Listen!

Prayer has been one of the most easily ignored aspects of my spiritual life. Ever since I heard the concept of breath prayers, little prayers sent up to God throughout the day, I let those prayers take the place of a more formal prayer time. I told myself that I lived my life in an attitude of prayer, so I didn’t need an actual prayer time.  But honestly, those breath prayers were few and far between, and they usually came at times of need and stress. God, please help me! I need you! Prayer was my lifeline, not a conversation. Not a relationship.

So recently I’ve felt challenged to re-examine my prayer life and what I believe about the nature of prayer. That’s a big topic for a blog post, so for right now I just want to focus on an idea that I got from Too Busy Not to Pray, by Bill Hybels, and this is it:

Listen to God. Literally, listen. With your ears.

For me, talking to God is exceptionally easy. Give me an hour to walk in a quiet, out of the way place and I’ll gladly pour out my heart to him. I’ll work my way through adorations and confessions and thanksgivings and supplications, and throw in anything else I might have on my mind, too. Then comes the amen, and I move on with my life. But is that really a complete prayer? Shouldn’t God be given a chance to speak, too?

Yes, God speaks to his people in many ways, and it’s rarely through an audible voice. He speaks through the Bible, through other Christians, through situations that we go through in our lives. And he also speaks through the Holy Spirit. What better time for the Spirit to speak than during a time of prayer? I think he would, if I would let him get a word in edgewise!

So I’m trying something new. After I read the Bible and I pray to God, telling him all about my needs and blessings and challenges, I stop to listen. I try to clear my mind of any thoughts or sounds or distractions. I listen to the sound of the silence, and I pray, Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. (I Samuel 3:9)

And I wait.

No, I haven’t heard a voice. I’m not sure that I’ve heard anything at all. But I’m giving God those few moments of silence as an open door into my mind, to say whatever he wants to say. It’s a physical act of listening, and I think that’s important. It reminds me that I’m communicating with a real, living being who is completely able to speak back to me. In listening, I expect him to speak.

Moreover, the God who created the whole universe actually, in real time, listens to the words I say to him. That fact alone should bring me to my knees in humility every time I pray! When I set aside time in prayer to be still and listen for God's voice, I take on an attitude of humility. I acknowledge his lordship over me. I am ready to receive any command or rebuke or encouragement that he has for me.

The bottom line is, there are two speakers in a prayer, and one is much more important than the other. I'll give you a hint: it's not me.

United with Beauty

One of the things I love most about reading is finding my own experiences written in someone else’s words.

Two years ago, while staying in a hostel by the English coast, I got up early to sit on the cliffs by myself and stare out at the ocean. I wrote this in my journal:

Right now I’m seated between two cliffs, not far from the hostel. The morning light on the water is beautiful, the air is still, and I can hear birds calling to each other across the fields behind me. I wish I could do more than look at this scene. I wish I could fully experience it, pull in its beauty, breathe it in and make it my own.

I want to run into the ocean, but I know that won’t satisfy me. It’s not enough to stand on the cliffs or to fly above the water like so many gulls that have passed overhead. And it’s certainly not enough to try to capture it with my camera. I cannot fulfill this strange desire to somehow consume this beauty and really partake of it. I can only remain still and look.

That morning I praised God in wonder at the beauty he had created, but I was still aware that the pleasure I felt was incomplete, that it fell short of what my soul really desired.

Then today I read an essay by CS Lewis that miraculously gave words and meaning to what I had been feeling:

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that bounty is enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. … That is why poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of a murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather the greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in and through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.

The essay, The Weight of Glory, is absolutely worth reading in its entirety, but this passage particularly struck me as it spoke so clearly about a feeling I had struggled to express. Lewis’ words not only validated my experience, but they tapped into an unspoken revelation and made it speak. Of course I was not satisfied by merely looking at physical beauty! I was created to be intimately united with beauty. Not the beauty of the earth – that is only a symbol, a poor reflection. It served its purpose to point me to a higher beauty. My soul cries out to be perfectly filled with the beauty of Christ, to put on his glory, and it will never be satisfied with anything else.

