Experiencing God

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Elizabeth

I have been a Jesus follower my entire life, yet it is only in recent years that I have begun to experience God.

I should qualify that last assertion. It is only in recent years that I have begun to recognize my experience of God.

God is here and interacting with me even when I am wholly unaware of it. He is evident only when I am awake to His Presence.

I still have never had An Experience of God. Never a burning bush, a voice from the sky, a parting of the waters.

Thus far in my life, God has revealed Himself to me through the quiet, the small, the subtle. I have to pay attention.

In all my years of showing up to church, studying Scripture to gain understanding, and praying at God with all my words, I never learned how to slow down and look for God Himself.

This kind of awareness of God’s presence comes slowly, by degrees. As A. W. Tozer writes:

It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence … He is nearer than our own soul …

This was certainly my own experience. It took an entire year of learning to be still and quiet before God in prayer, of learning to read Scripture in a deep and listening kind of way before I recognized God’s voice.

I pray I will never forget the first time I understood what it was I had been hearing my entire life.

Awareness of God, being awake to His Presence, comes in degrees. As I surrender to Him, being faithful to spend regular times of quiet with Him and His Word, I am more and more receptive to His Presence with and in and around me.

In the same way, when I allow my life to become too busy, neglecting my rhythms of being with God, it becomes more and more difficult to hear God and recognize His Presence.

Receptivity (to God’s Presence) … can be present in degrees … It may be increased by exercise or destroyed by neglect. It is not a sovereign and irresistible force which comes upon us as a seizure from above. It is a gift of God, indeed, but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other gift if it is to realize the purpose for which it was given. ~ Tozer

This is, after all, a relationship we are after, not a magic formula to the good life, and relationships take time to develop. Time spent together, talking, yes, but listening as well. Time simply being together.

I am learning that it is worth it. Every moment spent with God leads to more awareness of Him throughout the day, which leads to more time spent truly with Him, which leads to … simply more of Him.

Which is what our hearts desire more than anything else.

This is what fills us up and satisfies us in the middle of this world that promises to fulfill us but ends up draining us instead.

Next week I’ll write about the other issue that keeps me from experiencing God. I hope you will join me.

In the meantime, if your heart thirsts to know more about this, I have written about it in even more depth in my book, Beyond the Front Door: Cultivating Rhythms of Abiding in Jesus. You can click here to find it on Amazon.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Johannes Vermeer; Pathway of Life by Thomas De Witt Talmage; The Road to Emmaus by Robert Zünd

Beyond the Front Door: Cultivating Rhythms of Abiding in Jesus

A Great Lie of our Culture

Posted on March 5, 2021 by Elizabeth

One of the great lies of our time and place is the idea that there exists a separation between sacred and secular, that faith should be private, that what happens in religion has no bearing on the “real world.”

We have decided it is acceptable for people to have faith as long as they keep it to themselves.

There’s no need, after all, to go crazy and foist your beliefs upon everyone else.

The very truth, however, that the physical body of man is now the temple of the Holy Spirit reveals this for the lie it is.

The whole man is now made the temple of God, and his whole life is from now on a liturgy. ~ Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World

It is through us that the temple of God is in the world.

Spiritual and material are not in opposition, but

each ounce of matter belongs to God and is to find in God its fulfillment. Each instant of time is God’s time and is to fulfill itself as God’s eternity. Nothing is ‘neutral.’

God reveals himself through the material and in Christ it all holds together.

When we assume there is no connection between the material world and the spiritual world, we live in agreement with our culture. We deem, as Schmemann writes, the world to be profane in the deepest sense of the word — incapable of any real communication with the divine or of any transformation.

Yet the material world is precisely the opposite of profane. It is sacred in the deepest sense of the word. The world was created as “the material for one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.”

The sacraments (such as the eucharist/communion, baptism) do not transform something “profane,” that is, religiously void or neutral, into something “sacred.” Rather the sacraments reveal the true nature or destiny of some material item such as bread or wine or water.

