied with far less than He wants to give us. We decline the offer or glory He gives because we fear it can’t be true, or that He can’t be trusted, or that we just can’t abide the cost. And so we cling to the crumbs under the table and wonder why our lives seem decidedly less than we had hoped they would be.
It reminds me of a thought about adventure. I’ve been encouraging men to seek and accept the adventures God has for them because, you know, adventure is cool! It’s fun! Who doesn’t love adventure? And yet in that Hurrah moment we generally fail to remember that Sam and Frodo suffered great sorrow, endless days of hunger, insurmountable risks, all on their journey to Mordor. It’s like Sluss II says, people don’t actually want to have an adventure, they want to have HAD an adventure. Something under glass to put on the mantle and wax nostalgic about. We want the memory, but not really the experience. And I’m not saying that’s wrong in any way – to seek after pain is creepy in a whole different way. But the unavoidable truth is this: to walk with God is to expect heartache. Bonheoffer says the offer of Christ is “to believe and to die.” (or something like that...)
OK, I’m hopelessly rambling now. The point was just this: I’ve seen a lot of examples recently where fear lead folks to do things they didn’t need to, and in many cases really shouldn't have. I’ve always thought of fear as a kind of secondary sin but I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t more foundational to the way we screw our lives up. And I’m increasingly aware of the ways in which I’ve stuffed disappointment with God into deep holes where it festers and turns putrid instead of approaching the throne of the father who I KNOW loves me to say, “I know that you are good, but right now it looks from here as if you let me down when I really needed you and it hurts so very, very much I feel like I’m going to die. Please help me understand this so there isn’t any weirdness between us.”
...and then patiently...
...stubbornly...
...faithfully...
Wait for Him to speak and heal.
Allow me to ‘splain.
I had made the mistake of cutting up roughly half a sausage into bite size bits and placing the small pile of meat on the high chair in front of him. In what is a relatively new behavior, he started playing a pork filled version of chubby bunny - stuffing bits of sausage into his gob as fast as he could without bothering to chew or swallow. Seeing the approaching problem I put my hand between his and the additional meat, effectively stopping him from choking, but also breaking his heart.
The incident would be sort of laughable except for the very real pain Odin suffered through the misunderstanding. In his mind I had put a good thing before him (what's better than sausage?) and then arbitrarily kept him from enjoying it. In his mind I had taunted and betrayed him in that moment. He didn't understand that I was protecting him. He didn't know his zeal was leading him rapidly toward the Heimlich maneuver. He just saw the sausage that he wanted and me stopping him from eating it.
I quickly recognized what had happened and tried to tell him 'slow down' as I lifted my blocking hand, but that only caused him to dive into the pile with renewed vigor as if it might all disappear entirely in a moment - which caused me to intervene again - which lead him to burst into bitter tears...and start to choke on the first raft of meat he still hadn't bothered to chew. Now he's sobbing, and choking and Rebekah is there looking at me like 'what's going on here?' and I'm both trying to keep him from still more sausage as I try to comfort his clearly wounded heart and none of it is working. I barked at Rebekah, glared at Odin, and dropped things all over the floor. It was horrible.
Eventually he calmed down and in an ill advised effort to salvage the moment I set his food back before him. But now he looked at it and me with a kind of suspicion that I've never seen on his face. It was like for the first time in his life, my son didn't trust me. He'd asked for bread bread and I'd given him a scorpion so to speak...at least that's the way he saw it. He reached tentatively toward the sausages again as I nodded in encouragement, but once he got one in his mouth his hell bent mission to get every stinking piece in his mouth simultaneously resumed at double speed. Needles to say, I had to intervene again and dinner ended with Odin wailing in emotional misery, deeply wounded by my efforts to save his life from himself.
