Out Walking

The Gift of Wakefulness

I'm not sleeping very well.  I haven't always been this way.  I think, perhaps, that before I was 40, I did in fact sleep through the night, rarely waking, but I haven't been that way for a long time.  I wake up once, and then I go back to sleep.  Lately, however, I wake three to four times a night, and I do not always return to sleep.  I am not worried about anything.  I am not sick.  I do not have sleep apnea, or a host of other things that may keep you awake.  I'm just . . . awake.

My children and my wife do not know the sound of the house around us at 2:00, or 3:30, or 4:45.  I do.  The air conditioner fan turns on, and off, then back on.  The refrigerator hums.  Someone snores, or turns over, and the bed creaks.  And there are other strange creaking sounds that are mysterious, perhaps the house settling back into the earth, forecasting its demise one distant day.  That's the newspaper deliveryman, the paper landing with a plastic-wrapped thud on concrete, headlights playing off the walls.  Around 6:00 the birds awake, and my cat begins to move about, with an odd chirping meow, letting me know she's up.  And then there's the sound of remembrance, and you think of a childhood trip with your family to the mountains where you stopped by a mountain stream for a picnic, or a long-forgotten smell of a home you grew up in, or the beckoning of a voice you have not heard in a while calling you to dinner.  The world is at rest and you can really listen to it and remember and consider things that get pressed out of your mind during the day when our thinking is more economic.  At night we can afford to waste time, to be expansive. . . that is, if you cannot sleep.

I've been lamenting this lack of sleep, silently (mostly) complaining about it, as well as engaging in a bit of uneducated self-diagnosis.  But the bottom line is that I haven't a clue as to why I am not sleeping that much.  Today, however, I suddenly realized how rich I am, what a gift I've been given in what I considered lack.  Someone said this last week, in another context, that we should not live in our lack but in our wealth.  I think that was meant for me.

It's one thing to be wakeful because you are suffering pain, anxiety, or some other trial.  It would be difficult to call that a gift.  It would also be difficult to call wakefulness a gift if it caused you to have difficulty functioning during the day.  But none of that is generally true of me.  A few years ago my good friend Jerry told me that he was only sleeping two hours a night.  He was delighted.  The rest of the night he wrote songs, read his Bible, and walked all over the mountain on which he lived and through his neighborhood praying for people.  I felt sorry for him then.  I figured he would crash and burn at some point.  I thought he was crazy, even manic, and yet he considered it the spiritual high point of his life.  Nothing bad happened to him.  After several months, he began to sleep again.  Now I think God gave him a gift, a crazy irrepressible wakefulness, delighted that Jerry could spend time alone with Him.  I never heard him complain about it.

This kind of wakefulness is not what I would call ideal, but I have no choice.  It's given.  You can't seek it, or you will crash and burn.  I wonder some days how I function on all but four-five interrupted hours of sleep. And yet God promises rest to those who come to Him, saying "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Mt: 11:28).  In fact, rest is the optimum state of the believer, "for we who believed enter that rest" (Heb. 4:3).  Sleep is a "sweet" gift to the laborer" (Eccl. 5:12), and yet that's not my gift right now.  It just may be that His "rest" does not include a lot of sleep but means he'll sustain me as I trust Him through the night watches.  He just may have things for me to do and think at night.  Besides, have you worked at sleeping?  It's counterproductive.  Kind of like trying to work at being saved.

Just this past week two other friends told me they were having trouble sleeping.  Maybe I'll call them up tonight.  No, maybe not.  It may not be a gift to them but a trial.  But  next time you see me, ask me what I been doing with my nights.  Whatever I do, I hope its Godward.  Pray I'm resting in Him.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Life On the Edge (Day 40): Praying Through Reality

Setting your thoughts on things above, as Paul exhorts us to do in Collosians 3:1-2, is not to ignore what is around us or to treat life as a waiting room for eternity, holding to the idea that that is where real life begins.  Rather, we look not around life or above life but through life to a greater reality, to the eternal in the temporal.

Years ago I read a book by Edith Schaeffer entitled The Life of Prayer.  While I have lost the book and most of my memory of it, I do remember her saying something so elementary but so imprinted on my memory:  She recalled riding on a bus, with all the people around her --- all the noises of people chattering, bus engine groaning, honks honking, babies crying --- and yet praying through the sounds and sights of reality.  Essentially, she carved out a space of solitude in her own mind, there in the midst of a messy reality that threatened her concentration, carrying it all to God in prayer.

