Month: August 2016

“Be still and know that I am God.” ~ Psalm 46:10

“When your heart gets restless, turn to worship. When the interior atmosphere settles, return to listening.” ~ Graham Cooke

“Blog” has become a household word in recent decades. It was originally an abbreviation for web log, which is more or less what a blog really is; a log that has been published on the Internet.

Not the Ren and Stimpy kind of log, mind you, but the kind of log that Captain Picard would record his voice notes in. So, basically a diary, except it doesn’t sound very masculine for the captain of a Federation starship to say “Dear diary” so he says “Captain’s log” instead, which makes it a log, and not anything else. (Certainly not a diary.)

Breathing Jesus is intended to be a log of what it looks like for a person to deliberately engage in life on Earth as a human being who has chosen to embark upon the adventure of becoming friends with the God who made them.

It is unavoidably necessary that we must spend a lot of time with someone if we desire to know them well. It is no different with God. This was made very difficult for me by the fact that God is an invisible deity Whose very existence my propensity for analytical thought has led me often to question, and whose primary mode of indelible communicative effort is represented in a collection of ancient writings (the Bible) put together by human beings — a comcept with which this selfsame propensity has caused me severe internal wrestling.

These difficulties have been intensified in that I have also struggled all my life with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It is a condition that is perhaps over-diagnosed, and trivialized in popular culture, but I can assure you it is a real problem. It’s like scouring a book with a highlighting marker, intending to mark only the important bits, but somehow being made (by some terribly annoying force) to involuntarily highlighting the whole entire thing. The best description of ADHD I ever read likened the condition to existing perpetually “in a soft rain of Post-It notes,” trying to decide which things are important, and which things should have more attention paid to them, but being unable to do so because of the fact that everything seems to have been already marked as important.

For me, writing things down has become the tool that I use to focus my prayers when my thoughts are too scattered (which is basically always, it seems.) I’ve been keeping prayer journals on paper, in Microsoft Word, and on Google Docs for some time now, and I wanted to create a blog that I could use to do this publicly from time to time, because…well, because I felt like it would be cool.

Now, as I write this, I bring these problems to You, Jesus, as they are simply way too much for me to be able to overcome on my own. These are facets of my own self, which is all that I have every really known…but you know my self better than even I do, Jesus. You are the one who thought me up.

I am thankful and happy that You made me to be intelligent, and to instinctively seek answers and explanations, and I desire that greater faith and deeper trust in You would operate firmly and effectively alongside these traits, and not in spite of them.

I choose to praise You here and now, because You are good.

I feel like the concept that God is good has become so ingrained in our speech patterns that it loses its actual meaning, almost. Like when you say a word over and over so many times that your brain loses track of its actual meaning, and starts hearing only the sounds themselves.

You are good, though, and you are so good. Like, in the way when someone pauses and says, “Wow…man, that’s good.” (Except, like, times a billion. Basically.)

You are good even when there are problems. You are good even when these problems cause me pain. Your goodness remains a constant factor in the equation, no matter what forces happen to be working overtime to bring ruin and decay. Help me to have the right perspective about this stuff. Help me to not give voice to the enemy and the accuser, but to instead give voice to Your Spirit, the artistic medium through which all of this goodness has been expressed throughout time. Help me to — as much as possible — see things as they truly are, and not through the lens of my prejudices…

And so on.

God is our refuge and strength,
a helper who is always found
in times of trouble.
Therefore we will not be afraid,
though the earth trembles
and the mountains topple
into the depths of the seas,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with its turmoil.
~ Psalm 46 (HCSB)

God is always found in times of trouble.

We can know that this is true because it is promised in Psalm 46. Why do some of us need to wait until everything is burning down around us before we will seek Him with all of our heart? I don’t know.

And I don’t have to know why. And neither do you.

The point is that God has made Himself freely accessible to you and to me. We have to learn to refuse the influences that would come against this idea.

The enemy wants us to believe that God will not help us. He wants us to believe that God has abandoned us. He will stop at nothing to convey this idea, but it is a lie nonetheless. God has given us everything. He has opened heaven and beckons us freely to come in and sit down with Him there. We can do it here and now. We can respond to life from this place of rest and power, and only in so doing can we realize our destiny in this world.

No matter what else is going on in your life, no matter what troubles are rising up against your soul…choose to focus on the ever-present availability of God. Make Him your first priority in all things, and you will find that He is faithful. Despite it all, God is faithful.

When something hits you right in the exact place where it can do the most damage…

Right there in the exact middle of your absolute weakest spot…

All of the old things rise up. They offer to protect you, to comfort you. They offer vindication. Your sense of confidence in the love of God seems to fade…

You have to remember who you are. You have to hold onto that knowledge with everything  you’ve got. This storm has more than enough of what it would take to destroy you completely, but destruction is not what God has planned for you. You must cooperate with His plan, and not give in to the pain. You need to trust in Jesus to keep you, because this time it’s too much. You can’t do it on your own. You absolutely cannot. You don’t have the strength. But He does.

God has the strength, and He offers it freely.

He is always with you. He is for you, and not against you.

Everything that would speak contrary to this constitutes that which exalts itself against the knowledge of God.

It’s time to do war now. It’s time to rise up into your place as a manifesting son/daughter of the Living God.

Ignore the pain. It does not have any real power over you. Accept who you are. Be still and know that Yahweh is your Creator and your Deliverer, and that as He is, so are you in this world. Do not back down. Hold your head up. Cry out to Him until you have nothing left, and know that He hears, and He is bringing you through this. You have a future. You have a Father. You are loved by the very Power that holds everything in the entire universe together, and nothing can separate you from this love.

Step away from everything that runs contrary to this pure, unadulterated hope, and refuse it all with your very last drop of strength. God will be faithful. He will restore.

