To feel safe is to stop living in my head and sink down into my heart and feel liked and accepted … not having to hide anymore and distract myself with books, television, movies, ice cream, shallow conversation … staying in the present moment and not escaping into the past or projecting into the future, alert and attentive to the now …feeling relaxed and not nervous or jittery … no need to impress or dazzle others or draw attention to myself. … Unself-conscious, a new way of being with myself, a new way of being in the world … calm, unafraid, no anxiety about what’s going to happen next …loved and valued… just being together as an end in itself.
~Brennan Manning
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the Founder and Perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by Him. For the Lord disciplines the one He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives.” It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
~ The Encourager, in Hebrews 12
Oh beloved, it is true.
Every moment, of every day we are bombarded with the temptation to live where our life is no longer present. We look, actually, in two places; both are disastrous.
Firstly, we look to live in the physical circumstances. Then, we work as hard as possible to try and control what happens to us, and around us. And, all the while, we bruise and batter ourselves against the dock of reality. Even though we somehow know, really know, that control is an illusion. We keep trying until we whip ourselves into complete exhaustion from fear and doubt and continuous “what if it really does fall apartness?”
Then, when the physical fails us, as it always does, we attempt to live life in the space of our intellect. We work to work out the problems with mind and logic and reason. We manipulate and twirl the situations about in our heads like some sort of spiritual beads or relaxation balls in our hands. It doesn’t work. And as we push the higher portions of our brains into overdrive, the lower portions push out signals that drain the rest of our bodies of energy, but fill them with tension and stress.
Beyond the problem of trying to live in our circumstances, or in our minds, we come up on the focus of both of these milieus. Both approaches are about control. We find ourselves trying to keep everything together – like somehow we even know what this is. We sense that if we just get all the things around us lined up just right, then everything is going to be OK. But, in trying to get everything around us lined up, we miss the only opportunity we actually have for things to come together.
Can we see it?
All of this is just a distraction from where we need to live. None of our attempts to control our circumstances or to think our way through issues is going to yield what we are looking for. Both are much to flimsy – way too gossamer thin – to climb through to the higher ground we seek.
There is a place within us, the inner man, the heart, where we can see What we need to see for all of this to work. And usually, it is only after the beatings our minds and circumstances have given us, that we are able to go there. It seems that we almost need to be exhausted to find it.
But when we finally do. When we finally allow the brokenness of our thinking and of our circumstances to just be what they are…
We quit looking through our physical eyes, and we begin to see through the only part of us that really has any true sense of vision. We look out through our spirit. And it is here, where we see Him.
We see that He has already been broken for us, and swallowed up all of our brokenness with His. We see that life is actually not about control. We see that Life is about yielding control, and in letting go, we find the wholeness that was not where we thought it was before.
So, have you been allowing your existence to distract you from Life? It happens. But, it need not continue. Look away from the places that have never worked. Then look to The One Who has never failed.
Tonight is your night, beloved. Time to quit being distracted.
There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear because of the noise, hurry, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on.
~Frederick William Faber (1814-1863)