When we pray as Edith Schaeffer did on that bus, we can carve out a space in the midst of the swirl of life and take up the life around us in our prayers.  The babies crying become prayers for weary mothers, for new lives where the Gospel is ingested and lived.  The chatter of strangers becomes prayers for redeemed relationships, honest work, encouraging words, and for hope to replace the despair that some labor under.  Even the grinding of the bus gears becomes prayers for an end to the groaning of creation for redemption, for the making new of places where we live, for clean air and water and air, for livable, beautiful cities, for food for the hungry, for an end to the cries of the unborn --- for all things to be made new.

In this way, in taking up the life around us, carrying it to God, we participate in what Christ is doing every moment of every day, sitting at the right hand of God, reminding Him of his covenant love, of His promise he cannot not keep, telling Him that this is the world He loves, these are the people He made, and that He who has already done justice at the Cross must now extend mercy and hear His people as they pray because He is love.

I'm setting my thoughts on what's above by looking at what's right in front of me: a man sleeping in an airport lounge chair, weary and homebound; the forest life clear across the airfield; the children playing on the floor at their mother's feet; the flight crew on the tarmac; the sun warming my back by the window; the loudspeaker announcements of delays and gate changes; the smell of Maui tacos and Starbucks coffee.  Outside lies magic, says John Stilgoe, and he's right, because in it we see God's glory and through it we pray.  It's a sometimes messy reality around me, a cacophony of sight and sound, and I'm praying right through it.  And I'm not closing my eyes.

[The "40 Days On the Edge" posts have been my ruminations in light of Stephen Smallman's devotional entitled "Forty Days On the Mountain," read in conjunction with Harvard Landscape History Professor John Stilgore's "Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places."  Both books may be ordered by clicking on them where they are listed in the sidebar under "Current Reading."  I've completed this 40 day exercise, but I'll have some concluding thoughts on the journey in a couple days --- but tomorrow I rest (no media Sunday)]

Life On the Edge (Day 32): Being Still

Over 25 years ago I was a part of a small group using the Navigators 2-7 Bible study and scripture memorization system.  It's amazing what has stuck from that series.  Even though I've done little to no scripture memorization since then, I can still remember many of the verses I learned back then.  When I consider how much I have forgotten since then this is a minor miracle.  I cannot even remember everyone that was in that small group.

One of the things we did as a group then, whether recommended by Navigators or done on our own initiative, was to go to a wooded local state park, spread out, and armed with nothing but a Bible, spend a half day in prayer.  Alone.  I assume I did pray and read my Bible, but I remember thinking that I'd never make it, that I would have nothing to do at some point.  I'm sure at that time in my life (well, and often since) I'd never prayed more than 20 minutes at one time , and then not often that much.  I remember how quiet it was, about fighting the thought that we were wasting time, but then enjoying the simple solitude and opportunity to talk to God about literally everything I could think of and then some, and then, finally, when I couldn't do that any longer, to meditate on scripture and listen to the world around me.  It was an unusual experience.  (And keep in mind this was before cell phones and the Internet or even computers for that matter were in widespread use.)  Could I do the same now?

Solitude is a way of being powerless before God, of giving up our striving to please God or anyone else.  At the end of solitude there is no product you can point to, nothing you have actually accomplished (nothing to be proud of, really).  And when you finish talking to God, when you get all that out of the way, you can finally just shut up and listen.  We live in a state of perpetual distraction, unable to simply be still.  Like Moses, Elijah, Job, or Isaiah, when we worship our best is when we simply bow before him and rest.

Maybe a dark closet is the best place, after all.  Not much there to distract.

40 Days On the Edge (Day 21): Impudent Prayer

Whether it's carefully observing buildings, fences, streets, power lines, and other parts of the built environment (as does John Stilgore in Outside Lies Magic); staring hard at the natural environment (as does Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek); or holding a microscope to your own life (as does Federick Buechner in Telling Secrets), persistence is rewarding.  Understanding comes with patience and doggedness in knocking on doors, seeking out truth, and asking for understanding.

