“Doubt.”

H,

We are free to have doubts. We have been told to test all things, doubt all things and hold on to what remains true. It is part of the process. There are no certainties because we do not know enough. We see in shadows, life is obscured in the great mirror of images. Some of these images may not be real.

We cannot deny that we feel off it many times. It is not always a grand adventure and it has not yet felt like it is complete. It is still a thing in progress but sometimes we move in kilometres and other times we move in centimetres. We are never quite on it. It seems elusive and our Creator can sometimes feel aloof.

These are just the disciplines though. We cannot have emotional states over inner witness. Emotions go up and down. What you know can be set in stone. What you learn by experience can be imprinted on your soul. It cannot be shaken off. Imagine how much the horrors of this world are smeared on the souls that experience it. Imagine how much joy is needed to replace that old stain with something new and eternal. This is the process we go through.

Doubt, of course, will rear its head over and over again. We still live on the limited side of things. We sit in the joy of experiencing God to get strength to keep walking. We are on our way home. Doubt is just a temporary companion. We will leave that little gargoyle behind one day. 

“Doubt.”

H,

This may be with us for a while: doubt. There is this silly idea that we must never doubt anything. It is not true. We will doubt everything. The more we see ourselves in the light the more we are aware of all that former darkness. To believe that evil is darkness receding is fine but to not be honest enough to wonder why it is so strong in the first place is covering up the places where growth is needed. A closed up wound is out of sight but festering.

My prayers nowadays, as little as they may be, are all around doubt. I keep wondering about everything we know, we think we know, everything we heard in the secret garden of words, everything we think we heard. I wonder about the slaughter of innocents, the horrible acres of war on the planet, the terrible hurt children suffer and the illness in the human spirit that makes all this possible. It is easier and much more profitable in the secular and spiritual worlds to ignore what is bad and focus on what is good. Personal stories and familial progress can cover up the true horror that is human history, the present state of many souls suffering and the future that seeks to advance the good story over the real story. We are constantly looking for hallmarks, heroes, exemplars, neat endings and tales of progress. When we hit the great stone of all stones, when we come face to face to something we cannot explain, then we fall back to the old rhetoric of change, the old mantra about choice and the curious logic of the dialectic over the humane. We put things in perspective so it looks like the dark is not winning.

These are all thoughts of my doubt and I know the dark is not winning. I just wish I could connect with what He says. I wonder what She thinks of the world and how much She still cries over it. I wonder that They think about my doubt.

“Of Ambition and Destiny.”

H,

There is always the problem with practicality. How do we feed our children? How do we make a way in the world for our voice to matter? How do we become the exception to that old quip about lazy Christians and poor church rats?

Now only the first may have any real significance. We do not need to have a voice in the world beyond being more and more like the things we profess. The old slanders hold no water when one is really engaged in the business of heaven.

Still, there is a material reality that has to be faced. The world, like Caesar, demands its coins. This is a difficult one to answer because words cannot capture the desperation, fear and compromise that poverty may bring. There are so many questions that money can answer quite well. It is a lie to say otherwise. In our own experience we can only point to the esoteric nature of our walk and say: we got by somehow. There is not one single practical answer to the question of how to live the spiritual life with material awareness. This is the wisdom we are given though. We are to walk the higher path of having but not having at the same time. The things that we have must be seen as transient so we can truly appreciate the things that we will always have.

Jim Elliot said it best: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”  And he paid the ultimate price for that belief. We have no answer to that. There are no half measures here. The  Spiritual and material must merge in our minds so effectively that the former always leads the latter. Not in tithes and offerings and silly “prophetic seeds” but in how we value the wellbeing of our family, how we balance the books in favour of the needy and how we treat money and wealth as a tool and not a destination.

Our ambition and destiny is to be more like a person we know and have come to accept as way, truth and life. Once we grant that first premise, the rest will follow suit.

We will not be perfect in anything at the start. This is a lifelong thing. We should not give up because we will fail at it many times. We must keep our eyes on the prize of becoming that other person written into our hearts as forever. We will learn to share as they did. We will learn to feed each other. We will learn that sacrifice is the great currency of the kingdom. We will learn that love takes everything and purifies it and gives us everything back again. 

“Of Ambition and Destiny.”