Between this incident and a discussion with #5 I've been thinking about disappointment and God. Yes, there is an obvious object lesson here in how we can sometimes find ourselves deeply resenting the hand that acts to save us from ourselves, totally missing the help and only seeing that something we want desperately has been striped from us, but that's not really what I wanted to talk about here. Yeah, Odin misunderstood what was happening - but he's 18 months old, that's to be expected and it happens every day. What really got me churning was the distrust that rose up later - the fear if I can use that word - fear of being hurt again by his daddy.
A while back I was musing on how I had started to glimpse how powerful fear is but at the time I was thinking in he context of how fear can stop us from stepping out when God’s invites us forward. What if He doesn’t catch me? What if something goes wrong? What if I didn’t really hear His voice? It’s that ‘what if’ fear that paralyzes us and turns faith to inaction. This incident with Odin was in many ways the converse of that. It reminded me of how fear can also drive us to rash action. In Odin’s case you can see that urge we get when things look dire and feel compelled to grasp at something for fear of losing out. This would be like Satan’s first temptation for Christ in the wilderness. “You’re starving to death. Provide for yourself. Take what you can because clearly God is holding out on you.” Poor Odin got scared that I would take his precious sausage away again when in fact I wanted nothing more than for him to eat it, but his fear and mistrust literally put his life at risk and in the end he was unable to have what he most wanted because of that fear.
Needless to say, the other place we se this is when fear drives us to ‘get to safety’ as quickly as possible. It’s the fear of abandonment when we find ourselves in unknown and threatening territory. “God has forsaken me. I’m on my own. I must find whatever safety I can...anywhere but here.” It’s the brand of fear that makes us quit school or a job, the kind that makes us turn from relationships that cause us pain...come to think of it, maybe it’s best understood as the fear that makes pain intolerable, unendurable. We can endure great bolshie buckets of pain, physical and emotional, so long as we believe there’s a point to it. But when this kind of fear creeps in it whispers that MacBeth was right – life is just a tale full of sound and fury...signifying nothing. And from that precipice, devoid of any larger purpose, we feel like getting away from pain is indeed the highest and most natural calling.
I recently heard a pastor say that the largest barrier stopping folks from experiencing a deep and powerful walk with God lay in unresolved disappointment. The thought punched me in the gut as I started to ponder the implications. In essence, we all experience things in our life that feel as if God has let us down – a prayer for healing that never happens, a personal tragedy, or just the daily erosion of minor disappointments from tension in our marriage to the promotion that never comes. Of course we deal with things in several ways but if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that at least some of those linger long after. I may be unwilling to openly accuse God of failing, but my mind returns over and over to wondering why Odin’s throat wasn’t healed when I prayed my hardest prayer. I think that unless we make a very deliberate effort to settle those kinds of things in our deep hearts, that disappointment can’t help but morph into a kind of subtle fear.
It’s not to suggest that God abandons us when we fear, by no means! I certainly won’t abandon or chide my son the first time he backs away from a diving board...or the second time. But it’s when our trust in God is undermined by those disappointments, especially by long patterns of disappointment, we can turn away in fear from the very best things God has for us – and we learn over time to be satisfied with far less than He wants to give us. We decline the offer or glory He gives because we fear it can’t be true, or that He can’t be trusted, or that we just can’t abide the cost. And so we cling to the crumbs under the table and wonder why our lives seem decidedly less than we had hoped they would be.
It reminds me of a thought about adventure. I’ve been encouraging men to seek and accept the adventures God has for them because, you know, adventure is cool! It’s fun! Who doesn’t love adventure? And yet in that Hurrah moment we generally fail to remember that Sam and Frodo suffered great sorrow, endless days of hunger, insurmountable risks, all on their journey to Mordor. It’s like Sluss II says, people don’t actually want to have an adventure, they want to have HAD an adventure. Something under glass to put on the mantle and wax nostalgic about. We want the memory, but not really the experience. And I’m not saying that’s wrong in any way – to seek after pain is creepy in a whole different way. But the unavoidable truth is this: to walk with God is to expect heartache. Bonheoffer says the offer of Christ is “to believe and to die.” (or something like that...)
