The Light in the Woods

 

#27 – THE LIGHT IN THE WOODS – OCTOBER 2007

 

© Aubri Dennison 2007

 

10/2/07 Insights from Study        Bernard of Clairvaux: “Any weakness is desirable if the power of Christ compensates for it. May I be not merely weak, but absolutely helpless, if this will allow me to enjoy the supporting power of the Lord.”

 

10/3/07 Insights from Prayer          No matter how dark things get, I can always make sense out of them when I go to God in prayer. I have only just begun to know despair – I feel like I have been living in Wonderland and am about to have a very unwelcome intruder force his way into my carefully constructed haven. I’m not going to battle to keep him out, because I somehow instinctively know that’s futile. But I am going to go to God for comfort and protection, and he’s going to tell me to keep my eye on the prize. When I get back to focusing on my life as it is after I die, what happens to me before that loses its importance and its sting. And anyway, what’s bad about a situation that draws me closer to God? As for what I do here on Earth, I remember that just because my desires seem good and holy, I shouldn’t mix them up with the desires of God.

 

10/6/07 Inspirations           How arrogant of any person to say that I should believe this or do that. I should believe and do exactly what God tells me to believe and do. And if I please God, to whom would I have to answer any higher? Yet in my own tracts I do precisely what is so arrogant to do. It’s not that I forget that God is the arbiter of each spiritual path – it’s that I get so wound up in my own experience, and that is the only experience I know. I don’t mean to teach others – I’m not an evangelist. My job is to bring others to put themselves before God; to present Him with an open, receptive spirit, so that others can be taught by the Great Teacher. Then they will experience the work of God within themselves, and from that moment of acceptance I have nothing more to say. I must remind myself not to preach, but to invite.

 

10/6/07 Insights from Prayer          I’m still searching for my way to serve God. I know it involves presenting Him to others, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be proactive – try things out and accept God’s judgment as the whether or not it’s good – or wait until He guides me into what He wants for me. Could it be a little bit of both? This morning I brought this quandary before Him without getting a straight answer, but I did get an intuition: democracy and economic opportunity are conditions under which openness to God-centeredness can take place. People with dignity and purpose are more disposed to explore spirituality. Don’t let people discourage you by pinning accusations on this method – colonialism, materialism, economic domination, slavery. These things are products of extremes, and it isn’t necessary to go to extremes. We are interested only in the building blocks of the foundation of personal and economic freedom, so that religious freedom can follow. We cannot hold back just because there’s a possibility the method could be abused somewhere down the track. I know someone has started such a movement, and I must explore if I have a role to play. Ideally, it would involve natives of a poor country producing a product that encourages Christian ideals without forcing Christianity down the throats of people not prepared for it. Through exposure, some of the morality may strike a chord. And if there’s success a plan could be built in whereby the companies can “pay it forward” out of their profits, so that someone gets an opportunity to start a small business too. No stockholders to answer to; no CEOs to get the lion’s share. We can guard against the secularism and materialism that turned our own country from graced to gluttonous if we start small and encourage new ventures as success makes that possible.

 

10/7/07 Reflections            When what’s written in my heart and what’s written in the Bible are in conflict, I will go with my heart. My conscience doesn’t bother me because Satan puts something bad in my heart and tries to pawn it off as something good. My conscience bothers me when I’m tempted to ignore what God has put there. You don’t have to be highly intelligent to know good from bad, and if you’ve never heard of the Bible you would still know good from bad. That’s one reason why I don’t believe you go to hell if you don’t know Jesus. The other reason is: Wasn’t that the whole point of Jesus’ incarnation, death and resurrection – to save all souls? To hear fundamentalists talk, you would think that Christ’s mission is incomplete without the help of man; that without their help most of the world is damned to hell. They do not acknowledge goodness in people outside of Christianity; they do not acknowledge the work of the Holy Spirit in such people, or admit that a person can go to heaven because they are Christlike even though not Christian.

