Encouragement

I get the frustrated email all the time. “Wayne, it doesn’t seem like anything is happening in me.” People who go on a journey to learn to live in the love of the Father get impatient when change doesn’t come as fast as they hope for. I understand. Many are used to intellectual change. I hear something. I believe it. And then I should be able to apply it to my life.

But transformation doesn’t work that way. We may know God loves us, but letting him win us into the reality of that love takes time. It may even seem as if nothing is happening and we begin to doubt either God’s love or the process. I’ve watched over many years as people write me frustrated that they don’t seem to be “getting it.”  In fact Brad and I recently did a podcast on what may be the scientific reason Why Transformation Takes Time. If you missed it, you might want to give it a listen.)

I try to tell people to relax in the Father’s affection and to relax in the process of how he changes us. I know it isn’t easy.  We want quick-fixes and be in control. But we can’t rush it. It isn’t ours to do. All we can do is just lean into him each day as much as we are able and set our affections on him. Yes, we’ll make mistakes. Certainly we’ll fee trapped by habit patterns and ways of thinking that don’t seem to change. But what we miss is what’s going on deep down in the core of our lives, beneath the level of us simply trying to act better.

That’s why I tell people to let it unfold the way God wants, even if it takes two or three years to see progress. I know that’s hard, but one day you’ll begin to see that things have been shifting in your life and now you are able to transit circumstances with more freedom that we’ve had before. That’s when you’ll know God is doing the work not you. Like Paul, you’ll end up with nothing to boast about except him and his work in you.

I got this email earlier this week from someone I’ve been in touch with over the past few frustrated years.  Look at what God has done:

I (am now experiencing) what I have been seeking for years.  I can only describe it as heavy warm feeling on my chest that leaves me feeling peaceful and I am left with an excited expectation for what is next to come in my life and that all is well.  I found out I have grown into Fathers reality a lot more than I ever dreamed because when the chips were down and I came to the end of me, grief lost its power, fear had no effect and I was left with a simple faith knowing he is in control. That’s the only way I know how to explain it.  I was growing up all along and didn’t even know it.

I love that. Changing by our own strength is much quicker, but it doesn’t last long and we soon slip back in our old patterns. Transformation works more deeply, helping us think differently from the inside, so that we live differently on the outside.  I hope this email encourages those of you for whom change seems to be moving too slowly. He is at work in you. You’ll see it one day and then you’ll overflow with thanksgiving.

Life rarely gives us what we want. How many of us have dreamed of things that bring us great joy but can’t find any way to fulfill them in this age?  We look at others who have the job we want, a better marriage than the one we struggle in, or with opportunities we wish we had. We see people getting the “lucky breaks” while it seems like everything we try seems to turn to dust.  It is easy to think that God is against us, or at least life is. The longer we live the more frustrating our disappointments can become.

I ran across this quote by C. S. Lewis yesterday:

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

I love that thought. Sure some of our dreams and desires are fleshy and fulfilling them wouldn’t bring any of the joy we hope it would. But many of our deep-seated desires will never be fulfilled in this age, not because God doesn’t love us, but because this world cannot fulfill them anyway. I have often been comforted in the face of such desires knowing that they may be drawing me into a truer space, where the flesh no longer harasses us and where joy is untainted by human greed and competition.

It is easy to forget that our 70-80 years of life here is so fleeting. Scripture says it is like the dew on the grass which dries up in the morning sun. Real life lies beyond a veil we can’t see beyond. I often think of all of our life in this world like standing around in the lobby of a great play or concert, waiting for the doors to open.  You weren’t created for the brokenness of this age; you were made for a richer destiny in realities that your mind has not even thought of yet.

But we do have tastes of it—moments where love seems so rich and nourishing you’d think you’d die in its beauty, of joyful abandon when the cares of the world are swallowed up by pure bliss, and even where a dream exhilarates your heart with the hope of, “If only…”

So don’t let the brokenness of this world define your hopes. Why wouldn’t God fill us with hopes and desires that are for the main show, not the lobby? Why wouldn’t you hunger for things that you may only glimpse in part in this world but will someday be completely fulfilled in ways you don’t know?

