The Danger Within

Even as a child I wanted to hear God’s voice. I was promised in Sunday school that He was individually interested and that He spoke to each one of us through His Word. Looking to test this, I would pull my Children’s Explorer’s Bible off the bookshelf lined with my grizzled collection of My Little Ponies, and flop down on my bed; open the book at random, and drop my finger somewhere on the exposed pages to see what God had to say to me. I didn’t really think it worked like that—the spiritual equivalent of spinning the globe with your eyes closed to find out where you should live—but I thought it was worth a try. If memory serves, God didn’t have any specific messages for me.

These days I find myself doing slightly more sophisticated versions of the same foolish thing because I still want to hear God’s voice speak directly to me. I want Him to talk to me about the things that are close to my heart and the things that are close to His. Sometimes I think I’m listening to the Holy Spirit, but I hear my own heart instead. It is so easy to err when God starts to sound a little bit too much like me.

Few of the deceptions that we face in life are as unvarnished as an email from an obscure Nigerian prince with an inheritance to bestow upon those who speedily reply with their banking details. Even the slickest of con men seeking to swindle the unsuspecting out of their money are only mere entry-level deceivers. True deception—the kind you really need to be on guard against—has a far subtler hand. It oozes in through the cracks in the brickwork of your life; it pushes open the unlatched gate; entering through the broken places you just haven’t gotten around to mending yet. And it isn’t after your money, but rather your soul.

“The heart is deceitful above all things. 

And desperately wicked; 

Who can know it?” 

(Jeremiah 17:9)

Culturally, the heart—the seat of our emotions— is lauded as the most trustworthy organ of decision. Following one’s heart is the irrefutable defence; the final say on a matter; the trump card that has no equal. The heart is the means by which the unbelieving world chooses its way. Absent the Holy Spirit, the World must feel its way forward, rather than discern what the Spirit of Wisdom is speaking.

The scriptural warning against the heart is not an embargo against emotion. Human beings are made in the image of God and our emotional capacity finds its original template in the Most High. But real deception invites your emotions to dance. It offers you its hand through offence, jealousy, fear, anger, lust, despair, or pride;— until it whirls you about in a flurry of feeling and confusion; never tiring in order that the room never stops spinning. Emotions are a powerful counterfeit for truth because they feel so true—and we feel powerful when we feel so much. Wisdom, however, promises no such affectation. 

Discernment is the spiritual means of perception, and it is a function of the Holy Spirit. It is the ability to differentiate the whole truth from the half-truths—the genuine from the counterfeit—amid the cacophony of emotional noise. It is the only remedy against deception; the still small voice that reveals what is true as opposed to that which only feels true. It’s worth contemplating then, that the Holy Spirit came to rest upon Jesus as a dove;—a sensitive creature apt to take off at the slightest surprise. No dove ever came to rest upon someone in the middle of a temper tantrum. Likewise, the Spirit of Discernment, cannot be heard when an emotional reaction has been given free rein to guide. The voice of wisdom is heard by the quieted soul in a posture of humility who is longing to hear. It’s not complicated, but it is hard.

(A version of this article was published in the July/August edition of live magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com)

Faith Pursuing Real

I write stories for a living. I invent people and stick them in impossible scenarios to see how they manage. Usually, when I start writing I have some idea where I want these characters to end up; whether they will behave nobly or ignobly, —usually a mixture of both—as they confront the obstacles I throw in their path. The trouble is, characters—like the Velveteen Rabbit who was loved by his boy—eventually become real. Real to me at least, and then I can’t do a thing with them. I write scenes and put words in their mouths and they stubbornly disagree and refuse to say them with any kind of conviction. The action of the story stalls. The other characters look at the floor, awkwardly pretending not to notice my embarrassing faux pas, and the writing comes to a dead end until I delete all the way back to authenticity. Characters who have revealed who they are can’t be manipulated into being someone they aren’t.

God also has a stubborn way of being real and not taking my stage direction. More often than not, He doesn’t say the thing I want Him to say, and the stuff He does say;—well, let’s just say that God isn’t particularly concerned about human opinions. He is who He is.  

