#4: Fighting

“Remember the LORD your God, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons and daughters, your wives and your homes.”

Nehemiah 4

“While children go hungry, as they do now, I’ll fight; while there is a poor lost girl upon the street,

I’ll fight – I’ll fight to the very end.”

William Booth

I had met him before, last November, and he was then in no better a state than when we found him today. Walking into his home, a thatched hut no more than eight feet by eight feet, I recognised Dancel immediately, a 30-something man bent arthritically in the foetal position on the mud floor. I could see every contour of his ribcage through his wasted skin, which was covered in leprous sores. He hadn’t eaten in days, was far too weak to stand, and so his home became to him an unbearably smelly prison cell from which he was unable to get any relief. Having been long since abandoned by his family, I couldn’t imagine when he might last have seen visitors; perhaps not since we had met him five months before. Holding his hand for the second time, offering him all the same encouragements, prayers and sentimentalities I had before, was haunting. You always hope that your prayers will be an axis upon which someone’s life will turn; that you will leave a trail of lives transformed behind the moments that you encountered a situation. God knows I hope that’s the way this thing works, when it’s working well. But when it doesn’t happen that way, when faith toes the line of doubt and hope the line of despair, you find yourself undone before the hanging pretences of a faith you thought unshakeable. For the second time, I left David’s home in just the same state in which I had entered it.

I don’t know if in my whole life I can recall doubting whether God exists, but that night, sitting on the ground outside my own home, I'll admit to wondering whether perhaps he was a god of love without power, or a god of power without love. Either would make sense of a world in which Dancel exists. In that place, lost in the desert clutching as best we can for answers in the dark, we would do better simply to make a choice: give up on God, or give up to God. I prayed that night the only thing I could express of an honest heart, “God, where are you for Dancel?” And what happened I can’t explain. Whether it was a voice over my shoulder or a whisper in my soul I’m not even sure, but from wherever it was spoke it said to me, clearly as ever I’ve heard a voice in my ear, “Where are you for Dancel?”

Sometimes I feel like I’m just subjected to life. Sometimes I feel like life is subject to me. Really, both are true. Life is a series of choices we make in response to things over which we had no choice. You can’t guess what obstacles, what hills or valleys, sorrows or joys, will meet you as you walk the long road through the desert. That’s what makes it feel unfair. I can’t wrap my head around the reality that life doesn’t bend to the choices I make of it; there is only so much of me that is the sum of the choices that I have made, the rest I didn’t choose at all. Some would assume that Dancel is where he is because of the choices he made in the past, for which he’s now reaping the consequence. But he isn’t. And wandering in the wild confusion of life’s unfairness, I don’t hear the answer I want, but something different. The realisation, freeing and inviting and demanding all at once, that it wasn’t Dancel’s choices that brought him to this place, but it is mine that might lead him out.

Life meets us before we have the chance to invite it. It is a gift that nobody ever asked for. Some even think that were they to have been given the choice, they wouldn’t have taken it. But that’s the way it is, and I’m learning that God doesn’t ask our consultation before making us for one reason.

Because this life is not a gift to us only, but to all in whose life we were destined to make an impact.

We are not in the desert for ourselves alone. We were put here to fight for those who, for even a moment,  have lost the capacity to fight for themselves. We were led here to meet those broken by the way side, and to give them strength enough to stand; to discover that this life is bigger than us, that our footprint will long outlast us and that our impact far outreaches us. Not to discover that is to deny the world the debt you owe it. There are some who have been so robbed of the right to offer a voice in what becomes of their lives that now, they need our choices to make a difference, to afford them strength enough only to stand and begin to walk again. And the God who leads us shoulder to shoulder through the desert would ask of us, “Where are you for them? Because wherever you are I will be too.” 

Some people only need to discover that Jesus yet speaks over them,

I have a plan for you, a plan to prosper you and not to harm you; a plan to give you a hope and a future.

Jesus doesn’t need me to fight for him, he’s already strong enough without me. But he invites me to fight at his side, sold out to a cause worth my all; to seek and to save that which was lost.

Life. Love. Hope. Health and wholeness. The freedom to dream.

To claim back what was taken captive, to be a light of life to a world lost in darkness, is the gift for which life was given us. For Dancel I pray only that I’ll have courage enough to give it all. Sometimes I’m the first to walk away from the fight, but in my better moments I take up the courage to be the man that God sees in me. One who would walk within an inch of hell to draw Dancel back. One who would spend every breath to see him loved. Because there is a next place for Dancel, not in heaven only but here too. There is for Dancel a life redeemed and renewed in God. There is for him a life that in all its beauty and freedom and light and love is only a dim reflection of what is to come.

