Year: 2012

Caused to Sin?
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“People, circumstances, etc. are never the cause of failure. Self’s reaction to them is the cause and the one problem to be dealt with.” Miles J. Sanford

Others can never “cause” us to sin, even when they have sinned greatly against us. When we respond to being hurt by another by hurting them we sin and are responsible for that sin. The problem is that we tend not to fully rely on God for our solace when wounded by others. Instead we often take matters into our own hands. The major goal when choosing how to react to being sinned against should be to seek understanding for the sinning party and divine strength to bear the wound, not to use that wound as an excuse to do wrong. Then we must trust God for our needed healing.

In a fallen world it is impossible to escape being hurt by other people. Such injuries are sometimes completely unavoidable. Also unavoidable is our own inborn tendency, conscious or otherwise, to injure those people ourselves. It is something we are born with and the spiritual re-birth that makes us Christians does not automatically banish the propensity to hurt back. The popular contemporary term for a believer is “wounded-healer”. Unfortunately sometimes a better description for us might be “wounded-wounder”.

It often seems as if the last thing we want to do at the moment we have been offended is seek God for help in responding. The flesh immediately puts forth its own agenda and it is powerfully tempting to follow its prescription for dealing with the offender. If someone punches me in the nose my first impulse is not likely to be to pray to the Lord for wisdom in understanding why that someone would do such a thing. My first impulse is to punch back. If I follow that impulse the world will likely tell me I am acting in legitimate self-defense. As my newly-bruised nose throbs “legitimate self-defense” sounds pretty good to me! But Jesus might well tell me to turn the other cheek in such a circumstance .My flesh, of course, wants nothing to do with the concept. The call of the Spirit speaks softly and my sense of grievance is screaming. Often I never hear God’s call at all.

But part of the problem may be that I do not really want to hear it.

One aspect of attaining to spiritual maturity is deciding that no matter how urgently the flesh is speaking to me I will choose to listen for the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit before I react. This is by no means easy. Some people never learn to do this and, at best, live in spiritual defeat all their Christian lives. Initially it is far easier to heed the flesh than the Spirit. This is true with any temptation, not just the one to take revenge. Ask any addict. Resisting sin is difficult. However the long-term results of not resisting lead to death and that death is far worse than the pain involved in choosing to flee temptation. Experiencing the short term gratification of giving into sin is never worth the aftermath, never.

Beyond that there is a better reason not to fight fire with fire. Our best motivation for seeking God’s solution to injury is simply that we want to be lovingly obedient to Him. We perhaps love God best when we strive to emulate His beloved Son. This is the call of the Spirit in our lives, to truly do what Jesus would and to do it out of love for Him. This is greatly pleasing to God and, make no mistake, He will make up for whatever loss we sustain in taking the harder road of Christ-likeness. It may be in this life or it may be in the next, but our Lord will surely wipe away our tears and heal every wound we have sustained.

That assurance is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of a Christian who has just been punched in the nose.

Our Truth or True Truth?
by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
-Anais Nin

The only human being who was ever capable of insight unsullied by the fallen subjectivism of our race is Jesus Christ. For the rest of us reality is filtered through our personal experiences and then warped by the self-centeredness we have been afflicted with since the advent of original sin. The result is a world perceived in terms of “personal truth” vs. absolute truth.

Who among us cannot remember a time when we were sure the worst-case scenario was about to descend upon our heads only to find out that “this too, shall pass.”? What so often happens is that we perceive God as ready to act towards us the way we would act towards a person we have been wronged by. But God doesn’t treat us as others do or, for that matter, as we treat others. Why? It is because in His omniscience He clearly sees every angle of the circumstance in ways we cannot. Objective reality belongs to Him. In fact He is objective reality. Only God completely knows what is really going on in any situation we might find ourselves in.

This is why it is so vital for believers to pray for the insight that only comes through the power of the Holy Spirit. Our Counselor can open our eyes to understand what we never would understand had we depended solely on our own foggy vision and false wisdom. This is the only way we can stop seeing through the “dark glass” of our own prejudices and leave our subjective unreality behind us.

