John of the Cross. Brilliant. I’m not sure if there’s much else to say than that.

I am presently three days into “a 40-day journey in the company of John of the Cross”. The book, “You Set My Spirit Free”, is arranged and paraphrased by David Hazard. I do not yet know what days 4-40 hold, but if they are anything like days 1-3, I think this one is worth searching out.

The words of today’s reading are still drifting along the surface of my thoughts. Here are a couple of sentences that nicely convey the general message of this chapter:

“The more we allow love to enter, the more we grow to love others with our whole will–even when they treat us miserably.”

“I tell you, acting in love when others are not acting in love toward you–this is of the highest value to your soul.”

And I am utterly convinced.

This is where the Holy Spirit has been leading me… into love. He is teaching me to desire the most excellent way. He is exposing my selfishness, my coldness, my impatience, my bitterness, and the ways “I barricade and protect myself against others… and mostly against [Him].” (Borrowing that quote from an ouchy little prayer at the end of the chapter.) He is tenderizing my icy heart with the flame of His love. Opening my heart to Him, exposing it to that fire, is the wisest thing I can do. I am so grateful for His leadership.

That is why I am being so deeply moved by today’s reading. It simply and beautifully articulates the lessons that my Teacher has been so persistently unfolding in these last months. The Spirit of Truth has not relented in drawing my stubborn, calloused, and weak heart into wisdom. And amidst the tears and the immense pain of the journey, He has continually manifested Himself as my Comforter and the source of life, the One who sustains and enables me.

Holy Spirit, teach me! You are able to present me faultless. You know how to lead me. Do not relent until You bring it to completion. I commit my way to You. You who are able and faithful. Your words are faithful and true. Bring them to pass.

John 14-16 is presently one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Jesus’ words. He speaks a great deal about three of my favorite topics: Holy Spirit, hope, and love.

Actually, now that I think of it, the Holy Spirit and hope are THE two topics that I am actually highlighting in my current Bible. And love is something I have been seriously focusing on for the last 5 months. No wonder I love this passage so much!

Throughout His dialogue, Jesus elaborates several times on the immanent sending of the Holy Spirit and how this person of the Trinity would serve and help us. (Ah! God’s humility!) I love it when one person of the Trinity talks about another person of the Trinity. They actually do it quite a bit. It’s beautiful! If anyone knows about God and has something to say about God… it’s God.

The hope topic isn’t necessarily evident in a quick scan of the passage. This is primarily because he uses the language of peace, joy, and believing.

And then we have love. Jesus keeps coming back to this theme. And He especially focuses on defining love as obedience.

This post was originally going to be about obedience. I was having one of those really good conversations with the Holy Spirit that felt like it needed to overflow into verbal expression. But then, as I sat down to write… I realized that I wanted to talk about a lot of things from this passage. And that I was so enamored with the other two subjects that I could not leave them alone in order to maintain some level of focus for this post.

So we have, instead, an introduction. I have decided, in my failed attempt to stay on the one topic, to start a tiny series of posts on John 14-16.

I’m not looking at the passage right now. In fact, I haven’t for a few days. So right now I am simply talking from what has stuck with me in the last few months as I have been looking at it and talking to the Lord about it.

From those recollections of the things that have most struck me, I would say that these three topics are essentially the three main themes of this passage. If I sat down and looked at it more analytically, I might change my stance a bit. But, my study of the Bible happens in the context of relationship and primarily exists as dialogue with God about God. (Let us all remember, prayer and love are literally my primary occupation. Sigh… I love life as an intercessory missionary. Apart from being at the core of my job description, though, these are truly what we are called to as Christians.)

So, as I talk about this passage, I will be emphasizing the things that have been the highlights of these “conversations” with God. So, whether hope, Holy Spirit, and love=obedience are the three main themes of this passage or not… I can almost guarantee that they will be the three main themes of this little series.

I’m not going to make any promises about how quickly these posts will be written. I am simply going to state my intent to write them and follow through with that at whatever pace my schedule allows.

I also cannot make any guarantees concerning the length of the series. I anticipate that there will probably be three posts, one for each topic. But… then again… I anticipated, upon sitting down to blog, that I was writing one post about obedience. And now… here I am, introducing a series. So who knows what this will look like when all is said and done.