"Sojourner" is a weird word

Well, if I’m going to keep going with this blog (and I think I am) I thought I might as well take this opportunity to explain why I chose the title a stranger and a sojourner, since it’s a little vague, and probably more than a little bit pretentious to use such an antiquated word. Oh, well. I hate titling things, and I was so annoyed when trying to come up with a title for this blog that I almost gave up on the whole idea. But there is a reason behind the title I finally chose, and this is it.

Lately I’ve been struggling with a feeling of homelessness. Not in the sense that I don’t have a place to live, but in the sense that I don’t have a real home anymore. My parents moved out of my childhood home while I was still in college and, on top of the fact that I haven’t lived any one place longer than three months for the past four years, it has made me feel unsettled. In the midst of seemingly constant transitions, I crave the comfort and security of a physical place I can call my home.

One day after my parents moved I was trying to express these feelings to my dad, and he reminded me that we are strangers and sojourners in this world and that as Christians we aren’t meant to belong here. Our citizenship is in heaven, not on Earth. At the time, I was a little irritated because I was just looking for someone to listen to me and appreciate what I was going through. I thought it was a perfectly natural human desire to want to belong somewhere, and to mourn the loss of a place that held so much significance and memory for me.

But in the year or so since then I’ve often been reminded of that conversation, and I’ve come to see the wisdom of my dad’s words. Of course the concept of seeing heaven as our home is not a new one, but when he put it in the context of letting go of my desire to belong somewhere, it took on a new meaning for me. In a way, this feeling of transience is not a feeling I should be fighting or resisting. I should always feel a little unsettled in this world. I’m a stranger and a sojourner, travelling far from my home.

The phrase strangers and sojourners comes from the King James Version of the Bible, and it’s used often to describe the people of God. From the Israelites living in Egypt to the New Testament believers looking toward their heavenly home, God’s people lived as strangers and sojourners on Earth. They were strangers among the people they lived with, but they had faith and hope in the home that God had prepared for them.

In contemporary versions, this description is usually translated aliens and strangers or foreigners and strangers. But I chose a stranger and a sojourner because I thought it sounded cooler and more unique for a blog title. And more seriously, I think the word sojourner has a fuller connotation than alien or foreigner. The word means a short-term traveler, someone visiting temporarily. When applied to Christians, it expresses the fact that not only is Earth not our home, but our time travelling here is short.

So from now on I want to view myself as a sojourner. I don’t want to let myself build an identity through my earthly life or try to find comfort and security here, because this isn’t where I belong. And knowing that my time on Earth is brief, I only want to focus on those goals that will have meaning when I go home. I want to keep my ties to material things and physical places loose, so that I’m always ready to go wherever God wants me. And I want to wait expectantly for the day when my sojourn on Earth will come to an end. Come quickly, Lord Jesus!

My Ebenezer Stone

With the myriad of blogs available for people to read, I have never before felt the need to add my voice to the blogging world. In my more cynical moods, I believe that there is truly nothing new under the sun, and that I certainly don’t have anything unique enough to say to merit anyone’s attention.

That being said, I am writing this blog entry, so there must be a reason. And there is. For the last five months since I graduated from college, I have been unemployed. In this economy, that fact is not exactly shocking, but that doesn’t make the reality any easier. Unemployment has been one of the most painful experiences I have gone through in my life. Yet it has also come with great blessings, and that is the reason why I am writing this blog entry. It may be the only entry I end up writing, but I felt that I needed to express to others the work God is doing in my life, and this seemed to be a good means to do it.