 

10/9/07 Insights from Study          Jonah 2:10 makes me want to put my Bible back on the shelf and leave it there until I can believe it again. I am sure in my heart that God doesn’t devise evil for us – if He was going to be that unhappy with our response to Him that He would have to hurt us, why did He bother to create us in the first place? It’s like having a baby and then killing it because it cries. We Christians are in a bind – we preach that God is love and when someone allows as to how they might become a believer, we hand them a Bible and tell them what they find in it is the infallible word of God; the only word of God. Forget what you feel in your heart – this is what defines your relationship with God. But what do they read? For instance, God gleefully drowns Egyptians in the Red Sea after having plagued their country with frogs, lice, flies, bloody water, animal disease, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and eventually the killing of all their firstborn. Here is your God of love in action, and it’s only one example in a long list of biblical references to God’s deliberate meanness. Scholars defend this by telling us “Well, that was the Old Testament. The coming of Jesus changed all that.” No doubt it did change the God/man relationship for better. But then these same scholars gleefully tell us who will go to hell. Sinners? Well, them sure, but also anyone who hasn’t read, been taught, or believed the New Testament Gospel. I have visions of a poor, third world native looking at a missionary and thinking “All these years I’ve been a good person who loves my neighbor and glorifies my Creator. Now this guy comes along and tells me all this time I’ve been headed straight for hell, because the only thing that will please my Creator is to replace what’s in my heart with what’s in this book. This book must be magic!”

 

10/10/07 Insights from Prayer          Lord, when I do what You want me to do or when I do what I think You want me to do, please help me keep away from spiritual pride. As it is, I’m holding on by such a small thread because I love You and feel chosen by You, and in a small way tonight that’s being confirmed to me. I want so badly to be successful for You – You and I understand the dynamics of it, but the worldly realm I live in will attribute to me any success my ministry may have. Please bring success, but help me not to fall for spiritual pride. If I have had little success so far, it could be because I’m not ready; that I’m still too susceptible to spiritual pride. I may know to whom all glory belongs, but it’s up to me to convey that concept to others. This turning point in my life may not only be the vehicle I can use for Your work, but also, for myself, offer circumstances of spiritual pride that I can hopefully turn into spiritual humility.

 

10/11/07 Inspirations          We were all saved around 33 AD, on the same day, at the exact moment on Calvary. People that go up to others and say “Have you been saved?” belie the most major tenet of their own religion. Our individual discovery of God has nothing to do with being “saved” other than the fact that Jesus’ sacrifice made such union with God possible. The desire to seek God is what gives purpose to Jesus’ life on Earth, but the “saving” was done by His death and resurrection. The claim that mere mortals can go out and “save” unbelievers is unchristian. Christ did the saving; God does the reminding.

 

10/12/07 Insights from Prayer          It should make no difference if, alongside my path toward God, there are flowers or sulfur pits. If my focus is on God it doesn’t matter what is happening to me or what surrounds me. But the hardest thing for me to ignore is what others think of me. Am I too fundamental? Am I too metaphysical? The flowers alongside my path to God hinder me because I stop to enjoy them. The sulfur pits alongside my path to God hinder me because I stop, afraid to go further. But the voices of doubt aren’t alongside the road at all. They are with me always, flapping their wings of negativity around my head and in my face as I go. It isn’t doubt of God, but doubt that there is any approval of men for the path I take. But like the roadside consolations and tribulations, the hounding of worldly approval or disapproval needs only to be ignored to be ineffective. God’s smile will keep me focused, and God’s grace will conquer all.

 

10/13/07 Reflections              This unitive state isn’t what I expected it to be. When I’m there I don’t even think about revelation and inspiration. It feels like God and I are living on a train. I’m totally and peacefully at ease with His presence, and He keeps showing me things out the window — “Look at that” or “See what’s over here!” Each new sight is like a gift that fills me with awe. I don’t have to meditate, pray, contemplate, or interact with them at all — they are just there, and they are mine to keep. And wonderful as they are, the best part of the ride is that I’m on it with God next to me and I get to talk to Him whenever I want.

 

10/14/07 Insights from Prayer         This morning I deeply prayed for God to remind me about a great idea I had yesterday that kind of slipped away out of my mind. I love it when I have these great ideas and then forget them, because I can ask God to, if the thought pleases Him, bring them back to me. It’s like an affirmation that it’s good and worth pursuing. Distraction in prayer is the same way – when my prayer is pleasing to God He will interact in some way, sometimes actively and sometimes passively. Passively, the affirmation lies in His help in bringing me away from the distraction, back into attentiveness. This morning, though, a divine presentation was the distraction. I looked up and two beavers were lying in the water outside my window. As I watched, they acted peculiarly. I was about as close to them as I could ever get, and had a long time to observe behavior in them I’ve never seen. Maybe they were scoping out a potential homesite, or maybe they were taking advantage of our abnormally high lake level to graze on shore brush that’s now in the water. I always see nature going about its business as reminders of the presence of God – I would never want to be so rigid in prayer that I couldn’t enjoy that.