In any case, I am excited about it. This is the stuff that is moving my heart. I love to talk about the things that move my heart. (Now that I have a heart that moves and all. Thank You, God, for reviving the heart that I spent so many years trying to numb and deaden!)

Yay fun!

I realized yesterday that I have been accidentally studying Song of Solomon for the last few weeks. I REALLY didn’t mean to.

First, Anne had me working on a bunch of Song of Solomon commentaries, books, and articles that Mike had used in some of his research. I’m still in the middle of a large bin full of them. (This project may never end. My only hope is that a higher-priority project will put this one on pause for a time.)

Because of what I am doing, I’ve had to read, skim, and even type large portions of the text of these resources. While I have not sat down with the intent of taking in any whole book or article, I have certainly absorbed a lot of what has been before my eyes this entire time.

Despite the wide variety of opinions and angles that these authors have taken on these texts, it is somehow all working together in my mind and really impacting me (in a variety of ways).

At first, I was slightly annoyed. Helping a friend plan her wedding (which I am actually delighted to do) and spending more than 30 hours each week staring at the Song of Solomon did not seem like ideal tasks for someone who was walking through very painful boy-related things. (Lest everyone jump to conclusions, these very painful boy-related things are not about Richard. No… please don’t try to figure out the private details of my and other people’s lives at this moment.) But God has certainly used the project to move my heart, on numerous occasions. Sometimes (read, often-times) this started from the place of intense pain and then moved into deep heart-impact. (Like I’ve mentioned before, God really knows how to use our pain.)

(Just a quick side note, this task has had its painfully awkward moments as well. Honestly, I’m not too squeamish around sex-talk… something that abounds in writings about the Song of Solomon. I won’t get into details about the one book, but I thought the thing was going to kill me. It should have been labeled with serious “Stay away!” warnings for single women. That’s all I have to say.)

And then we have the prayer room.

I did decide, a few weeks ago, to start going to Cassie Campbell’s worship with the word on my night off. I did it for the sake of my heart… and it has really paid off. She is currently doing Song of Solomon. This would be my one intentional step in the direction of Song of Solomon.

However, I have also accidentally stumbled across a lot of this book while watching the prayer room webstream. Just in the last few days, both non-NightWatch sets that I randomly chose to watch from the webstream ended up being Song of Solomon worship with the word sets. (These are from teams that I don’t usually see/hear.)

All of these prayer room sets, (Cassie’s and the two other teams’) have made me cry. A lot. And I have encountered the Lord pretty profoundly.

I don’t think I’ve ever accidentally studied a book before. In all truth, though, I am pretty sure it didn’t just happen. SOMEONE was being pretty intentional about pursuing my heart with all of this.

I wanted to write a post about the things that are on my mind. I was going to call it “Grateful” because I am full of gratitude right now.

Then I realized that a lot of what was on my mind was really intimidating and I was scared. Change of plans: I was going to call it “Grateful & Scared”.

Then I realized that a lot of what was on my mind was…

I could keep going like this for a while. We’ll just stop there and sum it up with this: I am feeling A LOT of emotions right now. (I’m feeling. Let’s just pause for a moment to thank the Lord for that one. My heart is alive. So very alive. That wasn’t always true.)

When I said that I would stop there and sum it up, I didn’t mean to stop the entire post. At least I didn’t think that I did.

I started to write about the things that are on my mind.

I realized that this wasn’t stuff to blog about. Not yet.

I highlighted and deleted huge chunks of text.

I stopped and realized that there was nothing left but a play-by-play skeletal description of an event that was never allowed to… happen. Happening is to events as living is to organisms. It seems that there was no event after all.

The post could not bear witness, itself, to the fact that it nearly existed. It could not bear witness because it did not exist. Nonexistent anythings are nothing at all. Something must exist to truly be or do anything.

I judged it as right to leave this. I saw it fitting to leavesome evidence of a thing that nearly existed but was never allowed.

Here this is. And here that isn’t.

Or is it?

What I am about to write is actually what motivated me to finally sit down and write my last, introductory post.

As I have been setting myself to behold God’s love and pursue the way of love in my own life, I was recently carried further in the journey by unexpected means. I had a unique opportunity to witness someone else choosing love in a profound way. In fact, I’m not sure that I’ve ever witnessed that kind of love in this measure.