The sacraments restore the material world to its proper function, revealing it as true, full, adequate. The sacraments cause all matter to “become again a means of communion with and knowledge of God.”

This is what the world was created to be, and this is why the idea of a separation between sacred and secular is so monstrous a lie.

When we build a wall around our faith, denying it any relevance to the world outside our churches, what is denied is quite simply “the continuity between ‘religion’ and ‘life,’ the very function of worship as the power of transformation, judgement, and change.”

We deny the world its ability to be a means of communion with and knowledge of God.

We deny God the power to transform the world through his people.

In truth, we deny ourselves our roles as rulers and priests, the twin roles we were given from the very beginning.

We as Jesus-followers, we the Church, must begin to think differently, to speak differently of our faith and the world.

We must stop walling up our faith and instead allow it to permeate every ounce and instant of our lives and, through us, of the world all around.

If we do, both we and our world will find in God our fulfillment.

Our worship will again become the power of transformation, causing our world to again become a means of communion with and knowledge of God.

It begins with us, God’s rulers and priests in this world.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: photographs of the cathedral, light through the tree limbs, and tulips are by Kirk Sewell; all other photographs are my own, copyright Made Sacred 2021

Purchase my book Beyond the Front Door: Cultivating Rhythms of Abiding in Jesus

Waiting with Eyes Wide Open

Posted on February 12, 2021 by Elizabeth

We all go through times of waiting.

Perhaps all of our lives are spent waiting.

My waiting usually looks impatient and discontent.

My waiting usually is spent trying to arrive.

If all of our lives are supposed to be made sacred, how can this waiting become sacred? How can this waiting become beautiful?

If all of our lives are meant for God’s glory, how can we lean into this waiting instead of resisting and pulling back?

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch theologian, writes about waiting as an active kind of waiting.

He speaks of those at the beginning of the Gospels (Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah, Simeon, Anna) as waiting with a sense of promise. A promise that allows them to wait. Nouwen says that the secret of waiting is the faith that something has already begun.

Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. ~ Waiting for God

It is a waiting that knows the waited-for thing has already begun.

Like planting a seed and waiting for it to emerge. Like seeing the plus sign on the pregnancy test and waiting to hold the baby in your arms.

It is a knowing that there are beautiful things happening in the darkness. It is a knowing that even though you cannot see, it is growing.

It is a giving up of control because none of us quite know what we are waiting for when God is involved.

Rather than waiting for a job or a baby or a spouse, we are waiting for whatever God chooses to give. We hold our expectations and dreams lightly, with cupped open hands, knowing that whatever comes is ultimately the best thing of all.

It is a giving up of control but it is a gift of surprise and adventure, of something even better than what you had imagined.

It is a waiting with eyes open and breath held in expectation. Expectation of beauty and excitement.

This is a waiting I can lean in to. A beautiful, sacred waiting that glorifies God.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credit: Final photograph of crab apple blossoms by Kirk Sewell; all other photographs copyright Made Sacred 2021

edited from the archives, as I work on the release of my book, Beyond the Front Door, this week!

Finding Truth in Fairy Tales

Posted on January 22, 2021 by Elizabeth

I love how much truth can be found in fairy tales and myths. I love that God chooses to give us glimpses of Himself and His Word in the words of storytelling throughout time.

We often view Christianity as rules and laws, as limitations on our freedom. We wonder why God puts so many limits on our fun. I once experienced a switch of perspective.

I read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. In his book, he points out that in fairy tales, there is always an “if”. You may go to the ball IF you return by midnight. You may marry the princess IF you never let her see a cow.

All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend on one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden. ~ Chesterton

Everything beautiful and glorious that cannot be understood is dependent upon a condition that equally cannot be understood.

In fairy tales, this does not seem unjust. If Cinderella asks her Fairy Godmother why she has to be home by midnight, the Godmother may reply “why should you go to the ball for any amount of time?” If the miller asks “why can’t I let the princess see a cow?” the fairy may reply “why should you get to marry the princess at all?”

Fairy tales never focus on the condition. The condition is so small as to seem irrelevant. The focus is on the dazzling, the wild, the fantastic vision.