OK, I’m hopelessly rambling now. The point was just this: I’ve seen a lot of examples recently where fear lead folks to do things they didn’t need to, and in many cases really shouldn't have. I’ve always thought of fear as a kind of secondary sin but I’m starting to wonder if it isn’t more foundational to the way we screw our lives up. And I’m increasingly aware of the ways in which I’ve stuffed disappointment with God into deep holes where it festers and turns putrid instead of approaching the throne of the father who I KNOW loves me to say, “I know that you are good, but right now it looks from here as if you let me down when I really needed you and it hurts so very, very much I feel like I’m going to die. Please help me understand this so there isn’t any weirdness between us.”
...and then patiently...
...stubbornly...
...faithfully...
Wait for Him to speak and heal.
Please welcome...
It is my distinct pleasure to announce the late but always fashionable arrival of my love, my life, my wife.
Rebekah: http://travellingmouse.blogspot.com/
Rebekah: http://travellingmouse.blogspot.com/
20 February 2008
Breakthrough
Back in December, I wrote an entry that included this cryptic comment about coming very close to loosing my business...I reckon I ought to explain what that was about and also include some of the developments and hindsight that's come from that.
As far as the facts go, when Dec 1 rolled around it was payday at Code-Monkeys and there was no money in the till - which meant nobody got a paycheck. Needless to say that was stressful all around. Now the next important thing to note is this: from a fully earthly perspective, there really was no logical reason for such a state to have happened. We had been busy and productive the weeks and months prior, there was a bunch of money in the A/R queue and we had a totally full schedule for the upcoming weeks. In summary, the buckets were all full but no water was coming through. Long standing, reliable clients simply forgot to pay their bills - so sorry. Projects that were birds in the hand, suddenly decided to take a week break to reevaluate. So as a result we had this mysterious break with no money, AND no work. It was like tumbleweeds and crickets. Let me be as clear as I can be and hope that you'll be willing to take my word for it: nothing at all, in any way was wrong with the business. As a matter of fact when December was done, not only had we totally made up for that entire week of doing nothing, we had also had another full week of vacation between Christmas and New Years, and December STILL wound up being a record smashing month, the biggest December we've ever had by a factor of two and the second largest month we've ever had, ever.
But I don't want to get ahead of myself here, I want to focus on the immediate situation and how we all felt without the benefit of hindsight. When that day came and there was no money to pay anybody, I think it's fair to say that everybody in the shop got more than a little weirded out, including me. Since there was really no work to do, even the busy work had been taken care of, we had a lot of time to sit in our circle and pray..and we did...a lot. Of course we prayed for the immediate needs we all had: rent, bills, medicine, all the normal stuff, but we also had a lot of space to really dig into this situation as wave after alternating wave of emotion rolled over us. We were alternately wrestling with a kind of panic, and doubt as well as rising to great heights of joy and faith and confidence. One day turned into two, which rolled into three...a whole week went by when there was no bread in the cupboard and we were still wondering what the hell could be going on.
I should point out that this situation brought all of us face to face with several financial issues in our lives that were purely practical. Obvious stuff like not counting chickens, not having savings, not writing checks on money we didn't have yet. And while many of those lessons were costly and painful, they were also the kinds of things we couldn't blame on anybody but ourselves once all the frustration and anger burned off. We all had a very vivid lesson that asked if a single day of a delayed paycheck could throw most of us off so bad, then we were clearly managing our money improperly. We were living way too close to the edge. That said, the purely practical, fiscal lessons weren't at the center of the experience. That office was held by another phantom.