In seeing such incredible beauty, I naturally desire to declare the identity and the specific choices and actions of this one who so remarkably chose the most excellent way, that you might behold this beauty with me. But for more than one reason, I cannot do that.

Love does not parade itself… and I have not been given authority to expose it, either. There is also a facet of this love that finds beauty in it’s hiddenness and secrecy… the silent suffering and sacrifice that demands no acknowledgment or recognition.

Thus, I am going to be a little vague. (Nothing new to this blog.) And I am going to refer to this person using “he/him/his”, as I have done with past posts about anonymous individuals.

“He” might be a woman. And I’m really not worried about you guessing. The small handful of people who will know who I am talking about will find it blaringly obvious. I’m pretty sure the rest of you don’t even have a chance. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste my energy trying to guess who I am talking about and how I know about the choices they made.

And so it begins…Love is patient, long-suffering. And this one that I am describing truly suffered long. The pain was real and he did not waver. He stood, steady, in the midst of prolonged pain. Rather than numb his heart to the pain (choosing resignation and the kind of death that runs contrary to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Life), he leaned into the Comforter. He kept his heart open and alive and let his pain be an escort into fellowship with God.

Obviously, I cannot see fully into this individual’s experience. I am not him, nor am I God. I do not know the full depth of the wound that was inflicted, and I do not know the full extent of the struggle that he faced. But I know that he suffered.

I also have not seen the full extent of the battle. I do not know how much he stumbled or how difficult it was to choose love at various points along the way. I know that it was not walked out perfectly. I know that it was not easy. I know that he surely failed along the way and had moments of weakness. But the Lord’s declaration over this individual is that he has loved well.

Loving when someone has wounded you is not easy. Loving when love is not reciprocated is painful. It wounds further. It hurts deeply. Loving when the one you are obediently choosing to love does not (and probably will not ever) recognize the pain you are feeling, the sacrifice you are making, and the death you are facing can be excruciating.

And he said yes to it. He endured the pain. He leaned into the Lord. And God matured love in him and gave him incredible strength that can be derived from no other source.

In the midst of injustice, rejection, wounding, and deep pain, he chose love. He showed kindness where he had not received kindness. He was extravagant in his kindness toward one who was completely undeserving.

This was a choice before the Lord that went mostly unseen. It was not publicly rewarded. It was not recognized. In part, it was not even received. Love was quiet… secret… a hidden choice that was not proud or boastful.

He did not push for his own rights or his own interest. He instead preferred this unworthy other where opportunity arose. He chose what would most help the unworthy one. Even when it was painful. Even when it was costly. He did not push for what was best for him. He did not dishonor, even when there was nothing deserving of honor.

Where there was occasion for envy, he chose instead to bless. He truly did not delight in evil but rejoiced with the truth. He chose wisdom and imitation of Christ. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And he did. (Another translation says, “always protects”… also true.) He truly persevered!

I hardly know how to describe the impact that simply witnessing this love had upon me.

On one level, it was REALLY provoking and encouraging. He is just as weak as I am. He is just as human as I am. But he said yes to love and found the grace to persevere. God gave him all the strength he needed to love well.

But the impact went even beyond that. I was thinking about how undeserved it was. I was thinking about what a painful choice it was. I was thinking about how difficult it can be to love and how easily we can choose a lesser path. And I began to recognize it as one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

Beauty began to move me deeply. I was struck with revelation. This love is merely an imperfect picture. It falls so short of the love of God. It was just a small expression of what is perfect and pure in God’s love.

And suddenly my heart was getting turned completely inside-out. I was receiving God’s love in a way I never had before. It was impacting me profoundly, touching things in my heart that had never really been opened up to be touched before.

I was having a pretty bad week (have I mentioned lately that the Lord is really requiring love of me?), but I was carried to this place of receiving God’s strengthening, transforming love in a way that truly sustains and truly satisfies. (It didn’t stop my bad week, but it kept the pain from killing me.)

And all because a simple, weak man chose love. All because someone said yes to the invitation of the Lord and pursued the most excellent way. And God let me see it.

I have been spending A LOT of time in 1 Corinthians 13 and 14 lately. It’s kind of creating a new vision statement for my life. In fact, the intensity with which the Lord has been directing me in the ever-famous love passage is what led to my little description in the new box under my profile picture on facebook:

I am choosing the most excellent way. It’s going to kill me, but it has to. I will pursue perfection until faith, hope, and love are the truest things that can be said of me. I WILL love, at the end of the day. God lives in me. It’s not in vain.