H,



There is that rush you get when salvation finally comes to your soul. It is a feeling of invincibility. Those of us who finally succumb to the Pentecostal bite are told we are kings, princes, sons of the most high but we will die like me if we do not learn the lingo. If we do not act as if. Suddenly all our fears have a purpose: to lead us to learning the strange language of exceptionalism. We are not like everyone else. We do not have the same experience on the earth. They are food for Satan and we are servants of God. There is a hedge around us and a light within us that makes us walk on the higher path. And our destiny is sure. We are going to live forever in the high places with God. All we have to do now is make a living that contrasts with the dead lives amongst us. All we have to do is show these zombies how it is done and some of them may choose the brighter path. The ambition and the destiny come together into purpose.

Now, the point of all these things has been lost in the gulf between doing a thing and being a person. Blaise Pascal said: ““All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The lack of contemplation is always a recipe for misuse of principles. We form dogma out of our own fallen hearts because we cannot sit still against the wave of criticism, self-doubt, failure and boredom. We need to have a thing to do because we are scared of being.

If we are told that there is only one ambition and there is only one destiny it would shake us. Well, there is only one ambition- to be like Christ- and there is only one destiny-to be with God. It does not matter how old you are or how successful you are. Christ even made the point that material wealth is more of a hindrance than a help. It does not matter if you leave you mark on the world and it will count for nothing if a few years after death you are only in a history book. All are but a minute compared to the real thing that is eternity. All the things we fear have no bearing on the eternal life in God. “Death, what else have you got?” the apostle dared to say.
“Ordinary Life on earth what else can you offer?” we should dare to ask ourselves every day.

“Of Ambition and Destiny.”

H,

I keep thinking of those early days when the road seemed somewhat simpler than it is now. I am now tempted to quote Hemingway again mostly because you hate the repetition but: “life breaks us all…”

Have we not been broken by the common wheel of everyday life and adventure?  Are we not struggling for balance in the twin goals of servicing both ambition and destiny?

I hate to put things down into two simple ideas but just for now let me frame the thing on my mind in this way: human life as an empty hole that ambition fills sporadically or human life as a reach for something sublime and away from the everyday tedium of solving immediate problems.

What has been our ambition for so long? I know I used to have these pipe dreams of world domination. I believed in the great advance of public acts and notoriety. I saw a better world as a natural state of the world in my image. But I was nine or ten with two much literature on the subject to comprehend what the outside world was really like. After a while, after a few years, I had a community of opinions of who I should be. I adjusted. It was in with the Law and out with the Journalism because my talents were weighed on an imaginary false scale and I was told to adjust upward. And I did. I always thought of it as not being alone. I wanted to be common by then and by that I mean I did not want to stick out of any class or group. Ambition became survival. In the wider world of expectations I was paralyzed by fear, by doubt and by the idea that I was indeed different but not in any positive way. I was the proverbial sore thumb and my ambitions could not be said because they were dumb and somewhat sinful. Not that I had plans on sinning (that always just happened) but I thought the very idea of ambition was sin.

Ambition is where you want to go and destiny is where you will go. If you are a free will sort of person it is about ambition. You will even summarize you ambition as your destiny. That is you will say that accepting your destiny will give you some real ambition. If you are of a more esoteric bent you will find yourself looking for signs in the metaphysical sphere that tie your destiny and ambition together. You will say talent leads to goal and goal leads to acts and acts become habit and habit becomes destiny. Now, it is not an either/or proposition. I routinely find myself in both places, thinking of the weight of my decisions as well as looking for signs in the ether of some greater reality to come.

All of this is easier than just sitting still. All of this is more natural to the hurried state of modern life than taking a chance on asking the right questions about your own soul. The life we live now has told us that paying for the things we need and do not need is the call of the moment. It is ambition to be in the black and it is destiny to make progress without the pilgrimage.

I have no easy answers to this question except that I know the disquiet in my soul does not go down with any victory or any defeat. Negative or positive vibes do not adequately feed my very human but existential hungers. I suspect that if I wrote down all my goals in life and ticked them off one by one I would still feel this disquiet. I suspect that dealing with daily life head on will not cure it and I know hiding under the bed from troubles will not silence it either. My ambitions are too small for it and my destiny is still too unknown to comfort it. I still have to look up and find meaning in connection.

That I have not been doing at all. That I have to remember is the call to wake up. Ambition is where I want to go and destiny is where I will go. Both are beyond my immediate grasp. All I have is the promise of love and the doubts I bring to Him on my knees and in my heart.

“In and then Out.”

H,

We are not called to the inner part of things so we can ignore or run away from the outer part of things. The one flows into the other. There is no escaping into God and higher “purpose” to the detriment of kindness, patience, humility and the other fruits of a life lived in God. The gifts of God are always inferior to the fruits of a life in God. The former will not get you into the Kingdom but the latter is what the Kingdom is all about.

