Year: 2016

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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I have sometimes imagined a hole through which I must pass in order to ultimately arrive in the Kingdom of God. This “passageway to Heaven”, I have discovered, has a tendency to shift in size in my mind’s eye as I live out my days on Earth. As I have walked on in my Christian life of the past 25 years it has sometimes seemed wide-open to me. Far more often, though, the size of this opening that always lies ahead has appeared small, sometimes very small. At times it has given the appearance of being almost completely closed to me. Perhaps you too have sensed such a hole in your own spiritual life. If so you may have wondered, as I have, what causes its inconstancy.

The recurring theme of the Bible is the absolute inability of any human being to attain to Heaven by self-effort. We are told repeatedly in chapter after chapter and verse after verse that any attempt to gain the salvation of our souls through pulling ourselves up by our own proverbial “bootstraps” is the essence of futility. We cannot comply with the law of God. In and of ourselves we always fall short of it. In fact we fall so short of it that Isaiah 64:6 tells us our righteousness “is as filthy rags.” The only hope we have is saving faith in Jesus Christ, itself a gift of God, and a function of His “unmerited favor” better known as grace. The Christian is to enter the kingdom through the atoning blood of Christ only; not by anything we can summon up within ourselves apart from His work on the cross on our behalf.

We know this as biblical Christians….and yet we do not.

It is a constant temptation to try to live the Christian life by our own effort. We pray for grace to become more intimate with Christ and then promptly go to work to achieve that intimacy. It is enough to sometimes make us wonder if we even want what we pray for! The flesh must be crucified, not enlisted in our attempts to “be holy”, but enlist it we do and figuring out exactly how to crucify it instead eludes us and this sometimes many years into our professed Christian walk. At times we may succeed in “letting go and letting God”, hopefully with greater and greater frequency as time goes by. Still the “old man” remains and he is all about “earning salvation”, a term which is perhaps the greatest oxymoron ever conceived by fallen human beings.

This struggle between the flesh and the spirit, between offered works and received grace is, in my opinion, the cause of the perceived ever-changing size of that opening into Heaven. When we are trying to work our way to God the opening seems to shrink, but when we grow blessedly tired of working, and open ourselves to His saving grace in sanctification, it widens and, through that widened portal we bask in the light of Heaven.

Few things are more frustrating to us then working for nothing. Few things are more disturbing to our souls than losing sight of Heaven and the God who dwells there. To avoid both these things we must learn to trust Him and Him alone for our eternal well-being and that is simply not easy for us. Our pride militates against it and so does our insecurity. But if we ever hope to pass through that maddeningly variable opening we must sincerely trust that Christ and Christ alone has propped it open for us and keeps it open for us. It is only the grace made real and available by His shed blood that allows this to happen and we must embrace that grace, and Jesus Himself, as the ultimate gift of God’s love if we are ever to make it through.

 

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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There are two worlds that every human being experiences. One is the world of “objective reality,” that which is outside ourselves and independent of us. The other world might be called “subjective reality”. This is what we perceive through the eyes of our own heart. Unlike objective reality subjective reality is internal to us and thus is not always reality in the same ultimate sense (although it can be). But whether this perception is fully true in the sense of that which is subjective it expresses how we feel about ourselves and thus by definition is, if nothing else, deeply and personally meaningful to us.

In our presently fallen world there is, of course, much that is wrong both inside and outside of us. The external world we live in everyday, as well as the internal world of our hearts, has been damaged by the sin that unfortunately continues to exist on this side of Heaven. Beyond this these two worlds affect one another because what we are inside ourselves obviously influences what we do outside of ourselves and vice-versa.

In the context of our existence, then, it is a fearful thing to know that darkness continues to manifest itself in the world both within our hearts and in the world around us. Even as Christians the seeming intractability of the evil we see both within and without can be daunting in the extreme. The only thing that provides hope in this predicament is the redemptive power of God through His Son, but sometimes we tend to forget that this power addresses both the objective and subjective aspects of reality, and thus our hope may not be as complete as we need it to be.

The redemption secured on the cross by Jesus is an all-encompassing thing. The world that exists outside of us is subject to it. Someday, at the consummation of all things which will occur after the return of the Son of God; the Creation, in fact the entire Universe, will be “set right” by the omnipotent hand of the Savior. At that same time the “universe” within each redeemed human heart will also be finally set fully right. In this way absolutely nothing will be left with imperfection in the Kingdom of God. This is the promise He has made to us who are His children: both everything we see and everything we are will be transformed.