Ultimately, it is a journey into discovering God’s heart in ways that far surpass anything I have ever seen or understood before. But this journey, setting myself to gaze on the beauty of His love, is also the means of my transformation. It’s a life-long pursuit, not just a fun new study focus when I open my Bible. And it is a daily discovering of my need for God, my need for the power of the Holy Spirit in my daily life. I really do want faith, hope, and love to be that which is truest of me, and I’m not going to get there without Him.

Recently, the Lord began asking me to choose love in a couple of situations where my original action-plan was… well, not love. It wasn’t the first time he gave me a special invitation to actually obey the command to love. So I knew how painful it was going to be. But there was such grace on it, so I said yes. (Not to mention, obedience and responding to God’s invitations are generally… wisdom.)

I began to spend long periods of time in 1 Corinthians 13, just crying and growing in wonder… and conviction. Honestly, I was getting more sting from 1 Corinthians 13 than mushy-gushy happy feelings. WAY more sting. But it was good. And I was beginning to make more and more of those little choices in the direction of love.

Honestly, most of my time in the Word, since moving to IHOP, has revolved around the revelation God gave of himself in Exodus 34:6 – the Lord God gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. (I just kind of smooshed together a few translations there… I’ve been singing it for enough years now that I figure I am allowed to just pseudo-quote.) God’s patience, compassion, steadfast love, and faithfulness are the constant testimony of the whole of Scripture. You cannot escape these themes. This is who God is and how He relates to us.

So… fixing my gaze on God’s love was nothing new. I am simply continuing in that same pursuit. We’ve just reached the point where it is starting to get REALLY personal and REALLY painful.

I’m not gonna lie… the process of my transformation sure doesn’t feel like it’s “from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3). I tend to associate really positive (and shiny) things with the word glory. Not death. Not failure. And not weakness. Oh how much I have to learn!

So, as I’m stumbling along in this wholesale attempt to follow the most excellent way, you are probably going to see a lot of love-talk on here. And you can probably expect that it is going to posses virtually nothing of a gooey nature. As Wendy keeps reminding me, love is death.

I don’t really have time to write much about Good Friday, but it seemed like I should at least get something in before Easter (although it is technically Sunday already).

The service on Friday was amazing.

I knew they would be wearing all black. I didn’t expect it to impact me at all. It’s just a different color. I was wrong.

They looked so plain and bare and mournful. Just like the stripped altar at the front of the room. Plain… bare… empty… lacking. I guess I never consciously thought about it, but they usually come out in white or beautiful, bright colors. I had never seen these people stand at the front of the room with no ornamentation… in simple, dull black. There was such an evident absence… such a clear lack.

I knew that they would prostrate themselves once they reached the front of the room. I honestly expected it to feel a little cheesy. I expected to be somewhat amused, whilst yelling at myself internally for being so irreverent. I was wrong.

The moment was so somber. There was no processional music, as in a normal service. They simply entered in silence as we knelt between the pews. When they fell on their faces at the front of the room, my heart turned over within me. As they lingered there in that posture, the sobriety deepened.

The whole service was amazing. Tears kept welling up in my eyes and escaping in little streams down my face. My heart was so violently active. It was so sensitive to the constant stimuli that would not leave it in peace. The songs that we sang. The passion reading. The scripture readings. (The book of Hebrews is always sure to do something to my heart.) The entrance of the cross into the room.

I had spent much of the previous night in Psalm 22. As the congregation read through the first half of Psalm 22, my heart could hardly be contained within my chest. The depth of the impact of these words was immeasurable.

Most of the rest of my time through the Maundy Thursday vigil the night before had been spent in Exodus. The Lord had moved my heart with His patience and compassion on the people of Israel. How faithful He was to them… how undeservedly kind He was to them. And then all of those things from Exodus came and struck a blow at me that I had never anticipated…

Oh my people, what have I done unto thee? Or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

Because I brought thee forth from the land of Egypt: Thou hast prepared a Cross for thy Savior. …

Because I led thee through the desert for forty years, and fed thee with manna, and brought thee into a land exceedingly good: Thou hast prepared a Cross for thy Savior. …

I indeed did plant thee, O my vineyard, with exceeding fair fruit: And thou art become very bitter unto me. …

