Closing Spidery Thoughts….

Whenever I tell the story of my faith journey (sorry, couldn’t resist) to people, the same kinds of questions come up. To close things out (so that I can finally get on to other important topics like what I’ve been doing, and what I’m hoping to do next), here are those questions, with some, as short as I can make them, answers.

Q: I know what (college/church) you went to. Are you honestly saying that you didn’t learn these things there?

Well, no. But also, yes.

Not hearing something because it wasn’t said, and not hearing something because you weren’t paying attention, are two very different things. It’s absolutely possible that my immaturity closed my ears and eyes to what was right in front of me.

But….

(Warning: Tricky, potentially self-sabotaging, honesty alert:)

In the years since I left, I’ve listened in on numerous chapel talks and sermons given at both places. To this day, in both places, I still hear a lot more about what we are to do for God, than what God has done for us in Christ. And it wasn’t until I more clearly understood the latter, that I began to be clearer about how the former is even possible. It’s a little like playing a piece of piano music, where one hand carries the melody, and the other the accompaniment. It’s one thing to play all the notes in the right sequence. But if you don’t apply consistent extra weight to the line carrying the melody, the melody gets lost. Where I was, the gospel line was played. It just got played with less emphasis than I needed. The law line, on the other hand, was deafening, at least to my ears.  That’s still the way I hear it played today.  Maybe that’s because my hearing is off. Maybe a lot of people really like hearing it that way, or need to hear it that way. I’ll leave it to my betters to sort and measure the implications of those things.

Q. Isn’t it possible that you just weren’t really saved until a few years ago??

Of course! There was such a delta (to borrow an old-life marketing term) between my thinking and doing before this happened, and after, that I’d be remiss not to consider it. But I have to say no. Even though I can’t think back to my college years without mentally cringing in shame at how immature I was, a more objective assessment of how what I loved and hated changed tells me otherwise. Two examples: Before I was saved, I hated to sing about God, and I neither cared to read the Bible, nor was able to understand it. After that fateful day in my dorm room, both of those things changed. I loved to sing about god, and suddenly the Bible made sense. It made sense enough that when I was, at one point, dating an unbeliever, and knew I was hardening my heart against repenting and breaking it off, I refused communion one Sunday. I knew from God’s Word, I was in deep spiritual doo-doo.

That’s not the heart of an unbeliever, IMHO. Just the heart of an immature one, desperately needing help, but not knowing what kind of help she needed. That thought has huge implications too, ones that I will come back to write about one day. We are all immature, and in need of spiritual help, every day.

Q. So, are you some kind of closet Charismatic, just putting on a happy cessationist mask so that Dan doesn’t unload a giant bazooka of Bible on you? What’s with the ecstatic experience??

Well, first, it wasn’t ecstatic so much as kind of heavy and overwhelming. But as I said in the post, I didn’t walk away hearing or believing anything that wasn’t already in Scripture, had I had the good sense to look for it or study it. But I wasn’t sensible. I was physically exhausted, and spiritually malnourished. And God was merciful to point me, in a somewhat atypical way, to where nourishment and rest, truth and power, could be found:

In God’s Word. In His Spirit. And in all that is mine because my life is hidden in His Son.

Here’s what’s interesting, and hopefully, the right note on which to end:

 

Before this happened, I hadn’t prayed for it to happen.

And, to this day, I haven’t prayed for it to happen again. Or rather, I have prayed for it to happen in a different way. Why? Because in the years since, as I have grown in my understanding of who God is, of what His Word is, of all that is mine in Him, I haven’t needed to. Do I pray expectantly each Sunday? Oh, more than ever. Do I even pray specifically for the Holy Spirit to move powerfully in my life or in the life of those I love? Of course. Paul prayed that way. So I pray that way too.

I’ve learned I don’t have to stand on top of God’s Word as a means to some higher, more supernatural experience. I simply have to stand under God’s Word, sit under it, rest under it, and take it into my soul. And that’s a lesson I’ll never need to unlearn.

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