I can always tell when I’ve tried to put words in His mouth or force His hand when the conversation goes dead and I find I’ve painted myself into an uncomfortable spiritual corner with no where to go. Once again I realize that I’ve tried to call the shots and write both sides of the conversation. It’s embarrassing but I don’t think it’s just me. It’s a bad habit that plagues us all. Humanity doesn’t want a God with His own opinions. We want a god whose rules enable us to live as we please; who we can pick up with our hands; and see our own reflection in the gold-plated surface and set aside again whenever convenience suits.

But God is real and the faith that He gives us to pursue Him is far more unwieldy than a set of religious dictates. Faith is vision and the drive to pursue the God who is the destination of life’s arduous climb. Sometimes the path of faith is steep and harrowing. Sometimes we pause out of breath with every exhausted muscle screaming for reprieve, and doubt whether we have another step in us. But the view is from the height is something else.

After their victorious exodus from Egypt, the Children of Israel elected to stay at the foot of the mountain. The God who had rescued them through wonders and signs was too frightening to meet face to face.  

“You talk to Him,” they implored Moses, “and we’ll do whatever you say.”

Moses’s faith drew him up the mountain because he alone longed for God’s presence. The people, however, stayed far below, content to cater to their fears and appetites. What each of them saw of God depended on where they stood. Moses climbed the mountain and entered the glory cloud of God’s presence where the Almighty spoke to him; revealing His thoughts and plans as one might share with a friend. But to those who wanted nothing to do with God Himself,  “To the Israelites at the foot of the mountain, the glory of the LORD appeared at the summit as a consuming fire.”  (Exodus 24:17)

At a distance, God will always be frightening to us—no matter how many oceans He’s parted, or how many desperate prayers He has answered. When we stand far off and resist the beckoning of faith, He is terror and destruction to our eyes. Yet when we dare to approach Him, He envelopes us in His glory cloud and unclasps His heart. The destination of faith is God alone. It is to be taken into His presence; to experience the revelation of who He is. God will always resist our habitual attempts to fashion Him into our image. After all, He’s real and He is who He is.

(A version of this article was published in the May/June edition of live magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com).

Confessions of a Spiritual Narcoleptic

I’ve been trying to solve a narrative puzzle in one of my manuscripts for quite some time. I’m 90,000+ words into the drama and dire things are afoot, but I haven’t figured out what to do with one particular character and this has put the brakes on all my progress (such as it is). What to do with the old man? I ask myself this question day in, day out, while I fiddle about the edges of the story, bedazzling the language with adjectives I will no doubt have to savagely edit out in a later draft. But what to do with the old man? It’s the question that plagues my thoughts.

Given that I’ve been in this holding pattern for quite some time, you’d think that when inspiration struck the other night as I was waiting for sleep to come, that I would have bolted out of bed and written it down. Aha! Eureka! Old man problem solved at long last! You might think that, but you would have been wrong. Morgan—as I condescendingly refer to myself when dealing with the personal attributes I find frustrating—Morgan thought, “I’ll remember and do it in the morning.”

Of course I didn’t remember. Of course I don’t even have a sliver of the slightest indication of what I was going to do with the old man. And so, now I sit, berating my lethargy in a blog post instead of working on the manuscript that is somehow ballooning into a series against all my wishes. 

If only I hadn’t fallen asleep. 

I feel like I’m always falling asleep when the plot is thickening; dropping out of consciousness at the most inopportune times only to emerge groggy and incoherent days later as though I’ve gone on some existential bender that I can’t quite remember. And not just regarding the fictional plots that I am working on, but the actual plot that I am in, as well. Questions flood my not-quite-firing synapses as I find myself looking blearily about. “Wasn’t God saying something to me? I feel like He was saying something to me that I shouldn’t have forgotten…”

It’s one thing to forget what to do with the fictional old man. It’s quite another to forget what the Son of Man has said. I’m not the first to feel this way;—that there is something terribly important to remember that is slipping past my fingertips. I am like Jill Pole in C.S Lewis’s The Silver Chair who was given important signs to look for from Aslan when she first arrives in Narnia, but the further into the adventure she goes, the fuzzier the details become. Were there four signs? Oh dear, oh dear…

Jill forgets and I fall asleep. 

At times it seems that God speaks so clearly—He even gets me to repeat things over and over like Aslan instructed Jill, so that muscle memorization might save my faulty consciousness. But somehow even so, the lesser things of daily life drive the words from my mind. I think I won’t forget, but I do. I’ll happen across an old journal entry or a half-written blog post and find the echoes of an old conversation with God and I remember with a pang. It had been so clear, and now I can’t find the notes to the tune.