The primary struggle we all dealt with in that season was fear. Panic even. In hindsight I can say with confidence that some fear was probably normal enough, but this was wave after wave of highly enhanced fear - a powerful and sustained attack by the prince of this world that had all these trailing attendants of distrust and blame and division. We each fought our own battles about how this could possibly be happening when we dedicated so much of our work to God. Basically, the 'how could a good god allow' lie but with a green leotard on. We struggled with how we could break this awful news to our wives and whether they would see us as failures and on and on. We all struggled, a lot, with whether or not all of this was worth this kind of pain and disappointment and every one of us, including myself, thought about throwing in the towel.
You have to understand that in the last 2 years, Code-Monkeys has transmogrified into something that is not easily characterized or explained. We are growing into a kind of highly integrated, very close knit group of Christians who see this company as a kind of starting point on a very long-term and exciting trip toward who knows where...but the next step seems to be this Christian video game company called Soma. So when I say 'is all this worth it' I'm not talking about a job, I'm not even talking about a company I've poured every dime I have into. I'm talking about something far, far larger that is just starting to bud - and all the guys at CM sense what I'm talking about. They all know to a greater or lesser degree that they've been invited into something special. Something fragile and tenuous, but with gigantic potential, and totally committed to God. So you have to understand that this struggle in our minds wasn't about whether or not it was time to look for another job - but whether or not we believed that this thing was actually special like we'd said, and to what degree we were willing to fight for it, and what degree of hardship we were willing to endure to keep at it.
I don't want to underplay how tense that week was or how close each of us came to folding. In the end, each man had to fight that fight that is essentially an internal battle about what we really believe and what we're really willing to pay to have Jesus and the life He promises. Now I'm incredibly proud to say that everybody hung in there. Everybody toughed it out and I'm proud of all my men, as well as deeply humbled by the experience.
There have been tight moments before at Code-Monkeys and in those moments I'll often pray that God provides and He almost always does. I say 'almost always' not because of His provision, but because I know I've screwed those moments up form time to time in my own panic and His provision gets mismanaged. That's part of my own learning process. But as I prayed the day before payday He told me 'My grace is sufficient'...which meant He wasn't going to provide a sudden rush of money. And He also made it very clear that I was in way to interfere with the test that each of these men had to go through. I knew I just had to let them all walk through it, which was incredibly hard. In the past, I've borrowed money to cover those bills, or foregone a paycheck for myself to pay somebody else, but I was totally disallowed to do that in this case, and totally unable anyway - like I said, there was no money - period.
As we prayed that week, baring our souls and pouring out our fears, we seemed to come to a general consensus that what we were experiencing was an honest to goodness test - a trial that was not (at it's root) a matter of spiritual warfare or mismanagement of funds, or a downturning economy, but a kind of 'put your money where your mouth is' trial. In the previous two months or so, a very common theme that we continued to pray on was this notion that God was our true provision. Not this job, not ANY job, but God. And we prayed a lot about an attitude toward money that was in synch with Jesus and not beholden to the world. Well here we were being asked, 'So, who is your provision again?'
I know each of the guys had to work that question out for themselves. For me, I had my question about who my provision was, but I had the additional question of who THEIR provision was. It was one thing to trust God to feed my family. It was quite another thing to trust God to look after the families that I feel deeply responsible to, the men He's brought to me for employees and friends. I was a mess! But this sense that we were in the middle of something with a larger point helped a lot. I am convinced that one of the central aspects of the test was to prove (either to God or ourselves) that we couldn't be bought - that it really wasn't about the money. And in that regard, I think we all learned that there was a lot more spiritual reserve in each of us than we thought.
When we'd gone a week without any pay and we were sitting around praying again (still). It seemed to me that all of sudden something broke and I had this sense that it was over. Whatever that was all about, it had just ended and within two hours we had two separate people call us, totally out of the blue, and give us new work that we had never bid one, never solicited, and they both wanted to pay the entire balance up front, that day. People, in seven years, that has never happened, NEVER. It's just one more point of indication to me that in the final analysis, God had the whole thing in His hand all along, but we all needed to learn a certain lesson that can't be taught in the classroom...and we passed.
