The ultimate revelation in the vision of faith
is the depths of life that God meets you at.
Only when you’re there at depth desperate to seek God, though. What I mean is, when you’re already sold out to God — like you’ve got nothing else and there’s no other scaffold to cling to.
There where you expect God to be, you will find what you search for.
It’s as if the Spirit of God desperately wants to communicate at our depths — “I’m here AND I’m enough!”
I recall a time when there was such a void in my life, a depth of despair I’d plummeted to, where, with nothing to give but my weary, glazed attention, there was such great spiritual capacity to receive. I was hungry, thirsty, needy — yet no human connection could have met me.
Pain of loss had so gripped me, I reconciled only pain for pain, drawing upon only my parents and the fellowship of those others in some kind of similar pain to where I was at — the rooms of AA.
Such paradoxical experiences of “I belong here with these people” with “How on earth did I get here?”
Later, of course, it was the church, and later it was seminary, where I’d been given people to support me.
But the times I was alone were both the hardest and most precious.
It’s an alluring impossibility to put into words the memory of those moments alone. Both the absolute pits — the utter essence of mental, emotional, spiritual torment — but, with faith, the unconfirmable yet shimmeringly real presence of a hope that you KNOW will see you through it all.
It’s the holding of two divergent forces together in tension, one of comprehensive despair, the other of unrelenting hope.
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For the one who has plummeted to that place of aloneness in loss, catapulted to the desolation of grief, this thing I can tell you ...
There are experiences you’re going through right now — especially the hardest realities you never conceived pain like it possible in this existential life — that will prove to be your most solemn and cherished possessions for you later. Possessions of experience you’ll bizarrely want to return to again and again.
I cannot explain this other than such a pain experienced with a hope that seems distant but true is a true spiritual gift. Not so much a spiritual gift you use, but one that you HAVE. It’s a spiritual gift of BEING, not doing.
I cannot explain this other than it’s the reality of God’s touch — that you’ve been MET in a place of your being you could NOT have been otherwise met.
Again, these things are something you see better AFTER the event — the presence of your help at that time is gone, even as your need at that time is gone, but that presence was otherwise there, right there with you, at a time when the presence of pain was untenably acute.
The presence of God, it can be seen later, was the only thing you could have with you at the depths, it was all you needed, and God proves the divine miracle as evidence enough through what got you through at that most frantic time.
Having traversed such a time — and it only needs to be once for all time — the spiritual gift you possess is that portion of the knowledge and faith of God’s presence — in pain. You needed to be in need to receive it.
You know there’s no limit to pain yet also the unequivocal presence of God that meets people in it — by faith.
Having traversed such a time — to the depths you may never be called to return to — we embody something that is tangible for the ministry of souls in anguish. It’s not a ministry of doing, it’s a ministry of being.
There’s something of having been to the depths that we miss when we’re no longer there — once healing has come and the new normal is absorbed into self-acceptance.
And yet, if we are called there again, there is now something of the revenant about us; we’ve already died a death to self over such an extended period to the point it changed us, and we find grief a strangely familiar place. Though the pain is real, there’s more capacity to feel and be real. It will seem bizarre to some people, especially those who’ve never been to hell and back.
So don’t be fazed and accept what seems easier than it should be — accept it for what it is. Perhaps at this we’ve partly melded into the divine?
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