Teleia Philia

O Love divine, that stooped to share
Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear!
On Thee we cast each earthborn care;
We smile at pain while Thou art near.

Though long the weary way we tread,
And sorrow crown each lingering year,
No path we shun, no darkness dread,
Our hearts still whispering, “Thou art near!”

When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
And trembling faith is changed to fear,
The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf,
Shall softly tell us Thou art near!

On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
O Love divine, forever dear!
Content to suffer while we know,
Living and dying, Thou art near!

 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 1859

Solitude and The Divine Silence

Thank you to all who have been praying since my last post. I recently had to spend a few days away from home, and this time away from the routine allowed me to spend a lot of my time in solitude. It was exactly what I needed in order for God to breathe new life into me. On the morning after I arrived, God met with me in my solitude and quietly led me to the Psalms of David.

Psalm 88.13-15

But I, O Lord, cry out to you;
   in the morning my prayer comes before you.
¹⁴O Lord, why do you cast me off?
   Why do you hide your face from me?
¹⁵Wretched and close to death from my youth up,
   I suffer your terrors; I am desperate.  

Psalm 27.7

Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud,
   be gracious to me and answer me!
⁸‘Come,’ my heart says, ‘seek his face!’
   Your face, Lord, do I seek.
⁹   Do not hide your face from me.

Although my circumstances were very different from David’s, I found myself relating to his desire for God to meet with him, and with his frustration with the silence he was receiving from God. I don’t know whether God was silent or if I was deaf, but the effect was the same. I wanted desperately to hear from God. I was thirsty for His presence and hungered for His fellowship.

 

The Dread of Divine Abandonment

A haunting feeling of dread accompanied me all day long as I considered the possibility that God had  abandoned me in my suffering. Had I sinned against God, causing Him to turn His back on me? What must I do in order to regain God’s favor? How do I repent if I have searched my heart and found no evidence of hostility against God and His ways? Was this all a result of my medication? Is it possible that the physical affect of a medication also affected my soul? Whatever the reason, I knew that I did not want to continue to feel as if God had abandoned me in my suffering.

 

The Divine Speaks!

After dinner that evening, I returned to my hotel room and began to seek God in my prayers. I was hoping to hear from God, and He was gracious. He led me once again to the Psalms of David where I read of His goodness.

 

Psalm 27.13-14

  ¹³I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord
   in the land of the living.
¹⁴Wait for the Lord;
   be strong, and let your heart take courage;
   wait for the Lord!

 Psalm 32.6-7

⁶Therefore let all who are faithful
   offer prayer to you;
at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters
   shall not reach them.
⁷You are a hiding-place for me;
   you preserve me from trouble;
   you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.
           

God had finally spoken the words of reassurance that I needed! God had not abandoned me at all- He had been  there all along offering His deliverance. The problem was that, all along I had been seeking a deliverance from the very thing that He was asking me to embrace. I had been seeking a deliverance from pain, but He was offering deliverance from His silence.

 

Interlude: New Sensations

 In recent weeks, I have started to feel some new sensations that were not previously a part of my symptoms. As I understand it, it is a part of the peripheral neuropathy that accompanies my disease. These sensations can best be described as a sharp and persistent burning pain. It is more like the burning sensation that you feel from touching a hot metallic object as opposed to the burn of hot water. If you have ever brushed up against a hot clothes iron while pressing your clothes you would recognize the sensation. As a matter of locality, they are occurring along the length of my arms, neck, back and face. They tend to last between 30 seconds and two minutes, but the residual pain persists for a few hours. As a result, I have been dreading the possibility that thid burning will continue to get worse. Quite frankly, I don’t like to feel like I am burning.

 

Conclusion: Delivered by Pain

There is a song that we used to sing in church. I don’t remember all of the words, but it says something along the lines of ” I want to hide where the blazing fire cannot burn me.” That line has been playing in my mind since I first started feeling these burning pains. As such, my prayer for the past few weeks has been for the burning to cease. However, as is usually the case, God has been trying to teach me something completely different through my suffering. When I first started experiencing the burning, that line from the song came immediately to mind, and for obvious reasons. However, I stopped too soon. I didn’t realize that God had placed the song in my mind as a reminder of where I am to hide… for the full sentence from the song says “I want to hide where the blazing fire cannot burn me- In your Presence O God!