It is a wondrous thing to know that God will right every wrong in this complete sense. For some of us it is easier to imagine Him redeeming the world around us then it is to imagine Him redeeming us because we perceive our hearts as being somehow the harder thing to change but, blessedly, this is not true. God almighty can and will change both because, for the believer, everything within and without is destined to ultimately yield to the purpose and power of His love in Christ.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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What is the greater miracle, creating something good out of nothing, or bringing something beautiful out of ugliness? We know God does both yet we seldom think about which is the more profound act. The Lord creates and the Lord redeems, and we praise Him on both counts, but I wonder if the latter action is not the more profound of the two.

The nothingness out of which God made the universe by sheer creative fiat was apparently morally neutral. In the Genesis account we have no sense of the “darkness upon the face of the deep” being darkness in the evil sense we see applied to the word later in Scripture. Deity chose to will that the void be filled by the wonders of the Heavens and the Earth, but the void apparently had neither positive nor negative value. It simply was.

Spiritual redemption, by contrast with physical creation, entails taking something wicked and making it into something good. Redemption involves the recovery of a fallen soul. “Recovery”, however, does not adequately cover the depth of divine redemption. We must also use the word “re-creation” because this is, in effect, what God does with a sinful soul. He re-creates it into something beautiful, something of eternal value. Through the blood of His Son He somehow transforms darkness, this time truly darkness in the negative definition of the term, into light. The history of the Faith is replete with accounts of men and women whose lives once reflected evil in the extreme, yet became profoundly different people after encountering and embracing the Person of Jesus Christ.

The transformation of a wicked heart may seem to pall by comparison with the establishment of the planets and stars, but I wonder if we see things rightly in this regard. As awesome as the natural creation is (and we dare not trivialize its grandeur in the least) there is something about the alteration of a soul given over to moral depravity, a soul worthy of Hell that is simply astonishing. Salvation may seem to work in the comparatively small physical arena of the human heart, but in the realm of the spirit its operation might just eclipse the creation of the largest galaxy.

We know that the physical universe is amazing, but the grace that turns moral darkness to light may be more amazing still.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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Sometimes we fear that the very thing we most need from God is something we do not want. Even worse we may feel that either we will never be able to want it or that God will not give it to us even if we were to truly want it.

I felt this myself recently when I came to wonder whether I truly want to be surrendered completely to Him. I also found myself wondering how I could get to the place of wanting such surrender. This coincided with the unpleasant feeling that if I even needed to ask such questions after 25 years as a Christian then I must be in bad shape. After all, if a quarter century of professing to follow Christ has not produced this desire (except perhaps during fleeting moments of devotion) then when can I ever expect to have it?

The byproduct of such thinking is a terrible kind of fear and I’ve known quite a lot of this type of fear during my life. It would be one thing if it felt like it was some kind of divine discipline, designed to bring me to a truer, deeper kind of faith. Unfortunately such moments all too often seem more like some kind of punishment for my lack of faith. It just feels more like rejection then it does conviction.

Why does it have to be this way for some of us? Is it because we have become so used to being rejected by imperfect, fallen human beings in our past? Do we prefer the misery of doubt and fear to taking the chance of giving ourselves fully to a God who we mistakenly think may be the next one to reject us? If so we have yet to realize that God does not turn away those who sincerely seek him though Christ. We are still thinking of God as just another abuser in our lives. This is the lie too many of us sometimes live our lives by.

The bottom line is that God’s persistent grace, mercy and love is the only hope those of us who fear Him in the worst sense of the word have for overcoming that fear. We desperately need to continue to be persistent in praying that God will help us come to realize that our wrong belief is what makes and keeps things so hard for us, not Him. It is our doubts about His character that drives us to work so hard for His acceptance that we cannot live from His acceptance. If we have sincerely asked Jesus Christ to be our Lord and Savior then at some point we have to stop doing what we think or feel necessary to make Him love us and start receiving that love in simple faith. The main thing which produces the desire to surrender the parts of us we hold back from God is the experiencing of a grace, mercy and love that we have never known from others, and have begun to know from Him.

I’d like to say that I have come to this place as I write these words but I know I haven’t. I hope that being honest about this might help some of you who are in the same place I am to at least know that you are not alone. Leave the “super-spirituality” to the “super-spiritual”. Those who consider themselves immune to the kind of struggle I’m describing probably cannot relate to any of what I have just expressed, but I know many of you know exactly what it is of which I speak. It is for you alone that I write these words and offer this one thought:

Let go of your wrong fear of God, but please, please don’t let go of Him and remember that it is His perfect love, not your tortured effort, that makes that possible.

