I am the man who has seen misery by the rod of God's own fury;
He has walled me in, so I cannot escape;
I have been deprived of peace and have forgotten what prosperity even is;
My splendor is gone, and all that I had ever hoped for from God.
Yet, because of his great love, I am not consumed.
I wait quietly for your salvation...
A singular desire has rendered me a simpleton in this dark night of the senses, and for once in my life I’m okay with this. I used to hold God in my conscious thoughts like a possession, like a Rubik's Cube I could fumble around with and solve. Having let Him go, he's ventured below the horizon where I can’t meddle with his work.
Read MoreIt’s no small irony that less than a month after posing the question hypothetically, a dear Atheist friend of mine asked me what difference God makes. What need would she have for God when she's able to do all the things she does on her own? That's not God, is it? Or is it supposedly God, rather than her? I was immediately reminded of God's answer when I asked that question myself.
Read MoreI recently read an account of a life-long Atheist who, in her seventies, suddenly began seeing God everywhere she looks. Some might say she's come face to face with her own mortality, but according to her it's something else. It was only when she'd done life, had her successes, raised her children, retired comfortably, and done all the things she felt she was supposed to do that she stepped back, reflected on it, and realized God had been there all along.
Read MoreYou are relentless. I feel empty, as impoverished and barren in spirit as I've ever felt in my life. You have carved out all the falsity in my being, all the sandcastles my hands endeavored to build in the time between shifting tides. The Proxigean Tide promises to wipe away even the memory of what once was.
Read MoreWhen I was a young man, I sought to know God with my mind, to understand secrets, mysteries. If I had any success at all, at best I merely knew about God. I’d succeeded in filling my head with knowledge, facile aphorisms that impressed in church lobbies and university classrooms, but made little impact on anything real inside.
Read More[God] recast this anguish as a blessing, because through it, and it alone, can trust and obedience be forged. It’s a necessary part of finding oneself in Christ. Until then, it’s just words – affirmations uttered in comfort with no basis in reality
Read MoreI believe we’re predisposed to losing the best of all good news because it's so terribly hard to understand and even harder to accept. To think we’re called to follow Jesus into this unitive mystery, to effectively become one with God and thus a unique embodiment of the same divine synthesis Jesus modeled, is challenging on so many levels it's impossible to innumerate in a single sitting.
Read MoreA teacher recently asked what the Spirit convicts me of, thinking I would respond “sin.”
The Spirit convicts me of my own self-condemnation.
I don’t understand. Why would the Spirit convict you for condemning your own sins?
Read MoreCompetition is inherently egoic and the most distilled form of comparison. It’s said it brings out the best in people. It certainly does motivate people to strive, but I believe people are at their best when inspired to come together and work toward something meaningful, something they believe in.
Read MoreI was reading Genesis today when something dawned on me: the garden myth is suggestive of a physiological change in Adam and Eve. Self-awareness, including that of nakedness, and increased pains in childbirth, resulting from the bipedal morphology of hominids, imply a physiological change.
Read MoreIt is said that knowledge is power, but this is only a partial truth, based on the self-proclaimed authority of our Age of Reason. To know of something is not to know it, and to have ideas about something is not to experience it.
Read MoreI thought of the wilds, of the wandering Hebrews, and recognized myself in them. Why, oh why, Lord did you take me out of corporate America, to pull me away from everything I've ever known, only to leave me here, living with my parents, unable to take care of myself, utterly without a home or a purpose, wandering around like an impotent fool?
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