Tag Archives: God

Faith, General

Circling God

I circle around God,

around the primordial tower.

I’ve been circling for thousands of years

and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

This poem was written a Rainer Maria Rilke as a love poem for God, a modern psalm, over a hundred years ago. It refers to God as a tower, much like David did in his own psalms and Solomon did in the proverbs.

Psalm 61:2b-3, “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I, for you have been my refuge, a strong tower against my enemy.”

Proverb 18:10, “The name of the Lord is a strong tower; a righteous man runs into it and is safe.”

A tower refers to a tall part of a fortress or city walls. For the Jewish people, it was a picture of God’s protection. Its presence brought a feeling of security and well-being. They would look to the tower during times of spiritual or physical peril. They would flee to the tower in times of terror.

I think what is so poignant about Rilke’s poem is that we all have the habit of circling the tower that is God. We circle and don’t land. We circle and we wonder. We circle and we doubt. Always circling, never landing.

And his question is valid. Why do we keep circling? What form does our circling take?

Perhaps you are a falcon. For early Christians, the falcon became a meaningful spiritual symbol. A wild falcon symbolized the unsaved, the sinful, and the lost. A tamed falcon symbolized the converted. It was a symbol of hope and victory.

Before someone is saved, they are like that wild falcon the just keeps circling. But, we are called to be tamed, to find refuge in the tower. Are you still wild or do you still wrestle with your wild ways?

Perhaps you are a storm. In the Bible, storms are a contradictory image. On one hand, it gives life with its water. On the other hand, it brings death through its violence. It is an uncontrollable force of nature.

You may feel a little out of control. You may feel like a walking contradiction. You may be simultaneously drawn toward and repelled by the tower; by God. The reality is that you will only feel grounded, centered, and complete when you go into the tower. The storm within will only be calmed by the presence of He who commands the wind and rain.

Perhaps you are a great song. I like the idea of being a great song because songs are symbols of the soul and singing is an expression of the soul. What is your soul expressing as it circles? What kind of great song do you possess?

Great doesn’t always mean good. It simply means big. You can be a song of big sorrow or big joy. You can be a song of big anger or big love. You can circle because your song is one of outrage which keeps you away from God. You can circle because your song is one of adoration that makes God seem untouchable, unapproachable. But the reality is that the best songs are sung in the tower. The truth is the God is also a song – the believer’s song.

If we know how we circle, then we know why we circle. If we know why we circle, then we have a choice.

Can you stop circling? Can the wild falcon within you be tamed; be saved and finally find hope and victory? Can the storm, the uncontrollable force of nature within you be calmed? Can your song connect and join in with God’s song?

It is time.

It is time to find rest and refuge in the tower. You have been circling long enough. Rilke said that he had been circling for thousands of years and in biblical terms, 1,000 is the largest figure they could count by. It wasn’t literal. It was his way of saying that he had been circling for as long as he could remember.

Perhaps you have been circling for thousands of years too.

We are prone to circle God. A part of us is drawn to Him, yet we tend to wander away. We may settle into the tower for a time, but then circle again. Or, maybe we aren’t fully settled and parts of us are still circling.

Whatever it may be for you, the tower isn’t going anywhere. The tower isn’t the one that moves. We move. We circle. We wander.

God is faithful. God is patient. He waits for us to make a choice. He invites us into relationship with Him. He offers us exactly what we need – whether we happen to be a falcon, a storm, or a great song.

Faith

“What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”

My 4-year old son has recently taken to sneaking things so that he can enjoy whatever seems enjoyable of that particular item before getting caught and having it taken away.

It has become quite frustrating. My husband and I have tried explaining the wrongness of sneaking, hiding, and lying. We have told him many times that if something has to be hidden or performed in secret, then it most certainly is something that he should not be doing at all.

That fact has not yet sunk in for my son, which shouldn’t surprise me, because I think that fact eludes most adults as well. Except we shroud our actions in terms of privacy and personal space and individual rights. The truth, however, is that most of what we do in secret should not be done at all either.

But, the idea of confessing our wrong actions, of bringing into the light whatever we have been keeping in the dark, is quite scary.

For some things, we know exactly what is hidden, which is why we keep it hidden.

For other things, we imagine our secret to be worse than it really is because it has been secreted away for so long. If we were to open the door to that particular closet, we’d realize that what we believed to be a monster is really a mouse. Unfortunately, for most of us, our fear keeps us from ever investigating and we continue to live in fear of our secret monsters.

For all the rest, we stashed them away in the dark a long time ago, and we have allowed ourselves to forget about them. It is as if our mind has erected a barrier that keeps that part of ourselves locked away so we don’t have to deal with it. We look in that direction and all we see is darkness. We have no real idea what is there.

We hide things from others. We hide things from ourselves. We hide things from God. Or, at least, we think we do.

The Bible says of God, “He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him” (Daniel 2:22, ESV).

He reveals deep and hidden things. Things we have removed from sight, not to be searched out.

He knows what is in the darkness. An inherent knowledge, a revelatory knowledge of our darkest places.

The light dwells with him. Both an illumination and a wisdom that fellowships and abides in him.

A light and a wisdom that abides within every Christian through the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit.

That means that there is nothing truly hidden, no real secrets, and no impenetrable darkness in which we can keep our actions from being found out. Which is both a dreadful notion and a relief. We dread the judgment, reaction, and mistreatment that could accompany such revelations. Yet, there is also a relief in knowing that these hidden, secret things do not have the degree of power that we currently believe them to have.

Walking out of the oppression that is the darkness in which we hide and secret things away is a difficult process, at best. However, if we can take one thing at a time and first confess it to God, then to ourselves and finally to one other person, then we could truly be free.