 

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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To be a slave to love is not to be slave at all because there is no slavery in truly selfless love. When we are possessed by it we are, paradoxically, set free. This truth is important to remember when we read in the scriptures about being “slaves” to Christ. It is only love that authentically compels us to give ourselves totally to Him, and in that self-giving is our liberation.

The word “slavery” has a nearly universal negative connotation in the 21^st Century. When we think of it in America we are naturally drawn to our corporate memory of the enslavement of blacks that existed in our country prior to the Civil War. It is a part of our past as a nation that the vast majority of us find morally repulsive. As a result, when it comes to personal liberty in the worldly sense, we have been consciously at the forefront of securing it for others, both at home and abroad, for much of our history since then; most of the time this has been a good thing.

The problem that stems from our glorification of legitimate civil liberties is that we have a tendency to assume that any giving up of our personal “sovereignty” to another will harm us. We chafe at the idea of belonging to another unless it is on absolutely equal terms, such as in earthly romantic love. This frame of mind and heart is also present among many believers. We have been conditioned by the radical individualism of our culture, often without even being consciously aware of it.

The result is multiple generations of Christians who keep God at a safe distance. There are those of us who sing the hymn “I Surrender All” while simultaneously knowing in our hearts that what we ought to be singing is more like “I Surrender Some”. The idea of voluntarily making Him the true Lord and Master of every aspect of our lives deeply disturbs us. It runs contrary to our desire to not be a slave to any one at any time.

So is there hope for we modern Western Christians? Are we condemned to keep the rightful Owner of our souls at arm’s length and possibly forfeit our relationship with Him altogether? Not necessarily. The answer comes in knowing the attributes of God or, more specifically, one: His infinite love for us.

I would venture to say that most, if not all, true Christians have experienced firsthand the reality of this love. These are the moments when we have viscerally come to know just what our Savior did at Calvary, and why, and for who. Such moments are beyond description. Perhaps the best way to relate these times of exultation is simply to say that we have been touched by the love of God, a love we have never known from anyone else nor ever will. Ten seconds of the received love of Christ is enough to undo us, to make us realize that we have been fools to want anything other than Him, the One who perfectly pursues the best possible outcome for our lives with a singular passion, He is, in short, the Lover of our souls

At such moments “slavery” to such a God does not feel like bondage, it feels like the greatest thing we could possibly imagine, and more than even that. We find ourselves wanting it, desperately. We know that we were made to receive this love and give it in return. We were made to enjoy it, to enjoy Him, forever.

These moments may be fleeting, but they whet our appetite for more and as we learn to seek Christ with all our hearts such moments continue to come, pointing the way towards final consummation on the day we stand before Him. We grow progressively deeper in love with our God and we really do come to surrender all to Him in love. We want to be His “slaves” because that is one of the ways we can love Him in return, by becoming truly His in every way. We surrender our lives to Him, not with reluctance, but with surpassing joy and suddenly slavery doesn’t seem like anything so much as union with our Beloved, our heart’s deepest desire.

The phrase “a slave to Christ” becomes not a curse, but an expression of the most wonderful thing we have ever experienced. We are now liberated to dwell in the pure light of His love in the deepest sense and in our “slavery” we have become profoundly free of all the things that kept us from that love.

And this is the truest freedom.

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

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When human beings separate their existence from God, they separate their existence from meaning in any ultimate sense. This is why existential angst is the natural byproduct of secularism.

Apart from God, all of the things that we count on to give our lives meaning are temporal and therefore temporary. None will continue past the end of our physical existence, and many will be taken from us long before that happens. As a race we have always longed for the transcendent permanence of something or someone. This is often true on a conscious level, and I would argue that it is always true on an unconscious one.

Even as an atheist, I knew this longing. The world and all it contained in the 80 some odd years I might be expected to experience it was not enough. For me this fact was mostly unconscious in the earlier years of my life. The longing was present, but I could not define it or even express it very cogently. It mostly manifested itself in a feeling I sometimes knew. Perhaps some piece of music or natural scene caused me to gaze into the distance and feel that there had to be more to existence than what my senses could deliver. It also showed itself in my pursuit of the things of this world looking for some kind of happiness or joy, which eventually proved to be futile.

