Jekyll and Hyde

Tuesday 9/24/19 6:49 AM

I feel a little like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in my spiritual life right now and my readings today seem to confirm it. In a matter of minutes I can go from being secure in my faith to questioning if it is all true.

I am scheduled to have hip surgery in about three and a half weeks. As the day gets closer, I thought I would start to worry about whether or not I would have a good outcome, but that has not been the case. My psalm this week is Psalm 3 and verse 6 states, “I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me.” When I read that verse, I had a very strong sense of peace and confidence that everything would be fine, regardless of the outcome of my surgery. God has sustained me throughout my life, through both the good and the bad, and I’m certain he will continue to do so.

A minute later I am reading an excerpt from A Cry for Mercy, by Henri Nouwen, in which he describes what seems to him to be an enormous abyss between his insights about God and his life. His words really describe the way I have felt over the past couple of years. “It seems as if I am standing on one side of a huge canyon and see how I should grow toward you, live in your presence and serve you, but cannot reach the other side of the canyon where you are. I can speak and write, preach and argue about the beauty and goodness of the life I see on the other side, but how, O Lord, can I get there? Sometimes I even have the painful feeling that the clearer the vision, the more aware I am of the depth of that canyon. Am I doomed to die on the wrong side of the abyss? Am I destined to excite others to reach the promised land while remaining unable to enter there myself? … I can only keep trying to be faithful, even though I feel faithless most of the time. What else can I do but keep praying to you, even when I feel dark; to keep writing about you, even when I feel numb; to keep speaking your name, even when I feel alone. Come, Lord Jesus, come.”

This waffling between confidence and doubt; between having clear vision and groping in darkness; between having an acute sensation of God’s presence and spiritual numbness or apathy is frustrating. In Psalm 18 David describes the way God came to him when he was fleeing from Saul, one of David’s dark times. “(God) parted the heavens and came down; dark clouds were under his feet. … He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him－the dark rain clouds of the sky. … He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters. He rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes, who were too strong for me. They confronted me in the day of my disaster, but the Lord was my support. He brought me into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.” I need to remind myself that the darkness which frustrates me is the domain in which God moves. Lord, be merciful to those who live in darkness and doubt.

A Lesson from Trash

Saturday 4/27/19 5:47 AM

As I was walking home from the gym this morning at about 5:30, I saw a used paper towel in the parking lot. I stopped to pick it up so I could throw it in the trash can by the bus stop on my way home. As I continued walking across the lot, I saw more trash and an aluminum can that I added to my trash stash. When I went to cross the street, there was more trash in the gutter that I also picked up. I went to the trash can and emptied my hands of the trash only to see more trash about ten feet past the trash can. I picked that up too and returned to the can to dispose of it. As I threw it away, I thought to myself, “God’s world is a little cleaner than it was before.” There were not many people on the road at that time of the day so there were only a couple cars that passed. I was secretly hoping someone saw me and even thought it would be nice if a police officer saw me and cited me for doing a good deed. While I continued my walk home, I wondered why I wanted the recognition from others for picking up the trash rather than being content with doing it to make God’s world cleaner than it was before.

I’m not alone in those feelings. Henri Nouwen writes a prayer in his book, A Cry for Mercy, that I also prayed this morning. “Why do I keep looking for popularity, respect from others, success, acclaim, and for sensual pleasures? Why, Lord, is it so hard for me to make you the only one? Why do I keep hesitating to surrender myself totally to you? Help me, O Lord, to let my old self die, to let die the thousand big and small ways in which I am still building up my false self and trying to cling to my false desires.  Let me be reborn in you and see through you the world in the right way, so that all my actions, words, and thought can become a hymn of praise to you.”

God's Glove

Thursday 3/21/19 5:45 AM

Much of my devotional time over the past couple of years has been trying to determine what it is that God would have me do to help right the injustice in the world. When it comes to specific actions that I feel God wants me to pursue, there has been nothing but silence.

Today I read this prayer in the book The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, by Hannah Whitall Smith: “Lord, I am thine; I do yield myself up entirely to thee, and I believe that thou dost take me. I leave myself with thee. Work in me all the good pleasure of thy will, and I will only lie still in thy hands and trust thee.” That is considerably different than the prayer I’ve been praying; that God would give me something to do. Somehow lying still in the hands of God, trusting him to do what is necessary flies against everything I’ve been taught, namely, to avoid sloth and to work hard.

I hope to work in the yard for a while today or tomorrow. I will wear gloves to protect my hands. The gloves do nothing but cover my hands, which are doing the work. The analogy is probably a poor one but, Lord, make me like a glove, molded to your hands and accompanying you as you work in the world.