Nowhere to go.

So I feel like I'm beginning to climb out of this incredibly deep trough. I know it may be a sort of a strange sentiment, but I'm not too crazy about it. I don't want to come out of that experience just to be restored to the status quo. If I'm going to be brought back up, then I want to be brought higher than where I was when I left off. If anything brought me through that fire to begin with, it would be lukewarm and compromising religion. Oh, God, enough! Enough of the vague impressions that I receive once in a while! Enough of the times that I get to share about you, only to find myself digging up things that I've only heard other people say! Enough of this secondhand religion!! God let me see You for Yourself! Let me experience Your miracles! If I'm going to be a Christian, let me be all the Christian I can be, because I know the world is empty and transient. My flesh kicks and screams and quite honestly does everything possible to resist You, but God I ask for Your Spirit to come do a work in me. No more of the abstract and distant teachings of God... train me to seek hard after Your face and Your life! God forbid that I return to the half-hearted Christianity that I lived before! I do want, Lord, to have a relationship with You; wherein I wake early in the morning to spend time with You; wherein I weep and pray and fast for the things in Your heart; wherein my attitude is aligned with Yours; wherein everything I do, I do according to Your will and in Your Name! Lord, You know my desire, yet You know how much I don't desire it as well. You know how easy it is for me to blow my time on TV and internet distractions; how easy it is for my thoughts to wander away from You, even while praying. You know how I sometimes run away from the prayer closet. Oh God, I want the relationship and the spiritual blessing, but I don't want to starve the flesh. I know I don't deserve it... but I ask for Your hand to change me.

Through the prophet Ezekiel, You spoke to a people who ran after everything but You. Lord, I am no better. I may have thought in the past I was, but I'm not. At the advent of an opportunity, I run after the world. Yet You promised to give Your people an undivided heart... a heart to serve and seek You and You alone. God I ask that You might follow through on Your promise right now. I don't mean to be melodramatic... but to an extent, I feel like I will die if I go on like this.

God... please... for an undivided heart of devotion to You. In the name of Jesus, that You would be my one and only desire.

Tired.

I'm really tired of blogging how I feel lately. Really, really tired. Every day seems to be getting worse. I am realizing how capable I am of sounding emo, but frankly, if I'm going to blog, I might as well blog what's on my mind, plain and simple.

I don't remember ever feeling this crappy since I've been saved. This summer, I've willingly wasted so much time on TV and internet. The past few days, I've given in to sexual temptation, too. I suppose I'm blogging about it just to remind myself in the future how it feels to have gradually stifled the spiritual desires and replaced them with worldly ones. There's a fire in me, but all it's screaming is "emptiness." I feel like there's turmoil raging inside me, but only to tell me that I'm empty. I feel there's an experientially unprecedented distance. I don't want to sleep. I don't want to pray. I don't want to read. I don't want to watch TV. I don't want to do anything. Is this what it feels like to reach rock bottom? Is this where God swoops in, at my point of nothingness to fill me with everything?

I don't know. I don't want to go back to the world. It'll just be the same screaming emptiness, just that over time I'll begin to stifle it, and soon I won't notice. But I don't want to spend my lifetime doing things that I don't actually enjoy and aspiring to goals I don't actually have. Maybe it's God behind this feeling. Maybe that's what those characters in the Bible meant when they asked God to leave them alone; that the nagging of the Spirit would cease, and they could lead normal lives.

What would I ask God if He were here right now? God, what is going on? What is this feeling in me? How are You going to do everything you said? Why is this happening? What should I be doing? How should I be reacting? What are You thinking? How can I know You? Who are You? What do I do?

The last two questions are the two questions that Paul asked Jesus when he met the Other on the road to Damascus (see King James Version). I heard a pastor talk about how important these two questions are... and that throughout the rest of Paul's life, he continually asked these questions of the Lord: "Who are You, and what will You have me do?"

God, if You're going to do this...You have to do it all. I have no desire, no ability, no resources, no willpower... nothing. But Your Word and other people say that You knew this when You chose me, so now... come through.

I was greeted upon arrival to church this morning with a curious sight: what looked like a garden hose trailing down the stairs and off into the kitchen, chairs piled upon tables, and an exaggerrated variation of a smell reminiscent of rainy days on the bus, or prayer meetings with poor air circulation. The church basement had flooded.

All of the carpeted rooms were turned into marsh. Rain water (which, incidentally, in NYC, is not even very clean to begin with) had seeped through whatever orifice or medium to get inside, and it brought many friends that it met along the way. The result was something between what you find in an elementary schoolchild's water color cup (the one he's supposed to dip his brush in after every used color) and snow after it's been "processed" by car tires. But alas, we had to have service, so the towels and the buckets came out, and the stomping and wringing began.

Eventually, we came to the point where we couldn't wait any longer, and we started service (which, incidentally, wasn't so bad, in terms of the smell of damp carpet). Soon afterwards, we got back to work. There was the CM room, the EM room, and the room next door... Thank the Lord for Mary's husband David, who first came up with the idea of raking the water out. And as if showing us a method that was three times as efficient as our old method wasn't enough, he also came up with the idea of using the chairs to shovel water out. Then we thought it'd be even better if we had people SIT on the chairs to push them down while we shoveled, getting more water out. In the end, it felt like more of a day at a very, very dirty water park.