One of the reasons those worldly quests as a young secular humanist turned out to be futile was that even at the same time I sought and experienced them I had an increasingly debilitating sense of meaninglessness in the “here and now” of my human existence. The lack of something ultimately true and permanent in my life was slowly driving me to despair although, at the time, I could not have expressed the reality of this aspect of my state of being very well either. Today I would say that there existed in me an unasked-for desire for something I could not obtain materially but could no longer truly live without as well. It was a huge part of what led me to nearly self-destruct in my early 20’s.

The answer which came to me before that became my fate was one that I had not considered except in the negative sense of being sure I did not want it. This was a belief in, and relationship with, a transcendent yet personal God. The full story of how that came to be cannot be told here (although I have written at length about it elsewhere). Suffice it to say that I finally consciously came to know what, or actually Who, I was missing. When I asked for this “Who” to help me He made Himself known to me in such a sublime and powerful way that my life was never the same. “He” was the God of the Cross.

I now knew why I existed and for Whom. I knew that the Ultimate Meaning I had unconsciously, and finally consciously, tried to find was undeniably real. It was the self-existent and eternal answer to everything I could possibly conceive and desire (and, as it turned out and continues to turn out, much that I could not yet conceive).What I obtained at that moment, and have had ever since, is an existential “Bottom Line.” I have had a myriad of difficulties and pains in life in the ensuing years, but the agony of meaninglessness has never been one of them.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” Beyond this, I would add that that we were also made for the Maker of that other world, our present world, and all worlds. It is only in coming to know this eternal and infinite truth that existential angst can be replaced with the certainty there is an ultimate meaning for our existence as human beings.

 

 

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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When God’s peace comes into our lives, it can sometimes be difficult for us to accept. For those whose Christian experience has known more times of strife, doubt and fear than of calm, assurance and encouragement, it may be challenging to rest in the blessing and favor of God when it finally becomes real to us. The peace of Christ may actually feel alien to believers who have been perpetually striving to keep their spiritual heads above water.

Only the most Pollyanna among us insist on maintaining the erroneous belief that the lifelong walk of faith does not include, for all of God’s children, times of great personal struggle. Who can deny that even the greatest “heroes” of our faith knew periods of darkness that stretched them to the seeming limits of their endurance? If the Christian life were inherently serene why would the Bible memorialize the details of the deep trials of the saints in both the Old and New Testaments?

Perhaps the most afflicted believers are those who have known severe abuse during their pre-conversion experience and who possess a constitutional tendency towards the melancholy. They are also often among those who take their faith walk with the greatest seriousness. For these individuals it may be that only a lifelong pilgrimage of healing will slowly open them to the deepest blessings of the authentic Christian walk.

One of these deep blessings is the experience of “the peace that passes understanding” (Philippians 4.7) which Jesus promises to those who come to know Him “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23, 24).This is the peace that comes despite circumstances, not because of them. It is a profound rest from all the anxieties that plague us even though the circumstantial sources of those anxieties may still remain present in our lives. It is not the absence of negative things in our lives, but rather a transcendence of them through the presence of the Spirit of Christ.

Such a transcendent manifestation of God’s peace may not come until many years into our Christian experience. Again, this is especially true if we have deep “grooves” of negativity in our hearts and minds from earlier traumatic experiences, combined with an inherently “heavy nature.” For us, periods of knowing the peace that passes understanding may be few and far between, especially in the early days of our faith.

When, after years of perseverance in belief, we finally begin to more consistently know the serenity of a heart progressively surrendered to Christ, it may initially feel unnatural to us. After all, most of our Christian lives have been marked by long stretches of tumult and pain. It may seem that real, enduring peace is too good to be true! We might even find ourselves resisting it and retreating back into the “unease” to which we are accustomed.

Although we assert that we want to know this new blessing, we also dread that if we give ourselves over to it, it may disappear and leave us more bereft of comfort than ever before. Some of us may go so far as to unconsciously sabotage this increase in our well-being, proactively striking against it before it has a chance to damage us further through its departure.

This fear of accepting God’s renewal of our hearts and minds is spiritually irrational; the Bible clearly states that God longs to give us His peace as part of our inheritance as His children (John 14:27). Of course we are often irrational beings and, beyond that, many of us have been damaged by others from whom we once derived a certain sense of peace. For us, learning to accept the true peace of Christ is a process, and one that may have been impeded up until this day by unhealed wounds deep in our souls.