So rather than let your disappointments frustrate you, let them draw you closer to the Father who gave them to you and bask in the hope that someday, perhaps sooner than we all think, they will be fulfilled in ways that make even glimpses of them here seem like a paltry shadow anyway.  Wait until the real glory comes!

Love this quote and thought I’d pass it along today:

When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Henri J. M. Nouwen  Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

As always when I share stuff like that, I’m not thinking, “Wow, I’ve got to find friends like that,” but rather, “That’s the kind of friend I want to be.”

Unfortunately more people seem to want to have friends rather than be friends. That’s why there’s a dearth of amazing friendships in this broken world.

Find someone to love today and love them well.  See what God does.

After I sent out the our Lifestream Update for Fall about God’s enjoyment of us as his kids, I got a few emails back from some individuals certain that was not true for them.  One had the title I’ve used above.  “He cannot love me!”

The reasons in each email vary.  If I only understood the choices they had made, the abuses they had suffered, the troubles they had faced, and the feelings they didn’t have, I would agree with them. Their conclusion were all the same “I am damaged, or cursed, or ignored by God, if he exists at all.” Certainly God would not enjoy them.

I don’t read such emails lightly.  They shatter something in my heart. But I’m glad they are at least reading and interacting with what I wrote. There is hope still. Their heart wants to embrace what their head tells them they can’t. It is a horrible darkness indeed to feel as when you cannot believe that God loves and desires you. There is no greater lie whispered in the universe than that God does not enjoy you and does not want you to know him.  He does. Regardless of what evidence you feel you have to the contrary, it is a deceptive web spun in your head and heart. To think that you are too damaged for God is like a child who feels their diagnosis of cancer leaves their parents too disgusted to love them. The diagnosis doesn’t make you less loved, but even more endearing to the One who made you and cares about you so deeply.

How can he help but love you even more than I love my own granddaughter (above)? This world is incredibly cruel and horrible things happen to people. We are all tempted into actions and attitudes that we may even find contemptible. But when God looks at you he sees who you really are underneath all that has sought to twist you or destroy you. Remember, God doesn’t have love, he is love! It defines his very nature and that is focused on you as much as anyone else in the world.  No one that’s existed was unloved by God and not invited into the knowing of him as an endeared child. The great horror of the Fall was not just that Adam and Eve had disobeyed God, but even more that in their disobedience they considered themselves no longer worthy of God’s affection.  Shame drove them to the dark place of seeing God as their enemy, when Father’s love for them never waned.

That’s what God wants to win in us. His love, even at our most broken and destitute, is the flash of light that opens the door to a wider world. I know that isn’t easy to see from many people’s vantage points. The pain, guilt, or fear is so deep that we can’t see him when he’s right in front of us. “But couldn’t he make it more clear?” I’ve been asked. Of course not. Wouldn’t he make it as clear as possible to everyone? It’s fear and shame that feed the darkness and seem to affirm the lie. But it is nonetheless a lie.

You are deeply loved by the God who fashioned you. That doesn’t mean he loves all that we do or think, or the choices we make. He just doesn’t define us by those things. He looks on the heart to know who we really are and it’s that unique son or daughter in the middle of the brokenness that he loves and that he invites out of the darkness into his light. You may not hear that now or recognize it yet, but it is growing inside you. He speaks and though it may go unheard by your physical ears the truth settles deep in your soul first and then it will become more obvious. Just keep coming, asking, and in hope against hope believing.

Two people sent me some poems that encourage them when they felt they were too damaged to be seen and pursued by God  Both are incredibly powerful and I hope you take the time to read the entire poems.  The first is from Then the Whispers Started by Jenny Rowbory, a young woman who’s faith and courage inspires me.  The words are God talking:

I will tell you of the wonders I see within you,
I will tell you again and again and again
until you come to believe the truth
instead of the lies.
For I love you
I delight in you
and I say that you are good.

Then someone else sent me David Whyte’s poem, Everything is Waiting for You.  What a powerful look into the pain of our loneliness and how to find a way out:

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone…
Too feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings…
Put down the weight of your aloneness
and ease into the conversation…
Everything is waiting for you.

