JOY

JOY does not simply happen.

   We have to choose JOY

                  and

 keep choosing it every day.

                                                               - Henri Nouwen

God Does Not Owe Me, He Loves Me

Thanks to Stephan Straits for posting "Single and not waiting" on his facebook page. I really enjoyed Rachel Selinger's thoughts on what it is like to be 23 and single. She talks about what it feels like watching her friends get married. About how others often refer to their wedding day as the first day of the rest of their lives.

I felt a great connection with her when she said,

I've been living like God owes me something. Like he hasn't held up his end of the deal. He has given me the desire for relationship and marriage, and he just hasn't followed through. I've been living under the impression that I deserve a relationship.

Good words. It seems like I have to return to face my demand over and over. My demand that life look differently. Even at 49 years of age, my demand for a father and a husband still rages deep within me. Provoked not so much by the marriage of my friends these days, but now by the marriage of their children and the birth of their grandchildren.

Some days it is really hard not to compare lives, and really easy for the demand to rear its ugly head. At those times, I have to remind myself that the desire for relationship is good but the demand for God to give it to me is not. God does not owe me a father or a husband, or for that matter deep friendship.

What God is really after, is my heart. He longs for my desire to be solely for him. When my heart is full of demand I can not fully receive the depth of his true love for me. It must sadden him greatly. I long to feel equally saddened, and perhaps that is the journey of God's pursuit of me.

God's Relentless Love

"Love one another as I have loved you." This command to love has always felt simple and straight-forward to me. I hadn't really given much thought to the possible depth of the command, that is until I considered the great passion in which Jesus loves me.

A couple of Sunday's ago at church we sing, "Jesus lover of my soul, all-consuming fire is in your gaze." I felt stopped in my tracks by those words. Did I really believe what I was singing?

I wondered recently what that really looks like, what that really feels like. I can't even imagine someone having that much desire for me. I wondered how I would live differently if I really did live my life knowing the deeper passionate love of God for me.

The recovery of passion is intimately connected with astonishment. We are swept up by the overwhelming face of mystery. Self-consciousness evaporates in the presence of what Rudolph Otto called "mysterium tremendum." The transcendent God overtakes us and overcomes us. Such an experience may wash over our consciousness like a gentle tide saturating the mind and heart in a tranquil spirit of profound adoration. Awe, wonder, and amazement induce speechless humility. We have a brief glimpse of the God we never dreamed existed.    - Abba's Child - Brennan Manning

Recently I caught a brief glimpse of God's transcendence in a conversation with a friend over breakfast. In became clear to me later that when I chose to live out of my belovedness, when I believed that I am wanted, pursued and loved, it pushed away the lies for a moment. And in that moment as I talked with my friend, I was in touch with my true self, a loved child of God. What a wondrous, crazy thing!

I am in awe of God's relentless love: His pursuit of something deeper in my heart that one day may hopefully free me fully to love others as passionately as He loves me. All this despite the terror I feel when I allow myself to be vulnerable and loved deeply. May I keep turning back to Him and bending my knee to His healing hand knowing a better day is ahead.

The Impostor

Each of has has a false self or an impostor that we use to make ourselves into someone we are not. Brennan Manning wrote the following thoughts in Chapter 2, The Impostor, in his book, Abba's Child:

• The impostor prompts us to attach importance to what has no importance...
• The impostor is a liar.
• Our false self stubbornly blinds each of us to the light and the truth of our own emptiness and hollowness. We cannot acknowledge the darkness within.
• The impostor bears a distinct resemblance to alcohol for the alcoholic. He is cunning, baffling, and powerful. He is insidious. 
• ...God does not know anything about him (Thomas Merton)
• It is the nature of the false self to save us from knowing the truth about our real selves, from penetrating the deeper causes of our unhappiness, from seeing ourselves as we really are--vulnerable, afraid, terrified, and unable to let our real selves emerge. (James Masterson) 
• ...a life devoted to the shadow is a life of sin. I have sinned in my cowardly refusal--out of fear of rejection--to think, feel, act, respond, and live from my authentic self. (Thomas Merton)
• The impostor must be called out of hiding, accepted and embraced. He is an integral part of my total self. Whatever is denied cannot be healed.
• Peace lies in acceptance of truth. Any facet of the shadow self that we refuse to embrace becomes the enemy and forces us into defensive postures.
• Hatred of the impostor is actually self-hatred... self[hatred always results in some form of self-destructive behavior.
• [Must be taken], where unknowingly [the impostor] has longed to be--into the presence of Jesus. 

This leaves much to consider. We were made to live fully as a child of God, but we cannot escape the emergence of a false self. I wonder if we can't really see ourselves clearly until we are willing or able to see the impostor for who he really is, a liar. 

Trust

...when we wallow in shame, remorse, self-hatred,

and guilt over real or imagined failings in the past,

we  are betraying  our distrust in  the love  of God,

that we have not accepted the acceptance of Jesus

Christ, the total sufficiency of his redeeming work.

Preoccupation  with  our  past sins,  our  present

weaknesses,  our  character  defects,  gets  our

emotions churning in self-destructive ways, closes 

us  in  the mighty  citadel itself,  and  completely

preempts the presence of the compassionate God.

                                                     - Brennan Manning 

Old Ache

…There we are warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words: “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.   

                                                                                        C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The Weight of Glory

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

 …Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven…

 Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy...  

                                                                                                                    [C.S. Lewis]