For that I’ll fight, just as we have to fight for anything that carries a worth greater and more lasting than itself.

Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way,

Say to those with fearful hearts: “Be strong, do not fear,

Your God will come...he will come to save you.”

- Isaiah 35 -

#3: Waiting

Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.

- King David, Psalm 27:14 -

“How much of human life is spent in waiting...”

There are two kinds of waiting.

One person waits towards an end, towards the curtain close, the way you choke down an aspirin and wait for the pain to subside. You know the kind of person. You see them as you walk the desert. Theirs are the camps, the townships, built upon along the roadside; the Bedouin communes who set up, sit down and settle in. They long since decided that the meaning of life is to endure it, so they build sandcastles and live in them, with their dearest desire only that they will go to the grave without any broken bones.

One person waits towards an end, whilst another waits towards a new beginning.

That was Caleb, all over. Forty years he had spent walking the desert. He had watched his friends and family die out around him, a living fossil of an extinct age; all of it in waiting for the next place. As a younger man Caleb had been amongst the first to enter the Promised Land on the original scouting mission. He had foretasted what was to come, and nothing less would ever satisfy again. But he was alone, only Joshua would share his reckless readiness to take the land. The rest had set up shop in the desert. He found himself a conqueror amongst cowards, a pilgrim in a camp of Bedouins.

So he waited. For forty years he waited, until the entire generation was past, all for this day, the day his footstep marks a land he has walked once before, done with the tortuous and unyielding desert, free and, at last, home. And in this moment he turns to Joshua, the only other man who had laid eyes on the promise, and claims that for which he has longed. “Just as the Lord promised, he has kept me alive for forty five years while Israel moved about in this desert. So here I am today, eighty five years old! And I am still as strong as I was the day Moses sent me out. Now give me what the Lord promised me that day, the hill country where the Anakites live. Give it to me, and I will drive them out.” (Joshua 14)

One person waits towards an end, another waits towards a new beginning.

The difference is what their waiting inspires of the time they have.

I resonate with Caleb’s story. It must have seemed unfair that he was afforded a taste of something so good that he would never stomach anything less, and then had to wait half his life to taste it again. So too for me, it feels unfair that I would bathe in sunlight one minute and be lost beneath opaque skies the next. So often I have walked with God into the next place, into more impossible joy, into surer and more steadfast trust, into greater love, wider compassion; into the presence and power of his spirit and the deeper and more dangerous things of his heart. And then the next day, it’s different. The place I stood with my flag stuck in the ground is just the next place again. Like a subsiding tide, I’ve gone one step forward and two steps back. The things I praised him for yesterday are exchanged for a memory of things lost, or a dream of things that never were at all. I look about me for the root of the problem, like searching for a splinter in your foot that you can feel but cannot see. I don’t find what I’m looking for, but I do stumble upon something else. Something beautiful.

That I have tasted the next place and nothing less will ever satisfy again.

I don’t know what it is that makes me track backwards sometimes on my walk with God, or if I’m even tracking backwards at all. Perhaps, not trusting that he won’t snatch it back out of my hands, I hold onto the gift so tight it breaks. I know the fault is not God’s, I hope the fault is not mine, and the only thing of which I’m sure, after all this time walking with Him, is that I will settle for nothing less than a life spent giving him everything. Knowing that there is always more doesn’t make you stagnate in the now. It sets your feet to running. It makes you wait in the direction of a new beginning. It makes you chase after something you saw once, maybe so fleeting you would even doubt it was real, like a shooting star spanning the sky, were it not for the image it emblazoned on your eyes. And in life’s darker hours, in its pits, in its joys and in all the mundane mediocrity that fills in the rest, it is the longing for more that compels you overcome where others only endure. There you find yourself encountering the unyielding desert with an unyielding heart, demanding everything you have that you might lay hold of everything that is to come. You live from the next place, you find your purpose in the next place, and you know that whichever place you find yourself now, it is only a dim reflection of the unveiled wonder of the next place.

That was Caleb’s story. By God’s grace, it’ll be mine. Because the champions of this life are not those who come to its end dressed, pressed and glad that it’s over, but the spent and scarred few who fought their way to its end, a sword in hand and a song in heart, that they might stand as conquerors among cowards. The crown they receive will bear glory the weight of the cross they carried. Their life is spent in waiting, not for an end but for a new beginning.

