every time

The story about the prodigal son is another one of those stories that we all know to be true. Or rather, we all hope it to be true, we all feel it should be true, but not until we’ve walked with God do we know it to be true.

Every single time I have waken from my shame to return to him, he was still there waiting with open arms to receive me back. Amazing. And more than that, he has come running out to pre-empt my attempt at self-blame and self-debasement so that my return is not in shame but in glory. If you haven’t experienced God like this, then you haven’t experienced God, probably because someone has been lying to you.

I have been lost so many times. And found just as many. Anyone who tells you that there are lost people and then there are “saved” people has got two things messed up, I think. First, the opposite of lost is not saved, it’s found. The father said, “we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” So, there are lost people and found people. Second, you can be lost and found many times.

My friend Brent was telling us about a dark time in his life, when he felt like he was away from the Lord. I said, “So basically you were lost.” He froze. “No, I was a Christian.” I said, “But you said, you were in the dark, you didn’t know which way was up, you were confused about everything, and you didn’t even know where to begin to get back to Jesus. So,” I said, “it sounds like you were lost.” We talked about that a bit that day, and have continued to talk about it.

I know I have been lost many times and found just as many. More than being entirely lost, I have lost heart, lost interest, lost friends, lost dreams, lost purity, lost every kind of thing that can be lost. And every time, God has been waiting at home for me, and come running out for the joy of receiving me back. That’s who he is. “The son of man came to seek and to save that what was lost.”

What was lost is not a code word for non-Christian. When we label other people “the lost” to raise money for our mission we are being abusive. We are the lost. We are the losers. All of us. All humanity. Believers and unbelievers. Everything about us can get lost. And the son of man came to seek and to save what was lost. He still comes. Every time.

Being lost is much wider than we have imagined. Not only does it not mean “people who don’t go to church”. Neither does being lost mean having a loose lifestyle. You can be lost in a tight one as well. Being lost means being separated from God, and that can happen in many ways. Pharisees, for example are lost because of their “yeast of hypocrisy”. Here’s something Henri Nouwen wrote about the two brothers:

In the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), there are two sons: the younger son, who runs away from home to an alien country, and the older son, who stays home to do his duty. The younger son dissipates himself with alcohol and sex; the older son alienates himself by working hard and dutifully fulfilling all his obligations. Both are lost. Their father grieves over both, because with neither of them does he experience the intimacy he desires.

Both lust and cold obedience can prevent us from being true children of God. Whether we are like the younger son or the older son, we have to come home to the place where we can rest in the embrace of God's unconditional love. (Bread for the Journey)

It’s easy to see the younger son as being lost, but the older son was, too. The good news in all this is that the gospel is for us. I know so many TIRED Christians who believe that now that they’re not lost anymore that the gospel is for everyone else. But they do get lost. And the great thing about being lost is that Daddy is always waiting at home where there is rest.

We had a plaque at our old house hanging over the table that said, “home is where the heart is”. How easy it is for me—and I think for everyone—to leave home. But the Father’s heart is always open, bidding us come back home, to come back to the heart. He’s still waiting to run and meet us to catch us in His arms. Every time.

sex

I need a new definition for sex. I’m trying this one on and I think it fits pretty well.

sex n. – being closer to someone than you can be

The reason I need a new definition is because the ones that are floating around out there are weak, incomplete, and perverted. That’s what my world has done with something as beautiful as sex. And the church instead of offering a divine definition has done the typical: reacted, accepted what the world has to say, toed the battle lines where the god of the world has drawn them, or retreated in fear of something God made and calls good. The church should be promoting sex every chance they get, brining sex to every corner of the world. But I imagine that a lot of Christians would be appalled that would even I talk of sex this way—maybe even blush at the title of this post. But lofty glances from lofty people do little to save.

Sex is being closer to someone than you can be, and sexual desire is the desire to be closer to someone than you can be. Both are good. Both are good not only in a human sense, but in a divine one as well. We all have this desire to be closer to another being than we can be.

If you take even a casual look at carnal sex, you will see this definition holding true. Two people want to be closer than they can be. They want to be closer than speaking, closer than face-to-face, closer than hugging, closer than touching. They want to be in each other. If this weren’t true, then what is up with French kissing? And it’s a violent desire. Think about it.

My friend Jon said he still remembers the first time he held hands with a girl with fingers interlocked, and how fast his heart beat. He was experiencing this same thing. As his fingers went inside hers and her fingers went inside his, they experienced the fringes of sex. It’s no good for us to be close. We want the other person inside of us, one with us.