Today the Christian Church is rent with divisions and prejudicial judgments. Part of the reason for this sad state of affairs is the tendency even believers have to see things according to their own passions while claiming that it is God who is showing them some truth. We have far too much confidence in the idea that we are accurate arbiters of reality in the power of our flesh. The fact is we are always off the mark when we let our own filters trump revelation as the place from which we seek ultimate knowledge. How many teachers and preachers are selling as truth the twisted logic that comes from their own inner conflicts? The answer is too many, and this is one of the reasons for the splintered church of our time.

It is very dangerous to assume that we can always accurately discern what is really going on. That this is something which even has to be reinforced today in Christians belies the depth to which we have come to trust the accuracy of our own perceptions. We should know from Scripture that the “human heart is desperately wicked” and, further “Who can know it?”

It is God’s desire that His children come to know the truth and be set free by it. One of the ways this comes about is when we surrender our own “truth” and ask for His to supplant it. If our sincere goal is to become more Christlike it behooves us to stop manufacturing our own reality and align our ideas about the “way things are” with His. Only in this way can we live consistently in the truth and, by extension, in our God.

When Contrition is Missing from Confession
Copyright  by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Unfortunately I can count on one hand the number of times I have felt deep remorse over my own sin during the twenty years I have professed Christ as my Lord and Savior. By this I mean those times when my emotions matched my knowledge of wrongdoing, when I shed tears over doing something I definitively knew I shouldn’t have.

This is not to say that I have not regularly confessed known transgression against God’s law and asked for both forgiveness and the power to resist the temptation to transgress in that way again. What it means is that the sadness I have always thought true Holy Spirit conviction should bring has very seldom been a part of my Christian experience.

This is also not to say that I have not known what it is to grieve and grieve deeply and openly. I have cried many tears over the losses in my life, especially losses connected with the deaths of those I’ve loved. I’ve learned not to be afraid of the power of grief to cleanse my soul of some of the bitterness I’ve known in this life that originated in loss.

No, the thing that seems glaringly absent from my experience is the grief that comes from realizing deep in my heart that I have done real wrong, and in doing so grieved the heart of the God I call my own. It is one thing to pray a prayer of confession and ask for forgiveness. It is quite another to both feel and express the pain that comes from the long ago realization of King David; that it is against God, and God alone, that I have sinned. Every time we deeply hurt someone by our own wrong actions should we not feel remorse if we have truly “come to grips” with what we have done? Can we claim to have a “Godly heart” if this is rarely the case?

Perhaps the best thing those of us who have a hardness of heart in this area of our Christian life can do is get on our faces before our Lord and earnestly ask for the Spirit of true conviction to break that heart. Maybe we also need to ask that same Spirit to show us what we ourselves must do, if anything, to make that heart “breakable”. While we can do nothing apart from God it might be that we are responsible to become willing to face and truly forsake what may be a deeply held conviction that our sin just isn’t “that bad”.

The truth is all sins are horrible acts against a holy and loving God. We cannot decide some are minor and some are major. All represent terrible wrong that we should feel terrible about, at least until the Lord’s grace and forgiveness lifts up our countenance and wipes away real tears of sorrow for what we have done, and what we continue to do.

Our hearts should match our confession. Our spirits must show the contrition that represents real repentance for our wrongs. If this is not happening can we be sure that the forgiveness we ask for is forgiveness we even truly want? What if, deep down, we have no intention of giving up our sin? This is a fearful thing to consider but something, it seems to me, which we ignore to our soul’s peril.

Biblical Paradoxes (and Why I’m Sticking to Them)
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The Bible tells us in several places that the Lord takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and that He also calls the wicked to repentance. This seems to make perfect sense…that is until we read somewhere else verses that  imply the Lord’s total sovereignty in determining the fate of every human being for all eternity. From these latter verses comes the entire doctrine of Predestination, a view held by many millions of Christians today. But how can a God who” takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked” choose to make them wicked, as the pure “Predestinationalist” teaches?