The atmosphere of the world that we all live in is soporific. It lulls us into a somnolent daze—like Dorothy and her Ozian friends in the bewitched field of poppies—we lay down for a moment and wake to find the world has changed and time is shorter than ever. 

Dorothy wakes to the cold of snow falling, whereas I’ve woken to a world afire with fear of a virus. The media preaches panic. More than ever social media has revealed itself as an aggressive exchange of mutual ignorance. Now—more than ever—it is time to unplug from the collective wisdom of the world. The situation is no doubt serious, and serious situations have a way of bringing us all to full consciousness.

It is hard to stay sleepy when an alarm is blaring and the earth is shaking.

The thing is, the alarm that is blaring for me is not a warning about the danger of coronavirus. Sure, I’ll follow the measures that my local jurisdiction has enacted, but the alert that is sounding in my spirit isn’t about the spread of a disease. Instead, it is a call to faith. It is akin to the bugle call that summons the soldiers to the battle field, rather than a fire alarm that clears a building. 

A summons to fight the good fight of faith is different than the warning a fire alarm. Those with no weapons, or training, or will to fight, will flee an oncoming battle at the trilling of the bugle, while those who are prepared will make themselves ready and show up to contend with the enemy for victory. 

This is one of those moments when we wake up to the reality that our theology must become more than an intellectual adherence to a set of Christian doctrines. This is the bugle call to the spiritual battlefield of faith. And while for some that battlefield will take place in physical terms in facing sickness. For most of us, however,  it will manifest in the realm of our thoughts. What do we really believe? Is it just a nice symbolic thought that God is our refuge in times of trouble? That He will protect us from the deadly pestilence as Psalm 91 proclaims? Or do we regard that as foolhardy and view the promises of faith as valid only in an abstract spiritual sense; possibly to only be cashed in on after death?

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue and those who love it will eat its fruits.” (Proverbs 18:21)

This verse has come to mind so many times as I scroll through the headlines hoping to catch a glimpse of the horizon on this pandemic. But I had it backwards. I kept thinking it said “Life and death” not, “Death and life.” Oh well, same meaning, isn’t it? And yes, I suppose it is, but a writer puts words together with care and that order is not indifferent to the intended meaning. Death comes first for a reason. Death comes first because that is our natural inclination in speech. We talk about what goes wrong. We discuss the mistakes and screw ups long before we add the addendum of what worked out—; that is, if we remember to mention the good at all.

Death comes first because it is the curse that needs lifting. Life follows it because it has the strength to undo the curse. At risk of going back to the same trope over and over, remember the uninvited fairy in the original fairytale of Sleeping Beauty who cursed the infant princess with death upon touching the spindle of a spinning wheel? The evil fairy sought that her pronouncement of death upon the princess would be the last word, but there was one small fairy left with a blessing of life to offer. 

Death comes first because it is swallowed up by life, not the other way around. The proclamations of death are overwhelmed by the words of Life that follow. Jesus stunned His followers with a hard teaching and watched them all recoil and drift away. He then asked the Twelve if they would leave Him, too. And, Peter, in a shining moment responded, “Where are we to go? You have the words of Life.”

Death is swallowed by the words of Life. It's time to wake up and speak.

One of the Faded People

It used to be that if you were going to see people begging in Calgary, you had to be Downtown. That isn’t the case anymore. There’s the young guy with his cardboard identity of “Homeless because of PTSD” sitting outside Superstore begging for change while playing on his smartphone. There’s another sitting outside the bookstore with his dog in a faded pile of blankets. His shift coincides with that of the veiled woman at the nearby intersection making the rounds of drivers’s windows before the light changes. A bag of fresh buns—given in place of money—lies discarded and unopened on the side of the road.

Maybe this proliferation of begging—this symptom of social sickness—is a result of the economic downturn that our province has endured. Maybe it is part of a crisis of mental illness and addiction. Or, perhaps our culture is merely living out the downstream physical consequences of our spiritual bankruptcy. A family friend—no stranger to addiction and psychological difficulties—once poetically referred to these denizens of the streets, as ‘the Faded People’.

I confess, sympathy is not the predominant emotion I feel when I see the guy with his sign and his smartphone, or when I see someone else’s gift of groceries disdained and trampled. It is more like an unholy irritation at the attempted emotional manipulation; at being asked to participate in whatever dysfunction is being perpetuated.