We must go in for sure but we must not get insular. The world is where the light is to be shown. We dwell in the light so we can shine in the dark. The arms of God are not for constant consolation but rigorous discipleship. There is nothing weak about love, about honesty, about giving a damn or about change. There are no higher callings on the human spirit and in trying to navigate the world without this inner compass we find that it is much easier to hate or judge or dislike, to lie, to become indifferent and to stay exactly as we are.

The great call is to find our peace, our dwelling, our very home in the heart of the Creator. The great calling is to make that the way we see everything else. And everyone else. 

“In and then Out.”

H,

It is hard to carve the role of intimacy out of the culture of fear. We are told we are to fear God for His severity and appease Him for His goodness. Of course there are many reasons this makes no sense. First of the all the root word “fear” as used here is more akin to acknowledgement, cognisance or respect than fear. It is more like saying “trust” than “shiver before”. And it is not to stroke some universe building ego. He does not feed on His children. All instructions to “fear” God are from a place of peace. The idea is that you are better off if you do. It is for your benefit. It is you that will move up. He remains eternally unmoved by anything.

The second point is that there is nothing we are told to do that is outside His own nature. He only asks us to be more like Him. To make this point, He came down. He came to show us this original intent. He does not tell us to be selfless so He can be selfish. Claims that God cares for nothing but His impersonal “Will” make no sense at all.

The God we can all get into is beyond the stoic representations of Old Testament interpretations or the closer inflections of New Testament prophecies. There is a vastness there that no sixty six books can truly capture. That we are to see Him in there as a guide to a very narrow path does not mean that He is bound within those pages. He is bound by nothing. We are the ones that need to walk the narrow path. In Him it becomes a wide path to keep us from slipping. In Him we become eternal beings of inherent being. This is how we must see ourselves now. This is how we live out of our hungry hearts. We are eternal beings of inherent value loved by the creator of everything. 

“In and then Out.”

H,

It is funny how you always tell me: “do not be afraid.” I always immediately think: “of what?” I never feel I am afraid of anything but that is mostly because I am afraid of everything. Well, not everything, most things. I have always had this feeling that the sky is about to fall. Not only that but I know the specific reason why it is about to fall. This fear, this idea that the future most hold only bad things and the present will have no solution, is at the root of all my faux predictions about why my world is about to end. I should be told to curb the fear. I have a lot of it.

The thing about fear is that some of it is actually true. There is a fear of things that might happen and then they do. We are crushed by an expected end. The idea, however, of the Christian worldview is that no fear is fatal if we live in the light of God. The expected thing coming to pass is not the end of the story. It is a line, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter. The book is long and never ending. We have to put our fear in the context of the eternal nature of the sacred life. It is not that we will not see the outcome, it is that we will see way beyond that.

There has to be an inner life of faith to speak to the outer feeling of fear. Fear makes us inert. Faith makes us plausible, proactive. The only cure to crippling fear is a faith in something above fear. To the Christian this is in God, in that view of history and in the picture painted of the world to come. All things will resolve in the sacred curve of time into reality.

This is not an easy view to take. It is not a stand that living on earth will help you get better at. It is not enough to take the easy placebo of positive thinking couched as faith. It is an invitation to find real faith in the arms of your father. Not to be fake but forthright. Not to put on a smile but perhaps to start with tears and on your knees. To be open to the inner life of God is the best way to face the outer world. No one will do this perfectly. There will be ups and downs. It will take a minute. Yet like all real cures it is not a one-time event but the trajectory of a life lived in faith.

“When everything matters.”

H,

To the great struggles we have with daily life and daily death we cannot afford to give in to the idea of futility. The idea that nothing will ever change is silly but the idea that choices change nothing is dangerous. It is also a lie. The Christian practice is based on the foundational idea that we can change. In fact, after I have fallen from one of my numerous high horses and succumbed to some ignoble act, the first thing that comes to my mind, and I count this as the counsel of the Holy Spirit, is the idea that I can change. The comfort that I will not be this way forever. Some say that this sort of thinking means that we are taking grace for granted. Well, first I think that there is nothing more important than taking grace for granted; counting on it and expecting it to always be there like oxygen and gravity. We do not weigh our steps over physical laws. It is silly to do so over spiritual law.

The second thing is realism. We are constantly falling down. Covertly or overtly we are always breaking some of the literal law of love and well-being. This is not a consolation it is a fact. The law is put before us as a mirror of our own grotesqueness. It is a measuring line for the depth of our depravity and our foiled attempts to love. It is not futile to love or to make choices to love. It is futile to think that failure to do so is final and then nothing matters after that. Everything will always matter. Our struggles are a sign. Our failures, our successes, our seeming failure and our seeming success. It all counts in the beautiful progression of love through time that will culminate in the restoration of everything.