 

To make matters worse, we sang that very song the Sunday before last… and I still managed to miss what God was telling me! Even when we sang the song in church (as an act of worship to God) my focus was on myself (as an act of worship to myself?). In singing the words to the song, I was so focused on my own ”blazing fire” , that I neglected to see that God was beckoning me to find comfort in His presence. I had bought into the lie that pain is evil- that it is something to be shunned. What I didn’t realize is that God gives us pain in order that we might draw into His presence. It is something that we must learn to embrace rather than shun. In doing so, we take our eyes off ourselves and come to discover the riches of His mercy and sufficient grace.

 

Kairos

My time with God was especially rich today. I know this is only because so many of you have been praying for me. Yesterday, after the evening prayer service, a dear friend of mine had the courage to ask me how I was doing spiritually. Now this may not seem like such a big deal to most of you, but this is the first time in many years that I recall anyone asking this of me. Quite frankly, the question was exactly what I needed to be asked because it forced me to stop and think about why I have been feeling so distant from God lately. I think God for friends who have the  discernment to recognize when I am at a spiritual low, and who have the courage to ask at the most opportune moment in time. I believe that he was able to do this because he is filled with the Spirit of God. When God prompted him to speak, he did.

 

The pleasures of pain

You see, I have been struggling as of late to hold near to the presence of God. There is a battle going on this very moment in my mind. It has nothing to do with God’s goodness, but everything to do with the tension between His immanence and His transcendence. For the past few months I have been in tremendous amounts of pain, and the result was a closeness and nearness to God that I never knew was possible. I feel closest to God when my prayers and devotions are focused. For the past few months God had granted me a clarity and focus in my prayers that continuously drew me into His presence. It is the paradox of suffering. We experience the pleasure of intimacy with God the strongest when we are at the height of our suffering. God uses experiences such as these to draw us to Himself. Through our suffering, He teaches us that it is not about us, it is about His grace (II Cor. 12.9).

 

The pains of pleasure

When our pain is taken away (be it through healing, medicine or diversion) we quickly lose sight of  the pleasures that our pain once brought us. Since starting my treatment about a month ago, my pain has been significantly reduced to a tolerable level. This sounds good at first, but it comes at a high price. It may be, in fact, a bargain with the devil himself. I have redeemed God’s gift of suffering for relative  painlessness and a dull mind (both being effects of the treatment). Mornings which were once rich in communion with God are now a muddled conglomerate of half-baked thoughts and petty prayers. Evenings which were once rich in communion with my family, are now spent in sleepy solitude and useless lethargy.

 

The paradox of God’s transcendent immanence

All of this has caused me to think about God’s immanence. After spending so many days near to God, I am now feeling as if He is far off. I know that He is near to us, but I do not feel it. I find myself begging Him to show His face and walk away feeling as if He has hidden Himself. My first response to this was to reject my feelings as irrational (a well conditioned Neo-Platonist) and cling to the objective and more rational knowledge of God’s immanence. However, the more I observed my response, the more irrational it began to appear. Why am I so quick to dismiss God’s transcendence when I know full well that it is an essential quality of His being? God is, as Barth insisted, a being who is “wholly other” than us… and yet He graciously condescends to our level to become immanent to us. I cannot reject the notion that my feelings of  alienation from God are errant. We are categorically different than God.

 

Rescue the perishing

These feelings of alienation are  a reminder of what life was like prior to my adoption as a son of God. This experience has given me a new appreciation for the empty longing for God that those without this salvation experience. Having experienced the nearness of God, I see clearly the horror of my alienation. Mine however, is temporary. I know that God will restore to me the joy of His salvation. This has caused my heart to ache even more for those who are without hope. You see, my hope is a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul (Hebrews 6.19). I have entered the inner shrine behind the curtain, and have seen the face of Christ who had entered before me as my high priest (vs.19-20). What horrors await for those who do not enter so boldly?!?

 

Wrapping it up

I know I that  have been all over the board in this post and that it may not make a lot of sense right now. Rest assured that it doesn’t make much sense to myself either. I am sorting through a lot of new feelings and thoughts right now and may or may not return back to normal. What I do know is that we serve a God who is near to us, even when we don’t feel like He is near. Likewise, we also serve a God who is wholly other, even when we are flooded with the joy of His salvation. The wonder of God is not His exclusive immanence or His exclusive transcendence; it is in the affirmation of both. It is in the realization that He has condescended for our sake and by doing so we have ascended to a position of glory. This realization is accompanied by joy, but also by fear and trembling. For there are millions around us who are destined to an eternal horror if we chose to keep silence about our salvation.