We don’t focus on the vision. We focus on the limitation. We wonder why we must not get drunk instead of marveling at the beauty, the deep color, the richness of the wine. We wonder why we must only marry one person instead of living in wonder at the existence of sex.

No restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself…keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman…It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. ~ Chesterton

What a beautiful change of viewpoint! To look not at the limitation but at the wonder of the permission. To not complain about being asked to keep our words pure but to wonder at the startling glory of language. To not gripe of not being allowed to eat all that we desire but to be astonished at the wild and vast expanse of color and taste of food. To look upon the dazzling, wild, fantastic vision.

In Christ, all is made sacred, so search for Him everywhere. Look for Him in the stories and fables, in the myths and fairy tales that you read. You will find Him there.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: Fairy Tales by Jessie Willcox Smith; Fairy Tale Barnstar by Arman Musikyan; In Fairyland by Richard Doyle; A Fairy Tale by Dorothy M. Wheeler; The Fairy Tale by Walther Firle

edited from the archives

The Defeat Itself Becomes Victory

Posted on November 20, 2020 by Elizabeth

There is much suffering in our world.

Much pain, grief, loneliness, disease, fear, death.

These are normal on our planet. No one escapes.

This suffering reveals the defeat of man, the defeat of life itself, and no number of advances in technology or medicine can overcome it.

Yet their very normalcy is abnormal. It is not how our world was created.

Disease and death is not the way we were intended to live, yet our sin has broken our world and our very selves, and here we are.

It is into this abnormal reality that Christ comes. He comes not to remove our suffering but to transform it into victory.

God through Jesus transforms even our ultimate defeat, death, into victory, into an entrance into his kingdom and into the only true healing.

The Church comes, then, not simply to help us in our pain but to make us a witness to Christ in our sufferings. She comes to make us martyrs.

A martyr, in the words of Alexander Schmemann, is “one for whom God is not another — and the last — chance to stop the awful pain; God is his very life, and thus everything in his life comes to God.”

If we only come to God to stop the suffering, if we only turn to him for comfort in our pain, we miss the chance to become who we were created to be. We miss the chance to become more truly human.

We miss the chance to be made more closely into the image of God.

Rather than merely receiving comfort, we could become a witness to others of Christ himself. We could become one who beholds “the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God.” We could become the victory for those around us.

We could gain the glory of Christ.

Through (the witness’) suffering, not only has all suffering acquired a meaning, but it has been given the power to become itself the sign, the sacrament, the proclamation, the ‘coming’ of that victory; the defeat of man, his very dying, has become a way of Life. ~ Schmemann

This is the way of God. Flipping the things of this world on their head. Pain becomes proclamation. Suffering becomes sacrament. Defeat becomes victory. Death becomes life.

Don’t settle for a dry crust when you could feast with the King.

Surrender to God, to whatever he wants to do through your suffering, and allow his Holy Spirit to transform that suffering into a sacrament of life.

It takes submission, and this is hard. So very hard. Yet God has promised. Your surrender to him allows him to turn your defeat into victory, and that victory leads you into the only true healing.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: Resurrection by Luca Giordano; all other photographs are copyright Made Sacred 2020

Too Slow, Too Common

Posted on November 13, 2020 by Elizabeth

Slow.

Discipline.

Cultivation.

Practice.

These are not popular ideas these days.

We prefer glitz and glamour, look for fast-paced action, demand instant results.

We are impatient of slow, meandering ways of reaching goals.

This is what we have been taught as we live in this technological age: this dismissal of slow as substandard, this elevation of streamlined over satisfying.

We want to rush through everything in order to cram in more. We strive to find the most efficient ways of reaching our goals so we can stretch ourselves toward newer, better achievements.

We want to do more, have more, be more.

There is much that is lost when we fall into this way of reaching career, parenting, or personal goals.

Everything is lost when applying these technological methods to our relationship with God.

We read our chapter of Scripture, have our devotion, talk at God for a moment or two, then rush off to the rest of our day, wondering all the while why we feel such deep emptiness inside.