This is the bullion of our faith. All the evil in us and in the world will be addressed. That is what judgement is. It is the rising up of the great and eternal flag of justice over the temporal fever of our present nightmare. The disciplines of God extended through all of history and put in practice by love and grace.

My heart breaks over death, rape, murder, the slaughter of innocents and the general darkness on our patch of earth and beyond. My heart bleeds when these are in my thoughts as victim and as perpetrator of the most violating acts. I long for the sword of God. I long for the new heart in me and the new heart at the centre of all existence. I long for a world where everything matters again. 

“When everything matters.”

H,

It is because everything matters that we are free to be part of this great adventure while freeing ourselves from the burden of pride, the need to be seen and the ego that propels us to think we are the centre of things. The human experience is not at the centre of the universe. The human soul is not the most important thing that ever was. This does not mean it is nothing. It means it is part of everything and will find its true bearing by being in everything eventually. Imagine it like this: in the ocean there are no drops of water separate from other drops of water. Everything is one thing. Vast and endless in quantity but one thing tied together. This is what I believe eternity is. The binding together of all things into one.

Free of that speculation, which is all it is, and free of trying to outshine and outdo one another, we can learn to be part of one another and bound into God. There will not be a missing drop, a missing part of the great flock of Christ or a missing person. The burden, we are told, is light because all we have to be is who we are. All we have to do is be.

Imagine this: not that we are free of consequence or that we do not see the world as something worth saving but that we know what final consequence is and our faith and fate in it is to be a person more like our original, natural self as we are being forged into eternal identity. That the troubles of the world do weigh heavy but that is only us forming into God’s heart. That we fight crippling inertia and vigorously pursue our own path and that is only walking with God. That we learn to be of service to others and love them not as tools or emblems of our value but as fellow travellers and as part of a family in God. 

“When everything matters.”

H,

Everything matters but we are not in control of everything. There is a vast difference between empathy and megalomania as much as there is between wisdom and indifference. We are not in charge of everything and in fact we are not in control of anything except that space within our own lives where we choose left or right. This limited view of vision is a blessing not a curse. This untroubled sense of being part of a larger body is vital to the things that are to come.

We will always feel some things deeply but this is curated by the fact that we will be indifferent to other things. The things outside the sphere of our concern may be as deeply in need of attention as the thing within it. This should humble us. Our myopic views of what matters are not truth. They are only as far as we can see.

There is the grating need for a lifelong purpose in all of us and when we find something to latch on to we hold on for dear life. We tie together our value, our ability to love, our bond with God and our light on this earth to this one idea of what matters and build a life around it. This is a mistake. Not that we should not focus but this sort of narrow vision focuses on doing not being and on the specific one-eyed appreciation of something that may need more than one line of vision. There are fires all around. There are issues with humanity that confound learning and wisdom. We should not step back from one way of seeing the world because it is hopeless. We should step back because we need to learn more.

So, what should we do? Remember the need for connection. We connect with God first then we connect with others. There is no one in place of the other. God is not an escape from the world. In fact, you become more alive in it if you let the light in.

We connect with others because this is the church; a group of enlightened despots and tricksters realizing the truth about all of existence and seeking to listen to, learn from and serve each other. Fight against the need to be a lone ranger. There are no enemies but the one. There is a deeper call always underneath the surface of things. It is not a call to do something to preserve the status quo of a world manifestly unjust and prone to decay. We are seeking a better world. A place where everything does matter. 

“When everything matters.”

H,

There is often this grain of thought in popular culture about the tiny nature of the human experience compared to the vastness of the universe. The tale is spun that we do not really matter, our efforts are all dust and we will simple be forgotten by time and space when we become extinct as a race. I admit I like this line. It suits my nihilistic ideas about the nature of being. It had a nice ring to it when I was much younger but I am not sure this was because of some scientific enthusiasm for the vastness of outer space.

My aims were still very close to earth and my particular patch of it. I felt if nothing mattered because our time on earth was a grain of sand on an endless beach then nothing I did truly mattered. I was trying to be free of guilt, of anger, of disappointment and of the fear of giving account for the stewardship of a life I barely understood. I was afraid of engaging life so the idea of being the third planet to the left in one solar system of many more unknown meant that it did not matter what I did. It was all an abyss, anyway.

Of course this is a silly way to look at life. It is almost as silly as saying everything I do is of such extreme importance that I will shake the fabric of time itself by picking the red pill over the blue pill. There is a place where everything matters but it is not in my head or in my inflated or deflated opinions about myself.