Jesus, I want to believe in your mercy and love as ferociously as I have believed in your holiness and judgment. I want to choose life as strongly as I have feared death.

Fear has come so naturally to me. I’ve not been without bravery, but bravery can only exist because of fear…and I don’t want to be brave, per se. I want to be fearless. I don’t want to white knuckle it. I don’t want to be holding on for dear life. I want love and peace to radiate as freely and naturally from me as light from the Sun. I don’t just want it…I need it.

I feel as though I can’t exist anymore without it. And yet, I know it’s something I already have, and that I need to learn to look past the illusions that dance and threaten…this is something I need to choose to know, something I must consistently decide to want to believe…we can be so fickle, we humans, with our fragile minds and our simple flesh.

Consistency, then, is the key.

Who am I when no one is looking? What kind of a person am I when all hope seems to have fled, and there appears to be nothing left to lose?

I choose to know who you made me to be, and I choose it now and always.

As I wake up this morning, I put aside every impulse and squirrel-seeking function, and I lay myself down at your feet, Jesus. I bring you my tired, frustrated self…I bring you my idol-worshiping, me-obsessed self that is excited to do something else immediately without focusing on you first…I bring you my worries, my cares, my anxieties, and I lay it all down as I come into your presence.

I refuse to listen to the lies that try to convince me otherwise. The enemy would tell me that you don’t have time for me, that I am not good enough, that I am not wholehearted enough, that my desire to walk in your favor is useless…

I know that these are lies. I know it from experience. I know it because you have heard the voice of my supplication a thousand times over, and you do hear it now, and your spirit testifies with my spirit that this is so. I choose to acknowledge your spirit as the source of ultimate and absolute truth, and to deny these other anxieties the right to influence my thoughts.

I come to you in the midst of the greatest pain and distress that I have ever known. Jesus, I have known pain so many times before, and have been intimate with suffering in so many ways, and you know this…but I have never seen this type of anguish. Nothing on this level. It doesn’t diminish with time, not even a little bit. It stays big and bright, and its fire burns just as hot now as it did even two years ago when this whole thing started. It threatens to consume absolutely all of me, to leave nothing behind, to rape and pillage my very last ounce of hope in your mercy…

Even now, your peace wells up within me. It is a peace that defies all else, and flies in the face of conventional wisdom. This is something that can only be known because it has been tasted. It cannot be explained. It cannot be purchased with money or with human effort. It cannot be looked for and discovered in the normal way. It can only be accepted as a gift.

It is the deepest form of anything, the fullest manifestation of the very thing that holds the universe together, and it is being born all over again, right here and now inside this very heart which cries out for reprieve and deliverance from a pain which can only be described in nightmares, and not with words.

This is what it means when it says that you are near to the brokenhearted.

Somehow, the fears and the panic are still an option, but I choose to lay them aside. I choose instead to focus on who you are. I choose to focus on all the different levels of it, which I have known, and on all of the different experiences that I have had of your mercy and grace in my life.

You came to me when I was young, and you stayed with me no matter what I did. I remember kneeling in prayer all those years ago, listening to that song, and I remember being struck by the awareness that I had never in my whole life been so sure of anything as I was of your acceptance and your love right there in that moment. I asked you to lead me and to guide me, and you picked me up out of a place of limitless confusion, and you carried me right into a big, beautiful life that I never could have earned or deserved.

All of these problems that are here with me now, they are temporary. Your love is the only thing that lasts forever, and everything that aligns itself with that love will pass with it into the realm of eternity.

I choose now, here and now, in the middle of this pain, to align myself with this love, even as it swells within me, and I allow it to take me completely over.

I choose to trust this love.

I enter boldly into your throne room, as the warrior poet you intended when you dreamed me up, and I bring my supplication before you. I know who you are, and you are good. I remember back through all the pain and the fire of what has happened, and I look immediately to the now, underneath all the obstructions, beyond every distraction, to what is clear and present, to what is real, and it is you, the very source of all that is love, the very center of all that is good.

I ask that you would silence the voice of every former tyrant master who would try to convince me of the hopelessness of remaining true. I ask that you would do your part in this, and that you would open my eyes fully, beyond every doubt, to see what it is that constitutes my own part. Remove every source of confusion. Make my way plain.

Jesus, unless you help me in this, I have entered into a place of absolute despair. Even so, even in this, I know who you are, and I know you are good. I know you have a plan for my future, and that it is a good plan, and that it involves hope, and peace, and the fullness of every good thing. I know it fleetingly, though. I know it only in part. I know it in a way that becomes altogether insufficient when the storm hits.

I ask you to increase my understanding. Increase my faith.

“Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief!”

You are fashioning a tale of victory through all this. I want my desires to be the same as yours. I am so done with this flesh, with these petty concerns of the soul. Let my deepest convictions be only those that exist in spirit and in truth. Let everything else fall away. Let me come to you freely and fully, without doubt, without fear, and without the voice of the accuser echoing ever in my thoughts.

Cleanse every part of me. Teach me to be clean. Instruct me.

“Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect unto all thy commandments!”

I don’t want to struggle against anything that contradicts you. I want those things to simply die. Even so, not my will but yours be done. I ask that you keep me through the storm. Though it rage about me, let me only have your peace in my mind. Let my mind be fixed on you. It is only through you that I am able to do this, “for it is you that work in me, both to will and to do your good pleasure!”

 

As believers, everything we do must be done from the position of rest in the secret place of God. Never underestimate the strength you have in that free, gentle intimacy with God, and never let anyone convince you of anything to the contrary. Real, actual victory over this present darkness can only happen when we are operating out of a center that looks like pure love. God is in love with us, and we should make that pure and simple fact the very basis of each and every move we make.