your story

Every once and a while I look at my life and wonder where I have come from and where I am going.  Sometimes I see the horizon and great joy wells up within my heart, yet I know that this too shall pass.  I see beauty that transforms the heart and enriches my life with hope.  I see it and am humbled by the great splendor that this earth is wrapped in leading me to truth. There is nothing to fear.  These things are barely tangential reflections of what is to come.  We will be loved.  We will be like the sparrow hopping in the grass, moved by the spirit.  He is clothed in glory.  It is a certain type of glory.  All things have their own honor and glory that can be revealed to us if we have open hearts and minds to see it.  The nature of glory is that it needs a receptor.  A deaf man cannot hear.  A blind man cannot see.  A hardened heart cannot glory.

As I get older and learn a little bit more from my experience, much of which is painful, I am graced with the desire to not judge men.  I will call things out and will stand for honesty and integrity, but I will not judge a man. I am a man.  I am like all men.  I am like you.  Broken just as you are.  With this in mind I will tell you that we have the same story.

I have always been very aware of myself and what I imagined for my life to become.  I had a story that I wanted to write.  I took my creative genius into real life and to my dismay found that the characters in my story were real people with their own ways and choices.  My characters had free will!  I was not prepared for this.  I had been very keen to situate myself to avoid things that I didn't want to be part of my story.  I tried to include things that I did want to be in my story.  I discovered that my story was a romantic story.  It was a story that was sensationalized, idealized, and decidedly not real.  I wanted to present my readers with something that was beautiful, intentional, courageous, and yet humble.  Not exactly sure where the idea came from that I was a different specimen of humanity or that I was someone that should be a presentation for others.  It was not until the last few years that I began to discern that "my" life (the pride of life) had no value to God.  It was my death that He wanted.  My celebrity was of no value to God.  He did not want "people like me" to show others what a good story was.  God did not need me.  In fact my lack of integrity did not hinder God's work in this world.  I was of no relevance to the status of the Kingdom of Heaven.  I know this may seem contrary to what may seem right or normal as far as conversations go,  but what God wanted from people like me was to give up trying to be or do anything.  He wanted me to realize that as far as righteousness and integrity I was a complete failure and would never be a success.  His purposes  for men is that we die and fall to the ground.  His desire is that after death He would raise men that have a heart for Him and that will allow God to be their lives.  His purpose is that He confirm His story within us.  (I do not mean that God does not value us, we are His greatest treasures. I mean that we are of no consequence without bowing our knee to His love.  We must surrender to Love.)

If we are aware of ourselves we will make decisions that reflect this.  We will strive to present an image.  God has already written our story.  We all have differences that will give us little nuances, beautiful nuances (I love your nuances), but our story has already been written.  The story is very simple.  It is a beautiful story.

Due to nature, we hated God.  We being animals, yet ones undoubtedly different than the others, would rather live like the others and live by the law of nature.  In this state God made Himself known.  His ways stirred in our hearts.  In community He gave us the ability to know Him.  In community and the conflicts that it presented us He allowed us to be tested.  For fear of being alone we followed the crowd.  The crowd sold us into slavery.  Together, the people of God, in our slavery and collective consciousness were bound to hopelessness.  It was in this moment that God decided to provide deliverance.  He not only wanted to deliver us from slavery, but more importantly deliver us into the promised land.  He performed great works in our lives and led us forth into the desert because He wanted to speak to our hearts.  It was in this desert for only a few days that we turned our hearts toward our old natures. We desired to be back where things were normal and we accused God of not caring for us.  We became bitter because we did not think that He had fresh water for us to drink.  We were more comfortable trusting in our own cisterns.  It was three days into our deliverance that we began to get our own ideas about what was right for our lives.  Due to this unwillingness to trust we began to wander around in the desert for 40 years.  We were following God yet going nowhere.  It was due to God's heart that He decided to let us take the promise that He had spoken to us 40 years prior.  When we saw all the land and what it had to offer, our hearts rejoiced.  Life and love was finally just around the corner.  Within moments as our hearts were celebrating hope we learned that there were Giants in the land.  Our hearts grew faint because all that God had put us through in the desert.  We were finally ready to lie down by the still waters and there were Giants! We were small in our own eyes.  We would have written an entirely different story.  This story kind of sucks.  We didn't deserve this. We said, "When will God quit being a chump and just leave us alone?!"  Here we are disheartened and we just wanted to relax and quit trying, and God says to take the land.  We were done with the games.  This was a joke.  We said in our hearts, "Why don't you take the land.  You are the one with this whole plan and have yet once cared to ask if we really wanted to be part any of this.  To be honest I think it is a bit childish.  As for me, I will write my own story.  I will at least write one that is fair and just."  