You will surely forget your trouble

Recalling it only as waters gone by

Life will be brighter than noonday

And darkness will become like morning

You will be secure; because there is hope

You will look about you

And take your rest in safety

- Job 11 -

#2: Hiding

Elijah was afraid and ran for his life into the desert… He walked forty days and forty nights until he came to the mountain of God. There he crawled into a cave and spent the night. And the word of the Lord came to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

- 1 Kings 19 -

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days

- Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven -

He was the man who stood against a nation. With the king’s price on his head he’d lived in hiding for three long and lonely years, the last survivor of a faithful people. Every corner of the known world had been scoured in search of him, every rock upturned, yet when he needed an audience with the king he happily gave his hiding place away. He was the man at whose word the rains dried up and fire poured down, the man who had outrun and outdistanced chariots, who had breathed life into the lungs of the dead. The last and the greatest of his kind. Yet when we cross Elijah’s path in the desert, he could be called little more than a tired old prophet fleeing the noose. Somehow, despite all that he had seen, all that he had done, it took only a wound-up word from an angry queen to instill fear enough to drive him into the desert. He ran, and he hid. He ran until he couldn’t run anymore, which means he wasn’t drawing from the same source that helped him outrun the king’s chariots. His exhaustion must have been a novel experience. He even begged for death, the most “delightful hiding place for weary men”, as the Greeks called it. He didn’t really want to die; he was just donning the dramatics that help us cope when life gets tough. (If he’d really wanted to die, he only needed to make an appointment with the queen.) And after one day, exactly the amount of time the queen had given him to live, he stopped running, and he looked around. He was still alive. In that shameful moment, sheltering in the shade of his own failing, God caught him up. I don’t know what to make of the way God responds to Elijah’s childishness. In as much as he had run away out of fear, he had actually run away from God himself. And yet God sends an angel to him. More than that, when the angel meets him he doesn’t come with a rebuke, or the hard hand of discipline, but with a warm meal and a word of comfort. “The journey is too much for you”; it is too much, but it is not over, is the angel’s message. Elijah had to go further into the desert. Because an angel wasn’t enough. He had to meet with God.

Elijah might have run a whole day to get away from God, but he would walk forty just to hear him whisper. And that is where we find him, at the mouth of the cave, his cloak over his face, drawn out by the still, small voice of God asking of him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

I might not know what to make of the way God responds to Elijah’s failing faith; I just know that this is the way he responds. It’s the way he always responds to people in hiding. I know it better than I’d like to, since I’ve discovered God’s faithfulness most arrestingly in the times when my faith fails me the most. In those moments of dark and doubting obscurity even someone as superhuman as Elijah can’t seem to shake the most fundamentally human response – to run and hide. It’s the condition to which everyone from the first Adam to this Adam has been subject. We are, all of us, nothing more than “troubled guests on the dark earth”, and too often we choose to veil ourselves in the darkness rather than learn to walk in it. We run, but the Hound of Heaven chases. We hide, only to be sought and saved.

The whisper at the mouth of the cave speaks of the deafening revelation that God seeks hiding people, and invites hiding people to seek. The second of those two things merits some thought, especially by anyone who has known what it feels like to walk in the dark. Shame drives us into hiding, and the grace of God compels us out. And how? With a whisper, and with a question, “What are you doing here?” Though we would have it different, God is usually far more interested in getting us to ask questions, far more interested in drawing us to him in the very midst of our doubt, than he is in offering an answer. That’s because questions make seekers of hiding people. Questions we can understand – What is on the other side of a black hole? How did humans get here? Why would you let this happen, God? – their answers often we cannot. But God wants seekers as desperate as he. How humiliatingly humble a thing it must be for an all-knowing God to lower himself enough to ask a question of a people without knowledge. But that is my God, who seeks hiding people to the very end.

…who asked of Job, shivering in sackcloth with strength left enough only to wag a finger at God, “Would you discredit my justice?”

…who laid bare his infinite longing as he called out to Adam, shadowed in his shame, “Where are you?”