This is how his reality overtakes ours. It’s rarely a white knight riding in on a white horse changing all our thinking with the flash of a sword, but a God who continues to unfold himself in the recesses of our mind, and the revelation of Creation around us. The process may seem slow and less obvious that we’d want him to be, but I am convinced that God is reaching out to us in the best way imaginable, and it just takes time for us to see it and embrace it. What helps most is someone else who will reflect God’s love in the world. Find someone like that, and if you know his love be someone like that so that others still lost in the darkness might find a connection through you to the Father who delights in them.

One more thing, I read an article last week about how God created our brain and explains perhaps better than anything I’ve ever read what the renewing of the mind (Romans 12) looks like inside.  It explains why transformation takes time as God rewires our brain to think differently.  Of course, the article doesn’t have God in it, but I see his hand in this process. I’ve told people for years that moving from a performance-based, fear-based relationship with God to learning to live in his affection takes many years.  We just don’t have the synapses yet to contain a different story than the one pain and shame schooled us in.  But all of that can change and I’m grateful the Holy Spirit is involved in the process. The article is here:  Good News: If You Keep Your Brain Active, It Will Continue to Grow Long Past Your 20s.  Brad and I talk about it on the podcast that will release Friday at The God Journey.  Here’s an excerpt:

BY DAVID EAGLEMAN FROM THE BOOK FROM THE BRAIN: THE STORY OF YOU

A baby’s neurons form two million new connections every second as they take in information. By age two, a child has over 100 trillion synapses—double the number an adult has.

This peak represents far more connections than the brain will need. The incredible blooming is then supplanted by neural “pruning.” As you mature through the teen years and into your 20s, 50 percent of your synapses will be pared back.

Which synapses stay, and which go? When a synapse successfully participates in a circuit, it is strengthened; synapses that aren’t used are weakened and eventually eliminated. Just as with paths in a forest, you lose the connections that you don’t use.

By age 25, our brains appear to be fully developed. But even in adulthood, the brain can form new connections…

If you’re having trouble believing that God would enjoy and desire you, you are not alone. Take hope!  He is winning this place in your heart. Just dare to believe in whatever small way you can, that you just might be wrong, and that God doesn’t look at you like you think he does. That will give you enough space to go on a different journey and see just how loved you really are!

This process of inner transformation is fascinating to watch, in my own life and others. It’s disorienting for many when their age-old religious practices start to shift. I know it was for me.  One day you’re doing a regimen of Bible reading and prayer, feeling good about yourself for ticking all the boxes. Then, they seem lifeless, or at least ineffective. Part of you says keep doing it no matter what, another part invites you down a journey away from religious obligation to discover what a real engagement with the Scriptures or God might be. I enjoy stories of those who take the road less traveled, and risk moving away from the lifeless status quo to discover a real relationship with God.

Transformation comes slowly. We may even been a bit naughty at the beginning since we’re not doing the things we’re “supposed to do.”  But what many of us have found on the other side is that prayer and Bible reading become so much more real inside a growing relationship, rather than as a rote exercise out of obligation.

I got this from someone today in that very process:

I’ve been contemplating something this morning….  I have a hard time with journaling now for a few days.  I was an avid journaler as that’s where I communicated with God.  I have a hard time “speaking prayers”…  I can say “help me God” but most of the time all that’s there are the thoughts within.  I don’t speak out much in the “dear God” prayers.  I’m not overwhelmed with guilt because I think of the Spirit groaning and Jesus interceding and since Jesus lives in me I believe that my thoughts and aches are translated in intercession to the father.  I’m not worried that I don’t have words because I know how I feel with my own children. Sometimes my son will come out of his room and just sit in the living room, yes, often on his phone… 🙂  But he’s in the living room with me.  I don’t care that he’s not talking.   I’m just happy he’s in the room with me.  If he wants to say something he can, if he doesn’t it’s ok.  He’s with me.