I bring up this seeming conundrum not to prove that Arminianism trumps Calvinism (I’ll leave an exhaustive debate on that subject to someone else) but to point out that the Bible sometimes appears to teach things that are contradictory to each other. I think most thoughtful believers try to hold these things in tension, and view them as paradoxes, because they believe that the Bible cannot contradict itself and that some aspects of meaning in the Scriptures are beyond human comprehension. I would count myself among those who think along these lines. It seems to me that mysteries we cannot completely grasp are inherent to a book that was ultimately authored by a God we cannot completely grasp either.

That said, I understand why some Christians cannot and will not believe in paradoxes that to them appear more like contradictions. But it seems to me that such individuals really have only one choice left to them if this is what they believe about the Bible as a whole. They must choose to go with all the verses on one side of the question and effectively disregard those on the other. At the very least they must try to make those other verses somehow back up what the ones they primarily want to believe.

Ultimately I think this approach to biblical interpretation is less than fully honest, but that doesn’t mean I do not sympathize with the motives that bring people to it. To be truthful, at times, trying to hold paradoxes in tension is a wearying thing. At such moments the temptation to go all one way or the other can be quite strong. Many if not most human beings greatly prefer certainty over mystery, especially when they are talking about subjects with eternal ramifications and, of course, the Bible is full of verses that address these subjects.

In the case of the most important issue of all I must admit to having occasionally tried to make a set of complimentary verses about the “mechanics” of eternal destiny absolutely authoritative in my mind. It has yet to work because immediately other verses come to my remembrance that, at minimum, appear to very strongly contradict the ones I’m trying to use to create some kind of airtight systematic theology on this crucial question.

What is interesting is that when this happens I tend to feel more relieved than frustrated. I’m not completely sure why this is but I think it may come down to the fears that an extreme position on either side of the Calvinist/Arminian divide often have left me to deal with. If everything is utterly predestined by God what if I’m not one of the elect? If everything is a matter of free will what if I get so angry with God that I choose to forfeit my salvation? You see, neither theological extreme gives me any peace. You may chalk that up to my somewhat obsessive-compulsive nature, but the fact remains that I somehow feel better about God, and thus more secure in His love, when I admit to not knowing exactly how all this works. It gives me the opportunity to simply leave it all to the One Who went to the cross and trust Him with my destiny, and exactly how it comes about. Because He is God I think I can count on Him to know what He is doing when it comes to the eternal future of the Human Race, including me.

So, yes, I’m sympathetic to those who crave certainty and choose one or the other side to get some felt measure of it. It is just that I cannot quite bring myself to give up clinging to those annoying paradoxes when two sets of inerrant Scripture passages that seem to contradict each other (even in context) come before me.

This may sound overly simplistic, and even a bit superior, but maybe I’d rather just have Jesus than a “theological certainty” which may suddenly become not so certain on the day we stand before God and know Him even as we are fully known. At this point in time, anyway, I’m willing to wait until that day for the definitive answer to all of my questions.

The “Crutch” of Christ
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

I once had someone in my family tell me that my faith was “a crutch”. He expressed a common belief among many who have not personally embraced Jesus as Lord and Savior. Often it is spoken by those successful in the world’s eyes. They propose the idea that Christians are somehow weak because we have come to believe that true life, both eternal and temporal, absolutely depends on a saving relationship with our Creator. But these individuals decide that Christian faith is a crutch because they live under the illusion of self-sufficiency. It often does not occur to them that they themselves have crutches of other kinds.

No one is truly autonomous but many of us in the 21st Century West have bought into that most original satanic deception, that we are gods onto ourselves. We think we are independent. The ethic of Western, especially American, individualism has enshrined this idea as a personal ideal. The Horatio Alger story of the “Self-Made Man”, someone who climbs to the heights of wealth and power from a low position through sheer force of character, is one of our favorite legends. In fact the word “legend” is a good choice for this belief because it does not reflect the ultimate reality of the human condition.