The best advice for those who can relate to this spiritual state of affairs is to continue steadfastly in holding on to God’s promise of ultimate peace while simultaneously learning to relax when it begins to manifest itself. In time the sovereign grace of God will begin to fill in those grooves of negativity with His healing presence, and enduring peace will start to gain a blessed upper hand in our hearts. In the meantime we need to persevere in the belief that His love always finds a way. Eventually, progressively, the divine peace we desperately crave will dawn in the deepest part of our being….and there it can remain.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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We cannot primarily want personal power for ourselves and also have authentic, loving relationships with others. Beyond that, as Christians, whatever power we do have we need to give away in the service of those relationships.

Human beings are relational by nature. This is one of the primary ways we bear God’s image for God Himself is relational within the Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are separate entities yet, paradoxically, are one. This is the essence of the relationship within the Godhead: separateness in unity. Another aspect of the bond between the Three is the sharing of divine power. This unity in separateness, combined with shared power, is part of the blueprint for every healthy human bond as well.

Christ’s earthly mission displayed this principle for us. We know that Christ ceded power in the very act of His incarnation. He voluntarily left His throne in Heaven and humbled Himself to become one of us. This temporal giving up of the Son’s full heavenly power was for the sake of relationship, more specifically to effect a restoration of relationship with a race which had estranged itself from its Creator. He could not have done this without identifying physically with that race and that meant becoming, in a sense, weak. Beyond this the earthly ministry of Jesus was regularly marked by the giving away of His still present divine power in two forms, one direct and one by proxy. The first was in healing. The people who received direct physical healing from Christ often received a restoration to relationship with the God of Israel as well. The other form was in granting His disciples the proxy to command demons to leave those supernaturally afflicted (and more importantly relationally isolated) by them. In both cases those who were on the receiving end of this power had a chance to be restored to relationship with both God and their fellow man.

If this pattern of giving for the sake of relationship was faithfully reproduced by believers today we would be an incredibly potent form of salt and light to a dying world. Unfortunately Christians are still human beings and we suffer from the tendency to gravitate towards seeking power more for ourselves than for others. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, set this curse in motion when they believed the lies of the original “power-grabber”, Satan. Although we are redeemed we still sometimes have the tendency to think, as he did, that power trumps relationship as far as being desirable. Rather than sharing power to establish relationships we hoard it. Our surrounding culture encourages this and we Western Christians are far too open to that encouragement.

Such hoarding always leads to misery in the end for the simple reason that we live primarily through our bonds with others, not through our bond with power. Power is only a good thing when it serves our connection with God and with our fellow human beings. Otherwise is becomes poisonous to us and potentially deadly to our spirit; even as we think we are somehow being enhanced by it.

That said it is important to remember that power, like so many things in the universe, is morally neutral. It is fallen moral agents who use it for evil. With that in mind we can thank God that, in Him, we now have the ability to choose to use it for loving purposes. The greatest joy that power can engender in us happens when we imitate our Lord and give it away for the sake of others. The new and restored relationships that follow this giving are the true blessings of power.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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Truly selfless love is a difficult thing for human beings, including Christians, to understand and desire. We live in a world that places a huge premium on personal fulfillment, on the validity of our own wants, especially as they apply to what we perceive as our own good. The kind of love that is considered desirable in our culture is rarely the love that has no other desire besides the absolute good of its object.

We Post-Modern people tend to view love as something that exists primarily to make us feel good as we make someone else feel good. This is why erotic love sometimes seems like the only kind which is depicted on our TV and movie screens today. Eros is often all about the pleasure people can find in each other through the use of each other. It tends to involve a sort of bargain. If you will sexually scratch my back then I will gladly scratch yours. While not all contemporary eroticism is purely about self-gratification much of it is, and even popular concepts of romantic love that go beyond the mere “hook-up” rarely embrace the idea of consistent and long-term sacrifice for the good of the beloved.

It is indeed impossible for fallen individuals, and difficult for redeemed ones, to fully embrace the love C.S. Lewis defined as “Agape”, the kind of love that involves deep personal cost for the ultimate benefit of its object. We crave our own security and sense of well being so much that we may even find ourselves resenting the very idea that the life our professed Lord led on earth is something we need to emulate. We would prefer to have a little bit of Jesus in us, but not so much that we cannot continue to look out for what we consider to be our own best interests.