I realized the other morning, though—in a flash of revelation—how often I am like one of the faded people to God. I go about my days looking to feed my addiction to pride and my own opinions. Always seeking the next distraction that will make me feel good for the present. I approach God with a hand extended for a coin—a pittance— instead of surrendering all so that He can transform my life of rags. I hold up a tattered sign bearing an identity meant to invoke pity in order to get what I want. I sit in the faded remnants of better days and resent it when God doesn’t feed my unhealthy habits by answering my sickly prayers.

I need my very desires to be transformed. The Bible tells us that we are made in the image of God—an astounding statement. It implies that our very freedom of will is a shadow of God’s own freedom of will. We cannot be made to change. We must choose it for ourselves. We must choose the greater joy of being abandoned to God’s perfect will over the lesser comfort of having our own way for the moment.

The Third Candle

There is a single rose coloured candle in the Advent wreath, a pale pink spire amid the faintly scented evergreen boughs and the stately purple columns that mark each Sunday of the season of preparation. The delicate pink candle is lit on the penultimate Sunday of Advent. Not on the last Sunday of the season, or on Christmas Eve itself, but somewhere near the end. Not quite at the end, but nearby. Some Christian traditions are more formalized than others and in the protestant way, we might talk about Hope, Love, Joy and Peace during the yuletide season as abstract or spiritual realities of our faith but we probably have to look up which idea belongs to which Sunday anew each year. It is easy to forget why one candle somewhere near the end of the season is different than all the others. 

The third Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday to our liturgical brethren. Joy Sunday. An idea that encompasses so much more than those three letters can convey. It is the unrestrained response of joy and elation as we come to the place where our waiting ends and our anticipating begins in earnest. 

Rejoice! The Lord is nigh! 

He’s almost here. 

It is the moment when the engine revs before power hits the wheels. It is when the orchestra all comes into tune as one sound for the opening bar of a performance. It is when the beginning is about to begin. Rejoicing Sunday is the Sunday when those who have been waiting spontaneously break into cheers at the entrance of the star.  Every nerve taut, every thought focused; as anticipation culminates in what is about to be fulfilled. 

Advent, as a season of preparation is characterized by both repentance and wild celebration. David danced with wild abandonment before the Lord as the Ark of the Covenant which carried the very presence of God between the wings of the cherubim on the Mercy Seat was brought into Jerusalem. The king’s worship of the Most High’s presence returning to dwell amongst His people Israel was total and utterly forgetful of himself, so great was his joy at God being with His people.

That is the promise of advent and of Gaudete Sunday. God will soon be among us. The Ark of the Lord is coming into the city of our God. Abandon yourself to worship as the divine Logos is clothed in flesh and reveals to us His name: Emmanuel. 

God with us.

The Church Behind Barbed Wire

A couple of weeks ago I found myself looking through the titles that line the shelves of my little church library. I was early and looking to entertain myself for a few spare minutes until the others arrived for prayer. As I scanned the colourful spines filling the shelves with an ecclectic mix of Biblical commentaries, biographies and Christian Romance fiction, a battered copy of  I Found God in Soviet Russia by John Noble caught my eye. I pulled it from its place and was soon absorbed in his story. 

An American stranded in Germany for the course of WW2, John Noble found himself behind a new enemy’s lines in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany. Quickly arrested without charges, the young man was confined in an East German prison, and two Soviet-operated former Nazi concentration camps;— until finally he was shipped east with a ten year sentence to slave labour in a Siberian gulag. And, the thing about the gulag—you weren’t meant to survive it. The Soviet penal system intended to wring every last bit of strength from a person’s body before erasing him from memory. Bitter cold, near starvation, hopelessness, and unimaginable cruelty were the daily lot of gulag prisoners. It's a story that none of us would choose for ourselves.

It was in the midst of Noble’s starvation in his first days of arbitrary imprisonment that God intervened. He didn’t send an angel to open the prison door and lead the formerly worldly young man out. Instead, the Almighty God joined him in prison. And thus began John Noble’s sojourn as an ambassador for Christ in one of the most hopeless places on earth;—a place no missionary could be sent. The Soviets sentenced John Noble intending for him to die, but God sent him to tell others how to live.