We try to fill that emptiness with more worship music, more religious podcasts, more sermons, yet none of this will make up for what we have lost.

What can bring us back?

That which we have rejected:

slow and steady,

being disciplined over a period of decades,

a long cultivation of spiritual habits,

practice and more practice and yet more practice.

The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. ~ A. W. Tozer

Spiritual practices such as silence and solitude, lectio divina, contemplation, self-examination and confession – these are the slow habits that bring us into a deep, abiding relationship with God.

We are called to abide with Christ, and abiding is necessarily a long and slow process, one that takes place by degrees over many decades.

If you are wondering where God is, perhaps you need to slow down, make time.

He is here. He is always here. We do not often perceive him, but he is always here.

Perceiving takes time. It is a sacrifice of time to be sure. I won’t pretend that it is easy to move against the flow of our age.

Yet for me, at least, I want this awareness more than I want the illusive rewards of hurry and instant.

I am trying. I fail often. The process is so much slower than I would prefer.

Slow as it may be, I begin to notice progress. I begin to notice God.

It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence…He is nearer than our own soul. ~ A. W. Tozer

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

The Truer Truth

Posted on September 18, 2020 by Elizabeth

You who are hurting,

suffering,

waiting,

grieving;

You who have experienced

loss after loss after loss;

You who have wondered about God,

turned away from God,

wept tears of anguish and rage before God;

You are seen.

You are known.

You are loved.

If I could sit with you, listen to you, hold your face gently in my hands and look into your eyes, this is what I would tell you:

There are two truths I want you to know, to grip tightly with both fists, to let sink down into your deepest, most raw and wounded places.

The first truth? Jesus is with you in your darkest places.

There is no hell you walk through that can keep Jesus from being beside you, before you, behind you, in you.

There are no tears you shed that are not shared by Jesus.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can separate you from Love.

The second truth? There is a reality that is deeper and more real than whatever you are going through.

Your hurt, your grief, your pain is very real. It would be foolish to pretend that the brokenness is not true.

And there is something truer. There is a truth that is more real, more lasting than any suffering you may endure.

Revelation is all about showing us the truer things behind the true thing. God draws back the curtain for John so that he can see the truest things.

The true thing for John?

The Church is being persecuted, tortured, killed. Evil appears to be winning the day.

The truer thing?

God shows John the Bride of the Lamb. He says, “Let me show you the beauty, the radiance, the glory of my Church, my Bride, as she reflects the glory and beauty of her Lord. This is what my Church looks like. This is who she really is.”

And this is what is truest for you.

Beneath all the dark and ugly and broken, you are the perfect, radiant Beloved one of God.

You are Beloved.

Regardless of what you see or feel, grip with all your strength to this truest truth ~ you are his Beloved.

And all of this suffering you are enduring right now? All of this pain and sorrow and loss?

All of it will be redeemed, will be transformed into something beautiful.

It probably won’t happen in the way or in the timing you hope for, and that certainly is a hard truth.

But that hard truth does not take away the truer truth that even if God does not heal anything here on this earth (And he might. Oh, he might!), the moment you look upon the face of Jesus, see his scars suffered for you and see the love streaming out of his eyes, all of this hard will melt away like the morning mist before the rising sun.

Because the truest thing of all is that right now Jesus is with you and right now you are his Beloved.

Hold onto that and do not ever let it go.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: Grief by Daniel Kornbau; Grief by Bertram Mackennal; Rabboni by Gutzon Borglum; sunrise by Kirk Sewell; broken Jonquil by Elizabeth Giger

This I Still Declare To Be True

Posted on August 21, 2020 by Elizabeth

We recently passed the anniversary of the death of my sister-in-law. Nine years. I wrote this essay when she died, yet in the middle of a pandemic, of political and racial unrest, of an election season, of economic downturns, in the middle of friends and family who are suffering, these words still ring true. It’s been a couple of years since I posted this. May these words bless you deeply.