So it is in prayer.  In Luke 1:5:13, Jesus recounts a story of a person who goes to a friend's house at midnight, wakes him up, and asks him to lend him three loaves of bread.  As you might imagine, the friend is not so friendly, given the late hour, and tells him to go home.  And yet his friend persists, and "because of his impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs." Jesus uses the story to encourage prayer, as He goes on to tell us to "ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you" (Lk. 11:9).  He seems to be encouraging an impudent praying, a persistence born of the imposition that a friend can make on another good friend, knowing that his good friend will not deny him what he seeks.

As Stephen Smallman notes, this is also true of the way Moses made his requests to God.  Even when God assures him in Exodus 33:12-16 that His Presence will go with him, Moses persists, wanting to be certain, to be clear, that God will go not only with Him but also with all His people.  And he gains that assurance.  His boldness, the imposition borne of familiarity, is not rejected but rewarded.  It's an amazing condescension that the Creator of the Universe would allow Himself to be addressed in such a way, and not only that, would give of what He is asked.

All this is a reminder to me that God loves us with the love of a good Father.  More than anything, He wants us to come to Him, to talk, talk, talk, to ask about everything, to seek what we need, to knock on the door anytime anywhere anyplace.  He never sleeps.  He has all the time in the world and more.  So come boldly.  Be impudent in prayer.  God will rise up and give you whatever you need.

[The "40 Days On the Edge" posts are my ruminations in light of Stephen Smallman's devotional entitled "Forty Days On the Mountain," read in conjunction with Harvard Landscape History Professor John Stilgore's "Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places."  Both books may be ordered by clicking on them where they are listed in the sidebar under "Current Reading."]

40 Days On the Edge (Day 17): "Epi-Knowledge"

Nothing is simply as it seems.  Or at least everything is much more than it seems.

John Stilgore's observations based on his explorations of the built environment are useful in peeling back the veneer of the particular places we walk through, drive through, and live amongst to allow us to see the myriad of human decisions that interacted with the natural environment to give us the sensory experience of the places in which we live and work.  Planners' decisions about density, minimum lot size, building setbacks, and size and placement of signs all combine to produce radically different places.  Combined with the characteristics of the natural environment, architectural style, and interior design choices, all these choices have a cumulative  impact on us: This is where we live, not there; this is where we feel at home, not there.  This is the place we know and even love.

I've heard of people who treat place like a commodity.  They shop for a suitable place.  They analyze the job opportunities, the schools, the climate, and the tax burdens, and then they move there.  That's foreign to me.  They move here, live here for a few months, and then figure they know the place.  They don't.  That takes years.  That takes a relationship with the sights, sounds, and smells of a place, as well as a history, and a web of relationships deep and wide.  That's not a superficial acquaintance but an epi-knowledge, a knowledge that gets to the center of what a place is, of its essence.

Something like this kind of knowledge is what Paul is talking about in his "prison letters" --- Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon --- when he prays that believers may "know" the Lord.  As Stephen Smallman points out, Paul uses an intensive word for knowing, the Greek word epignosis, which is "knowing at the center of knowing."  The essence.  The right stuff.  As Smallman says, that kind of knowing leads to doing, to a living out of the reality of truth.

Stilgore is closer to God than he may know.  The epi-knowledge of place is is a point on the way to the epi-knowledge of God.  Knowing a place is, whether conscious or not, a way of knowing the Place-Maker.  More than that, knowing a place is crucial to loving a place, and loving a place is pretty darn close to loving the Creator.

Rootless wanderers concern me.  People who love their place, who know it, who are wedded to it, on the other hand, are not far from the Kingdom.

[The "40 Days On the Edge" posts are my ruminations in light of Stephen Smallman's devotional entitled "Forty Days On the Mountain," read in conjunction with Harvard Landscape History Professor John Stilgore's "Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places."  Both books may be ordered by clicking on them where they are listed in the sidebar under "Current Reading."]

40 Days On the Edge (Day 14): Dogged Prayers

Although we no longer have a dog, I well remember persistent companionship of our German Shepherd, Faith. She wanted to be with us. We fenced in the backyard and provided her with a spacious doghouse. She never used it, preferring to sit or lie at the back door where she could watch our every move, even in the rain.