******************
Moving forward a bit, we (BCNW) recently got back from our second Advanced camp - four days on the Oregon coast in one of the most peaceful places I've seen and certainly the most spiritually protected place we've held any event. It was awesome. (Thanks for coming Sluss and #1) I think we still need some work on how we organize the advanced camp, we can be a little scattered, but it was a big improvement from last year's advanced and I think far, far closer to what we really want that event to be about. But enough about that - it wouldn't be a boot camp if God didn't kick me in the head.
One of the things we talk about at some length is what we call the stages of manhood. It's a broad look at the phases a man typically goes through in his life and what the point and challenge of the various phases are. For the sake of context they go in this order (if you're interested, read Way of the Wild Heart):
• Beloved Son
• Cowboy / Ranger
• Warrior
• Lover
• King
• Sage
Keeping in mind the fact that these stages are not discreet, and stages typically overlap, I find myself in a blend of the Warrior, Lover and King stages - which is pretty typical for my age by the way, minus the king part...and that's what God was talking to me about. No doubt there are places in my life where authority and leadership has come to me from outside sources - being asked to be an elder for example. But other places have grown out of my own ambition - Code-Monkeys to be precise. Before, I go much farther, I want to make clear that God wasn't eating my lunch in this conversation. He wasn't giving me grief or convicting me about out-of-balance ambition. He was pointing out the seeds of error - elements in my heart that left unchecked, could lead me into some dark places and all riding on great intentions.
One of the speakers tells a pretty compelling story about how he became a king way too early in his life, running a multi-million dollar company when he was barely 33. Of course, in most contexts that's a story of great achievement and something to be proud of, but David tells how the simple fact was that he was in no way ready for that kind of responsibility and as a result - he was a bad king. Now David would never have seen it that way at the time, it's only something that he has come to understand in hindsight, now that he's sold the company and has had some time to reflect. In some ways, but of course at a lower level, I see a little of what drove David in myself and when I hear his story I can really see what he's talking about. What's unfortunate is that until God pointed it out, I had been harboring this secret attitude that went something like this, 'Wow. David's experience has cost him dearly and I see a lot of parallels...of course I would never do that.'
David's message is one of the rare, sober accounts of a man saying 'Don't make the mistakes I made.' A little like Jacob Marley to be honest. But in my heart I've been hearing the wrong message. Instead of hearing what he has said very explicitly - that he became a king too young and it was bad for him, his family, and his employees - I've heard only a message to do it differently. In essence, I still wanted to be a young king, the ruler of a growing business empire, and I sort of figured I could handle it where he didn't, even though I never really thought about it in those terms.
It reminds of the fact that Jesus reserves some of his harshest words for the rich, mentioning wealth as perhaps the one place where we might actually loose our souls, and yet we are all quite eager to take that risk and we seek wealth with reckless abandon. Another aspect of this is that I'm a pretty independent guy and while I've told many men that life is better when it's not done alone, I've been sort of unconsciously disregarding my own advice, stubbornly insisting on cutting my own path - insisting that men who are clearly wiser and more experienced than myself, treat me as a peer...when I'm clearly not their peer.
Let me add one more log to this fire. For as often as I've told the story of Soma Games, I've always said that the whole thing has been God's idea from the get go. That I couldn't take any credit at all for the concepts or even the game designs. It all basically came to me as a download and I've been carrying it. But still in the three years since the download, I've grown sort of possessive of the whole thing. Acting as if I were the guardian of a sacred trust or something. I've had this attitude that other people could help - by donating $1M say - but they would have to play by my rules, because only I heard the vision from on high. You get the picture. Now of course I never would have said it that way, not even to myself, and I'm aware of the things that spooked me early on and made me somewhat cautious of unscrupulous investors, but it had grown out of balance, and God was kind enough to point the error out before I strangled to the thing like Lennie.
