I'm walking through a bit of a valley right now. More of an emotional valley, I'd say. God is seeking to bring something new from something old. Freeing me from some chains and survival mechanisms that simply don't belong any longer. I'm here to tell you that it's one of the hardest things I've ever done. But, I'm going to worship God anyhow.
Feeling a bit undone this morning, I was so grateful for my people. My Christian workplace and our morning devotion -- and specfically, my co-worker and sister in Christ who shared a reading this morning that was so "spot-on" for what I'm wading through. I found it online and am sharing the excerpt she read this morning. In the state I was in, it made me weep. Not sure it will be that profound for everyone. From the writings of Eugene Peterson in a book entitled "The Jesus Way." Here's to marrying the visible and the invisible....and celebrating the gifts we've been given in this life. Just the way they are.
"Faith has to do with marrying the visible and the invisible. When we engage in an act of faith, we give up control, we give up sensory (sight, hearing, etc) confirmation of reality; we give up on insisting on head-knowledge as our primary means of orientation in life. The positive way to say this is that when we engage in an act of faith we choose to deal with a living God whom we trust to know what He is doing, we choose a way of life in which bodily senses and physical matter are understood as inseperable and organic to vast interiorities (soul) and immense beyonds (heaven), and we choose to no longer operate strictly on the basis of hard-earned knowledge, glorious as it is, but over a lifetime to embrace the mystery that "must dazzle/Or every man go blind."
It is most certainly not disposition, an "inner life." It is an obedient life, a deliberate engagement of the will, a fusion of body and spirit, visible and invisible fused, taking us somewhere.
This involves considerable risk. The supposed security of objective certainty recoils from such risk. But for those who take it, it also results in inhabiting a vast, previously unperceived, reality. It also involves considerable retraining in virtually everything involved in being a man, a woman. The introduction of the word "faith" into our language produces a radical and total re-orientation from a flat-earth existence, plotted along the monotonous lines of suburban subdivision, to a multi-dimensioned "on earth as it is in heaven" in which God's presence is the dominant and defining reality with whom we have to do.
The way of Abraham continues today along these same lines. Somewhere along the lines, we realize that we are not in charge of our own lives. The life of faith does not exist in imposing our will (or God's will!) either on other persons or on the material world around us. We embrace what is given us - people, spouse, children, forests, weather, city - just as they are given to us and sit and stare, look and listen, until we begin to see the God-dimensions in each gift, and engage with what God has given, with what He is doing.
Everytime we set out, leaving our self-defined or culture-defined state, leaving behind our partial and immature projects, a wider vista opens up before us, a landscape larger with promise.
An excerpt from Eugene Peterson's "The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways that Jesus is the Way"
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