I know that there’s been such a huge distortion in regards to prayer for me as I often just don’t want to “talk” to God.  For one, it was displayed as an act of allegiance  to stay in right standing with God.  For two, so many of my prayers were about me getting what I thought was best for me.  An example: my broken-down car.   The way I would approach it  was to start to pray… and gather as many people as I could to pray.  We would all ask God together to cause the car to be an inexpensive fix.  That was the best thing for me, right.  I would pray constantly asking God to make it an inexpensive fix.  When the call came telling me it was a transmission there would be a deflation…. Why didn’t God give me “the best thing” and inexpensive repair.  What about “whatever you ask for in His name will be given to you”?  I had used Jesus’ name and asked over and over again, believing.  What happened there?  As a parent I would do that for my child, why wouldn’t he do that for me?  What kind of love is that?

Somehow I believe I have equated prayers answered the way I wanted with love, attentiveness, and care.  I got to the point that I stopped asking for things because what was the point, I rarely get what I pray for anyways. Answered prayer became some type of symbol of his love.  When it wasn’t answered the way I had prayed the indications were that something was really wrong, with God’s care for me of maybe with my value to Him.  I think somehow this distortion has hidden His love.   I think of the scripture that talks about “if a child asks for bread would he be given a stone.”  I often felt like I was being given the stone when God wouldn’t give me what I “so desperately needed”.. (of course I was determining what I needed)

So much has been distorted in the 50 + years of religious teaching that I sat under.   So nowadays I don’t say much in the ways I once did with words of “dear God”… I don’t ask for much.  I don’t journal much.

This is an incredibly healthy process. For me, when I realized that most of my prayers came from anxiety and that led me to always ask God to do what I thought best, my prayer life took a dive as well. No he doesn’t bless me from my agenda, he saves me from it.  He’s not the fairy Godfather turning our pumpkins into chariots. He’s with us in the reality of negotiating a broken world and all the while inviting us to know him better. As love began to win me, my prayer life too a real shift. First it seemed to die, then something more real and rewarding began to emerge.

His love built greater trust in me and I learned the power of prayer that rises from growing trust.  They weren’t “fix this” or “fix that” prayers; they were honest pleas for him to help me see what he was doing in the circumstances I was in and how I could be a part of that.  So instead of turning my anxiety into prayer requests, I just began to pour out my anxieties to him, knowing that love needed to win me into safer space. “God, why am I so anxious about this?” “Father, what do you want to show me of yourself.” “How do I keep my attitude free with the frustration of a broken car, or because someone else forgot an appointment, and how might you redeem this situation for your glory?”

I began to look toward him in everything and now pray more confidently for those things that God seems to nudge me towards.  Transformation is a great process.  Isn’t it fun to discover new things, to see movement in our journeys, to lose the religious habits of the past and find a real way to relate to him?

I love all that stuff and I love that it is happening in this woman as well.

What an amazing season when you risk the illusionary safety of the status quo and begin to let Jesus show you just how real this journey was meant to be.

Connecting with the Jesus and his Father as he makes himself known to you was meant to be the simplest thing in the world, until our religious approaches got us all twisted up in our own performance and we felt we had to try and make “it” happen on our own. Many people miss that revelation because they are looking for something far more complicated or spectacular than how God draws us to himself.

Most people seek God with their physical senses hoping to see him or hear him in supernatural manifestations of his glory. While God does that some times, he is far more interested in helping us learn how to recognize him with the eyes and ears of our heart and to awaken those senses that engage the Eternal. God is always active around us—always moving, always speaking; it’s just that we miss him because we haven’t learned to recognize or trust our spiritual senses that engage him.

Over the last twenty-five years I’ve had the joy of helping many people find their way out of the religious jungle of self-effort to the trailhead of a growing relationship with him. Unfortunately time does not allow me to do it with all that write me or even that I visit, so a few years ago I put the key things I think help people the most to a set of videos. There are twenty-four of them, only about 5-8 minutes long designed to get people thinking in the space that makes it easiest to see how God is making himself known to us. We called the series Engage as a way of helping people see how God is engaging them.

We affectionately refer to this as the anti-discipleship approach because so many people have the idea that discipleship is building a relationship with God. In truth, discipleship isn’t about you building a relationship with God; it’s recognizing how God wants to build one with you.