The truth is that every human being depends on something outside him or herself for strength. If that something isn’t God it most commonly is another person or persons. One man I know, for instance, always had a woman, be it his mother or later his wives, whom he unconsciously depended on to take care of him. He was one of those “Self-Made Men” in the eyes of many who admired him and he had indeed ascended from poverty to wealth, seemingly by pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. What those admirers did not know was that throughout his life he had an almost pathological aversion to being alone and the women he always had in his life were his crutches. I knew another person who presumed to look down upon what he perceived as the frailty of those who rely on God for help. But all who knew him intimately were aware that he looked to his family, particularly his parents, for stability and solace. They also knew that this dependence was unhealthy for a grown man and a destructive force in his adult relationships.

Sometimes the crutch is a thing. That thing can range from alcohol to inherited wealth to sexual gratification. What all these have in common is an ability to masquerade as something transcendent and ultimate, something on which we can rely for life and meaning. Such a masquerade may endure for a short time or for many years but eventually, and usually tragically, the masquerade comes to an end and we find out that what we have unconsciously depended on to sustain us has only hurt us.

The ultimate question is not one of some needing a crutch and some not. Simple common sense tells us that we are dependent creatures. We must depend on something other than ourselves for every breath we take and for much more than that. The question is rather who or what the crutch we are depending on is. Many, perhaps most, converts to Christ came to God because a personal crisis stripped us of the illusion of self-sufficiency or the sufficiency of any other earthly thing to give us life. The crisis simply opened our eyes to what was true all along but which we could not or would not see, our absolute need for the Source of all true life. At that point, by His grace, He made Himself known to us and we gave up all our false sources for the only real one.

To my relative I can only say that, yes, my “crutch” is Jesus Christ and blessed be His name.

Prayer, Anger and Honesty Copyright 2010 by Shea Oakley All rights reserved Honest prayer may sometimes mean sharing our worst emotions towards God with God.Most of us try very hard to present to our Lord the most pious self we like to think of ourselves as being. We attempt to always come across as humble, loving, caring, holy people. This is especially the case with any public prayer we may be called to take part in but it also tends to hold true even when we are “alone” with God trying to talk to Him. This goes beyond the old joke about “King James prayers” in which we suddenly find ourselves using words like “thee” and “thou”. What I am talking about goes far further than archaic syntax. What happens is that we try to come across as what we think God would want us to be when we attempt to communicate with Him. We somehow think (whether consciously or unconsciously) that He will be fooled by the outward piety we have learned to sometimes use as a shield against Him seeing what is really going on in our hearts. At such moments we forget what the word “omniscient” means. God is all knowing. When we try to appear as humble, loving servants of the King when we are actually (if hopefully only for the moment) resentful, bitter opponents of what we feel is a tyrant, God is well aware of it. He knows our hearts. It does us no good to sugarcoat our real feelings. In my opinion our Lord would rather hear an honest, angry rant than a dishonest, cloying prayer from one of his struggling children. At least the one doing the ranting is being voluntarily transparent before a God who knows what is really going on at that moment anyway. As a Christian counselor once suggested to me maybe, just maybe, the God of the cross is secure enough in Himself to sustain an angry, if ultimately unwarranted, complaint from someone He loves. We generally avoid sharing our uglier emotions with, and even towards, God for one reason and one reason alone: we are afraid of incurring His wrath. But wrath is not the response of God to men like Job, Jeremiah, and some of the bitterer psalmists, all of whom voice their negative feelings to God freely and apparently without the fear of a sudden lightning bolt in their direction. In Job’s case one of his infamous “counselors” asks him in chapter 33, verse 13 “why do you complain against God?” (NAS) and at least one translation actually renders the word “complain” as “rage”. Yet God does not destroy Job for his anger, perhaps because He gives grace to those who, like Job, are in great pain. Let it be clear that I am not here advocating anger with God for the sake of anger with God. Nor am I claiming that even the most honest anger we express to Him is without sin. The truth is that any antagonism towards an innately perfect being cannot finally be justified in the legal sense of the word. The issue is more whether that Perfect Being prefers the sin of anger to be compounded by the sin of hypocrisy, and this is what we do when we bring our false selves to God in prayer. If we are not feeling warm, fuzzy feelings towards our Lord it is better if we are honest, even brutally honest, with Him about how we are really feeling. At least such honesty “clears the air” and sometimes leads us beyond the anger to what might really be ailing us. Things like pain, hurt, and loss. Elsewhere in the Scriptures we are told the truth will set us free. Part of living a truthful, and thus free, life is loving and trusting God enough to share the truth of how we are really feeling with Him when it really counts, and that might be more often than we are aware. Many times, as fallen creatures living in a fallen world we desperately need to express our pain, even pain we are not altogether un-responsible for, to the only One who can redeem us from it. Never be afraid to be honest with that Redeemer.

