When desire runs dry

Henri Nouwen wrote, “Those who think they have arrived, have lost their way…An important part of the spiritual life is to keep longing, waiting, hoping, expecting.”

Today my heart and mind are tired and weary from waiting. I am worn out from hoping and longing. Yet I must continue. These are my feelings, but my feelings do not determine my faith and confidence in God. While I am weary and tired, I have to maintain desire for more of Christ. I have to continue to desire for God’s action and presence. If I cannot do this, I am utterly lost.

When my desire to pray is lacking, I have to pray for the desire to pray. If God gives desire to the human heart, and He gives if we ask according to His will, then I have to ask for more desire in the dry and weary places.

E.M. Bounds wrote, “Prayer is the oral expression of desire…the deeper the desire, the stronger the prayer. Without desire, prayer is meaningless mumble of words.”

When that desire runs out, I have to pray and ask for more. I never fully arrive, and I certainly need more and more of Christ in my understanding, my looking, my speaking, my thinking.

This journal

It has been since June that I resigned just after starting this journal. Journals have legs to walk with you through various journeys and seasons. Journals have backs and hearts to carry a great deal of things so you do not have to.

This journal is a gift from a friend I have not seen or spoken with in many years. It was a random gift which arrived just before an enormous life change I did not foresee at the time. This journal came to me from a friend who has always been a strong encouragement to “Keep writing. Always keep writing.” This journal came from this friend just before a season where it would have been easy to cease writing.

This journal has carried a lot of the things I never wanted to carry. If I could only displace those thoughts and processes on the back and heart of this journal, I could get through days, which would have been otherwise very discouraging and debilitating.

This journal contains the weak prayers of limping through the process of learning to ask God ‘what’ instead of ‘why’. I rarely get answers to ‘why’ questions, but I have learned to look at any and all circumstances asking, “God, what are you doing in me through this?”

This journal contains notes for interviews come and gone for positions I thought were great, if not perfect, but clearly not where God was guiding and calling me.

This journal contains notes for sermons along the way for beloved groups who, unaware to them, gave shock paddles to my heart by giving me opportunities to do what I love in a season when my heart was weak and confused for the future.

This journal has been able to carry the promise of prayer my heart made for the new year. It proves that the challenge remains. It is written in ink after all.

This journal, #38, passes a baton to #39 with promise and hope attached. It uses the discouragement and healing as a springboard to speak to my heart, “You are a better leader, husband, and father than you were before we began walking together, but more importantly, you are closer to the heart of Jesus than you were before we met.”

My Word of the Year 2015

Several years ago I quit making resolutions or new years goals. I accepted, then, a challenge to choose only a word for the year. “One word that sums up who you want to be or how you want to live or what you want to achieve by the end of 2015. One word that you can focus on every day, all year long. It will take hard work, and will require intentionality and commitment. But if you let it, your word will shape you and your year. It will guide your decisions and help you grow.”

This year my word is: PRAYER.

While I would say I am a man of God’s Word, I want to be more of a man of prayer. Prayer is not an element of my relationship with God, it IS my relationship with God. I have to realize my relationship is dependent upon communication and time together.

If I wrote my autobiography, someone could read it inside and out, over and over again. They could highlight important parts about my story and things that mater a great deal to me. But that person does not know me. That person and I have no relationship. We have never sat and spoken together.

Much like this, I can study God’s Word inside and out, over and over again. I can highlight important parts and dedicate years and whole college degrees to studying things very important to God. But I could do all of this and still not know God. I do not have a relationship. I have not sat and spoken with Him.

I am a man of God’s Word and a man after God’s heart, but I want to be MORE of a man of prayer than I have been before. I want to be more of a man of prayer at the end of 2015 than I am right now. I want to know Him more intimately. I want to be terribly close to His heart, and that will only come as we sit and speak together with more intentionality and frequency.

4 Things on God’s distance and absence

There are moments in every honest believer’s journey when God seems distant. It can be hard to sort out. Sometimes knowing with your mind God is omnipresent makes the sense of his absence all the more painful.

Those moments it feels as though your prayers bounce off the ceiling and walls only to return to you, we lose touch with the sense of God’s intimate tenderness as we once knew. These are moments and periods of time when we ought to know a few things.

1. Every honest believer has known this place.
Every believer has or will come to a point when God feels absent or distant at best. It is important off-the-bat to know you are not alone.

2. Do not assume you made this happen.
Do not assume you have done something wrong to drive God away. While our sin does separate us from God, that is not always the reason for this distance. There are times when the experience of distance is simply part of the experience of limited beings attempting intimate connection with a limitless God.

3. God has the freedom to come and go.
What kind of god would you have created who answers your every beck and call? What limited god would you have created who only comes and goes as you wish? If God appears at your beck and call, it is not likely the Biblical God you are relating to. God will not be formed in our image. He is free to come and go at His will; not yours.

4. The experience of absence is not the absence of experience
What might God be doing with you in this time? St. John of the Cross wrote about this part of our journey, calling it “The Dark Night of the Soul”. He says there are two “purifiers” at play during this time. One, you are learning not to depend on external things as proof of God’s presence. We can move further within ourselves to know the truer senses of spiritual connection. The second purifier is stripping us of our interior dependence. We are forced to challenge what we really believe about the character of God. Is God truly good and loving? What things have I created in my own image to demand God to do in order for me to believe he is good or loving? These times of feeling absent or distant make me truly realize God does not have to fit in my limited understanding of goodness and love.