I did scourge Egypt with her first born for thy sake: And thou hast scourged me and delivered me up. I led thee forth out of Egypt, drowning Pharaoh in the Red Sea: And thou hast delivered me up unto the chief priests. …

I did open the sea before thee: And thou has opened my side with a spear. I did go before thee in a pillar of cloud: And thou hast led me unto the judgment hall of Pilate. …

I did feed thee with manna in the desert: And thou hast stricken me with blows and scourges. I did give thee to drink the water of life from the rock: And thou hast given me to drink but gall and vinegar. …

I did give thee a royal scepter: And thou hast given unto my head a crown of thorns. I did raise thee on high with great power: And thou hast hanged me upon the gibbet of the Cross.

Oh my people, what have I done unto thee? Or wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against me.

(Snippets taken from the Good Friday Liturgy.)

And he chose it. He went willingly. The Son offered Himself up. The Father betrayed the Son unto death. For us and for our salvation. This exceedingly merciful, kind, patient, and compassionate God. This one who had shown nothing but goodness to us came and, willfully, was met with reproach. ABOUNDING IN STEADFAST LOVE!!! He was betrayed by us and suffered for us. He saw fit to come and have compassion on us. He saw fit to come and deliver us from bondage. He died, at our hands, that He might overcome death. For us and for our salvation.

What kind of God is this? What kind of King is this?

Even communion was altered according to the attitude of the evening. The cushions on which we usually knelt were gone. Just a cold, hard ledge and a wooden rail. It was as uncomfortable as the words we spoke and sang all evening.

We ended by reading a prayer aloud and then left in silence.

The silence created a space where this phrase from the prayer just hung in my mind: “And [give] to us sinners everlasting life and glory…”

What kind of God is this?

With all that is within me, I do love and adore Him.

Well, here is the latest in search engine queries that led others to this blog.

As usual, I had an abundance of searches for “IHOP cult” and the like. In fact, only one day in the last week did not involve such a search. I also had several searches related to topics in my “Marriage and Celibacy” posts. And there were even searches for people (Sarah Stroer, Matt Hartke, and Brooke Turner) that brought others here.

But this is the one that REALLY caught my eye…

can an intj love someone

OUCH!!!

As an INTJ myself, I assure you, we can.

Don’t want to take my word for it? I’ll leave you with some words from David Keirsey, who wrote Please Understand Me and Please Understand Me II, two excellent books about what we typically discuss as the Meyers-Briggs Personality Types. …

In his description of the INTJ Mastermind, Keirsey has a very lengthy paragraph describing INTJs and their relationships. He describes several characteristics that may give rise to the “Can an INTJ love someone?” question. Selection of a mate is typically a rational process. We tend to prefer head over heart in making decisions. We only enjoy physical contact with a very select few. And we are not very emotionally expressive. (Yes, these describe me quite well…)

But, in concluding this paragraph on INTJs and their relationships, Keirsey says:

“For all that, however, Masterminds are deeply emotional, even romantic types, and once they have decided a person is worthy of them, they make passionate and loyal mates, almost hypersensitive to signals of rejection from their loved one.”

Yep. It’s true.

So, in my “Of Man…” post, I explained how my pain and frustrations with a friend led me to a place of worship and gratitude.

This primarily happened in two ways:

Sufficient Grace, Patience , and Faithfulness.

As I struggle to choose rightly and keep my heart open, I find myself grateful for His leadership and the grace He has given to enable me to stand. It is a struggle, but I can succeed… because He has made a way. And I am thankful for His faithfulness. The fact that I can trust Him with my heart and simply rest in Him, rather than scramble to put up walls to try to defend myself. Resting in the Lord is a very peaceful place to be.

I love His mercy. I love the way that He gently leads me. Though I struggle, He is committed to working perfection in me.

Also, as I struggle to continue to choose love, I am awed by the way that He continually loves me in my worst moments of unfaithfulness and inconsistency. I am thankful for His patient love.

Contrast — His love is NOT wavering or inconsistent

The thing that was most moving my heart that night was the reality that He is abounding in steadfast love. He is not inconsistent. He does not offer love and then withdraw it. He does not show kindness one day and then suddenly turn.

This is one of the things that the Lord declares of Himself when He speaks to Moses in Exodus 34. “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, longsuffering and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” Abounding in steadfast love.