If God already knows the worst of ourselves and loves us anyway, and if we can face the worst of ourselves and love ourselves anyway, then perhaps revealing it to someone who also loves us might not be so bad. Perhaps the price of this freedom is worth paying.

“Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16, KJV).

(Title quote by Andre Malraux.)

Marriage

The Sigh Heard Round the World

Into the middle of a group of women lamenting their romantic failures walks Jerry Maguire ready to claim his woman. In this iconic scene of a humble and sincere declaration of love comes the infamous line, “You complete me.”

Women around the world let out a collective *sigh*.

That is what we think we want.

To have a man need us. To have him realize that we are his other half, that life would not be whole without you. You want to complete him.

A truly romantic, fantastical notion.

*sigh*

But not at all based in reality. And women truly don’t want it either. Not really.

We need to be needed. We strive to be important, significant, irreplaceable. But to complete someone? Really? You want to hitch your wagon to that half-developed star?

Lifelong relationships will only work between two full-people, not two half-people. These people complement one another. They don’t complete one another.

It was the whole point of another iconic romantic movie, “The Runaway Bride”. It’s what the whole deal with the eggs symbolized. Julia Roberts’ character was meandering through life as a half-person, taking up with different people hoping that they would complete her. It wasn’t until she met Richard Gere’s character that she was faced with the reality of her existence. She was so completely clueless as to who she was as an individual that she couldn’t even figure out how she liked her own eggs cooked.

Do you know how you like your eggs cooked?

Do you have your own set of values and opinions and experiences and emotional reactions firmly planted, making up who you are as an individual? Or are you a reed on the riverbank, bending whichever direction the wind takes you?

I know that it can be scary to look into yourself and ask “who am I?” But, it must be done. No one else can tell you what you think, what you feel, or who you are. You must decide what makes you, you.

Only when you are a complete person, in and of yourself, are you then ready to couple up with someone else. Preferably, another complete person because otherwise you’ll be spinning your proverbial wheels.

Throw out the dependence. Veto the co-dependence. Overrun the independence too. Instead, adopt an interdependence, in which you come together and allow the other person’s strengths to complement your weaknesses.

Find a way to *sigh* over the ways in which you are a match. Maybe one of you is level-headed while the other is passionate and headstrong. Maybe one of you is detail-oriented while the other keeps their eyes on the big picture. Maybe one of you is process-oriented while the other is people-oriented. Maybe one of you is a thinker while the other is a feeler.

The one caveat that I want to throw into this whole love-fest is that you will never, nor should you ever, find another person to fill the role that God is meant to have in your life. It is only God who can truly ‘complete’ you. He knew you before you were formed in your mother’s womb. He has a plan for your life if you will let Him guide you, and these plans are much, much better than anything you have for yourself. He knows what makes you tick, what makes you smile, what makes you feel fulfilled and happy. It is with Him, and with Him only, that you should be dependent because He is the one who possesses your next breath, who holds the keys to the treasure of blessings waiting to be poured upon you, who carries in His hand every tear that you have ever wept, and who died to be your Savior.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of love that makes me truly and deeply *sigh*.

Faith

Just Breathe

Take a breath.

A deep breath.

Draw the air in through your nose and bring it down into your belly space, expanding it like a balloon.

Now let it out slowly.

Like, super slow.

That breath is life.

That breath is a gift.

Your next one is not guaranteed.

Breathing is something that we do without thinking. It is a simple in and out exchange of air in our lungs. We usually don’t pay much attention to it unless we are somehow deprived of it.

Yet breathing is something that we can control, to a certain extent. We can choose to hold it, release it, restrict it, free it, make it shallow, make it deep, make it fast, make it slow, make it quiet, or make it noisy. We have some choice in what we do with that little gift of life we receive every few seconds or so.

Even down to our very breath, God instilled in us a choice of what to do with the life we have been given. We get to choose what we do with our breath, with our life, and with our connection to God. God is in our breath because life is in our breath and God is life.

But, as believers, we have also been given a deeper kind of breath – the breath of the Holy Spirit. In Hebrew, the word ‘ruach’ is translated as breath and as spirit. The Spirit of God is Ruach Elohim, so it could also be translated the Breath of God. With this different sort of breath, comes a different sort of life. Everlasting Life.

Take that breath again.

Draw it in nice and slow through your nose, all the way down to that belly space.

Feel the fullness of that breath.

Now let it out slowly.

Feel the hollowness without it.

You have received the breath of life for your body and you have received the Breath of Life for your spirit. You have a choice about what you will do with your breath, with your life, with your spirit. Will you hold it, release it, restrict it, free it, make it shallow, make it deep, make it fast, make it slow, make it quiet, or make it noisy?

Savor your next breath. Find the life inside of it. Feel God inside of it. Connect to the Ruach Elohim within it.

It reminds me of a scene from one of my favorite movies of all time, “A Walk to Remember”. I know it’s a Mandy Moore film, but it’s based on a Nicholas Sparks book so it’s good. She plays a Christian girl dating a boy that goes to church with his mother, but doesn’t yet believe in God for himself. My favorite scene is when he asks her how she can believe.

She says, “It’s like the wind. I can’t see it, but I can feel it.”

Ruach is sometimes translated as wind, too. It is air and spirit in motion. Don’t we create a kind of internal wind when we breathe? So, that’s how I picture the relationship that I have with the Holy Spirit. It’s like a wind that I create inside of me. I can’t see it, but I can feel it.

I, for one, choose to take my breath of life and make it deep and noisy and free. I choose to draw it out and experience as much of it as I can.

What will you do with the gift that is your next breath?