Last week I got this email from Ed, as he is sorting this process out in his own life. I love the journey he’s on, and even though his hunger is satisfied yet it is obvious that the relationship he desires with God is growing in him. Yes, it takes time and it doesn’t happen the same way for everyone. All we can do is make ourselves avaialbe to him and then learn to recognize where God nudges his thoughts into ours and pours his strength and power into our struggles.

I honestly don’t even know how to relax into the relationship as you put it in the Engage series (currently going through those for the third time). I am so trained to be on the treadmill of religious performance that I feel anxious and nervous when I’m not doing something. I can’t ever remember a teacher or institution that wasn’t prodding me to do more, be more, give more, etc. Relationship with God has been modeled and taught to me as an exercise program. I seem to have been (religiously) born into an endless state of panic about how God views me and I’m driven to chase a never ending list of dos and don’ts in the hope that one day I’ll finally arrive at a state of “acceptable”. Honestly it’s exhausting just to think about it.

When my wife and I first left the our congregation I thought the joy I felt was me learning to walk in relationship and really experiencing the love of Father. Now I know that I was just so glad to be out from under the oppressive religious system we grew up in that I mistook that sense of relief for everything else. Now I perceive that the religious system was off of me but not out of me.

I’m listening to the Engage podcasts again (but being the religious performer I have to listen to more than one a day lol) and this morning I listened to #18 on the way to work. I had to listen to it twice because there was so much in it that spoke to me right now. Your relationship with Father is a present reality and you seem to just live out of that. I suppose that’s why my wife and I keep listening and reading your podcasts and books, because we truly want to see what a life lived in real relationship with Father looks like. We don’t see you as a “guru” but an example of the kind of life we hope for. I hope this makes sense but just your being (verb) is as significant to us as anything you talk about on the podcast.

Yes, it makes sense, Ed, and I do think that’s how life in this kingdom gets passed on. I’m glad not to be your guru; I only hope to be a brother pointing the way to a trailhead that lets you discover with increasing clarity how God is making himself know to you. Obviously that is stirring in you and in time you will become more comfortable listening with your heart.

Recognizing God in your life is not difficult because it’s complicated, but because it is simpler than we dare to believe.

When we live by religious rules and traditions we unwittingly shift into achievement mode, trying to do the best we can to live up to our standards and most days falling far short and bashing ourselves. That, however, is living by the law.  The new creation offers us a new way to live, not by meeting the expectations of law (or even New Testament principles), but the joy of learning to live by his Spirit will draw us into Father’s reality and shift the way we live as the fruit of a growing relationship of love.  Transformation is a journey, not an achievement. While perfection is the long-term hope, it is never a daily expectation to be disappointed.

It is such a joy when that reality sinks into a heart.  I got this email the other day from a friend and it so touches me to see how this shift has happened in her and her compassion for others still lost in the world of achievement and performance:

I had to write and tell you that I loved, loved, loved reading your book, In Season.  It just helped solidified so much of what is going on in my life.  It’s helped me to stand strong through the trials I’ve gone through lately.  However, I can actually say that I feel like I’m coming into my harvest time.  I loved your book He Loves Me, but people really need to read In Season! I think, just my opinion! I’ve given away many copies of your book, He Loves Me, but, now I’m doing it with, In Season.

You know, I’m realizing there’s a lot of people out there that are hurting in institutional religion, that would probably love to walk in a journey like ours, but are just too afraid.  I love my journey with the Lord and I would never go back.  I’ve given my yoga instructor your book, He Loves Me. She loves it and talks about it all the time… she’s a believer!  She says she can’t wait to read In Season.

I use to regret so much in my life, but I don’t any more.  I’m the person that I am today, because of the things I’ve walked through.  I’m stronger, steadier, and less afraid!  I know that trials will continue to come, but, my responses are and will be so much different.

Isn’t that what’s great about a journey?  You don’t have to waste time in regret for the past. Yes, we all have things we wish we hadn’t done, or spent more time trying to get something to work that was never meant to, but even those things become part of our journey as he draws us into himself and shows us how we can live freely in him even in the broken world that can cause so much pain.