It is not a fickle love. It is not a changing love. It is steady and faithful. Hesed… loyal love, faithful love, covenant love. I love this about the Lord. He doesn’t shine the light of His countenance and then suddenly hide it. His delight and His loving gaze are steady… fixed… unwavering. He is the faithful God, faithful and steady in His love toward us.

As I was soaking in this truth, it brought some other things to mind as well…

Our loose use of the “dark night of the soul”

We too loosely define and throw around the idea of the “dark night of the soul”. If we’re having a bad day and are in any way dulled, we like to jump and say that the Lord has randomly withdrawn His presence to produce hunger and longing within us. Like we were going along one day, doing really well in the sight of the Lord, and He went, “Oh… I know! I’ll hide and make them miserable so that they can grow!”

Most of the time, we don’t feel the Lord because we are distracted and dulled. Our hearts are so filled and consumed with lesser pleasures and lesser concerns. We get distracted by all of those things that Solomon went to great lengths to describe to us as mere vanity. Or we are dulled because of our repeated efforts to shield ourselves from pain by putting up protecting walls or shutting our hearts down in ways that don’t let us truly feel anything. Sin, too, is remarkably dulling.

When we so freely turn our self-inflicted dullness into such a “dark night”, we make God out to be someone who easily and frequently gives and takes away His affections. One who plays with us. One whose love cannot be trusted. One whose affections are not steady and are not faithful.

This creates huge contradictions about who God is. But we will generally reconcile these by explaining it away by trying to convince our troubled hearts with logical but weak arguments: “He is doing it for the sake of our growth and later benefit. So it’s still good.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am not about to say that the Lord doesn’t hide His face. There are times when we will certainly not feel His nearness, love, and delight. Because He is just and faithful to discipline. When we are walking in outright sin, the Lord will, in His kindness, hide His face. What I am thinking of here is illustrated pretty well in Psalm 107.

Psalm 107 gives a couple of examples where men choose wickedness and God afflicts them because of their rebellion, transgression, iniquity. In their suffering they cry out to the Lord and He swiftly comes in His mercy to deliver them from all of their distresses and trouble. And then He blesses abundantly… because God likes to do stuff like that. The whole process, afflicting and all, is God’s steadfast love, if you ask me.

So… when it comes to things like discipline and judgement… sure… the Lord will hide His face. I’m just saying that, as a general rule, He doesn’t just hide His face for fun.

There are other ways in which I think we kind of get this “dark night” thing a little off. I’ve heard so many people teach that God withdraws for the sake of creating longing, so that we feel our need for Him. We become dissatisfied when He seems to be gone and hunger is thus awakened. Then, He can come and answer that hunger and longing and draw us deeper into Himself.

Rather, I think that the hunger comes first. God enlarges our capacity. He brings us to the place where our experience of His nearness is not quite enough… where we become desperate to know more of Him. It is an expanding and broadening. So He doesn’t have to run away or pull back to make us dissatisfied. (This would be the equivalent of a girl who plays games and especially plays hard to get.)

We simply have that hunger awakened within us that knows there is something deeper and has to have it. So we don’t necessarily have any less of God. We just can’t be sated any longer with what we are already touching of God. So… hearts enlarged and capacity expanded leads to awakened hunger leads to crying out to God and being met with His eager desire to draw us deeper.

So… another partial recap and conclusion of that last bit. I do not believe that God is particularly fond of inflicting the “dark night of the soul” by withdrawing His love and nearness for the sake of making us want Him more. He will awaken hunger within us, but that generally happens as the result of experiencing His lovingkindness… not ceasing to experience it. He is a God of faithful, steady love. In that faithful, covenant love, He will also afflict us when we are choosing sin… to lead us to that place of crying out to Him so that He can extend His mercy.

(A side-note of sorts: God, unlike men, does not have to put up walls to protect Himself. He has amazing strength and confidence. He feels the pain of our rebellion and rejection, but He doesn’t distance Himself off from us to protect Himself from feeling it. God doesn’t need protecting. He has the strength to endure that pain… and does to a far greater extent than I think we can imagine.)

OK, all of that may have been remarkably unclear. I tried!

Did someone manage to grasp a good nugget out of all of that jumbled “I think that what I am trying to say” mess?