Ultimate Reality
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Facing reality is sometimes hard, but living in unreality is worse. The Christian journey is about moving from the unreal to the real. We are born into a world that calls delusion truth. In fact it calls delusion truth so effectively that at one time many of us fully believed we could have a healthy, happy and meaningful life while leaving the God of the Universe completely out of the picture. Only eating the horrible fruit harvested from living in estrangement from Him brought us to our senses, and to our rebirth. Part of that rebirth was seeing ultimate reality, His ultimate reality, for the first time in our lives.

But some of us have been to a place where, after enduring terrible pain we feel we did not deserve, we have been tempted to blame God and walk away from Him. For a moment we think of our old way of existing, as being somehow easier or better than facing the daily struggles that are part and parcel of the Christian walk. So we look back at the days we knew before Jesus came into our lives imagining something better was there for us. Usually such musings, thank God, do not last very long. This is because they wilt when we also remember the terrible meaninglessness of those days.

Such meaninglessness is the product of living in a “reality” that does not include God. We may have had money, power, pleasure or fame but it was in a spiritual vacuum and all these things ultimately led us deeper into the lie of the serpent, and into our pit. The serpent’s deception was simple yet profound; he told us we did not need God to find meaning, purpose and blessing in our lives. When we, in the guise of Adam and Eve, believed him our once real world become horribly unreal, though our fallen hearts learned to think otherwise. Only divine intervention could restore us to true sanity, which we had mistakenly came to think was already ours. The blood of the Son of Man has achieved many things for us within the greater rubric of salvation. One of these things was the opening of our eyes to what is truly real, and always has been.

Of course this opening of our eyes was just the beginning. Discovering God’s truth is part of the grand pilgrimage we walk out in this life. Such discovery is progressive. In fact it is an ongoing process. This is why we say that no one believer has a monopoly on truth. There is always more to find.

There is also a need to test all we have come to believe is truth, for we still live in the serpent’s neck of the woods. The Devil is forever trying to lure us back into believing the deception he has personally fathered and continues to feed to an unbelieving world. You can be sure that when those “turn back from the plow” temptations hit us Satan and his surrogates are somehow involved.

The best thing to do when such moments come is to remember what made us Christians in the first place. Before our rebirth most of us followed the lies, the unreality we believed to be real, into the pit. The darkness finally became visible as it began to suck the will to survive out of our being. All of the once pleasant sins in our past, things that we had made idols out of in the absence of God, ultimately dragged us to the very gates of Hell. It was then that we cried out to our Lord and exchanged the dark lies of a fallen world and fallen self for the bright, blessed truth of God and the redemption He offers. When we remember the emptiness and despair we knew and compare it to the incredible fullness and hope we have found, the sinful past does not look as good as it first did. We realize that our temporal troubles will pass away and we will once more know the joy of His presence.