 

10/16/07 Presentations                  It hardly seems like a year ago, after a bit of deliberation, I bought a pendant with a silver cross on it. Sitting on top of the cross was a silver Jesus, laughing. In a way I found it disturbing (the crucifixion was not funny) and in a way I found it inspiring (the crucifixion was not the end of Jesus). Anyway, I finally did buy it and loved wearing it, although I pretty much kept it hidden under my clothes in case anyone felt like being offended. One day when we were cutting down a huge Norway pine, with all the needles, branches, sawdust and undergrowth on the ground, I realized that the laughing Jesus wasn’t there; just the empty string I had Him on. Well, there was no way I was going to find it in that mess if that’s where I lost it, and I wasn’t sure I hadn’t lost it somewhere else entirely. I thought back on the last time I noticed the crucifix was there, and it wasn’t too long before, but also, I had been in the boat and in the woods a lot since then. But I remained calm, thinking if I was meant to have it I would find it. I was half-heartedly looking around the area for any glimpse of silver, and suddenly there it was – just exactly how I imagined it would look if I found it. I no longer worry that Jesus doesn’t approve of my pendant.

 

10/19/07 Insights from Prayer           I have only one entity I must impress. No, not God – He’s the one, after all, who gave me the assignment and ability to do what I must do. The one I must impress is the one who is lost and looking, and I must impress this person by not trying to impress; merely to affect. If I can do this, then, like the fishermen of the New Testament, I may be able to get this person to present himself to God. And from there God will take over. It’s a very basic assignment, but one that needs complete trust in God because I don’t feel up to the task most of the time.

 

10/20/07 Insights from Prayer          I think a lot about praying for others, and how I always get stopped by the thought that if God wanted to help someone else, He would. Knowing He likes to be asked helps to reconcile my confusion, but to intercede on someone else’s behalf still seems prideful, and because it seems prideful, it becomes unproductive in my view. But then I realize that if we’re to be like Jesus, we could also become those who need help – to, in a substitutionary way, intermingle our spirituality with that of others in order to be a bridge between them and God. Just because this was the same meaning for Christ’s sacrifice doesn’t mean I’m unworthy to sacrifice this way in my own scope. No one could accuse Jesus of spiritual pride for taking on the sins of man – maybe it’s OK in our intercessory prayer to take on the petition to God that others could benefit from making if they would make it themselves.

 

10/22/07 Reflections          What’s with this liberal need to have things both ways? Their big complaint is that Godly people limit personal freedom when they insist on following God’s law. But it’s OK for leftists to enlist the judicial system and various governments to shove sin down our throats in the hope that we will become so used to it we somehow will accept it as normal. How hypocritical! Americans work hard and pay taxes to support schools where our children are “untaught” our morals and indoctrinated into the commitment to “anything goes”. Then no one will be superior to anyone else. Right – we will all be dragged so low that personal responsibility will be forgotten, but at least we’ll be equal. Equal sinners — great!

 

10/23/07 Presentations          When you learn to recognize the presence of God in each thing you experience, it becomes easier to take the bad with the good in life. You understand somehow that there is a purpose for everything, and that is because you are constantly being reminded that God is in control. Another thing you learn as well — there are an infinite number of unique ways God can show you His presence. You think you’ve seen everything there is to see, and then you see something unique and realize an all-powerful God will never run out of new ways to reach you. I hardly ever notice the beauty of the opposite shore any more; the way the trees are reflected from below in the water. But then during a particularly dense rainshower I saw the same reflection in a whole new way, because of the closeness of the raindrops on the reflecting water. It’s a matter of all creation interacting for your benefit, thanks to it’s all-powerful Creator.