That’s why I wrote In Season, to help people see that instead of trying to accomplish something for God by our own efforts, we can relax into the rhythm of his work in us realizing that each day holds the possibility of new discovery and greater freedom.  Since I grew up on a vineyard, this is a farmer’s view of John 15 and Jesus’ encouragement to learn to live in him like a branch lives in a vine. We get to enjoy the relationship and in doing so our lives are transformed with better ways to think, live, and love in the world. Spiritual growth is organic, a response to the circumstances and challenges in our life and the joy of walking in them with him and his strength.

And I love her compassion for people still lost in the world of religious performance. Having been there ourselves, who better to realize how lost and blind you can be even as your patting yourself on the back for being a ‘radical’ disciple of Jesus?  They need our love, compassion, and friendship, not our judgment and anger.

And as a reminder, most of our books are available at bulk discounts so you can share them with others affordably or start a study if you want. And individual copies of In Season is available for less than $10.00.

I couldn’t resist sharing this thought above. I love it and it’s a great reminder every day that we live.  There is far more about God that we don’t know, than what we think we know. That’s especially true when we add in the conundrum of how much of God we think we know about him that isn’t even true. We just think it is.

It’s from a book I recommended a couple of months ago, called Paradox Lost.  The whole book is designed to help us settle into the reality that our Father in heaven could never be cataloged in a book and just about the time we think we’ve figure him out. It’s a book I know many of you will enjoy.

That’s why we will find more joy in following him as he reveals himself, rather than following concepts of him that often disappoint us.  I had a friend who often referred to God as Jehovah Tsdnikki. You’d have to be an old King James reader to fully appreciate that moniker. The way he shows up unexpectedly and the things he does to touch our lives defy our imaginations. That’s why trying to follow a God that meets your expectations will be horribly frustrating. I know, I did it for decades and spent a lot of time wallowing in the anger of disappointment. And there I missed so much of what he was still doing around me.

Realizing God is so much more than we can sort out at any stage in this life can set us at rest from trying to do so. Fortunately we have a God who wants to reveal himself to us in the smallest bits every day. I find greater joy walking in what he has revealed about himself than frustrating over what I don’t yet understand. When I pray, “Father I want to know you as you really are,” I find he answers that in the things I most need to see in the circumstances I’m facing. That often comes in conversations with others who are seeing things about him I haven’t discovered yet.

Figuring him out is an adventure we’ll never complete in this lifetime and our awareness of that can create a humility that doesn’t try to force our view on others. And we’ll not sort it out here. I’m hoping eternity will last long enough to maybe get to the end of him there, if getting to an end is even possible in eternity.

For a book that was never meant to be a book I am amazed at how the story keeps traveling. So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore started as a website and a story serialized over four and a half years by two of us who wondered what the Apostle John might think of what Jesus’ church had become in the 21st century.  We made it up as we went along to help people think past the pain of the religious games many of us get caught up in and discover what it is to live as his beloved son or daughter alongside others in the world.

I never thought we’d print it, since it has been free on line since the beginning. We printed it only because friends said they would never read it on line.  Hundreds of thousands did, however, and still many also bought the book.  It showed up in Walmart and Costco and a thousand other stores.  I get to hear testimonials all the time about how people found that book and what it helped identify in their own hearts about God’s working.

A few days ago I received this from a man today who has just finished leading a thirteen-week book discussion through So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore. Here’s what he wrote:

Well, after going through Jake at least 4 times, plus going through a 13 week study of Jake with our Bible study group, I am finally done with Jake (at least today).  I can’t thank you enough for your efforts in writing this life changing book.  Since first reading The Story of Jake about a year ago my relationship with Father has changed dynamically. The guilt of leaving my church of 25 years and the understanding that Father loves me, even with all my faults, has changed remarkably.  It would take me 30 pages to tell you of all that has happened in the past year, but just know that Father and I are doing GREAT!  I didn’t say perfect, but GREAT!

Thanks, Carl. Dave and I were blessed to hear how much this story helped you on your own journey.

