Making the Connection
(Note: My use of italics in this article is a literary tool to indicate thought.)
For the last three years I’ve been aware that God was engaged in a major renovation of my soul’s outlook, but finding the words to describe His actions has been elusive.
As I write to you, I’m cloistered away in a rented home, elevation 9,000 feet in the Wet Mountains. It is snowing—and it is really snowing south of here in the Sangre de Cristo, so much so that I can’t get home. This is fine. I came to the mountains for two weeks of solitude, prayer, and reflection.
When I pull away like this, which I’ve done for about thirty-five years, I make a concerted effort to clear my soul’s clutter prior to leaving. I have no agenda beyond listening to what’s on my heavenly Father’s mind. My daily rhythm is simple: In the morning, I listen at my keyboard. In the afternoon, I walk and listen. In the evening, I follow up on the day with Father.
Solitude is one of the spiritual habits I wrote about in Rigorous Grace. For me, it’s perhaps the most tangibly rewarding of the practices—and this week has been no exception.
When I depart for my afternoon walk, I pray, “Father, I want to understand what you are thinking about. Would you speak to me [in my thoughts]? Would you protect me [my thoughts] from distraction and deception, please. I’m trusting you.”
Along these treacherous paths the Psalms captured my attention.
Then I start walking, believing God will engage, honor and answer my prayer, and speak to me [in my thoughts] however He wishes to communicate. My job is to pay attention and listen.
Yesterday my walk took me through a meadow with no company besides a herd of mule deer. I could hear nothing man-made. See nothing human. My hyper-vigilance relaxed, my soul eased, enabling all of me to be present for what the Spirit of God was saying—and while surrounded by solitude, my thoughts were an unleashing of pent-up insight.
Miles Stanford observed that God always works from and to eternity, which makes sense. Said differently, God isn’t too motivated by the passing of time and my opiniated need to know.
For whatever reason, this trek was the right time in God’s mind to make the connections that have proven elusive to this point.
So Father, you’re saying that the losses associated with being censored, cancelled, and blacklisted—you’ve turned these to your advantage and my benefit. When Satan attacked, stripping away my standing, reputation, and voice, you seized the moment to refine my understanding and conviction of what I mean when I declare, “Christ alone!” Am I getting the connection?
That’s right. Recall your nightmares….
Back and forth this exchange of thoughts went; weaving together, enlightening, connecting events that I would never associate and making His work more far-reaching than the last four years of censorship and loss.
Take the nightmares, for example: From January 2017 through July 2019, I had horrid nightmares every night. Each dream was different, but all hinged on the same theme: abandonment, loss, and unrealistic expectation. Every night, I woke up writhing and sweating with the terror of being left alone to deal with an excruciating situation that could result in nothing but failure.
In you I live, and move, and have my being.
As the nights added up, I figured my soul decided that January 2017 was the right time to resolve my lifelong labor to manage abandonment and unrealistic expectation. When the nightmares ceased, I assumed my soul had concluded its work.
Connecting then and lately: As a victim of censorship, cancellation, and societal blacklisting for political purposes, I felt abandoned by my country. Once I figured out that the government was behind my technological exile, I realized it was an unrealistic expectation that I could ever reestablish myself. Like my nightmares, I was fighting a battle that was unwinnable.
Along these treacherous paths the Psalms captured my attention. Like me, many of the authors describe abandonment and unrealistic expectations of deliverance save God’s intervention. They are surrounded by enemies and living in exile. Also, it was no small comfort when I realized my Older Brother quoted the Psalms more than any other biblical source.
Thus, I figured there was a connection between my experiences, a newfound trust in God that I couldn’t explain, and my awareness that God was doing a profound restructuring in my life. But I couldn’t make the connection.
Until I was walking through the meadow.
Son, the work your soul did a few years ago, through the nightmares? Your soul, with my guidance, was clearing the backlog of abandonment and unrealistic expectation. It left you vulnerable—vulnerable to repeat abandonment and unrealistic expectation, more entrenched distrust, wary, hyper-vigilant, and so forth. But this left you vulnerable as well to restructuring. Think about it: When you renovate, the first thing you do is tear out the old. These people who’ve targeted you for my sake: They meant to break you. They unleashed evil on you because you spoke as my advocate on matters important to me and my Gospel. One of these days, vengeance will be mine for what they did to you and the spread of the Gospel, but as is always the case, I have turned travesty into triumph. I’ve got you.