We again understand that reality, ultimate and redemptive, is only found in Him, and it is Him we truly want.

Adult Responsibilities and the Grace of God
Copyright Shea Oakley
All Rights Reserved

It is sometimes easy to feel overwhelmed by the responsibilities we face in life as adult Christians. Most of us have a day-job to hold down and perform during our working hours and sometimes beyond. Add to that participating in a marriage, taking care of children or elderly parents, maintaining friendships and fulfilling our ministry responsibilities (all of which we know should be done “as on to the Lord”) and it can begin to seem like too much.

Much is said in the church today about “burn-out”. In this second decade of the 21st century we are beginning to understand the toll that is often being taken on us denizens of the hyper-kinetic Western-world. In a society where “multi-tasking” is still seen as a desirable skill some of us are beginning to think of it as more of a curse.

That said Christians are also aware that our Lord never said life in any era of human history prior to the Eschaton was going to be easy. We also know that while some of the tasks we feel saddled with are not God-given responsibilities many are and we cannot shirk them without sinning against both Him and those who rely on us. The bottom line is that our adult responsibilities are many and difficult and simply cannot be avoided.

Possibly the best solution to the stress that devolves from all that is truly expected of us is to learn to trust in God’s faithfulness to supernaturally enable us to meet those expectations. So many times in my own life I have felt that I could not continue to handle all of the demands I felt were being made on me. My flesh told me that I was either drowning or soon would drown. The result was intense anxiety, an anxiety that came from trusting in my “worst case scenario” thinking rather than on the faithfulness of God. But over the years I have at least partially come to agree with what C.S. Lewis once said; that “that which is necessary is always possible.” I have found this to be a sound statement. If God has truly called me to do something he will always supply the grace necessary to get that something done, no matter what else may be impacting my life at any given moment.

This may seem to some like a spiritual oversimplification of the complexities and challenges of modern life. Perhaps, however it is a biblical one. The Scripture tells us in more than one place that His grace is sufficient for anything He allows us to face in this life. In the end we can either cave-in to the perceived impossibility of carrying a truly God-given load or we can trust Him to help us successfully carry it.

By all means simplify your life when you can and shed the tasks that you are truly sure are ones God never meant you to take on. But for the real burdens that a godly life requires us to shoulder try to remember that He never gives us more than we can handle with His help. It may not always feel that way, this is true, but He knows our limitations much better than we do and he will never suffer His children to be crushed under the burden a load that he, Himself, has given us to carry.

 “What Kind of Love is This?”

  Copyright by Shea Oakley

  All rights reserved

 

That God’s love for us is not dependant on us is one of the most vital truths that we need to understand and embrace. In human relationships love is rarely unconditional. A popular song during the 1980’s by Janet Jackson was entitled “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” Its context is a romantic relationship in which the woman is telling her man that he has not done enough to enhance her life recently and he can expect her to leave if he does not give her what she expects from him. The message is that the love a person has for someone will only last as long as that someone merits it. Such is love between fallen and finite beings. God’s love is not like this and for that we can be eternally thankful.

 

God loves the unlovable. He loves people even though he knows they will fail to return that love in kind. In fact He loves even those who do not love Him at all. The Bible is very clear that God’s love for humankind is not dependant on humankind’s response. We are told that our Creator cared enough for this race of rank sinners to die for us when we were still living the kind of lives that made it very clear that love for Him was nonexistent. This is love of a very different kind than we experience between each other in this world. As another song by Christian singer Margaret Becker is entitled, “What Kind of Love is This?”

 

It is the love of a long-suffering, patient God. What too many of us do not yet understand is that He does not cease to love us when we do the kind of wrong that might cause other human beings to stop loving us. To most people this seems not only illogical but somehow wrong as well. We are so steeped in the fallen concept of love being earned that the glory of agape love is often lost on us. Beyond that we sometimes do not like the idea even when we have a better grasp of it. How could the Lord love a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Saddam Hussein?  How indeed.

