Will you find me here, Jesus?

I remember the first time I took my meds for depression. I was worried about so much with them, mainly that I would no longer be me… and that God would not be able to find “me” behind the “medicated me”…

So I prayed over them as I had taught so many others to do before they take their meds… but this, this was different. This was me and my meds.

Anti-depressants take awhile to build up yet many say there is a placebo effect when you begin your journey to healing.

I will go to my grave saying that God answered my prayer that day.

We went to church, and I remember sitting there when tears slowly came to eyes as I felt the presence of God. I whispered “you found me like you promised” to the air.

Why am I talking about my meds? Because I believe God will find behind the shadows. His intentions will be fulfilled less “without me” than within me.

This is the “dark night of the soul”, the place where evangelical sorts forgot to read the entire poem. It is the hidden place of intimate love. This is where I am going, where we are all called to go

“I continued in oblivion lost, My head was resting on my love;

Lost to all things and myself, And, amid the lilies forgotten,

Threw all my cares away.”

Dark Night of the Soul

St John of the Cross

negotiating the times

Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?”

So Jesus said to them, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.

However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.”

Matthew 5:19-21

The best laid plans of mice and men will never best silence and humility before the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the wold. The foolish things, He said, will shame the wise and cause the men to stumble.

Be still….

This is the place where God can finally speak to dis-intigration in our lives, the Deep State of our relationship to God… the only state that matters.

Here is where The Holy Spirit can reveal the “why”…. why do we bite and devour one another, why do these demons not come out, whey do I do the things I don’t want to do when I want to do the good…

Why to you tarry Lord? … So he said to me, “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty.” Zach 4:6

praying old prayers from a warming shelter cot

I lie on my cot at night, and before I fall asleep I think about what I said and thought and to who.

I”m amazed at times of the things that came out of me! ME!

I ask God to show me where I messed up and ask for forgiveness

My friend shared these words with me as I was dropping him off at a warming shelter to spend yet another night there while he waits for an apartment to become available to him. I was taken back by his wording and had to repent that I was surprised that the Holy Spirit would gift this former addict and gang member the desire and verbiage to discuss the Ignatius practice of the Self-Examen.

We can profess all we want until the cows come home that we believe God can and does interact with, and speak through and to every condition of people. Yet, until that person is ridding shotgun in your truck, you really aren’t going to believe it…

Each night he lies on a cot in a room he is sharing with active crack addict. He closes his eyes to the ugly, and stops his ears to the lies and on a borrowed pillow enters into a deep and peaceful communion with the Lord God and asks him some simple and profound questions.

Those of us in recovery recognize that this is taking an assessment of our day and making amends with it, but for me and my friend it is more than that… God is meeting him in the Here and Now for There and Not Yet.

I am seeing a physical and emotional change in him, and it is transforming me too.

To the ends of the earth...

This past week I went with my wife to a Living Hope Deaf Church.

I love worshipping in a culture that is not my own. I love not fully understanding the language or the culture even though I have been around deafness for almost twenty five years.

Deaf culture is very nuanced and you can’t simply just walk into it. My friend who was preaching the day had befriended a deaf coworker many years ago and took it to heart to learn how to sign. He was the only person who ever learned to sign to him in all the twenty years he worked there.

This visit I was trying to be sensitive but I was amazed with these two… a deaf and blind man being told the sermon via another church member who was signing into his hand.

How badly this man wanted the word of God… oh, for his hunger!

As the deer pants for streams of water,

so my soul pants for you, my God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When can I go and meet with God?

Psalm 42:1-2

under my skin

I was reading Psalm 1 today while I strolled through the fall woods with my dog this morning…

It’s a psalm of “orientation”, and placed where it is at the beginning of the whole collection of psalms it serves let the reader know that an intimacy with God is attained when He becomes the object at the center of your thoughts and desires….

“But his (our) delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night” (ps 1:2)… so I asked the Lord for wisdom here, did he mean Torah, the first five Books of Moses, or torah, the keeping of the law?… and it seemed to me we are called to what Torah and torah are to accomplish… the integration of the will and actions to God.

…and He showed me a tree as I thought, a very large tree, that had been destroyed by some very small beetles that had eaten through the bark…

When we meditate (think about) God day and night, he becomes our lens, and our hearts (interior life) is protected…. the only way into the human heart is to allow things to enter…

and the more we think about God, he honors the intentionality my showing us more and more. He is good like that.

Vision Correction

God changed my Dream-Vision...

... for many years I would close my eyes and see a vision of an ink line drawing of a bird sitting on a wire above a city scape...old-school antenna poking up above rooftops.

Then muffled words would float up, and the bird would cock it's head like a robin listening for worms. He would bounce three times and then tuck it's wings in like a falcon racing towards the noise.