She followed you from room to room, trying to gain your attention in any way she could, nuzzling you, prodding you, and, at times, simply being a pest. If you were in the yard working, she would bring you a stick to throw for her, dropping it at your feet, in the path of the lawn mower, where you were digging in the garden, even in your hand. If you did not take note, she would pick it up and move it closer. Generally polite and patient, she would occasionally bark if nothing else worked to gain our attention, even gently put her paw on your leg to insistently beg your attention.

Whenever we traveled, walked, bicycled, or ran, she wanted to go. She’d be the first in the car, find her leash and bring it to us, run ahead of us and, looking back, beckon us on. Suffice it to say she wanted to be with us every waking moment, didn’t want to lose sight of us, and paid attention to our every move, however slight. She was persistent in her companionship, relentless in her requests, and faithful in her belief that we existed for her.

What a picture of our relationship with God. Moses, the greatest intercessor other than Jesus, demonstrated the same kind of persistence. He spent regular time with God. He held God to His promises, bolding reminding Him of what He had said. He audaciously and persistently asked (and practically demanded) that things be done. He spoke to God like a friend who could speak plainly, without fear of being cast off, having faith that God would be true to His promises. When God indicated that His presence would not be with the people, Moses entreated Him not to leave them, drawing Him back in. Moses lay down at God’s door and would not let Him go.

Our good dog Faith has long since gone on to some good destiny God has not shared with us, and yet she continues to provide a lesson to us of the prayer of faith, the dogged prayer of people who will not let God go.

40 Days On the Edge (Day 12): Embodied Prayer

Place always matters.  The obvious fact that we are embodied --- move about, lie down, taste touch, see, smell and hear --- means that our environment, rich with stimuli, holds meaning for us.

Consider the word "home."  Just to say the word immediately stokes the senses.  If asked, I could tell you what "home" looked like, sounded like, felt like, and smelled like for me.  I know the worn smooth feel of the brass doorknob in my hand, see my mother standing in the kitchen, hands in flour, rolling out the bread dough to make biscuits, know the feeling of the bedspread I would flop down on after school, and know the sound of the cars passing by outside or the breeze through the trees by my window.

That such places are impressed in our memories is likely one reason why having a particular place to regularly pray is important.  Through such habitual use of a place, we begin to associate the memory of it with prayer, with a "face-to-face" encounter with God (though maybe not quite in the way Moses did).  In fact, when sight, sound, or smell during the day reminds us of that place, we may even long for it.  You might say it becomes "memorable."

I have a place like that.  I sit in a chair in our third floor guest room and stare out the window at the trees.  The room itself is blessedly spartan, not a magazine or book or computer screen to distract me, and ascending the stairs to go up to that private place I have a physical sense of going "up" to Him, as Moses might have in going up Mount Horeb to converse with God or in walking outside the camp, pitching the Tent of Meeting, and entering into communion with God.  These physical acts are important --- going up, going out --- much as folded hands, kneeling, or lying prostrate on the floor may help our prayer be seen and experienced.  This doesn't mean we cannot pray anywhere, because we can.  As Emily Dickinson said, "Where Thou art --- that is --- Home."  God is everywhere, so we can be at home with Him anywhere, but a regular place helps visually and sensually establish a habit of setting apart a place and time for God.

In a real sense, when we enter this place, when we converse with God, we are brushing up against our true Home  As John Ruskin said, "[Home] is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division."  So get up, go out, kneel, lie down, bow, and find a place where you can be at Home with God.  Get physical.  Root prayer in place.

40 Days On the Edge (Day 11): Dark Night of the Soul

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

You can pray with all your might
Till your knuckles all turn white
You can look the other way
Hope it’s gone with each new day

You can do your best to hide
You can hold it all inside
You can curse and shake your fist
You can ask why God why this

There is peace somewhere I’m told
There’s a fire out in the cold
There are wonders to behold
In the dark night of the soul

You can give in to your doubts
Try to figure it all out
You can fight the fight alone
Do your best to drink it gone

There is peace somewhere I’m told
There’s a fire out in the cold
There are wonders to behold
In the dark night of the soul

Trust your spirit to be your guide
You’ll come out on the other side

In the absence of the light
Let the shadows hold you tight
You can let your fear and pain
Wash over you like rain

There is peace somewhere I’m told
There’s a fire out in the cold
There are wonders to behold
In the dark night of the soul
In the dark night of the soul

By Kate Campbell & Walt Aldridge
© Large River Music (BMI); Cross Key Publishing Co. Inc./Waltz Time Music Inc. (ASCAP). Featured on For the Living of These Days, Kate Campbell with Spooner Oldham (Large River, 2006).

