No One But Us

I read recently in Luke that Jesus said, " If you want to be my disciple, you must hate everyone else by comparison--your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even your own life.  Otherwise you cannot be my disciple." I thought and decided at the time that I would do just as He said, because, well, I really do want to follow Him.  I didn't realize I was like the children of Israel agreeing to do that which I could not do on my own. So I cry because I am afraid that I will not be able to hate all things in comparison, that I will be disqualified from being His.  Yet this He also knew, as He asked me. Soon after saying this He did the deed which proved me unable--he took the cross and hated His own life, to follow the will of the Father and make a way for this Elisa, and the whole world, to come to God. He did this as if saying "if you're gonna be my disciple, you must do this but, you know what? you can't do it. I will do it for you."  Knowing all of our fragility, our fickleness, our inability and our pride. . . He made a way for us to follow. Now there is only us, and the realization of who we are and who we are not.  The realization that we could not follow him on our own and needed Him even for this.  Yet it is us, as we are, who must come. Annie Dillard, once again, explained eloquently the new way I came to see this:

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead--as if innocence had ever been--and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak and involved. But there is no one but us.  There has never been.

God takes me. . . us, as we are and makes us able to follow Him, able to stand before Him, able to be pure. It was costly to Him, free to us. Will we follow Him? He will make us able. No price will seem too great. I am reminded again of a story told by Corrie Ten Boom--which probably will not be as richly recounted as I couldn't find it in her book at this late hour.  She told her father that she was afraid she wouldn't be able to die to declare the work of Jesus, that she would falter under persecution.  Her father, a wise man as he was, answered her fears with a simple story of a quotidian activity for the two of them: taking the train.  He said, "Corrie when we take the train, when do I give you your ticket?" She replied, "right before we get on board." He continued, "So will your Father in heaven give you the strength you need to withstand persecution for His sake at the proper time."

 Let us then go. There is no one but us. He will make us able.

And We Were All Afraid

There is a man that comes in regularly into the Coffee Shop. He has his own leather to-go cup in hand, and we usually fill it to the brim with our fresh brew of Colombian.  He’s friendly.  He’s a skydiver, apparently.   I hadn’t known this until today, when he did not show and I learned why.  His equipment failed him and he landed on trees at 60 mph. He hung tangled there for two hours until someone found him. He is alive--with major broken bones of course, but alive nonetheless.  He has done this stuff for twenty years, with no complications. . . until now.

I hear his story and I feel sorry for the man.  I look outside. Today it is pouring rain and blasting winds. The sky is a gray blanket, unbroken, unchangeable throughout day-time, as if there were no sun rising, falling or at all moving across the visible sky.   It has looked the same since the moment I first saw it when I woke up.
Sometimes in days like this I want to sleep the day away. Yet there are many things to do.  “Don’t put off till tomorrow, what you can do today,” the saying goes.  Why do we put things off? Why do we so often seek an escape from our present reality? We hide in sleep, we watch someone else’s “reality” on our TV screens, we look at our past through broken “good-ol day” lenses and wish to go back, or daydream of our future wishing we could haste past today and get there already. Hours, weeks, years. . . they seep through the cracks as we hold each in the cup of our hands. Yet all we have is today in all its magnitude, solitude, brokeness, gladness. We have today and its reality.

This is all we get:  twenty years,forty seven, sixty nine, ninety one. . . and we are gone. What is it that holds us back, that wants us to trade today, yet unlived, for tomorrow or yesterday?
Fear.  If not the only culprit, at least the most common one. It has often kept me frozen in time, other times moving, yet going nowhere at all. Fear of rejection, fear of failure or mistakes, fear of disappointment, fear of pain. . . We turn in fear even from the glorious.  From the amazing, powerful and baffling, and we run or  we push it away.   Once, Jesus healed a man from many demons. This man’s town came to see this wonderful thing and “they were all afraid.”  They told Jesus to go away and  leave them alone.
I wonder if our skydiver was scared that day.  His four-thousandth jump or so. And, why should I feel sorry for him? He did what makes him a skydiver after all. He did it knowing the risks and perhaps because of them. 

That’s just it though, for isn’t waking better than sleeping? isn’t knowing better than wondering? aren’t even the mistakes we make of more worth than never trying at all?    Yes, yes and yes… Yet fear and pain have kept me wanting sleep, wishful thinking, and a glass castle to never have to try, and fail  and get hurt.
For the longest time I’ve thought the antidote to fearfulness was courage, bravery—I was wrong. It is actually my misunderstanding of the true antidote that caused me to write about this. As it tends to be, connections in conversation, struggles, anecdotes and written works brought me to the same conclusion:  I need to better understand love.
Annie Dillard’s piece God in the Doorway, explains this relationship between fear and love as she tells of her first encounter with Santa Claus as a child. “I ran upstairs,” she recounts.

Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus, thinking he was God. I was still thoughtless and brute, reactive. I knew right from wrong, but had barely tasted the possibility of shaping my own behavior, and then only from fear, and not yet from love. Santa Claus was an old man whom you never saw, but who nevertheless saw you; he knew when you’d been bad or good. He knew when you’d been bad or good! And I had been bad [. . .] I wouldn’t come down, but I could bend over the stairwell and see: Santa Claus stood in the doorway with night over his shoulder, letting in all the cold air of the sky.

Like her, I tend to treat God much the same.  Yet, if I were to rightly understand His kingship and the nature of His love and the standing that these two over my life have granted me before Him, I would never again even hesitate because of fear. But no.  I tend to think that his love means I will be protected from harm, that I will be safe from the roaring waves of hurt and pain, that I will be strong.  Jesus did say however, “ I am sending you out as sheep among  wolves.” One word is written all over that sentence: pain.
Perhaps I misunderstand pain as well, it isn’t always punishment for having been “bad.” Some of it is consequences yes, yet some of it is opportunity.  Jesus said after the striking sentence above that this would provide opportunities for us to tell others about Him. Some of it is also “fine-tuning,” as I like to call it.  Breaking our hearts to make them more like Jesus, to hear other breaking hearts, to learn true love. John, the loved disciple, wrote to us of this:

We know how much God loves us and we have put our trust in His love.  God is love, and all who live in love live in God and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect [. . .]Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first.

I want to more and more experience His love. I want to understand it better. This is a dangerous thing to say, I know, especially after discussing the whole pain issue.  But I want to stop running recognizing with Dillard, as she finished her God in the Doorway piece, that

It is I who misunderstood everything, and let everybody down [. . .] God, I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge.  For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear and pain.  So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.