It felt really good, though. It was painful work at times, but I felt so blessed by the opportunity to serve God in this way. Ironically, I serve Him as a leader of His people, yet it felt good in a different way. I think a big part of it is that preaching and leading takes so much prayer and effort... I suppose I didn't have to agonize so much over what message to give and how to give it; I just had to grab a towel, stomp, wring, repeat. It's not the most noble reason to enjoy physical service, I know =P

I thank God for it, though. I feel truly grateful that we were given the opportunity to just roll up our sleeves and get to work (even though we may have to do it again soon, at the rate it's still raining right now...).

Thank You, Lord for what happened today in Your house. Only give me the same zeal to take care of the spiritual house that You started to build in me... that if one day I should come with a purpose to worship, and I find something that might get in the way, I will waste no time in deliberating, but roll up my sleeves and get to work. And when You, or someone You send comes along with a better way, let me not be so proud as to spurn correction, discipline or construction. Let me cast away the towels and buckets, and pick up the mop handles and chairs. God, come; open my eyes to see the damage done, to see the problem areas and the hindrances, and give me the spirit to obey and do something about it.

God, change my desires. All day long, my thoughts are filled with longings of the flesh; not necessarily bad longings, but fleshly ones no less. I know that many of them are God-given, for man is a physical being.... but I ask that the desires of my heart would not be for them. I can only ask this, because I cannot forcibly change any of it myself. Let my heart breathe after eternal, not temporal things. Let my eyes see the spiritual, not just the physical realm. Let my life be given all to You. Even now, there's a great portion of me that would rather take back these requests. God, turn me upside down and empty me out if need be, but cast me deeper into the things of God, that the shore of this physical life will eventually disappear.

In Jesus' Name.

when Faithfulness is not enough.

Job and his friends knew all about faithfulness. In terms of wealth, there was no one like Job. And judging from the personal friendship that he had with the three visitors, they were probably of high standing as well. Job in particular knew about the faithfulness of God. He led a blameless life, and interceded regularly for his family, and God blessed him with immense wealth. Yet there was something more to learn; there was more of God that Job knew not.

Honestly, the book of Job confused me like crazy. First of all, it's written in Hebrew poetry, which, as a comfortable speaker of the English language, I am not familiar with. Second of all, it's translated roughly into modern English, which, interlingual syntactical and idiomatic differences accounted for, is still confusing. Now combine that with seemingly repetitive and uncommonly snarky sarcasm, and I just don't know what's going on for most of the book. Yet I remember one time when I spoke with a friend who was going through an intense trial regarding her family. She didn't know why God, in His faithfulness and compassion, was allowing such pain and tribulation to go on in and around her. At the time, I had no idea what to say. Why does God seem to perpetuate pain? Why, as Job asks, do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?

At this time, a reminder of God's faithfulness is not enough. Job's friends insist that God is faithful, and that if Job repents of his sins, his fortunes would be reversed. And while God's faithfulness is undeniably real, it does not answer the question that burns: Why? It cannot simply be a matter of open sin, Job lived a blameless life and stood by his integrity even as it came under attack. What Job and his friends needed to learn through this was the wisdom of God. When suffering goes on for so long without a seeming answer from God, the question is "WHY is this happening," not "HOW can I endure?" The answer, then, is that God is infinitely wise.

God sees things so very differently, and He works everything out for our good in the end; it just doesn't always seem like that at the time. I can go through periods of torturous dryness and not have a clue why I feel like the heavens are brass and my prayers are dissolving into thin air, but God knows. He doesn't just know that I'm going through it, and how to get me through it, and how to get me out of it... He knows why it's happening, and He knows in His perfect plan how it's going to work out for my good.

Oh, that we could see that God is infinitely wise in all His dealings, and may that true revelation knowledge lead us into worship and ultimately nearer to Him. Oh God, for trust that remembers You are both faithful and wise!

Burning.

"There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight-- why the bush does not burn up." - Exodus 3: 2-3

When God sets something on fire, it does not burn up. When man, or anything natural, for that matter, sets something on fire, sooner or later, the fire is either put out, or the thing it is burning is reduced to ashes. God forbid we try to start a fire by natural ways; the work will either extinguish, and it will show for the fraud that it is, or worse still, the people we ignite will burn up, and lives that could have been used mightily by God are now, instead, embittered towards Him.

God, when we are faced with unsaved souls, or with friends in need of counsel, or with our own struggling and parched spiritual walks, may we not resort to the ways of man to ignite a fire for you. May we instead cry out to you with a faith that knows You are the only Answer; that You alone can set something on fire, and not have it burn out; that only the Holy Spirit can bring true salvation, true revival, true relationship.

I preached last Sunday about the inner life. I mentioned how it takes devotion to maintain that connection with God... and only now am I realizing the full weight of such commitment. There's a poem that goes

Two natures beat within my breast.
One is cursed, and one is blessed.
One I love, and one I hate,
but the one I feed will dominate."

Every day is a struggle to try to feed the blessed... yet I keep feeding the cursed one at the same time! All that's happening is that the two are receiving more strength to "beat within my breast." Oh, that the flesh would die! But it has such a nasty tenacity to survive. It clutches at every opportunity for food, manipulates both reason and will to be pandered to. Truly, truly only God can destroy this flesh. Only the resurrection power of Christ can change the heart. No amount of anything will do... I need God's grace just to deny myself every day... to pick up the cross and follow Him.

God...for grace. According to your love, Lord... grant me grace.