I am forced to let go of my stipulations and come to know the God whose love is a reckless raging fury I cannot form as I wish. Then, I can finally let go and trust.

Sit still in the presence

Today, God, I want your Word to affect both my mind and my heart. I need to know your tenderness, your intimacy, and your love in a way that I have not known it in some time. I will soak up your Word today. Please help my heart understand. Speak to my heart and may I come to know you more?

“and though you have not seen Him, YOU LOVE HIM, and though you do not see Him now, you BELIEVE in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls.” -1 Peter 1:8-9

I greatly desire my heart to know the joy of salvation my mind knows it is. My soul is saved, and my mind knows the good news of the reality, but my heart does not often sit and rest with the very good news that this truly is for my soul eternal. God, help my heart rejoice today. I want to love you more.

Help my heart today. Give me a heart of flesh to replace the bits of built up stone.

Taught to hear

So here I stand with you, God. I want to see my nature become more and more like you so that your Word speaks more clearly to me. If my character is more and more like yours, then your Word would make more sense to me. It would speak more clearly to me. Your Spirit speaks to that which is within me, but my natural and sinful heart will not hear Your words as they are intended to speak. Only as I become more and more like you through increased obedience, your voice in your Word grow that much clearer.

Teach me to hear you, and draw me closer to you that you would be all I ever needed.

Save some for Me

Last night I had a real hard time sleeping likely due to the great hunger from eating less and less these days on a diet, but I believe it was equally a spiritual hunger from less and less experience of God’s presence these days. When I could not sleep, I chose to listen to that spiritual hunger. God spoke to my listening heart last night, and it was to say, “Save room for me.”

Over and over God spoke these words to my heart last night. “Save room for me.” I laid in my bed hearing those words over and over until the word “enough” was added to the phrase. God spoke to my heart and said, “Save enough room for me.”

In a time of spiritual hunger and wilderness, God has made clear to me I need to begin setting aside and saving time for Him. Also, that time needs to be enough for Him to fit. I am not to save time for my God in the forced margins of time I concoct.

With no job, I have been surprised how little time it seems I have now. I am walking a wilderness. D.T. Olson said, “When one is forced to endure the wilderness for a time, it may be experienced either as a place of maturing and learning or as a place of disintegration and death.” At this point, I feel more pressed than I did when I was employed in full time ministry, and right now has been a difficult wilderness season for me.

I have been challenged to begin asking WHAT instead of WHY. “O my God, what are you doing in my heart and life while I am waiting?” I do not need to ask WHY God is doing anything, because most likely is a question to which I will never get the answer.

Right now, though, I am to save enough time for my God, my Abba, and my Jesus. I am to save time that is enough for Him to fill rather than cram tightly within.

Persist

When I pray to my God, I cannot stop after one shot at it. I have to continue to come to Him, and never let up. My God will hear me, and He may be determining how dedicated I really am to seeking Him in this situation and circumstance.

Here I am in need of God’s answer and provision, and I come once or twice out of a hail mary desperation, but will i continue to come with the persistence of the widow in Luke 18? Will I pray and not lose heart? I have not often prayed in this fashion at all. I have to pray and not lose heart.

God will hear me and come to me, but I cannot lose heart in my prayer. Otherwise I reveal something very important. The amount and longevity of my prayer to God reveal just how dedicated I really am to that situation, that circumstance, or to that person.

Praying for you/me

Reading Psalm 88 today after I have resigned from a ministry I have loved for 7 years has presented me a great challenge.

Though the Psalmist never turns toward any real resolve in this Psalm, there is one phrase he repeats over and over throughout all his sorrow and lament where I find my heart’s biggest challenge.

Over and over the Psalmist says, “I have called out to you every day, O LORD; I have spread my hands to you…in the morning my prayer comes before you. I have cried out to you for help, O LORD.”

Will I in this time, cry out to God each day? Will I spread out my hands to Him? Will my prayers come before Him OR will I wallow and mope and “try to figure it out”?

Today, I ran into a friend at the coffee shop and told her the news. She said she was sorry, and then she said she would be praying. I thanked her like I have everyone who said similar things the last week. But then she said, “No! I mean that. I WILL pray for you.”

I stopped to look her in the eye and say, “I believe that. Thank you.” (NOT that I don’t believe others are actually praying for me, but her directed affirmation was helpful.)

This has me thinking and challenged in this time. I appreciate all the prayers people are offering up on my behalf right now, and I am truly humbled by so many great friends who would do this for me, but here is the challenge: I MUST PRAY…also! I must pray each day and extend my needy and shaking hands to God. I must cry out to Him every day.

On hearing and understanding God

One of the reasons we do not hear God as we did in the Old Testament is because our sin has grown to do this to us. Humanity has been so sickened with sin that we have lost our hearing and we no longer even speak God’s language enough to understand Him if we even could hear His voice.

Hearts have been so hardened over time that we are too incredibly foreign to God whose image is actually imprinted upon us. We who are in His very image are terribly foreign to Him because of our sin.

The good news is that God desires his imprinted people. He desires connection, contact, and conversation once again. The silence we hate is as hurtful to God.

He had to speak a language we would finally be able to understand. Jesus is that language. “Jesus is God spelling Himself out,” wrote SD Gordon.

Jesus is God Himself.
Jesus is God Himself speaking a language our foreign sin-soaked hearts can finally understand.

That intimacy we once knew in Eden is possible now only in Jesus.