…who stooped low enough, at the uproar of hell and the disbelief of heaven, to make himself one of us. All so that he could seek hiding people, and invite hiding people to seek. In Jesus the longing love of the Father has a face, and a voice, quiet enough not to shatter the mountain, but compelling enough to draw us out of the cave. Jesus, the “incarnation of God’s furious longing”; the ultimate seeker, frantic for the sought. The Cross has made mute forever the question of how God responds to the human condition. He responds to it by embodying it, enveloping it. Every last twitch and tinge of humanity he takes upon himself. There is no corner of the desert that is not marked by the footprints of Jesus. Everywhere we go, he has been; indeed because he lives in us, everywhere we go he already is. And though that sometimes offers little hope to the child left abandoned at the loss of their parents or even to the tired old prophet fleeing the noose, it at very least says, like a still, small voice in the desert: “no matter how far you run from me, know that I will be waiting for you when you get there.”

“My dove in the clefts on the rock, in the hiding places on the mountainside,

show me your face, let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet, and your face is beautiful.”

- Song of Songs -

#1: Walking

It’s that time of year. 

Lent. That word usually precipitates a groan. For many it’s a time of sacrifice, a chance to kick that bad habit, if not once and for all, at least for forty days. For the more ascetic it’s an endurance test, an opportunity to give up things that you enjoy whether they’re bad for you or not. For many more (maybe even the greater majority!) the giving up is only a means to taking up a deeper intimacy, a happier and humbler walk, with God. For somewhere at the heart of it, somewhere at its genesis, this thing called Lent has something to do with a journey, a long road through the desert marked by the footprints of an ancient rabbi. Everyone knows the story. For forty days Jesus walked the Judean wilderness being tested and tried by the devil (and by his own appetite). It was a journey reminiscent of the prophet Elijah’s, or the Israelites’ long road into the promises of God. The desert is where it all began too; the Bible says that Adam was born in the wilderness and placed in the garden. In fact he was made unceremoniously from the dust of the desert floor. Perhaps that’s why the wilderness is a chapter in every one of our stories. The desert is a part of us, and to the desert we long to return. At some point, everybody walks in the wild. You have to. King David had to go there, Abraham and Moses too, Jacob and Joseph. John the Bappy was so drawn to the wilderness that he set up shop there. The problem is that we don’t understand the desert. Churchified vocabulary has abused the metaphor, making of the wilderness an analogy for those times of trial, of barrenness, of loss and void. Those are a part of the journey; they come with the feeble fragility that God weaved into the DNA of what makes us human. But were the desert encounter this and nothing more God wouldn’t invite us, in his own words even “allure” us, to walk in the wild. No. The desert must be reclaimed.

You see, the desert is a place of beauty. It’s the ground for a miracle; a place of absolute dependency and of extravagant provision. It is a place to hide, and to be sought out of hiding. It’s a place of war, littered with the spoils of those who fought and won and haunted by the memory of the martyred that fought and ‘lost’. The desert is where you will discover the depths of intimacy with God, because “there you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went” (Deut. 1). It’s the preparation ground; the Promised Land is always on the other side of the desert.  It’s a place, contrary to the wildly misinformed metaphor, of inexhaustible abundance. But at its heart, more than anything, the desert is a place of beauty. That’s why it must be reclaimed. Everything is beautiful in its time. You could say the desert is simply the place before the next place. Like life itself.

And so for the next few weeks I’m committing to a conversation on what it looks like to walk the wild with Jesus. I’m apprehensive about writing in this way; I don’t want to preach. After all, these aren’t lessons taught by me to you, but lessons I’m learning from God as I walk my own desert. That’s why I’ve called them letters, because perhaps it will do me good to write them down, and perhaps it might even do someone else good to read them. Sometimes you discover words penned by another to which you could sign your own name, or you discover that someone else’s thoughts afford you the solidarity to express your own. At very least it’s always nice to bump into others on the road. So these are letters from the road, lessons learnt wandering the wild. Really, all of this is just what I’m glimpsing day by day as I walk with wounded people here in the Congo, whose stories and words sometimes cut as deep as God’s own. This is where I'm encountering the arresting beauty of the desert, where in the midst of hopelessness there is reconciliation, where the deepest darkness is broken by the smallest glimmer of light, where life is bursting through the arid ground.

Lent… Groan. Or maybe not. If Jesus is walking in the wild then that’s exactly where I wanna be. The place just before the next place. After all, if the ‘next place’ is the Promised Land for which we were destined then this life, and all the hills and valleys it presents us, is never anything more than a happy and humble walk with God through the desert on the long journey home. If we recognize that then at its close we might be able to say with the sparingly worded Toni Collette: “being in the desert was brilliant, and it was hard.” Let’s walk!