Exam periods are always the same… Ups and downs, you’re undulating with emotions, eating patterns, sleeping patterns etc… How I long for the time when I have a job and don’t have to suffer the whims of teachers.
After spending a whole day indoors last week, I decided I could take it no more. It had been snowing for days and I hadn’t even taken advantage of that. I was frustrated physically, intellectually and emotionally. I put my jogging gear on, plus a scarf, bonnet and my crappy torn woollen gloves and ran out into the night, flakes still descending upon the already white blanket covering Collonges.
There’s something quite special about running in the snow. Whatever light there is, it is reflected by the snow on the ground, so on a late night walk through the city with a friend last week, it seemed like it was daytime, but on this starless night it was an opaque continuum interrupted by luminous patches, depending on the presence of lampposts. There was so much snow and it was so dark that, when I reached the fields, I couldn’t differentiate the path from the field with my eyes; I had to feel the path’s harder ground. However, after a while, I decided the road most travelled wasn’t the right choice, since I’d decided to go for a shorter run than usual and wasn’t getting any exercise, so I dove into the open field, ending up a foot-deep in snow with soft ground underneath. That got my heart racing! I pulled my foot out of the snow with every step, jogging uphill towards the mountains I couldn’t see, starting to breathe heavily, looking back from time to time to see the marks I was leaving on the previously immaculate carpet, but the snow was so pure and thick, I couldn’t even see them…
I don’t know how long I ran for. Nonetheless, on my way back, going through the same fields, reaching what I judged was the centre of the biggest, whitest one, I rolled, landing on my back, and just lay there. I made an angel in the snow and just stared at the blank sky. No Betelgeuse, no Deneb, no Cassiopea. Just a sheet of grey. I felt better physically, but still couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering me, what I needed to evacuate… Then I heard it. I can never tell how I do, I just do. “Shed that skin… just shed it.”
The words rang deep. I was lacking the vision of eternity. I’d been living off of cheap grace, that asks nothing of me and gives me nothing to live for, instead of the powerful and costly grace I’ve received, that asks everything of me but gives me all things. Flesh was obscuring my sight and killing my thoughts, my moods, my heart. I was living contrary to my calling. It’s really hard to express this with words, even for me, but I just needed to realise anew the depths of the joys of living in light of eternity, the freedom of living in obedience to God (that awesome paradox, wonderfully explained throughout Romans chapters 5 through 8 in the Bible), the joys of running effortlessly in the grace of Jesus Christ, no matter what I do. I needed to shed my skin. To rid myself of patterns of thought set in over years, hidden in my flesh.
I got up, looked back at the very realistic angel imprint and back-flipped my way out of the field, that is, until I realised that isn’t feasible in the snow…
Days later, I realised that comes also from an attitude I have of waiting and hoping for something to happen in my life, something that is missing. I need to live in the ‘now’ of eternity, I have all things NOW, in Christ. Christ has to be my ultimate satisfaction, or else I’ll be constantly disappointed. And it’s not that I have to put that on him: He already is! I have to understand that again and again, and go to him to drink, not mess around with other dirty sources of water, as Lewis points out in his address “The Weight of Glory”, when he declares boldly that our desires are “not too strong, but too weak”!
I formulated it this way today in a note to myself:
“There’s no expiration date on God’s faithfulness, goodness, ‘betterness’ for me. If I start thinking like that, I’m just using him as another functional god and not worshipping and seeing him as the one true God. That kind of ‘use by date’ worship can never satisfy. There’s no time in life when God will stop being the only important thing and will only serve the purpose I assign to him if I have this or that other things as well. You can’t tell God “well, I’ll live my life for you, but I’d better be married by the time I’m twenty-eight, otherwise my life will be wasted.” That’s using him, and elevating your self instead of giving it up and finding your place at his feet, as his child. You end up like the older son in the parable… Only when God takes his place as the centre and source of everything I live for will his joy, love and power truly flow and overflow into every area of my life, and make sense of everything that doesn’t, existentially satisfying me.”
John Calvin said that our hearts are idol factories. I have to regularly kick the things that would take their place in my life as functional gods out of my heart, or else my heart will grow sick. There’s nothing else that can be my saviour… No-one else can take the pressure, and all things material will anyway pass away in the face of eternity. And when eternity fully comes, the things I worry about now will lose all meaning, so might as well live like that now, trusting in God’s faithfulness, goodness, ‘betterness’.
That’s kind of two posts in one, sorry for the battyness, but I don’t care, nobody reads this anyway! (Except for you, thank you very much!)
Music that runs shivers down my spine as I'm writing this: Tonight, by LaRue:
No comments:
Post a Comment