"Your fire is dim."

H,

What do we do with this flickering flame of ours? How do we fan ourselves back into the mighty flame of yore? It used to be beautiful and now it is just what it is. There is an emptiness to the mass approved spectre of modern life and there is a creeping hollowness into the spiritual adventure of living for more. It is almost like being in some strange purgatory of the soul; you cannot go to hell and you cannot quite reach heaven.

What to do? What to do? What to do? Perhaps there are no easy answers and no sudden cures. The thing is in the day to day. We cannot manufacture the voice or the presence of God. We have to know by faith that it is always there. That He is always present. We are the ones who must reach out to grab on to the out stretched hand. No relationship works by proxy or in the singular. We do not need a pastor or the fantasy that all is fine so we can be who we presently are and that is enough for God. Both streams do not deal with the individual river that is our journey into the sublime.

What to do? What to do? What to do? We have to worry and not worry about it. Worry is a sign that we care and we notice. Yet that is a sign and not an act. Worry as an act is always useless. It is sterile and has no real staying power. It cannot move the smallest stone. It comes and goes and is at the root of inconsistency.  

We begin by telling ourselves, like today:

-our fire is dim. 

Reconnecting

H,

There is a certain romanticism built around rebellion. It is so ingrained in the fiber of our current being that to follow a straight line is to be something of a cube or, more particularly, square. The thinking out of the box brigade and all that sanitized, market-driven and mass produced collage of ideas that are not really ideas at all, keep telling us that if we want a straight life there is something bent about us.

Now, there is something to be said for not being sheep but I think it has to be said in very low tones by us Christians. We are sheep of His pasture being led out of the wilderness and back home to universe that actually makes sense in every way. We do not mind following, we are walking a narrow way that runs straight through the dark and we have a sure light. There is uncertainty enough in this phase of living. And there is nothing cool about burning out, dying young, hurting others or following the textbook about how not to follow textbooks.

More than all that though, is that we are already in rebellion. We are walking away from our base nature into the person we will forever be. We are in media res of a story that we must rebel from to even walk our own straight line. The stakes are eternally high. We could only wish harder for the much maligned straight line. 

Reconnecting

H,

There are all sorts of obstacles in the way of living what we consider a worthy life. Chief among them is doing it every single day. There are no holidays from sainthood. Any diversions are unintentional. It is not like you can take the great high of this sort of being and put it in a bottle. You have to live it out in the trenches of this low existence. And most of all, you will fail at it.

When we heard the great story of the seed planted in good soil we always took the stand that we were that thriving seed that bore much fruit in the end. The truth is we are at some point all those seeds. Life interrupts and chokes our promise and purpose. Weeds grow alongside our gifts and calling to love. We need to be pruned habitually. This is not a low stakes adventure. We are talking of the eternal destination of the human soul. There are no quick fixes to what has gone wrong.

It is faux bravery and folly to think that any of this is up to us. We cannot battle any darkness without the light. We cannot break through the thick crust of original and persistent sin without the never floundering Grace of God. We need to go back to that simple idea. That we need a saviour has never been in doubt. That we might let them fix us has always been the curious bone of contention.

We reconnect because we need to. We become perfect at failing and falling so we can become perfect at rising from the ashes of our constant defeat. The cracks of human endeavour and human progress do not reach the high standard of being and love. We are not here to go bigger but to go deeper. The great thing is not cathedrals or dynasties but kindness and humility. There is no place for anything other than ordinary love in eternity. This is the standard by which we falter. We judge when we should be compassionate, we talk down when we should lift up and we leave behind when we should go looking for that one lost sheep. We fall short.

The church of God is not a place for self-help gurus. The church of God will not teach you marketing skills and political tricks. The church of God is not for networking, getting ahead and instilling “kingdom principles” in ungodly behemoth corporations. It is not where we come and be who we think we are. We are here to learn who we truly are. And reconnect with that.

“Reconnecting.”

H,

It was great to reconnect yesterday. I could not help thinking of the many times in a life we disconnect from what is vital to connect with what is frivolous. Is this not the huge stain of all sin and wrong doing? In the anti-climactic moment of coming down from our mole hill we realize we did not truly see the heights and the thing promised in our lust for finding life in small sizes is still left unfulfilled. There are too many moments of prodigious “coming to ourselves” in every single life.

Yet, who says there are too many. Maybe they are just the right amount. It is not a sign of weakness to realize the often falls and many rises in the Christian life. It is a sign of wisdom to always seek to reconnect.

We truly have no other choice. Reality has rearranged itself into a central awesome truth. We know there is nothing else. It is the bottle of deception or the sobering truth that sets us free. In a very real sense we are all addicts to sin. We do not even know all the shades of our sin that well. We are constantly being revealed in the light. Sometimes we accept it, other times we ignore and mostly we retreat because the light is too bright and the imaginations of our hearts are too small.

We must learn this though: there is no other way. There is no other light by which we can see and be seen. This is the only thing that is real because it thrives past the absurdity of death and fixed time. When we disconnect from it we should remember we have a compassionate high priest. We should reconnect. Daily, if we have to.

This door is always open to the broken heart.