If we are eternal beings, if we live in the light of some cosmic wisdom from the steady hand of a creator and if we fall into line with the wide view of love then everything we do matters in a more introspective way than we imagine. There are more depths in the human soul fathomable than in the Universe unfathomable and, as yet, unreachable. We cannot avoid the imperative of being a full human being for the speculative fiction of the universe uncharted. I did this a lot as a child.

Growing up needs a deeper look at what it means to matter.

“True.”

H,

There is something simple about being in God. It is easy to be open with a being that knows all about your secret flaws. In theory, at least. We are wired to present the pictures that avoid disappointment. We are usually trying to pull some wool over the eyes of those we want to love us. We say they can’t handle it but the truth is we cannot handle them thinking less of us. We need them to love the bright spots and count it much more than the occasional slips.

The problem is that these things are not occasional slips. They are perpetual states. The Christian worldview says that we are not basically good with occasional lapses but basically sinful with occasional lapses into the light. All we are doing is avoiding being bad and doing enough good not to be ostracised by family, by lovers, by society and by God. We are keeping the horrible thoughts inside and the horrible acts within legal bounds. We are not being true to our real selves.

When you see this then you see everything. What God is proposing by grace is not how to make us better people but how to take us from being fatally flawed to being eternally redeemed. There is a difference. This is why being curt with God is such a bad idea. There is a mother within God that longs to nurture. There is a father in God that longs to embrace all our flaws and unspool them. There is a friend in God that longs to walk beside us. There is a lover in God that longs to be closer than close has ever been.

We have to let that He and Her and Us and Them all in. This is the only true way to change. 

“True.”

H,

The truth is never easy to say or live. There is something about trying to live an honest life in all respects that does not rhyme with the practical life on earth. Everything is dressed up, polished and presented to fit in with the zeitgeist of the moment. That Geist isn’t always the most sensible thing. Once it was slavery, the superiority of civilizations over one another and the idea of a woman being property and not person. We know now this is all wrong but in that age it was all life was to the vast majority of recorded human beings on the earth. It is story we are fed now.

Right or wrong is not relative in this larger sense. Freedom, choice, democracy, human rights, equality and mutual respect have been the highest echoes of the human ideal but it used to apply to specific races and groups within a particular race. The universal application of these ideals is a fairly recent concept. It is has always been right but it has not always been true to everyone. In a real sense, it is not always true now to every mind on earth. It is said in polite society but society is not ordered to give every person their due application of inherent value.

We are no saints ourselves. It is has often been easy to group people into them and us. We have always sought enemies instead of conflicting ideas or ideals. We have been told not to hate and we forget that we “wrestle not against flesh or blood”. We make enemies of the transient and forget the eternal story of love that wraps us all together.

What is true has to be true forever. The bible, perfect exemplar as it is, revises itself within its own script to become a more perfect reflection of the eternal life of Love in God. We move from a malevolent law giver to a compassionate graceful leader. We cannot take everything the saints said at face value. They are not Christ. We cannot ban women from leading worship, from speaking up in church or allow slaves to continue to be loyal to their masters. We must move into what is eternally true: we must learn slowly to love everybody because that is where God lives. 

“True.”

H,

It is true that as you grow older former times fold into romantic history or sullen tragedy. The history you connect with in joy becomes sweeter because it is gone. The darkness you cannot take becomes this haunting ghost that follows you around. We are not all the same and it shows in this; how we deal with the history and tragedy of our own lives. In dealing with these two strands that form our being we become more or less true or untrue.

If we are untrue then we construct a great dam against feeling the negative aspects of growing into ourselves. We let in all the good stuff. We reinvent the evil stuff. We make unicorns out of dragons and force back the dark into a single blot that we can wash away. We write fiction. We act like a character in the great play. We become heroes.

If we are true we carry this heavy weight of being. Living, working, trying to carve meaning out of daily life becomes the task of our age. We are upset and closed off when the tide of evil comes. We need the talking cure, the listening ear and perhaps, the light of God. There is no time for fiction. We are in the great play and it may go on forever.

I am not sure we are wholly true and untrue. We mix and match depending on memory or experience. There are times when you would tell me a story about our growing up together and it would seem so stale, so free of what I felt in that real moment and so much more like a fairy tale that I would call you a liar. My own version was no better. It was dark and nihilistic and there was no good in anything. Perhaps the truth was somewhere in the middle.

Perhaps in learning to listen to each other without judgement we may stumble upon what is true.