As it got closer to the ground, the blurred words came into focus, and faces began to appear, twisted, with mouths open...and the muffled call became a clear plea for help. As the very last moment, wings would open and a rush of wind would explode from silent feathers and the cries for help would turn to shouts of praise and the black and white canvas would erupt in color.

I used to think that bird was "the church"... but as I awoke today I finally started to see I perhaps I believed it was me, not in a boastful, imperialistic, "mighty-whitey-savior" way...

but it was me in my own power rushing into the pain and suffering I grew up with and saw all around me. Broken families, addiction, anger, violence, weapons of hate, sadness, isolation.

When Jesus claimed my life, I had a bucket of Living Water that I would try and throw on the raging wildfires around me..and my bucket ran dry and I found a hole in my bucket and my ax was too dull, dear Liza, dear Liza... and I could not cut the straw to mend the hole the bucket... so the fire almost burned killed me.

So I sat down beside the waters of Babylon and tried to sing songs of heaven in this foreign land and I heard Jesus singing over me...

...and I am a happy man that my bucket has a Holy Thorn prick and I am convinced it came from The King's Crown as He held me tight.

and now, each week, I simply drive a rented van to a place that has welcomed me as a friend. They wait for me to pull up and then walk over and we take our little boxes out of the van and build a Kingdom that has no walls where Jesus presides over-and-with-us and we worship and eat and cloth each other.

Yesterday I got to watch mom's with kids in their arms and wrapped around their legs hand the Bread of Life to beaming faces, smiley face stickers placed on street-worn jackets produced hymns of laughter and thanks, folks living with section 8 caring for those still waiting...

I preached on the Eucharist..."thanksgiving" as it is translated... and we all came to the Table together and busted out in praise.

I don't mind waiting, take your time

“I don’t mind waiting, take all the time you need….”

Whenever I say that to folks who are helping me anywhere there is always an exhale, a look-up-and-smile, and lifted eyebrows. It’s very uncommon to not be in a rush.

“I’m not the typical American. I’ve done lots of work in many places where it’s a miracle if you get three things done in a day….then we start talking. Like today…

I went in to get new glasses today and I asked the woman helping me about her name.

“It’s Polish” she told me, “I was born in Poland” So I gossiped about my trips to Warsaw working with Ukrainian refugees, and my trip inside Ukraine, and the bomb craters and machine gun trenches and the people and the air raids sirens.

Then I took out my phone and showed her a picture of me and a giant pirogue and both cracked up, then it got solemn again, and we spoke of Jesus and the church and that God is the only hope for the Nations.

Next I rambled off to Costco to give them our money for a couple of thousand hand and toe warmers we will be giving out to our friends downtown this winter… “boy, you sure are planning on a cold winter”…

No, I replied, and started to share with a man who was in the Farmington Fire Department. And I spun tales of people we’ve met and healings we’ve seen and the God-who-saves orchestrating in all.

no, I don’t mind waiting. no, I don’t mind you asking questions. I will gossip about my Jesus anywhere

“I don’t mind waiting, take all the time you need….”

gossiping about Jesus

here is the space I am landing for now… thanks for finding me…and us.

I often hear “we will miss your posts or we will miss you voice. I am not dead, I have just left the room. It’s not you, really, it’s me.

There are too many competing voices in the world, and for a guy like me it’s really difficult at times to be still but I am at a place now where I value stillness and the Voice of The Lamb over all things.

I pray you will join me here, far from the maddening crowd and the echo chamber… or the whirlwind, the fire, and the earthquake….

I’ll be sharing my thoughts and insights and by God’s grace I pray they speak to you.

Removing logs

"Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye' while the log is in your own eye?

You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye,

and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye." (Matthew 7:3-5).

…yesterday I spent a bunch of hours in First Aid training as part of my volunteer work for the town where I live. I’ve been through some very advanced training back in the day so much of it was review but the Holy Spirit was speaking around the instructor…

When you are dealing with a puncture wound and the object is sill embedded in the patient, don’t attempt to remove it as that may cause more damage. Pack around the wound, the object, and transport to ALS (advanced life support)

Jesus isn’t telling us to just yank the sin out of our lives… it will simply come back. He is asking us to listen to his diagnosis…we are blinded by our our ambition and addiction to “being right”..

Come to me, he says, and show me my our wounds. Don’t be afraid, look, here are mine… when we confess our logs John tells us in his first letter (1 John 1:8-9) the Great Ophthalmologist can remove them.

..so that we can see clearly not “their faults” but who God really is and who we really are…

You can’t see how beautiful God is when you have logs in your eye, nor the image and struggles of the one in front of you… God is more concerned in our blindness…do you see?

clearly that we have a bigger problem than the person are judging, that we are blind and cannot see even our own faults, that we cannot take the log out of ourselves.

As part of my own logging, I’m shifting out of social media onto this forum… I get too distracted by specks.