Because God cares about us and doesn't want all of our physical moments to be moments of misery He led us into the land.  It was all that could be desired. We built houses for ourselves.  We built treasuries for our gold.  We built silos for our grain.  The word of God, the Bread of Life, started to lose its appeal and need. In fact the Giants had ways of life that were enticing.  They loved the law of nature.  They lived like the other animals.  There seemed to be a very strong feeling in our flesh to their approach to life.  Maybe they had it better?  Who was to say that we should be constricted by these Laws of God?  Does He really need to be so arrogant and want us to worship Him and only Him?  Why was a good God so intolerant?  That didn't seem right.  We set out and made our own way.  God only left us lonely and hurting.  This new sense of pride and value and self responsibility seemed so much better.  We didn't realize that it was God who gave us all of these things.  He was also giving us over to debased minds because we did not want to retain Him in our knowledge.  We had begun to lose our receptors for beauty.  Our hearts began to become hardened. We learned how to move on.  We learned how to betray our hearts.  We went after our lovers and pursued them.  They turned their backs on us and we found ourselves empty.Our hearts became hard and we could not feel one way or the other.  Our lovers were no longer interesting.  God was standing by the whole time.  He in all of His Glory did not override our free will.  He let our hearts fail us.  If in these moments we were able to muster a heart of sorrow to seek to humble ourselves before Him, to honor Him with our acknowledgement, He gave us grace.  

He stooped down and picked up this mess of a human and breathed life back into this dead body.  He said, "I want you, you are Mine."  He was so excited to have you back.  He wanted you to be His bride.  He wanted to have your heart.  He wanted to spend all His time with you.  He clothed you in Glory.  He poured our His best for you.  He wanted to party with you for eternity. There was nothing that you had done nor would do that would ever separate you from His love.  He loved your smile.  He loved your gait.  He loved your heart.  He saw the tears of gratefulness at the corner of your eye when He looked at you and asked you to feed His sheep.  He wanted to raise you up in Honor to sit at His right side and let all of creation know that you were His.  Not once ever did your former ways cause His heart to sink.  You were made beautiful by His love.  

This is your story.  I know it is a paraphrase and that there will be different sub-plots and idiosyncrasies.  Your story will be beautiful because the King cares for you.  We, the Bride of Christ, all have the same story.  We were purchased by a price. This price was more than we will ever know in this life.  We need to be aware of the story so that we can interact with it properly.  The story is that God will take us into the desert to speak to our hearts.  It is in this desert where He desires to reveal Himself to us. If we let Him, He will honor us with Glory.  We will be children of the King. We will be the Bride of Christ.  We will walk in a stature and confidence that comes from the things that He spoke to our hearts in the desert.  God only takes those into the desert that He desires to speak to.  We chose how we will respond to Him.  

I am inclined to romantic thinking and it is sometimes good to be grounded.  God will transform your life if you will let Him.  Let Him.  I will try to do the same.  

My blog is a presentation of some of my thoughts as incomplete as they might be.  To be fair, I have a friend who has given me some of the ideas that I have been sharing over the last months, I am very grateful to her.  I will not give her name because I would rather let her know in a secret way that she is valued and appreciated.  I have great friends and whatever is good in my life is a result of God giving them to me and challenging me by their lives and ideas.  I want God to continue to encourage me to stand up and be the man He has created me to be.  I have had the honor of being able to step up to that a bit at the encouragement of those God put in my life.  I am nothing without Christ and I am alone without you.  I love you and appreciate you.