a light when all others go out

The past sixth months have been a spiritual and emotional rollercoaster for me. This October I thought I'd hit rock bottom. Slowly I recovered and regained my ability to rely on myself, only to wake up in January and feel like my passion for life had simply evaporated. It wasn't that I was unhappy or miserable. I was just apathetic--which for me is a worse state than being angry or upset or depressed because I'm typically so full of zest for life. My twenty-plus years of Christian experience provides a simple recipe for escaping apathy: read the Word and pray. For the better part of the last month though, I've really struggled to do this. I've prayed, but opening my Bible has seemed impossible. It was like there was some sort of imaginary clamp on it that I couldn't bring myself to pry off.

Thankfully, the Lord has wisely surrounded me by the strongest community of believers I've ever known in my life. Sunday, a friend encouraged me (or really gently forced me) to just open my Bible and start reading John. And not simply reading, but READING. As in, absorbing, digesting, listening, rather than glossing over. I quipped that I could recite the entire first chapter of John without reading it, but my friend was insistent and for some reason I listened. Funnily, I didn't make it past the first five verses. Particularly verses four and five I kept reading over and over:

"In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it."

When I finally submitted and started reading my Bible the darkness and apathy that has plagued me for the past month evaporated. It sounds crazy right? You don't just come out of something, but the past few days I feel like I've been renewed in a way that I can't fully describe. And I only am hungering to read the Word more and more. This is the strongest evidence possible to the power and truth and immediacy of my faith. The living, breathing Word of God has the ability to pull me out of wherever I'm at and change me instantaneously.

So whatever you're struggling with, big, small, tangible, evasive, get out a Bible and start reading. John is a good place to begin, but the Word of our Lord does not return void, so wherever you end up you will find that living light that shines in the darkness. You will find the Word that became flesh. You will find the Word through which all things were made. And you will be restored. Sound crazy? Absolutely. Ironically, it only functions to affirm what I know in my heart to be true. Every morning this week I've been reading my Bible and I feel alive again for the first time in a long time.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned..." John 3:16-18a

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misperceptions of others' perceptions
leading to extreme misdirection
round and round and round we go
where does this all stop? God only knows
the cruelest part of it all
is thinking rock bottom was months ago
recovered to functionality
now stuck in an inescapable apathy
trying the same thing over and over again
expecting different results all the same
the very definition of insanity
what's happened to me?
not unhappy
lost in an unnavigable ocean
gradually being lulled by the incessant motion of disappointment
heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak
too much to take
too insolent to listen
misguided self-reliance
repetition is suffocating
where are You?

when the Lord is quiet

What do you do when after six months of intense spiritual highs and lows, you suddenly fall flat with God? My fundamental beliefs about my faith haven't changed. I still believe what I have for pretty much my entire life and am convinced of the truths I cling to as the meaning behind why I'm here. Yet, for all my belief, my faith has become routine. I believe it and I live it, but it isn't alive in me. It isn't giving me the vibrancy, the complete joy that God promises to his faithful children.

A few days of thinking about it have only made it more frustrating to me. The root of the problem appears to stem from this: now that the most recent trial of my life has fully past and I feel healed of what I thought would never be healed, my willful independence has returned. It's not that I'm selfish, but rather incredibly self-reliant. Makes it difficult to rely on a God who demands my complete reliance. I know the recipe for getting out of this "rut"

Pray for God to change my heart and ignite my faith
Dig into the Bible

But right now, all of it is just going through the motions. God is quiet.

God isn't a big version of me...

With 2010 rolling full steam ahead already, I've been thinking a bit this weekend about things I'd like to accomplish this year. It's mostly fun stuff--learn how to bake an amazing cherry pie, go for a hike somewhere new in the Virginia mountains, write more. Really, I'm not a big fan of resolutions. They typically end up as unfinished things you wish you'd continued or things you never even get started on all together. It's so easy to say things and promise to do things. Last weekend at church the New Year's sermon was on changing your perspective, which couldn't have been more timely for me. I don't have a lot of life changes coming up or a lot of big goals, and lately it seems life has turned into my own personal version of Ground Hog day a little bit. But the point of the message was that God wants to do great things in all of our lives this year if we step back and let him. That led me to thinking quite a bit about how I've viewed God lately, more as a perfect version of us instead of as God.Thankfully, this couldn't be further from the truth.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9

So instead of setting 2010 goals, I'm setting a 2010 perspective: to stay focused on God, the God that chose to love me above all else, and remember He is so much more than a perfect version of humanity.