Saving the Sanctuary

I’ve been reading Practicing His Presence, a compilation of the writings of Frank Laubach and Brother Lawrence. Their thoughts are wildly encouraging and frightening at the same time. I want that constant “Christ liveth in me,” but I’m afraid to give up what needs to be given up so He can fit. It’s rocking my foundations these days, so please pray for me as I fight to lay down my will.

Something happened yesterday that I wanted to tell you all about.

I was sitting in the kitchen with Practicing His Presence, eating soup by myself, and listening to Sophia play Yanni on the piano in the other room. I was already looking inward, and when the music came I followed it to see where it would go. It flew past my thoughts, my feelings, and into a place so far inside me I hardly knew it beyond my intuition. It filled that space and I held it there, delighted with the fulfillment it brought.

Then a thought came, straight from heaven, I’m sure. That is MY space. Why are you filling it with something other than ME?

I almost groaned out loud as I saw in a flashing moment how I had filled this space with other things for years, as long as I could remember. Sometimes I let God in, and those times were the “God moments” that I treasured and searched for. Those were the times I felt Him near, and knew He wanted me to seek Him.

If I treasure those moments so much, why am I filling that space with other things, if only briefly? Why am I blocking Him from coming near enough to fill me completely?

Beautiful music is a vehicle that carries me to worship, opens my deepest places to God, but most of the time I let the vehicle take up all the space inside and lock the driver away.

I do this with many things: stories, romance, love, sexuality. I know the key isn’t to lock away everything that could push God away. I need to recognize why God created the deep-plunging vehicles in the first place. Why does music move us? Why does love make us whole? Why does sexuality make us come alive?

It’s not because they in themselves are enough.

If you, reader, are honest, you will know you sometimes fill that deep place, that sanctuary, with things other than God. We all do, all around the world. I think we should talk about it more, learn from each other how to protect the sanctuary. We have to save it, or God cannot wholly dwell in us. Enough of us have tasted the presence of God in the sanctuary to know it was made for Him.

Tell me what you think, below.

Give me this water

 Christmas in Ohio passed in a deluge of rain. Now the house trembles under a winter wind, but still no snow. Yesterday I leaned against my thinking tree near the neighbor’s pasture and wondered if I could walk far enough to find snow. Surely, deep in those woods, on the banks of the icy creek, perhaps, I would find something white.

This longing for snow is something children feel, I know, but I don’t want to let it go. Snow covers the world while I am sleeping and wakes me to a new, magical land full of diamonds and piercing blue sky. But when the new magical land comes, it only makes way for more longing.

Spring is pure, green life, stirring tired dreams and awakening the hearts that dream them. But when our dreams are finally awakened, we reach for the long, slow, steady be-ing­ of Summer.

And once we find it, our hopes move on to the brilliant, wild, chaotic ending of Fall. Or perhaps they remain in the warm magic of Summer, or Spring’s delicate life. Our longing always finds a place from which it can call us.

Our search to fill our longing and thirst is relentless and all-consuming.

The seasons are a universal demonstration of change and how it affects man. God didn’t create the earth or its inhabitants to remain static. He promises this in Genesis 8:22, after the great Flood: “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” Like the earth seeking to move through cold and heat, we will always strive for fulfillment. We will stop when we die, either because we have been completed by the God of our dreams, or we have been cut off from fulfillment forever. We never really do anything for no reason. We are always trying, if subconsciously, to find the piece that will finish us. (I say finish instead of complete because we will truly be finished, dead to this world, when we find that piece.)

Jesus, the water-bringer, understood this endless thirst. He says, in John 4, “But whosoever drinketh of the water I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

That sounds gloriously beautiful. The woman listening to Jesus thought so too. “Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw,” she said.

Quench my thirst, she cried. We all cry this, though sometimes we don’t know who we’re crying to. Whether we are purely pursuing God with our relationships and creating and working, or just desperately searching for any kind of fulfillment, he is there, anyway. “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” Psalm 139:8,9.

We can find God even on the wings of the morning and in the uttermost parts of the sea. Sometimes we may have to go there so we can forget that nothing lies between us and the one who quenches our thirst. We can find him in every breath of every day, for he is always there, water dripping from his cupped hands.

When I can forget that nothing lies between us, I devour stories because I know I will see God move in them, or where he could move if invited. I choose words carefully and arrange them because in the creation of story and essay and word picture I invite him to work in me. I pour my life into loving my fiancé not only because he’s the man I love best in the world, but also because I find God in him more than in any other.

What does God use to bring water to you?  Please leave a comment below and let me know. It can be the most mundane things…God lives in water fountains too, I have discovered.