The Revenant Blessing

THOSE who have experienced death — that death to their mortal pride — whilst they were still alive have lived the Revenant blessing.

A Revenant is someone who has approached their own death, so much so that it transformed their awareness, and it changed the way they see their life and life in general.

It’s a great thing to have approached death, or even to have apparently wandered through the experience, to the point of exploring the previously unacknowledged wreckage of that old life.

It’s a Christian’s experience, yet not all Christians have been blessed (yet) to experience what is harrowing at the time; a blessing afterwards.

You may read this as separatist, and if you do, hold out hope that if your death comes near you’ll have the poise or opportunity to hold it at safe distance.  Though it will bring great grief, there’s a blessing in it if you can suffer well all the way through to the end of the experience.  This may simply need to be borne in mind — should great loss come.

For, the return from death I talk about is from the loss of your own will to live, to fight, to take from this life, as you once did.  Once this mortification of our flesh has taken place there’s no competing fear for conquest and acquisition — we’re able to live life as it is without judging it as good, bad or otherwise.

It still sounds weird, doesn’t it?  I’m sorry.  I do want you to derive your 20-seconds’ value out of taking the time to read this.

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I guess this is what I’m saying…

Don’t spurn the end of one life.  Loss comes.  Then, with a heavy ambience, grief.  There is purpose in it.

What God needs to do to get most and maximum value out of us, for his Kingdom, is he needs to end the striving of our will in order that he might commence the striving in us for his — for real and certain.  We say we’re his, but are we really?  Are we ready to die a fresh death?  Once we’ve lived a death to ourselves, we’re able to do it more and more.

God needs to take us to the brink of our own disaster, and if you’ve faced the end of your life the way it is or was, then you know what God’s capable of.

God resurrects us only from the depths of the death to our own prideful life.

God needs to take us there; deeply down into the fissures of a grave-like abyss — to end one life before he can raise us to a new life.

This is why there’s so much more hope for us having traversed hell.  Hell need only be a waystation on the way to God’s Kingdom.  And, as Sir Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going!”

If we’re going through hell, we do need to keep going.  We don’t stop there.  We cannot give up even one breath.

God resurrects to new life that life that tastes death to the old, dysfunctional life.

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The Revenant blessing makes it possible to know this: when life seems impossible it’s possible to get through because you’ve done the impossible before.  You’ve seen God do it.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.