The Word

I dreamt I was suffocating, being crushed within a stone passage, and the more I tried to squeeze through the more stifling the pressure.  The message is clear: if I’m to survive this passage, the eye of the needle, it will be through the stillness of union with you.

At the time when I was the lowest, I experienced something perfectly suited to unseat my pride: God's unfailing love.  Despite everything I've lost and all my failings to get it back, despite my weakness, impotence, and brokenness, he did not hesitate to approach me.  In fact, it was like meeting him for the first time – as if I had not known him until that moment.

I lie awake at 2:00 a.m. addressing Jesus for the first time in many years.  The insights I've received over the past few days have affected me more deeply than I would have expected.  I find myself reaching out, looking to make peace with him and with myself.  I sit, grasping blindly for the reason behind his coming and in the still silence it plays out in the most humbling and disarming way. 

I've unwittingly taken self-acceptance and surrender and unconsciously subverted them into two final tasks I must undertake.  To approach them as tasks is a colossal mistake and utterly missing the point.  They are not tasks: they are the cessation of tasking, the polar opposite of willfulness.

Giving myself to God is like being at a casino, where he slowly relieves me of my chips.  He concedes a hand occasionally - just enough to keep me at the table - but is inexorably freeing me of them all.

How can the attachments our ego’s cling to, the anchors upon which our profound co-dependency moors itself, ever truly be released?  It is a REAL surrender in the mind, in the soul, and how unutterably terrible it is to face.  I must trust that in letting go, I will find myself and God will return to me everything and more.

I just read of the Man of God’s death in 1 Kings 13 and am left to consider whose counsel shall I heed in matters of life.  My Father speaks to me directly and through others in keeping with the vertical and horizontal nature of relationship; however, I must discern what counsel is trustworthy and defer to your direct word when it conflicts with the advice of those around me.

You guide us through the ages Father, always individually and sometimes collectively.  Talents are given and talents are seized.  You draw, you draw, and you bring about your plan.  Your ebb and flow of life and death, happiness and sorrow, blessings and curses, expansions and contractions draw us ever closer to you.

My best friend paid me a visit and gave me a book to read: Victor Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have spent considerable time considering it.  Frankl’s words have generated an inner tension between who I am and who I am to become.

It's day three, and I don't know where I stand with my wife.  She’s moved me out of the house, and despite her insistence on not using the term, it appears we're now separated. 

The things I read and receive are hints and promises of redemption, but I am exhausted and cry out questioning when it will come.  Right now, I feel I'm losing everything.

I arose this morning as depressed as I was upon arrival.  The weight of what this journey may ultimately cost me is bearing down hard on me.  It's clear my fears surround the potential damage my current course may inflict upon my marriage, as well as what it might do to each of us individually. 

I'm one person with my parents, another with my wife, another with my friends, and another with my colleagues.  Since I am everyone, I am no one - like water taking the shape of its surroundings. 

I recognize evolution, while simultaneously hating it because of what it implies about the weak or about someone like me – one who's unwilling or unable to accept the societal ramifications of such a banal, godless process.