God’s Words tell us clearly that there is pain, there is heartbreak in this world. We should not be surprised.

More often than not, God chooses not to save His people, chooses not to spare them sorrow and hardship. Hebrews 11 gives a long list of those who were killed or lost ones they loved, Jesus’ closest friends died martyr’s deaths, even His earthly father died without His intervention.

I have pondered long and hard this question of what I believe about God in the midst of it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Here is my conclusion.

I know my God, His character, well enough to trust Him when I don’t understand, when I cannot see in the darkness. I know, from what He has said about Himself and from what I have seen, that He is always good and always love. I know that, if we only knew the reasons, we would adore Him for what He does.

God promises that we will have trouble in this world. He also promises that if we are grateful to Him He will give us peace. He doesn’t promise that He will take the pain away but that we will be at peace, that we will have joy.

Isn’t that a much bigger promise?

No matter what, God is still God.

Will I only praise and thank Him when He does what I like? Will I only accept from Him what I deem to be good?

When I deeply think through the idea of declaring my circumstance to be bad, it seems incredibly arrogant.

How can I think that I know better than God what is good? How am I more capable of naming something to be good than the One who is good?

Will I trust that God has a beautiful, amazing plan only when I can see the beauty of it? Either God is God, and capable of having plans and reasons that I cannot comprehend, or He isn’t God, and I am silly for blaming a myth. There is not really any in-between place for the things with which I do not agree.

…if I go to Jesus, he’s not under my control either. He lets things happen that I don’t understand. He doesn’t do things according to my plan, or in a way that makes sense to me. But if Jesus is God, then he’s got to be great enough to have some reasons to let you go through things you can’t understand. His power is unbounded, but so are his wisdom and love…He can love somebody and still let bad things happen to them, because he is God–because he knows better than they do. If you have a God great enough and powerful enough to be mad at because he doesn’t stop your suffering, you also have a God who’s great enough and powerful enough to have reasons that you can’t understand.
~ King’s Cross by Timothy Keller

God is God, and since he is God, he is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere else but in his will, and that will is necessarily infinitely, immeasurable, unspeakable beyond my largest notions of what he is up to. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

I can trust God, trust in His nature.

Of course he’s not safe. Who said anything about being safe? But he’s good. He’s the king. ~ Mr. Beaver as told to C.S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

When faced with the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego told King Nebuchadnezzar that

If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and He will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if He does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up. ~ Daniel 3

When Job lost all of his children and all that he owned and was himself in great physical pain, he declared

Though he slay me, yet will I hope in Him. ~ Job 13.15

No matter what, I will praise God and offer Him my gratitude, my sacrifice of praise.

God tells us over and over in His word that He has a beautiful purpose for humanity and creation as a whole.

And that he has a beautiful purpose for each of our lives.

Sometimes I doubt this promise, this truth.

And then I look at Jesus, at His cross.

I’ve been clinging to Romans 8.32 through all of this:

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all–how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

If God ever had to prove Himself, prove His love for us, prove that He is taking care of us, He has more than proved it all through the cross.

I can trust God, trust in His love.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about Hezekiah.

In II Kings 20, he pleaded with God to “change his story”, to give him more life when God had told him (through Isaiah) that he was going to die. God did change His mind that time, gave him fifteen more years of life.

And in that fifteen extra years, Hezekiah’s son Manasseh was born. This son who wouldn’t have been born if Hezekiah hadn’t asked God to change the ending of his story ended up as king and “lead (Israel) astray, so that they did more evil than the nations the LORD had destroyed before the Israelites”. ~ II Kings 21.9

Our desired story ending versus God’s desired story ending.

Perhaps, just perhaps, God really does know best. Perhaps He does know which story will bring about a beautiful, redeemed, transfigured people.

When through the deep waters I call you to go,
The rivers of woe shall not overflow;
For I will be with you, your troubles to bless,
And sanctify to you your deepest distress.

The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to its foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.
~ How Firm a Foundation, att. John Keith, 1787 (modernized)

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

credit for images: Lion photo, painting by Simeon Solomon, Cross photo

Hungry for the Wrong Thing

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Elizabeth

This world, this created world, is gift. It is given.

