Love
“Love is not what you imagine. It is like a seed planted in good soil, cared for and attended to. It will grow slowly like a hardwood tree.”
The Silent People, Walter Macken
The way of love
“You would not ask if you had been married…Do you not know how it is with love? First comes delight: then pain: then fruit. And then there is joy of the fruit, but that is different again from the first delight. And mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step: for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair. You must not try to keep the raptures: they have done their work. Manna kept, is worms.”
The Pilgrim’s Regress, C.S. Lewis
This side of sunshine
I had spent many years preparing for and anticipating the opportunity to “take up my cross and die” somewhere out on the frontier mission field. But the Lord has consistently barred the way. Forced, you might say, to live in the land of luxury. A new and enlightening inner struggle has thus been birthed. How can I related to and connect with the human race, as Jesus once did? A cross to die on is not easy to come by here in America. And yet I am becoming more aware of the Lord’s work in my life and the path he is laying out before me. He is slowly changing the heart of stone I was born with into a heart of flesh. I find, like many, I am clinging to the hope that there is good news out there somewhere. The problem of pain is a big and nasty one. In the midst of it, with the weight of unanswered prayers and encounters with the giant-Death, I am discovering afresh the need for a Savior.
And then I remember Jesus. Here lies the crossroads of humanity…
“In the garden of Eden, our ancestors first prayed the tragic prayer that we have been praying ever since: ‘Not your will…’ they said to God, greedily eyeing the fruit…’Not your will but our will be done.’ In that one cataclysmic moment of decision, lust and craving corrupted the human psyche, passing from heart to heart through the placenta from one generation to the next.
And so, in another garden, another Adam must make another choice that will reverse the one made at the dawn of human history. Every human instinct of survival cries out against what Jesus knows he must do…No wonder Jesus cries, ‘Father take this cup from me.’ Surely, on hearing the cry, there are tears in the Father’s eyes, and his hand moves immediately to do just that.
‘Yet…’ and on that single word from Jesus, I imagine traffic screaming to a halt and birds falling from the sky. The Father’s hand pauses by the cup, heaven falls silent in suspense, hell jeers…’Yet not my will…but your will be done.’
A little later, during His arrest, Jesus would tell the guards, ‘This is your hour, when darkness reigns.’ (Luke 22:53) In surrendering to the will of God and the satanic onslaught to come, Jesus showed us that the way to overcome the world–the way to subvert the reign of darkness–is sometimes not to stand and fight but rather to submit like a lamb being led to the slaughter. In the words of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, when our lives are enveloped by darkness, our duty may not always be to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’ but rather to ‘go gentle into that good night.’ ” Pete Greig
I too, as every human must, have been in the garden. Who’s will?
Though the Lord is carving out a different path than I had expected, I still meet face to face the giant-Death, and his club of doubt. He has bruised me twice, but this side of sunshine I say, “Let it not be your will! Yet not my will but yours be done.” Prayers remain unanswered, but comfort is not a distant companion. And I hope to make better acquaintance with Contemplation, the daughter of Mr. Wisdom, and hope she will teach me something of the submission to a painful slaughter.
The christian road often goes right through Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief.
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
Perhaps it is healthy and human to pass through them on our way to accepting God’s will. Did not Jesus? I can say two things the Lord has done:
1. I have been able to say as Jesus did, the Father’s will be done, despite my prayers against it.
2. I have lost some ounce of selfishness. Though the Lord has not acted favorably to some of my most urgent prayers, I can honetly rejoice with those for whom he has.
Sometimes He overcomes the world with saving miracles, other times He overcomes it through miraculous acceptance. Nonetheless, it is overcome, and I take heart somehow…someway. Good news.