I still love this story and being in it a lot over the past couple of years as it quietly marches toward becoming a feature length film titled, Out of the Game. I’ve had a lot of fun helping to re-tell this story for a different medium and see if it can continue to help people discover life and freedom in him.

Opening my email every day is like going on a treasure hunt. I have appreciated the stories people have entrusted to me as they hold a longing in their heart for a more vital walk with God than they are yet experiencing. I get to be with them in the darkness and encourage them as best I can to lean more deeply into God’s reality. Learning to do that always takes longer than people hope or want. It is easy to get frustrated as their options narrow and the fears begin to rise that maybe he is not there and is not drawing them toward himself. My heart breaks for them knowing they can’t yet see what is right in front of them, but I know Father is working and one day that work will surface in a way they can see, too.

Yes, it would be easier for us all if he would work faster, if he would function on our time instead of his. But he does not delay to make sport of us, only because he is doing something far deeper and far more profound than we can possibly imagine. He’s not just making the outside better, but liberating us from the inside so that we can live differently and more freely in him. He seems to enjoy that process. I thought about that last night as I waited endlessly for our new puppy to take care of business before we put her down for the night. It’s painstaking raising a puppy. It would be far easier just to get a dog after it’s already grown up a bit, but loving a puppy is so worth it, even for all the accidents and damaged shoes and furniture. Sara and I love the process of helping a puppy grow up into a treasured part of our household.

Would it be so strange that God would enjoy our growth, too? Yes, he knows the pain we’re in, but he’s not about alleviating the pain, he’s about transforming us so the pain no longer destroys us. I got an email the other day that spoke to the glorious way God works, and hopefully sets us at ease to let him do it, rather than living in the frustration of our own timeline:

Thank you for responding to my several emails throughout my journey.  Your “work” (podcasts, books…) has been instrumental in my growth.  When I first contacted you a few years back I was inquiring about how to find a fellowship of like-minded believers so I didn’t have to feel so alone.  You told me to ask God.  I did.  Nothing happened.  This confirmed my inner less-loved outlook (actually “Esau complex”) at the time. So I went into another downward spiral, one of hundreds if not thousands.  The interesting thing is that I have not been able to quit God, though, I’ve tried.

Why would I want to keep coming back to a God whom I feels kicks me down and then kicks me when I’m down? It makes no logical sense whatsoever as I don’t have a victim mentality.  Yet, it has all been part of a process of God answering my prayers. Looking back, you and Brad and your online community have been for a time those “bigger brothers” (and sisters) that I prayed about.  I was not left totally alone.  I have a “sister” in Christ whom I’ve shared my journey with since 2000.  She lives in another state but we communicate frequently and have the kind of conversations you and Brad have.  So, while God didn’t answer my fellowship prayer in the way I wanted, He did answer it.

I know you’re familiar with the book Tattoos of the Heart. In it, “G,” made a comment about “trusting the slow work of God.”  Google informed me that it is a poem, which has brought me great comfort.  I don’t feel like God’s cast-away any more. I don’t feel like Esau (I shared this with you once before), and while I still don’t feel “LOVED” not feeling hated is AMAZING.  I trust that one day I will be able to feel the Father’s love because I am now able to recognize that He is doing this work in me, and He will complete it.  Here is the poem.

Trust in the Slow Work of God
by Pierre Chardin

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest. This poem speaks to the sometimes excruciating experience of waiting on God. 

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown, something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
— that is to say, grace —
and circumstances
— acting on your own good will —
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser. Amen.

Amen indeed!  No matter what evidence you think you have to the contrary, he is at work in you and he will complete what he has begin and fulfill every longing he has put in your heart. It will go so much better for you if you can relax into his timeframe instead of trying to force your own. Remember, he’s not doing what is fast, but what is right, real, and enduring.

I’ve had many a pained email by those on the verge of giving up, thinking that God isn’t there or if he is, that he doesn’t care about them. Then months, sometimes years, later I get the triumphant email that comes when they finally see what he has been doing all along. It takes an amazing heart to hold a longing before God until his glory makes itself known. But the joy that follows knows no bounds.