It is given to make God known to man, to make man’s life a communion with God.

We depend on the world to live. We take the world into our bodies and transform it into life.

“It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything he creates, and, in biblical language, this means that he makes all creation the sign and means of his presence and wisdom, love and revelation: ‘O taste and see that the Lord is good.'” ~ Alexander Schmemann

We were intended to take the world into ourselves and transform it into life, offering that life back to God in praise and gratitude. We were intended to be priests, offering the gift of the world back to God as a eucharist, a communion.

Then man fell and communion was broken. Man ceased to be hungry for God and began to be hungry for creation itself. Man stopped being the priest of the world and became, instead, its slave.

This, then, is the original sin. Not that man disobeyed God but that we no longer hunger for him alone.

Then Christ came and took this world into his perfect body, transforming it into perfect life, and offered that life back to God as a eucharistic offering.

Christ restored our communion with God, our priesthood of the world.

“…in Christ, life – life in all its totality – was returned to man, given again as sacrament and communion, made Eucharist.” ~ Alexander Schmemann

Now we, the Church, come together and take the bread and the wine. We offer to God the food we must eat in order to live as a way of offering our whole selves, our life, our world.

We enter into the kingdom of God as we partake of the Eucharist. We enter, however briefly, into the world to come, our world perfected. Our very world is right now perfected in Christ, even as we are still waiting.

The bread and wine, therefore, that is given to be transformed into life, that is given to be offered back to God, that is given to bring us into communion with him,

this very food of the new heavens and the new earth is Christ himself.

“He is our bread – because from the very beginning all our hunger was a hunger for him and all our bread was but a symbol of him, a symbol that had to become reality.” ~ Alexander Schmemann

Christ came and lived a perfect life, taking the world into himself as food and transforming it into his life, his life as perfect communion with God.

Now he shares his glorified and perfected life with us, saying, “Take, eat.”

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

The ideas contained within this post come primarily from For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann

Art credits: Prayer by László Mednyánszky; Communion by John Snyder; Last Supper by Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret

We Need Heaven and Earth People

Posted on July 31, 2020 by Elizabeth

Someday heaven and earth will be joined together as one.

The veil between will be torn away and there will be no more separation.

No more tears, no more pain, no more loneliness, no more separation.

God will fully dwell with us and we will fully be his people.

We long for this day and yet God has given us a preview, a foretaste of this joining together of heaven and earth.

After the resurrection, Jesus returned to heaven in his newly resurrected body, his earthly body that was able to be at home in heaven just as it was on earth.

At Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit entered into the disciples, they were transformed into earthly people who contained a heavenly person within them. They were transformed into people who stood in both heaven and earth at the same time.

We are people who stand in both heaven and earth at the same time.

We who are Jesus-followers, we who have the heavenly Spirit of God inside of us, are people who stand at the intersection of heaven and earth and work for God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.

This is never more true than when we pray.

When we are solidly on earth and speaking to or listening to God in heaven, we are joining God’s kingdom to earth in a way that gives us a slight taste of what it will be like when heaven and earth are wholly one.

It whets our appetite and stirs us up to work all the harder to bring God’s kingdom to earth.

We desperately need heaven and earth people right now.

Our world needs people who will stand at the intersection between heaven and earth and pray for that joining to be complete.

Our world needs people who are at home in both realities.

Our world needs people who will bring earthly concerns into heaven through prayer and who will bring heaven’s rule to earth through their work.

We are heaven and earth people, and we must not become so troubled by these earthly concerns that we forget who is really going to restore our world, yet we must not become so enamored with the heavenly reality that we forget the work that is ours to do to bring God’s kingdom rule to earth.

We are given the gift, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, of being the ones to stand at the overlap of heaven and earth and work to make them fully one as they once were. It is an astonishing gift.

So let us be heaven and earth people who are working for the restoration of earth toward its rightful end of becoming one again with heaven.

Do not miss this adventure!