 

10/26/07 Inspirations             Are we too, like Jesus, manifestations of God; existing before time and fated to once again exist as God exists outside of time? Are we divine creatures who, at the right time will become sinless; on par with God because we are pieces of God? In this context, I’m seeing God as a happening instead of a being – the glow of sunlight over the Earth and throughout the Earth, within which there is no distinction between us and the glow. Except we have put up the screen of sin so we can work our unholy desire outside the glow. This shade isn’t put on us by God – only places where we’ve willfully prevented the glow from reaching. This is pretty radical – I’ve always thought we had a spark of divine nature that must return to perfect, unfathomable divinity in order for us to enter the kingdom of heaven. But the leap from potential perfect divinity to being God Himself is a great leap — one we never take because we see and understand our own filthiness, and because we are conditioned to always have, and need, a higher authority. What if when we can finally see our highest high priest, we see that He has been us all along? Everytime you read the word “God”, think instead “the perfected us” — this is the kind of exercise that puts forth a theory so you can try it out and see where and how it doesn’t “feel right”. Learning by contrast is a major tool in the path to perfection.

 

10/27/07 Inspirations            I have a particularly stubborn blister on my hand from mixing cement without gloves (it’s odd how sometimes you know that what you’re doing is going to come to a bad end and you keep doing it anyway, thinking just this once you might get away with it). I was looking at how the skin was valiantly trying to re-form and I realized that everywhere around the sore where there was a wrinkle in the skin of my thumb, there was a corresponding wrinkle in the new skin that was being made. How does it know? How does it know!

 

10/27/07 Inspirations            There’s something really satisfying about the practice of saying a short, quiet prayer before and after I do something important. Today it was my weight-training workout. What it says is that I recognize that God is behind everything I do, and I want to acknowledge that and thank Him for being there for me. It also gives me a slight chance to pause and reflect on what I do, if it advances the will of God and is pleasing to Him. This small focus on the role of God in my life makes even the smallest thing a practice of His presence – nothing can remain small or unjoyful if it’s a part of God’s plan.

 

10/28/07 Insights from Study               If you try too hard to understand, you are only seeking understanding; not God. Better to wait upon God for His inspirations – in that direction lies the assurance of the purity of truth in what insight you’ve been given. It’s wonderful to study the Bible, but be on alert as you do for the little inspirations that come to you through the Holy Spirit and your reading of God’s word. God’s word can come to you in many ways; you don’t want to miss any of it.

 

10/28/07 Insights from Study                      It’s wrong to assume that, since God is all-forgiving of sin, He is not displeased with it. He gets very displeased with sin, and so should we. But like a parent who doesn’t quit loving a child just because it needs discipline, we shouldn’t turn our backs on sinners. Neither should we ignore the sin itself, because we don’t want God to be displeased over our own sins or those of others we accept by our ignoring. But we do need to be more helpful than critical. Jesus, who truly was “holier than thou” didn’t call upon others to see Him that way – He merely asked people to recognize and take responsibility for their sin. We too should leave the judging up to God, and only call attention to a person’s sin in order to encourage them with the joy of right-relationship with God. Those who accuse you of interfering in others’ private lives may have to be told that, while you try to act in the spirit of benevolence rather than self-righteousness, for a Christian evangelism is not a choice. God has laid a responsibility on us – if others remain ignorant of their sins and we see it and don’t address it, the judgment is on us as well as on the sinner. It’s our commission to spread God’s word to others — it’s what we should want to do for love of God and Christ’s sacrifice for us. To not do it shows rejection of the trinity and the passion. It can be done in many ways, but no matter how it’s done, there will always be those who mistake this commission for personal intolerance dressed up to look like compassion. We can’t shrink from our duty because of this. We can solidly state our purpose, but then we leave it up to God to handle the hard-heartedness of others, for only God can overcome it.

 

10/31/07 Inspirations               I’ve come to a lot of frustration and failure due to my obsessive need for routine and ritual organization. So now I’m moved to throw it all out the window and see what happens. I hesitate to try to be this way because I know I’m not naturally like this. I follow set routines; I finish what I start; I write things down so I’m recorded for the future. This satisfies me, but not necessarily God. It may, in fact, be counter-productive in that it takes up a lot of energy I could be using on things that matter. Will I be lost if I don’t have a plan and stick with it? Not if God wants me, and I’m sure He does. I have to wonder how much of what I do is artificial because so much is done on the compulsion of my own humanness. I should stop thinking that if I give up self-control of how and when I work with God, I will be denying Him. Better to show my acceptance of Him by letting Him define the occasion of my worship and devotion – then it will be God-inspired instead of self-inspired.