Noble's account witnesses to the world the existence—and explosive growth—of the Church Behind Barbed Wire. Prisoners of every ethnic, religious and cultural extraction found themselves desperate to worship together in secret without deference to denomination or tradition. Miracles were worked and people were saved even as they died. Orthodox priests served communion to prisoners with water standing in place of wine, and hoarded crumbs of bread for the body of Christ. Nuns who refused to do work for the devil through atheistic communism frightened their captors with their miraculous survival of torture and exposure to the Siberian cold. Lutherans shared their memorization of the Word. Baptists evangelized bringing revival. The Church Behind Barbed Wire had such a powerful testimony that even as the Soviet guards seized the smuggled Bibles—they hoarded them— hungry to read the Word of God themselves. 

Wherever you are is not an accident.

 It is a commission. 

In the midst of suffering, it is easy to wonder about the goodness of God for allowing it. It is more difficult to regard yourself as an agent of light sent undercover into darkness. But that is the truth. God purposefully places His people behind enemy lines to be agents of His Kingdom;

  “…to proclaim freedom for the captives and the release from darkness for the prisoners…” (Isaiah 61:2) 

Milk and Honey

The following article appeared in the Sept/Oct issue of live magazine. 

When I was a child my parents fought the good fight for Family Time. After supper while the mostly empty dishes sat unwashed and the mostly full water glasses sat sweating on the corner of each placemat, my mom would pull out the increasingly dog-eared copy of the One Year Bible and embark on the daily reading. We were soon behind the prescribed day and one year eventually stretched to five as we slowed to a plod through Numbers and Deuteronomy and my siblings and I grew languid in our chairs as so-and-so begat such-and-such. I picked at the stray grains of rice that stuck to the blue quilted placemats my grandmother had made and listened with varying degrees of willingness. Some nights there was a lot of grumbling. Whether it was the Children of Israel or the children of David and Sylvia, it’s hard to say with much certainty.

But it was during Family Time that I first became aware of God’s way with words; His power of description. We were in Exodus and His promise to take the Israelites into a land flowing with milk and honey caught my attention. I wasn’t a literally-minded child, so I didn’t imagine rivers of sticky gold flowing down from the hills of Canaan or milk bursting forth in a geyser of rich abundance. But it did arrest my imagination, this phrase—a land flowing with milk and honey—and I let it roll around on my tongue like dessert.

The goodness of God is like milk and honey. Unexpectedly rich, delectably sweet; ingredients hidden in everything. But neither milk, nor honey come without time and effort. They are both the product of creation fulfilling its purpose in time to the glory of God. Milk is rich and nourishing. Honey is sweet and potent. It’s a strange and beautiful pitch,  ‘flowing with milk and honey’,  God’s own description of His intended goodness to His people.

This goodness of God’s is flowing everywhere—is always being made in unexpected pockets all over my life— if I have eyes to perceive it. If I keep my vision clear through humility and thankfulness. If I’m not watching that metaphorical clock with the mocking expression on its face and silently accusing God of abandonment. It is in the waiting and the pain that God’s goodness becomes rich and sweet. Where it is made memorable and sustaining instead of quickly consumed and quickly forgotten. Time is essential for refining my focus, for revealing what needs to be treated; for making honey sweet and milk rich in nourishment. It was the passage of time that made a word from an abashed stranger—who sheepishly approached to tell me that God wanted me to know that my unravelled engagement was not a waste—a nourishing balm to my wounded thoughts. God saw the whole picture painted in years and He said that it wasn’t a waste. The sweetness of that message lingers still through the revolving seasons of a life that didn’t unfold as planned. 

God allows time to compound His goodness; intensifying it to an unfathomable sweetness that can only be tasted at the kairos of His will. Such as when my staunchly atheist grandfather suddenly proclaimed the power of the cross from his death bed to the utter astonishment of all. Generations had prayed for his salvation—from his own aged father on his knees beside his own hospital bed pleading for the soul of his son, to his great grand-children praying unprompted for ‘Great Grandpa Wolf to love Jesus’;— honey and milk made sweet and precious in the making, flowing over a century of yearning prayer for one self-made man who was unmade by his saviour in the twilight weeks of his earthly life. 

God’s goodness is so much better than anything I could dream up. Moments so sweet and rich that they practically take your breath away like some careful confection of honey-sweetened cream. Answers from God made richer by time bringing them forth in the proper season.