 

The answer lies in the nature of the divine. Unconditional love flows out of God to all of us because it is His nature to love. He does not need our love. He has an infinite supply of it within Himself. Further, God does not just have love; He is love. We need this love to live. It comes from outside of us. We do not inherently and perfectly love others out of the depths of who we are because we are not limitless. But He is. God’s infinite love, one not requiring a loving response or loving behavior, can be directed towards even the most evil members of the human race. It is not directed at that evil but at the persons who continue to commit the evil in the hopes that this unconditional love will bring them to repentance. We may reject this love but that does not mean it was not there, wooing us to the Lover of our souls.

 

The deepest freedom and joy of the Christian life comes as we progressively learn to receive the unique, unconditional love of the one true God. This love was most perfectly made manifest on the cross of Calvary and it is only the One who died on that cross who makes it at all possible for us to receive it. To know Jesus is to know the Father and to become partakers of a love so powerful that it finally saves us from our own slavery to conditional love, which, in the ultimate sense, is not real love at all.

 

 

 

 

Staying Near to God in Calm Seas
Copyright 2012 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It seems to be a fact of the Christian life that we find ourselves closest to our Lord when we are in the midst of our most difficult circumstances. It would also appear that God uses these circumstances to cause us to draw nearer to Him out of urgent need. In my own life the majority of my most powerful experiences with the power and presence of Jesus Christ have come when I have been in great pain of mind, body, or soul. There have been glorious moments when, in the midst of my suffering, I have been granted a visitation of His Spirit that has instantly taken me from a deep valley to seemingly the highest mountaintop. Such moments, even when sometimes followed by another descent into misery, have been the greatest ones of my life. If anything has made my hardest struggles worth the pain it has been these visitations. I cherish the memory of them.

In recent years I have found that the valleys of my earlier existence as a believer have become far less deep and fewer and farther between. I sometimes wonder if this is only because of personal growth as a Christian or also because of a lessened sensitivity to the conviction of the Spirit. Perhaps both these things are true. Either way I have found that as my life has become less of an ongoing crisis the intensity of my experiences with God has diminished and the experiences themselves have grown farther apart.

We are not, of course, to seek “spiritual highs” for their own sake. The idea is to seek the Lord for Himself and not for what he can do for us emotionally. I also have found that longer times of meditation upon God and the things of God, in recent years, have brought me to good places that are less fleeting if also less intense. Still, I miss some of those earlier mountaintop experiences and cannot help but wonder if they are never again to be part of my spiritual walk.

I do not think they can be reclaimed by trying to once more make myself miserable and I have no desire to try. The world, my flesh and the Devil can all potentially bring me back to the place of very difficult circumstances without my becoming some kind or spiritual Masochist. Such circumstances will always be a part of life in this fallen world on some level.

I suppose the real question here is whether it is possible to stay as close to the Lord in better times as it is in worse ones. So far I have no fully satisfying answer, though I do believe that part of the solution comes from disciplining myself to spend time with God not out of desperation but out of desire. Beyond felt desire I must also seek to stay near to Him because of a realization that desperation can be dangerously replaced by complacency born of calm seas in my temporal life that can be just that, temporary.

This points up another truth about the times between spiritual storms; they have a tendency to lull us into a sort of forgetfulness about Who we are living for and why. When the world seems pleasant enough we can quickly begin to forget that it is not, and never will be, our home. Sometimes we find ourselves walking away from our Lord without even being conscious that we are doing it.

It seems to me that before this happens it is best to be aware of the potentiality and guard against it. Again, the most effective way to do this might be to habitually practice the disciplines of the faith in both good times and bad. This means being very intentional about prayer, meditation, Bible study, fellowship, service and other exercises that are designed to keep us close to God.

These practices are perhaps harder to pursue when present pain is not driving us to them but perhaps it is when that pain is not present that we may be most in need of their pursuit. May our Lord help us to understand this paradox, one of so many in the Christian life.