What we call crises, God ignores; and what God reveals as the great critical moments of a man’s life, we look on as humdrum commonplaces. When we become spiritual, we discern that God was in the humdrum commonplace and we never knew it.
~Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)
For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
~ Romans 8:5-8
Everything means something. And for the person who lives in the Spirit, those things which don’t mean anything, quickly become uninteresting.
By His grace, we begin to understand that it is not that we cannot listen to the raging screams of our body. Oh surely we are able. It is just that to do so is a beyond-perilous course of action. We learn that to listen to the old man scream for relief is not just wrong, it is dangerous. To give ourselves over to the flesh, even for a moment, brings on a horrible choking sensation in our spirit. The quenching action of choosing to turn our minds toward the desires of our flesh, takes our eyes of the Source of now-all the power in our lives. And we begin to feel what we felt like before we had surrendered our lives fully to him.
We feel wretched. Alone. Dying. Putrefying…. How in the world did we ever get through five minutes before Christ? We didn’t. It was a slowly-dying life of quiet (and sometimes, not so quiet) desperation.
We learn that, not only can we not listen to our own flesh, we need to stop even listening to our own brains most of the time. They are great processors of data (usually), but the way the brain synthesizes data into information often twists reality. As a wise teacher once told me, “Stay out of your head when you are alone. It is a dangerous neighborhood. Especially at night.” So, when our bodies get sick, our brains will often translate this into something that is much bigger than the problem being caused by the bacteria, injury, virus, or even cancer. The brain screams that the body must stay healthy, that it must stay alive.
Surely, survival is wired into us by our Creator. However, when the brain’s impulses towards feeling good become the primary motivator in our lives, it once again takes the focus off our Creator and onto the created. And that which is created only dies if it tries to live of its own accord. All created beings function properly – and truly live – only when the source of their life is: The Source of Life.
We begin to learn that all of life is all about Him. Truly, HE holds us in His firm hands. But, when we try to squirm away from His loving grip, we only cause ourselves pain. We start to see that the only way this whole thing works is for us to rip our minds off of the circumstances of our lives, the pain and sickness and weakness of our bodies, and the emotional pain in our brain – and focus all of our attention on Him.
Once we do this, though, we quickly begin to see that He – most definitely – has everything under control. All of it. Yeah, even our pain, our circumstances, and our sickness… He has that fully under control. In this space, life simply makes sense and we are at peace. And this peace is not just for us. It is a peace that we now have the bandwidth to share with other people.
As we set our eyes on Him, it is as if He pours His own ability to see back into us. We begin to actually see things the way that He sees them, and the range of our vision broadens to include the people around us. And, now seeing with His eyes, we love them and simply want to pour forth the Life and Peace we have been so generously supplied. Every bit of life, the good, the bad, the sick, and the healthy all becomes about Him and His desire to share His Love and Life with everyone.
And we suddenly realize, that this is what we were ever made for. It is wonderful. And we wouldn’t ever have it any other way.
Soli Deo Gloria