Have you ever had the experience of your frustrations with a person leading you to the place of gratitude with God? Usually, it’s a case of contrasting God and men. I, for one, am quite pleased with the Lord’s ability (and tendency) to use someone else’s brokenness and immaturity and the pain they unintentionally inflict upon me to lead me to the place of a grateful and adoring heart.

Last night was a big one for me. It began with hurt and frustration, but ended in the place of worship. It hurt a lot, so I spent a lot of time dialoguing with the Lord about it.

This post is part one of two. Tomorrow, I intend to make some time to write about that latter half of what God did in my heart with the experiences and decisions that I describe below. Tomorrow’s post… “Of God… Abounding in Steadfast Love.” 

I will not describe the situation in much detail… and I will certainly not mention a name. But a general explanation may be helpful. For the sake of simplicity, I will be using masculine pronouns and such. We are just going to turn the person into a he. “He” may be male. “He” may be female. I figure you don’t really need to know.

My experiences with this person have been remarkably inconsistent lately. One moment, he is my friend. The next, I feel like I’ve become the pestering younger sibling or obnoxious neighbor kid who just won’t leave you alone. One day he was warm and friendly. The next, he was cold and in all ways inaccessible and distant to me.

Do you know that feeling where it seems like the person is exasperated to give you 10 seconds of their attention? When his body language and tone of voice clearly communicate the fact that he really doesn’t want to be talking with you at the moment? When he seems to intentionally ignore you and kind of push you away? Where it seems like every effort you make to relate to that person is only wearying and burdensome him?

This was the nature of last night’s brief encounter with this person. It built upon other recent interactions and continued in the general theme of the last several days. Cold and removed. Distant. Walled off. Wearied and burdened by my presence.

Such alternation of hot and cold tends to be incredibly painful, just as it is with actual temperatures. Hot or cold water is much more painful when it directly follows its opposite. The cold would almost be bearable if it were not constantly contrasted with the hot. The alternation is also quite confusing.

If you heart is open and able to feel and be touched by others, warmth and kindness stir the heart and awaken hope for genuine friendship and the opportunity to love one another freely. When the person becomes cold and distant in some way, it can be immensely painful. It is never fun to perceive that you have been walled out of someone’s heart. When your love is rejected in any way or on any level, it is going to hurt. The giving and withdrawing repeatedly generate and crush hope.

When done intentionally, I am convinced that to give affection and then withhold it is an act of utter cruelty. This is not love at all. And it has massive power to wound.

Because of the quickly turning affection, my heart wants to draw back and put up walls to protect itself. I want to abandon efforts of friendship and stop choosing to love this person… because then he cannot reject my love. I want to shield myself from being able to feel with withdrawal of affection. (I am not dependent upon it; I do not expect it. But its absence DOES hurt. It does not go unfelt.) The constant changes leave me confused… and feeling incredibly vulnerable.

The easiest (and “safest”) option I have is to guard myself. To put up walls so that I cannot be touched. To insulate myself against the alternations of hot and cold so that I barely experience either. To make it so that the person cannot penetrate… cannot affect me… cannot move or touch me in any way.

As ideal as this may seem, it is incredibly unhealthy. It is deadening and dulling. It runs contrary to God’s desire to awaken and revive my heart. He wants me to be alive. To feel emotions, as He feels.

I’ve been here SEVERAL times in the last year. Seriously… I have constantly had to make this decision and choose to trust the Lord… to rest in His goodness. To let Him be my refuge and trust Him with my heart. I have repeatedly said no to the temptation to shut down or dull my heart.

It hurts a lot when my love is rejected. It hurts a lot when I am shut out. It hurts a lot when love is given and then withdrawn. But God is my portion. He will meet and comfort me in the pain. And He will give me grace to stand and will sustain my heart, even when my pain is crushing me.

In making this choice again and again, my heart truly has been coming alive in amazing ways. I don’t know how to articulate it. (And I’ve tried several times already.) But saying yes to Him and trusting Him has increased my capacity to love and to receive. My love for those around my is growing. The pain is not leaving. Rather, it is intensifying. But choosing wisely has enabled me to love God and love my brethren more fully.

 OK… so all of that was remarkably scrambled and perhaps slightly incoherent. But… it lays the foundation for what I will talk about it my next post. So… there you have it. Do you (experientially) know what I am talking about? Do you know that temptation to shut down and not feel?