I really can only think of one other place in my life where I had a sort of sudden moment of clarity where I was able to make a sharp 90° turn but not need a more vivid crisis to kick me into gear. The realization of these things was like that though. I was able to very clearly see how I'd started down a bad path with my possessive attitude toward Soma and also to clearly recognize my need to seek and submit to some people who really have a lot to teach me. More to the point, I don't want to be a king right now, at least I don't want to grasp at that role - I'm not SUPPOSED to be a king right now. I think this time in my life is more about being the warrior (read the book if that doesn't make any sense) and the price I've seen paid by men who've become kings when they weren't ready is a price I'm unwilling to pay.
In short, I need to let some things go, take a deep breath - Ahhhhh.
****************
Now the really exciting part and the cause for this post's title. And I should point out that yes - I do se a very direct connection between what I've been talking about and this new development.
Soma has taken a very important step forward this week. Three separate men, men who have already succeeded in business and really know what they're doing, have all made commitments to see Soma move forward. They all get it. They all like the business plan. And they all want to see this thing be for real. Now any one of these guys could write us a check and fund our first round out of their pocket books but that's really not the coolest part. The cool part is the commitment of time, energy and expertise when none of those things are lightly given by any of them. One, for sure, has agreed to sit on the advisory board and the other two have had very positive responses and asked for a little time to pray just to be sure about what role they feel lead to play.
This is huge.
This is the day where Soma went from a cool idea to where it is now basically a matter of time before we start writing Arc. If these guys decide to invest themselves, great. If not, they have all the contacts in the world and will make it their business to find us a match for an investor or two.
And yet, as great as that is, I'm in a totally different place than I was four weeks ago. And as cool as it is that funding now seems to be over the next hill, I'm far more excited about working with a group of solid Christian men, men who are genuine and appropriate kings, and learning how to be a good king myself.
That...is breakthrough.
17 February 2008
We call it warfare
I heard a voice that cried
Balder the beautiful
is dead, is dead
The Word makes it clear that there is a time to rejoice, and a time to mourn. It also says that those who mourn are blessed - because they will be comforted. The last month and more has been a time of great mourning for me for a good and precious man, a kind of Balder in his own right, has taken a well-aimed bullet from the hater of our souls. In some ways there is so much to say, too much to say for all the hurt, all the sadness, all the pain. And in another way there is nothing at all to say - nothing really seems meet to the moment.
Without taking a single ounce from the tragedy of the fall, I am powerfully reminded of the words I've spoken many times to many men - this is a broken world and we are at war. If there were no casualties, it would put the lie to my own passionate assertion. Brave warriors can be struck down one step from the gate, a single arrow can unmake even the mightiest soldier. Odin's lesser known son, Balder, was beloved among the Aesir and Vanir. He and his wife, Nanna, inspired all who knew them with their grace and kindness and this special pair was held up and celebrated by heroes of much more renown. Thor, Sif, Tyr, Hermod, all of them brought gifts to Balder; they sought, and gained, oaths from everything upon and beneath the earth that nothing should harm their beloved Balder. But Loki the Hater was able to orchestrate the death of Balder with a sprig of mistletoe - a normally harmless plant with no root or strength. At his death, all of Asgard mourned bitterly that all their work to protect and lift up their beloved Balder had been undone by what no-one had deemed a threat. Over his body they sang bitter songs, "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead."
Still, for all the sorrow, all the mourning, I know that we serve a God of resurrection and restoration. We live under the bright and constant star of a risen Jesus and I pray that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living - the 'against all odds' rebirth of this man and his family. Of course some things change permanently - Our Lord's risen body still bears the scars of our sins - but no man, no situation, is ever beyond the power of God to redeem and make whole, even if that whole is a different shape than the original design.
With that in mind, I know that I must guard my own heart against growing hard, against taking pain-driven words too personally, against feeling any safety beyond a sober "there but for the grace of God go I."
Dear Lord, guide my friend back to you door and do not let the work of the enemy stand.
Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)