I will be the first to admit that my sufferings, compared with what other people around the world endure, seem small, even petty. Still, my pain is real. For what seems like an endless amount of time, I have been waiting to hear about a job that I desperately want. To me, this job means getting everything that I want and escaping everything I hate about what my life is right now. But even though I have waited expectantly, day after day, no answer has come. No decision has been made, and they can’t tell me how long it will be before I know. It could be weeks, months. But I don’t have months to wait.

It has been this way all summer. Waiting. Wait on the Lord. His timing is best. He will provide. So I waited. I thought I was doing so well. Look at me, I trust God completely! He will reward me for my faith! Then, this week, I was sure that I was finally going to get my reward. I was going to be sure of security and happiness and hope. But surety didn’t come. All that remained was more waiting, more horrible uncertainty, stretching out endlessly before me. And I collapsed. I stood in front of my house and I cried and I screamed at God. Over and over I said, I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do this anymore. All my patience, all my willpower, all my desperate hoping was gone. I couldn’t stand the thought of waiting in torturous uncertainty for one more minute. All the pain of the last few months swept over me. Pain of hurt pride from not being able to find a job, pain of separation from my friends and family, pain of fear for the future, pain of living on other people’s charity, pain of losing my earthly hopes and dreams. Pain of unworthiness and emptiness and loneliness. You’ve taken everything away from me, I cried to God, though I knew it wasn’t true. I still have many, many blessings. But I have keenly felt my losses, too. Why are you doing this to me?! I cried. Don’t you love me?! Please, make it stop, I begged.

I didn’t hear an answer. Finally, the tears stopped and I began to think of Job. He received no explanation from God for his sufferings, but he praised him anyway. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord. I knew that I could not turn my back on God, that even in all my pain he was still everything that he is and was and always will be. Good, just, all-knowing, all-powerful, merciful, providential. I knew that I must be grateful and praise him no matter what the circumstance, no matter the hurt I felt. So I praised God, even though my heart felt hollow.

I truly didn’t believe I could wait one more day for something to change. But, amazingly, God has given me the strength to keep waiting somehow. A friend told me once that forgiveness is a daily action. Well, I think trust is, too. Every day I wake up and I trust God to carry me through to the next day. I must trust that he will take care of me, that he has a plan for me, and that he will equip me to persevere through whatever trials he sends me.

It’s still hard, so hard, to have my faith tested this way. God has been testing my faith all summer, but this week the testing hit a new intensity. My emotions were stretched to the breaking point, and I cried in the arms of the one who was testing me. Shaping me. Refining me by fire.

I don’t know how I am able to say this, but I realized today that I am glad for this testing. I don’t mean glad in an intellectual way, in the sense that I recognize that testing is for my own good and that it must be endured, in the sense that I praise God through suffering because I know that I should. That is how I have approached testing in the past, always wanting desperately for the testing to end. I tried to quickly learn the lesson God was teaching me and looked for ways to numb the pain until it finally left. But now I really, honestly, am grateful that God is putting me through this. I don’t know how that is possible, but it’s true. I’m glad! It’s so amazing to read, Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, and to finally know what it means! I am actually, emotionally glad that I am being tested. I wouldn’t change one thing about this summer. I wouldn’t give up a single moment of it now, even though it has brought me so much pain. I have joy because I’ve never felt so close to God in my life. I’ve never needed him like I do now, or at least, I’ve never felt my need of him like I do now. I’ve never had this kind of desire for reading the Bible and praying and singing and memorizing verses. To be honest, I’m afraid now for the testing to end. I’m afraid that if God gives me comfort, if he gives me a job and money and an apartment and friends, I will wander away from him again. I won’t feel the same desperate need of him, and look to him for every meal. I’ll forget what it’s like to be incapable of making it through a single day without his help.

Yet I know that this is the very reason that God is putting me through this test; so that I won’t forget. He is changing my character and conforming it to his own image, so that I am ready for whatever he has planned next. He does have a plan for me, and he will provide what is best. So let this entry be my Ebenezer stone, to look back on and remember. May I never forget the faithfulness of the Lord.