That last line: I’ve got you.
With uncanny frequency over the last decade, I hear, “I’ve got you,” maybe six or eight or ten times per day. I’ve known it is God inserting Himself into my routine, but for the last decade I’ve replied, I appreciate you telling me this, but Father, I don’t know what you mean. Help me understand.
On this walk, a decade of declarations, nearly three years of nightmares, years of censorship, and a laborious battle against distrust, God chose to lace together the work of His divine ingenuity.
I stopped walking.
Turned my face into a wind-driven snow that had begun, feeling the bite, sting, the irregular persistence of icy needles striking my skin, sticking, melting, mixing with salty tears, my running nose, congealing in days of whiskers. God’s connection was made. I saw it. In His divine humility, He condescended to connect Himself, and His actions, with me.
While the abandonment you’ve experienced is real, by clearing the backlog out of your soul, then allowing you to face exile while vulnerable, I’ve been persistent in letting you know that I’ve got you! I will not abandon you, son.
The matter of unrealistic expectation? You are correct: It is unrealistic to believe you can defeat this enemy. As you’ve watched your life’s work burn in the furnace of their disdain over your dissent on my behalf, I’ve taken the opportunity to renovate your realization of what it means to depend upon Christ alone.
For the record: God was right.
At this point, another connection assembled itself in my head. So this is what underlies my newfound practice of stepping to the patio each morning to thank you for your fresh mercies and call upon you to live through me.
Right, son. If it weren’t for the disarming furnace of loneliness, disgrace, and loss of reputation, your lifelong distrust would not have been destroyed in the fires of tribulation. But in the moment when you were cast into the flames, you saw me there! I know you did—and for the first time in your life, your default changed from distrust to trust.
For the record: God was right. I had noticed that my disposition toward Him—my default attitude—was different during the censorship wars than during any other difficult time in my nearly seven decades on earth. I recognized it, but I couldn’t sort out why.
I thought of Joseph, a man afflicted with similar struggles to mine. He was abandoned, his only hope to overcome a series of unrealistic expectations. But in exile, he learned to trust someone other than himself and his own resourcefulness. In the end, he was humbled by the intervention of God. To his enemies, who sadly were his brothers, he said, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (cf. Gen. 50:20a).
Abandonment.
“I’ve got you.”
Unrealistic expectation.
“Christ alone!”
Loss
In you I live, and move, and have my being. In you, and through you, and by you I am held together, consist as a person, and have existential significance (cf. Acts 17:28; Col. 1:16-17).
Distrust.
Trust.
Son, I had to take you through a circuitous route, but you asked: “Father, help my unbelief,” you said. So, through Plato. Through examination of my apparent contradictions. Through a hard test of whether or not I’m good, and so forth, the connection was made. Once you saw the opening I made for you, you flipped the switch and distrust became trust.
God: “I’ve got you.”
Christ: “I’m in you.”
Spirit: “I’m with you.”
I turned my back to the blowing snow and stood with the mule deer. When they ambled into a thicket of oak to weather the storm, I turned toward the house.
Earlier, when I left for my walk, I knew I was changed in fundamental ways, spiritually different, but I couldn’t piece it together, couldn’t articulate my soul’s renovation. All I could do was live in it, like a marinade, a tempering, a resolving like fiddling with the focusing apparatus on a pair of binoculars.
But now, covered in ice and snow, Father honored my earlier request: In language I could comprehend, He rehearsed the story of my days, isolating His determined intent as He did so, and told me what was on His mind.
God is a bit wild, refusing convention, eschewing predictability, holding His cards close to His vest, and always working from and toward eternity. It’s a tricky business to play life’s Poker with God. He knows your cards and shows you His. His ante is Jesus and as the Dealer, He’s all in.
The question is: Am I all in or counting on the ace up my sleeve?
Sometimes when I walk and ask God what’s on His mind, He says, You are.