This is beyond doubt one of the hardest “spiritual nuts” for contemporary Western Christians to crack. We spend a lot of time talking about living like Christ, but little time actually willing ourselves to die to self in order to do it, and that is because perhaps it is something we simply do not want to. What we tragically do not understand is that truly living for others is what we were divinely designed to do. It is only in entering into a “disinterested” love, which truly puts its object’s best interests ahead of our own, that we will ever live and thrive in any true sense. It is in giving that we become our true selves because God is the ultimate true Self and He, in a sense, lives to give. Somehow giving our all, through Christ, for the sake of another in turn gives us a self worth having because that self then becomes progressively identified and unified with the Self-giving God Himself.

Jesus gave His all “for the joy set before Him” a joy that is derived from seeing the redemption of a race His Father originally created in His own image. Part of possessing that image is the potential of becoming involved in the circle of giving and receiving that is manifested in the Trinity. Somehow God the Father, Son and Spirit exist in a perfect give and take of love, the original “Blessed Community.” In constantly giving to each other the Three are One and the result is perfect bliss within the Godhead. Jesus gave up everything to bring us into perfect communion with that God, the Three in One, but in giving up everything He gained something precious, a redeemed race capable of entering in some sublime way into the dance of love and joy embodied in the Trinity of which He is a part.

We persist in seeking the lesser loves with which this world is more comfortable simply because we do not understand how much more desirable it is to be a part of this divine dance. To be in this communion is to experience the blandishments of Eros (or any other partially self-centered love) pale by comparison. Apart from the agape love of God all the other loves are ultimately worthless. We were created to give our all for others so that those others, and in the end we too, might know the ultimate bliss of being like God Himself. In living this out we find ourselves belonging to Him as a mysterious extension of the blessed community He embodies.

Giving ourselves to such a love as this may be difficult, but it is supremely worth the difficulty.

 

 

Copyright 2016 by Shea Oakley

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The soul of the believer can enter into the sublimity of God’s ultimate reality in all its forms, in security and love, as long as the Spirit of Christ is truly leading. It is then that we can safely lose our self-consciousness in being caught up in God’s presence in such a way that He, and He alone, is our focus. Such are perhaps the most blessed moments in our lives on earth for they are, in reality, brief “real-time” experiences of the eternal existence that awaits those who love God.

If this sounds a bit mystical it is because it is just that. Some degree of specifically Christian mysticism has been part of the lives of many orthodox believers throughout the centuries. Some great saints have been gifted with more of these experiences than most, but I believe that few who have sincerely followed Jesus Christ for any significant length of time have not known something of what C.S. Lewis once called “birthday cards from Heaven.”

These transcendent moments with God can manifest themselves at any time in any place. While they often occur in corporate worship with other Christians, they just as frequently happen in solitude. They may be directly linked with the reading of Scripture (and, in fact, must not be contrary to Scripture if not to be considered suspect), but not always. They may even come with just a “reading” of nature. The natural world is a sort of portal which the Holy Spirit uses to reach many. Certainly what I like to call “direct Creation” has often been the catalyst for holy flashes of glory that I have myself experienced. Music can also carry us into the ecstasy which God sometimes grants His children. Like nature sound and song can carry the scent of the eternal and be the divinely chosen instrument for initiating such experiences.

The Lord can use these and a seemingly infinite number of other circumstances to make Himself viscerally known to us. A factory worker focusing on the things of God in the midst of his daily work can just as easily be blessed in this way as she who beholds a breathtaking sunset on a solitary mountainside. God is not limited.

He is also not limited in the kind of mystical “postcards” He sends those He loves. The ones I have experienced have often been intensely personal; I suspect this is the case with all of us who have received them. Human beings are, far more than snowflakes, unique individuals; we cannot effectively share these moments with even our closest fellow travelers because they are, in a sense, just between our Redeemer and ourselves. If we cannot share some of the moments of our deepest human intimacy, we certainly should not expect to be able to relate all aspects of such moments with our Creator. In fact some of this intimacy might be so deep that we would not share it with others even if we could.

There have always been those among our more fundamentalist brethren who would take me to task for using the term “Christian” and “mystical” in the same sentence. I have pointed out that any experience that clearly takes us away from the Spirit of the Word of God must be discerningly rejected but, for me, that is warning enough. Anyone who makes a sweepingly negative statement about transcendent visitations from the God of the Cross has probably not yet experienced one. These brethren are, of course, entirely entitled to their own opinions, but I pray that they, too, will at some point know of what I speak…for the moments I have known of mystic experience with my Lord have been the best of my life.