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Art credits: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Jan Vermeer; Pentecost stained glass in St. Andrew chapel of St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague; Children at Prayer by Antoine Édouard Joseph Moulinet; Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet by Francesco Vanni

I have been a Jesus follower my entire life, yet it is only in recent years that I have begun to experience God.

I should qualify that last assertion. It is only in recent years that I have begun to recognize my experience of God.

God is here and interacting with me even when I am wholly unaware of it. He is evident only when I am awake to His Presence.

I still have never had An Experience of God. Never a burning bush, a voice from the sky, a parting of the waters.

Thus far in my life, God has revealed Himself to me through the quiet, the small, the subtle. I have to pay attention.

In all my years of showing up to church, studying Scripture to gain understanding, and praying at God with all my words, I never learned how to slow down and look for God Himself.

This kind of awareness of God’s presence comes slowly, by degrees. As A. W. Tozer writes:

It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence … He is nearer than our own soul …

This was certainly my own experience. It took an entire year of learning to be still and quiet before God in prayer, of learning to read Scripture in a deep and listening kind of way before I recognized God’s voice.

I pray I will never forget the first time I understood what it was I had been hearing my entire life.

Awareness of God, being awake to His Presence, comes in degrees. As I surrender to Him, being faithful to spend regular times of quiet with Him and His Word, I am more and more receptive to His Presence with and in and around me.

In the same way, when I allow my life to become too busy, neglecting my rhythms of being with God, it becomes more and more difficult to hear God and recognize His Presence.

This is, after all, a relationship we are after, not a magic formula to the good life, and relationships take time to develop. Time spent together, talking, yes, but listening as well. Time simply being together.

I am learning that it is worth it. Every moment spent with God leads to more awareness of Him throughout the day, which leads to more time spent truly with Him, which leads to … simply more of Him.

Which is what our hearts desire more than anything else.

This is what fills us up and satisfies us in the middle of this world that promises to fulfill us but ends up draining us instead.

Next week I’ll write about the other issue that keeps me from experiencing God. I hope you will join me.

In the meantime, if your heart thirsts to know more about this, I have written about it in even more depth in my book, Beyond the Front Door: Cultivating Rhythms of Abiding in Jesus. You can click here to find it on Amazon.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

One of the great lies of our time and place is the idea that there exists a separation between sacred and secular, that faith should be private, that what happens in religion has no bearing on the “real world.”

We have decided it is acceptable for people to have faith as long as they keep it to themselves.

There’s no need, after all, to go crazy and foist your beliefs upon everyone else.

The very truth, however, that the physical body of man is now the temple of the Holy Spirit reveals this for the lie it is.

The whole man is now made the temple of God, and his whole life is from now on a liturgy. ~ Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World

It is through us that the temple of God is in the world.

Spiritual and material are not in opposition, but

each ounce of matter belongs to God and is to find in God its fulfillment. Each instant of time is God’s time and is to fulfill itself as God’s eternity. Nothing is ‘neutral.’

God reveals himself through the material and in Christ it all holds together.

When we assume there is no connection between the material world and the spiritual world, we live in agreement with our culture. We deem, as Schmemann writes, the world to be profane in the deepest sense of the word — incapable of any real communication with the divine or of any transformation.

Yet the material world is precisely the opposite of profane. It is sacred in the deepest sense of the word. The world was created as “the material for one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.”

The sacraments (such as the eucharist/communion, baptism) do not transform something “profane,” that is, religiously void or neutral, into something “sacred.” Rather the sacraments reveal the true nature or destiny of some material item such as bread or wine or water.

The sacraments restore the material world to its proper function, revealing it as true, full, adequate. The sacraments cause all matter to “become again a means of communion with and knowledge of God.”

This is what the world was created to be, and this is why the idea of a separation between sacred and secular is so monstrous a lie.

When we build a wall around our faith, denying it any relevance to the world outside our churches, what is denied is quite simply “the continuity between ‘religion’ and ‘life,’ the very function of worship as the power of transformation, judgement, and change.”