"But I will not go up among you," said God to the Israelites.  For them, that was a dark night, what they termed a "disastrous word," to be without the presence of God.  But, really, it was both mercy in the sense that it prevented their destruction and a disciplining love in that it brought them to genuine repentance.

I don't know if I know much about what St. John of the Cross termed the "dark night of the soul," but perhaps I have felt it at times, that sense of dryness, depression, or lostness.  In such times we have no appetite for anything and we simply wait for God and hold to what we know in our head but do not feel in our soul: God is there.  God is love.  God is on the move.  "There are wonders to behold/ in the dark night of the soul."

40 Days On the Edge (Day 9): The Lives of Others

If you haven't seen the The Lives of Others, the movie voted Best Foreign Language Film of 2007 at the Oscars, perhaps you should.  (I only say perhaps because the move is rated R and contains some nudity and sexuality, so use discretion.)  Set in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's a movie that focuses on the transformation of Gerd Wiesler, a German Stasi (secret police) agent through his encounter with beauty --- the beauty of the relationship of actress Christa-Maria Sieland and her writer boyfriend, Georg Dreymann, the beauty of music, and the acting of Christa.  Wiesler comes to sympathize with their lives and see its contrast with his own drab existence through watching and listening.  He is assigned to surveillance.  Hence the title, the lives of others.

To be sure, it takes more than just listening and watching to transform a person.  It requires divine intervention.  But listening and watching are a conduit, a path on which God brings change.

Both Moses and Paul so identified with their people that they were willing to suffer judgment by God if it meant their people might be spared.  After the Israelites made the golden calf, on the eve of judgment, Moses boldly intercedes on their behalf, telling God that if He would not spare them, to "please blot me out of the book you have written" (Ex. 32:32), in other words, wipe him from the annals of history, to make him a non-person.  Paul said he was willing to accept damnation if it meant the salvation of his people (Rom. 9:1-4).  What's going on?  They were, like Wiesler in a way, so sympathetic to the lives of these "others" that they were willing to risk their lives for them.  And even more does Christ intercede boldly for us even now, indeed, died for us.

The lesson for me is not only to be aware of the lives of others, to watch and listen, but to pray boldly for their lives.  Then I will begin to know them, to sympathize with them, and even to love them.  Wiesler did it without praying.  Even more so we can change with praying boldly --- for the lives of others.

40 Days On the Edge (Day 8): Deja Voodoo

When you get to be middle-aged like me, you begin to have that odd sensation known as deja vu more often, the sense that you've been here before, done this before.  Traveling through the dark to Columbia, South Carolina tonight, seeing familiar exits, known landmarks, uttering the same thoughts ("I always think I'm halfway when I get here, but we're not."), I realize I've been here before, maybe 15 years ago, maybe 10, maybe a total of twenty times or more over the last 15 years.  I've seen these palmettos, felt the balmy air, cruised the sleepy towns of this very southern Carolina, pulled up to the same parking place, checked in at the same desk, opened a door to an almost identical room.  I'm here.  I've been here.  In one sense, it's a tiresome thing to realize.

It's that way with sin, too.  Only you might call it deja voodoo, that not so nice sinking sensation that you've done it again, committed the same offense, said the same thoughtless word, let you mind wander and dwell on the same ignoble thought, or let slip by the opportunity to do something good and kind, like say an encouraging word, defend one unjustly maligned, said hello to the clerk with a bad day.

Maybe I think the Israelites did worse.  They, after all, had seen such miraculous acts of God, such miracles, and yet when Moses was gone more than a few days, they opted to worship a piece of gold.  And yet they were not different than me.  Each of my offenses, like their offenses, is a singular act of rebellion, a statement that my way is more important than God's way.

I'm a sinner.  I've done it.  I'll likely do it again.  But I'm not compelled nor destined to stay mired in one place.  "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Rom. 8:1).  That "now" is effective  in a millions "nows," stretching backwards and forwards --- an eternal, infinite proclamation of what is true.

That "now" overturns the curse and undoes this terrible black magic.  One day, all our deja vus will remind us only of the good, true, and beautiful we have experienced.  That's a good magic.  I can't wait.