Having spent nearly five decades above the dirt, I’ve lived long enough to develop this precious thing we call perspective. As food for the soul goes, perspective is not a microwave meal, but a crockpot creation. Perspective takes time.
In my backyard there is a Japanese plum tree that swells with fruit in early summer. To the best of my recollection, prior to moving to Alabama, I’d never eaten a plum. Growing up just across the state line in Tennessee, my Big Mama had a purple leaf plum tree on the crest of a hill beside her driveway. We never ate the plums, but one long and boring summer day Jennifer Abernathy and I entertained ourselves by playing beauty shop and used crushed plums to dye Sara Mize’s long chestnut hair the color purple. This was a primer on perspective as I learned that our entertainment was an egregious transgression when viewed from the perspective of my grandmother, mother and the parents of Jennifer and Sara. I’ve come to know this type of experience as bittersweet — at first it is sweet, pleasurable, enjoyable, delightful, but is soon followed by a bitterness that can make you shudder or scrunch up your face as you try to process the radical shift from pleasure to pain.
Bittersweet is the best word I have to describe those Japanese plums in my yard. The first bite, when your incisors pierce the tender flesh of the fruit and a gush of water saturated pulp fills your mouth, is deliciously sweet in the way that only fruit fresh off the branch can be. But almost as soon as you swoon in its sweetness, the bitterness of the tart fruit seizes your body and momentarily paralyzes you. If you can find the resolve to keep chewing instead of spitting it out, the shock passes and the blend of bitter and sweet settles into a delightful flavor that leaves you wanting more.
Perspective has shown me that the awareness of the presence of God in your life can be quite bittersweet. For so many years I sought out the presence of God with the same level of commitment I give to a stick of gum. If you are like me, there are times when your mouth is dry or left with a stale taste, or perhaps you are just bored or worried that you have bad breath, so you reach for a stick of gum. Chewing gum is really a bizarre practice. Gum is not food, it is a precise mixture of gum base, sweeteners, softeners/plasticizers, flavors, colors, and, typically, a hard or powdered polyol coating. Mmmmm, sounds irresistible when you put it that way. Gum is more plastic and rubber than food, meant to be chewed briefly and then discarded, providing a very quick, sweet, burst of flavor that you can enjoy for a few minutes that quickly loses its appeal and is discarded. Even if you choose to chew it after the sweetness is gone you can’t make a meal out of chewing gum and you can’t get sustainable nourishment from it and eventually the taste becomes so bitter and the chewing so taxing that we spit it out.
I can’t think of a better metaphor of my pursuit of God’s presence for the better part of my first forty years. Though genuine, it was mostly plastic, artificially flavored and temporary. I longed for those moments on Sunday morning when the lyrics to our hymns hit home in my heart and produced a brief, sweet burst of the awareness of God’s presence in my life. Sometimes I hungered for those conversations around a fire at church camp when we were casual and let our guards down and “got real.” Annually I experienced the sweetness on evangelistic trips to other countries where dozens of believers from all over came together to focus on our faith and serving others. Those experiences were sweet and sincere, but they were also brief and within minutes, or at best days, life went back to normal. The sweetness of a momentary spiritual high passed quickly and then it was back to the day to day bitterness of a dull spiritual life.
Somewhere around ten years ago God began to invite me into something different. Perhaps a better way of saying it would be that around ten years ago I finally began to recognize and pursue what God had been inviting me into my entire life. It took perspective for me to recognize the invitation that had been there all along. The invitation was to live with the awareness of the presence of God in my life all the time rather than just brief glimpses here and there or in carefully curated moments. In much the same way as I accepted a stick of gum when my mouth was dry, my breath was bad or I was bored, this invitation was initially recognized during discomfort.
There’s a lyric in a favorite song of mine by Adam Hood that captures the sentiment best.
It took three days in a lonely place
But at least the pain it woke me up
And I hope my heart
Don't fall apart on me now
Yeah, it scares me but I don't mind
I keep on driving across that line
Maybe if I just hold on tight
Wherever I land I'm able to stand
And say that it's been worth the fight
The specifics of the story explaining the pain I was experiencing at the time isn’t important to the point, but suffice it to say it was the bitterness in my life that left a bad taste in my mouth and motivated me to accept what God was offering…..a life aware of His constant presence. The experiences that followed were bittersweet. One of the sweetest memories is of the day, standing knee deep in the Atlantic Ocean, where my heart was so swollen with joy and gratitude and love that I publicly serenaded Honey with love songs. One of the lines from a song I sang sums up the way I felt in that moment.
You hear that song, that song is our song
And so is the next song
I'm as certain as I'm ever going to be
I don't care about this crowd
Let 'em laugh I'm not proud
Nor am I ashamed for anyone to see
You’re all that matters, all that matters, you’re all that matters to me
But soon after, there was also the day where my grief was so profound and my pain so heavy that I couldn’t get out of my bed. A day when I heard the words of another song calling faintly to me from the deepest recesses of my heart.
Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
2 Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint;
heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony.
3 My soul is in deep anguish.
How long, Lord, how long?
4 Turn, Lord, and deliver me;
save me because of your unfailing love.
5 Among the dead no one proclaims your name.
Who praises you from the grave?
6 I am worn out from my groaning.
All night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears.
7 My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes.
8 Away from me, all you who do evil,
for the Lord has heard my weeping.
9 The Lord has heard my cry for mercy;
the Lord accepts my prayer.
10 All my enemies will be overwhelmed with shame and anguish;
they will turn back and suddenly be put to shame.
Psalm 6
I genuinely felt like I was dying. From today’s perspective I realize that in a sense I was. I was dying to an old way of living my life, viewing the world and experiencing His presence. Tangled in sheets and drowning in sorrow I realized I didn’t have to get out of bed, He was there beside me, holding me while I wept, calming me as I raged and loving me through my suffering. There was no need to pursue Him somewhere to find Him and experience His presence on Sunday morning or around a fire or on a mountain in Honduras, I could simply recognize His constant presence and live in it.
More recently there was the morning I spent on my knees in a mixture of prayer, singing and weeding the flower garden when I recognized His presence. Like the plums in summer, His presence was bittersweet. In that awareness a decades worth of pain, fear, shame, dread, anger and regret was mingled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control and I drank deeply from the cup. As effortlessly as I was pulling weeds from amongst the flowers, He was removing thorns and briars from my heart. On my hands and knees, amidst the dirt and the grass and the flowers, I worshipped with a ferocity and sincerity I never had before. It was, to this point, the truest moment in my life. For months now I’ve struggled to find the right words to describe this moment and the best I found was agonizing ecstasy, but today I think the simplest description is bittersweet.
I’ve learned that there is a biblical term for this experience. Though I’ve known this term my entire Christian life, I always misunderstood it because of how the word gets translated into English: the FEAR of the LORD. From the perspective of my youth I took this to mean I should be scared of God because He is everywhere and He is all powerful and if I don’t do what He wants He will kill me. This perspective served me well for the first twenty-five years of my faith, but then I encountered a scripture that changed my perspective. “Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning’” (Exodus 20:20). Don’t be afraid…so that the fear of God will be with you. So, should I be afraid or not? There are no less than eighteen words in Hebrew that get translated ‘fear’ in English. This particular one is yirah (pronounced ‘zhjee-rat’). It comes from two root words that mean ‘to see’ and ‘to flow from the gut.’ The fear of the Lord is to see, as in an awareness, a recognition, an ‘aha’ moment. But the fear of the Lord is also that which flows from the gut, as in the feeling that comes from deep within you in a moment of awe. Perhaps you’ve experienced a moment like this when you saw the Grand Canyon for the first time or witnessed the birth of your first child. When these moments meet you get an awareness of the presence of something far greater than yourself and far greater than you can fully comprehend and simultaneously you experience agony and ecstasy. Bittersweet. It’s what Moses experienced at the burning bush that prompted him to remove his shoes. It’s what Isaiah saw in his vision of the Lord on His throne that drove him to his face as he cried, “Woe is me! I am unclean.” It’s what Peter, Andrew, James and John witnessed when their boat was filled with fish that prompted Peter to cry out, “Depart from me Lord, I am a sinful man” and later what Peter, James and John saw on the mount of transfiguration where they fell on their faces and remained silent. Perhaps Job said it best, “Behold, I am insignificant; what can I say in response to You? I put my hand on my mouth...I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear; But now my eye sees You; therefore, I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes” (Job 40:5; 42:5-6).
Here’s the thing I missed for so long: the fear of the Lord should be read like we would the word of the Lord or mountain of the Lord, as in it comes from the Lord and belongs to the Lord. This yirat (fear) is the Lord’s and flows from His gut....not that God is afraid, but what proceeds from within Him humbles us, and moves us, and transforms us, in the same way a child is connected to its mother by an umbilical cord. It is only when we see God, become aware of His presence, that we are able to receive what flows out from within Him. When you become aware of His constant presence your perspective is forever changed. You simply cannot see things the way you saw them before. Everything has changed, the landscape is different, you are different.
While fully realizing that it will one day change, my perspective now shows me that there is no need to go anywhere or do anything to experience the presence of God. There is simply the need to become aware of His presence. God is either everywhere all the time or He is nowhere. So now what? I want my life to be a reflection of what I have seen.
“We have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 All who declare that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. 16 We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. 17 And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world. 18 Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. 19 We love each other because he loved us first. 20 If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a fellow believer, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see?” (1 John 4:14-21).
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