We deny the world its ability to be a means of communion with and knowledge of God.

We deny God the power to transform the world through his people.

In truth, we deny ourselves our roles as rulers and priests, the twin roles we were given from the very beginning.

We as Jesus-followers, we the Church, must begin to think differently, to speak differently of our faith and the world.

We must stop walling up our faith and instead allow it to permeate every ounce and instant of our lives and, through us, of the world all around.

If we do, both we and our world will find in God our fulfillment.

Our worship will again become the power of transformation, causing our world to again become a means of communion with and knowledge of God.

It begins with us, God’s rulers and priests in this world.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

We all go through times of waiting.

Perhaps all of our lives are spent waiting.

My waiting usually looks impatient and discontent.

My waiting usually is spent trying to arrive.

If all of our lives are supposed to be made sacred, how can this waiting become sacred? How can this waiting become beautiful?

If all of our lives are meant for God’s glory, how can we lean into this waiting instead of resisting and pulling back?

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch theologian, writes about waiting as an active kind of waiting.

He speaks of those at the beginning of the Gospels (Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah, Simeon, Anna) as waiting with a sense of promise. A promise that allows them to wait. Nouwen says that the secret of waiting is the faith that something has already begun.

Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. ~ Waiting for God

It is a waiting that knows the waited-for thing has already begun.

Like planting a seed and waiting for it to emerge. Like seeing the plus sign on the pregnancy test and waiting to hold the baby in your arms.

It is a knowing that there are beautiful things happening in the darkness. It is a knowing that even though you cannot see, it is growing.

It is a giving up of control because none of us quite know what we are waiting for when God is involved.

Rather than waiting for a job or a baby or a spouse, we are waiting for whatever God chooses to give. We hold our expectations and dreams lightly, with cupped open hands, knowing that whatever comes is ultimately the best thing of all.

It is a giving up of control but it is a gift of surprise and adventure, of something even better than what you had imagined.

It is a waiting with eyes open and breath held in expectation. Expectation of beauty and excitement.

This is a waiting I can lean in to. A beautiful, sacred waiting that glorifies God.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

I love how much truth can be found in fairy tales and myths. I love that God chooses to give us glimpses of Himself and His Word in the words of storytelling throughout time.

We often view Christianity as rules and laws, as limitations on our freedom. We wonder why God puts so many limits on our fun. I once experienced a switch of perspective.

I read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. In his book, he points out that in fairy tales, there is always an “if”. You may go to the ball IF you return by midnight. You may marry the princess IF you never let her see a cow.

All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend on one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden. ~ Chesterton

Everything beautiful and glorious that cannot be understood is dependent upon a condition that equally cannot be understood.

Fairy tales never focus on the condition. The condition is so small as to seem irrelevant. The focus is on the dazzling, the wild, the fantastic vision.

We don’t focus on the vision. We focus on the limitation. We wonder why we must not get drunk instead of marveling at the beauty, the deep color, the richness of the wine. We wonder why we must only marry one person instead of living in wonder at the existence of sex.

In Christ, all is made sacred, so search for Him everywhere. Look for Him in the stories and fables, in the myths and fairy tales that you read. You will find Him there.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

There is much suffering in our world.

Much pain, grief, loneliness, disease, fear, death.

These are normal on our planet. No one escapes.

This suffering reveals the defeat of man, the defeat of life itself, and no number of advances in technology or medicine can overcome it.

Yet their very normalcy is abnormal. It is not how our world was created.

Disease and death is not the way we were intended to live, yet our sin has broken our world and our very selves, and here we are.

It is into this abnormal reality that Christ comes. He comes not to remove our suffering but to transform it into victory.

God through Jesus transforms even our ultimate defeat, death, into victory, into an entrance into his kingdom and into the only true healing.

The Church comes, then, not simply to help us in our pain but to make us a witness to Christ in our sufferings. She comes to make us martyrs.

A martyr, in the words of Alexander Schmemann, is “one for whom God is not another — and the last — chance to stop the awful pain; God is his very life, and thus everything in his life comes to God.”