Clouds of life

God still has his secrets--hidden from "the wise and learned" (Luke 10:21). Do not fear these unknown things, but be content to accept the things you cannot understand and to wait patiently. In due time He will reveal the treasures of the unknown to you--the riches of the glory of the mystery. Recognize that the mystery is simply the veil covering God's face.
Do not be afraid to enter the cloud descending on your life, for God is in it. And the other side is radiant with His glory. "Do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ" (1 Peter 4:12-13). When you feel the most forsaken and lonely, God is near. He is in the darkest cloud. Forge ahead into the darkness without flinching, knowing that under the shelter of the cloud, God is waiting for you.

--Streams in the Desert

Today I acknowledge that I have had some difficulty entering my quiet place, that occasion where God and myself meet with no one else nearby. Recently it is an awkward encounter to find myself alone in the same room with Him, something from which I have been prone to flee. Maybe the thing is that I don't actually feel that it's just me and Him but that it's me, Him, and a formidably large elephant in the room that I don't want to acknowledge. But I feel that I can only find restoration unless I recognize the elephant. It's as if the elephant is standing right between me and God and God isn't going to do anything until I do something about that elephant. Or perhaps, that elephant is actually God's doing. Amidst circular argument, this triggers a lot of inner conflict about doctrinal disputes.

In one corner of the conversation, I can hear proponents of sin conviction and confrontation. In another corner, I hear warnings against "Jesus plus..." principles. In yet another corner is the reminder of the anticipation of completion that is not now and not yet but soon to come--an explanation for why there will always be a certain extent of emptiness and unfulfilled, unresolved feeling, and this internal debate is just part of that general hardness that it encompasses. It is difficult to determine where lies the deception and where veiled is the truth.

How do you reason with this idea that you feel that you are being pushed towards something, and you don't want to do it, yet in principle, there is nothing biblically wrong with doing or not doing that something. However, it is the conviction that there might be an aspect of calling that you are rejecting, or at least, it is the fact that you are willing to say no to an area of life where you don't want to relinquish control, and suddenly it's like you are cut off entirely because you just realized that you can't or are unwilling to let go of everything.

This is perhaps a testament to how demanding the Biblical God is, how He is all consuming, how He wants us in our entirety. And/or maybe it's also a testament to how He allows us to be given to our own desires and our own will without His force. But is it such that you find yourself in a dark place when you don't give Him everything? Because suddenly that is disobedience, pride, fear of the unknown, and ultimately distrust.

I am reminded of an analogy I once heard involving a dog tied to a podium (a podium because this was from a sermon). For 10 years, the dog is leashed to this spot, unable to go anywhere outside the radius of its leash. Finally someone takes the leash off, and the dog has freedom to explore the area around this podium, yet it does not go beyond the radius of its old leash because it has become so accustomed to the limitation. For so long it has lived within the restrained experiences and extent of its former chains, and, though free and liberated to go where it wants, it sticks to the comforts and seeming security of what it has always known.

I want to believe that this elephant is not as big and inconvenient as I think it is but that it is really an illusion or perhaps a hallucination emerging from my starvation of something I have been lacking, something that actually has less to do with the elephant itself. I want to think that the leashed dog is something that exists in all of us and always will, but that it does not sever us completely from God. Furthermore, I want to believe that the truth is greater than my perception and my sense of reasoning, that it surpasses my ability to understand what is bubbling underneath the surface of my being, that it is higher than what I think I can see, and that I can't for sure identify what's in or behind the clouds.