I haven’t read a lot of Freud. Most of what I know came from a sociology class I took in college, that and common knowledge from society and movies. What everyone seems to agree on is that Freud sexualized everything. He saw sex everywhere, as the source of all kinds of issues that people have to sort out and deal with. He even tagged the pleasure infants have in nursing and filling diapers as sexual. I think he was on to something. But I think he may have shot too low. It’s more than a physical sensation. I have a nine month old son named Caleb. Sometimes he gets so excited about one of us that he opens his mouth wide and tries to take a bite out of our cheek. Freud would say this is his sexual desire. I say that’s true. But it’s not reproduction or pleasure Caleb is after. He wants to be closer to one of his family members than he can be, and this is the best he can do. It's not a physical condition of his species. It's a spiritual condition inherited from his race and their metanarrative.

And while we’re talking about putting things in our mouth, let’s talk about eating. This world was always supposed to be the place where people enjoyed fellowship with each other and with their God. But in the fall of mankind, that connection was severed (literally sexed). Ever since then the plans of God for us have always been connected with the land. God’s original charter to adam included both filling the earth and subduing it. God’s word to Abraham and his descendants was that he would join them to a promised land, which He did. But when they didn’t give the land her rest every seventh year like He told them to, He had them carried off into captivity so that the land would “enjoy her sabbaths while it lies desolate without them”. In the New Testament, too, I read about the land groaning, waiting for restoration to come through mankind. Eating is sex, too. It is how we are closer to the land than we can be. We’re not content to enjoy being close to her. We want to taste her inside of us. What we eat and drink becomes one with us and produces life in us. This also kind of makes me think about when Jesus said, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” Eating is sexual. It too is being closer than you can be.

And God. When Adam and Eve were in the garden, they enjoyed intercourse with (they freely ate of) each other, the land, and God. It wasn’t until they were unfaithful to God (ate from another) that this intercourse was frustrated. It was frustrated with a treble hook: land with thorns, marriage with contention, and God through a veil. Three different areas: human, terrestrial, and divine. All frustrated. The intercourse is inhibited, and the attempt to restore the spiritual connection is a sexual proposition.

Look how sexual Jesus’ language was in his final prayer on earth. He wants us to be closer than we can be—to be one. He wants to unveil his glory for us. He wants to be in us. He wants us to be in him. This talk reminds me of the phrase one flesh or one body, referring to sex.

My prayer for all of them is that they will be one, just as you and I are one, Father—that just as you are in me and I am in you, so they will be in us, and the world will believe you sent me. I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are—I in them and you in me, all being perfected into one. Then the world will know that you sent me and will understand that you love them as much as you love me. Father, I want these whom you've given me to be with me, so they can see my glory. You gave me the glory because you loved me even before the world began! O righteous Father, the world doesn't know you, but I do; and these disciples know you sent me. And I have revealed you to them and will keep on revealing you. I will do this so that your love for me may be in them and I in them. (John 17)

A glorious body unveiled…Jesus in his bride…the bride in Jesus...his love in her...

If you think this is sexualizing something that was not intended to be, listen to what else Jesus said: “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” That’s wedding language. In Jesus’ day a groom would be betrothed to his bride, and then he would leave her to prepare a place for them to live together. Because God had granted each Israelite family a place to live, and also because the extended family in Jesus’ time was central to their life, grooms would build their house connected to their father’s house. And of course it shouldn’t be surprising at all to hear Jesus talk this way—after all the bible does begin and end with a bride and a groom.

All sex is frustrating. Because you can never be closer to someone than you can be. The marriage bed satisfies for a moment. The best of friends can only share so much heart to heart fellowship. Hunger always returns. Even moments of true intercourse with God are short-lived, and for most of us, rare. Because there is still a barrier that even sex, the most transcendent thing in our world, cannot penetrate. Ecstasy is not an option. Not now, anyway.

But somehow there is a day coming when sex will be no more—when we will be able to be closer than we (presently) can be. George MacDonald thought that when we were released from the shackles of this nature that we would be able to flow in and out of each other’s beings, that we could know each other fully, even as we are fully known. That’s an unnerving thought for now. But one day I think we will probably find it more pleasing than sex.

For now, we are all frustrated down here. We all continue to be baffled by Adam and Eve being “naked and unashamed”. Even creation herself waits, frustrated, in “eager expectation” for the children of God to be exposed. We continue to want to be closer to another than we can be, and scared to death of it at the same time. And sometimes we really mess up because of it. I wonder how much of our messing up is just because we fail to see what is really going on. I wonder if it's because we fail to know what we really want. There are so many other fruits that look like they might be edible and might satisfy, so many people to consume, and so many gods we would make our own or give ourselves over to. So the girl longing for shelter and affection she never found at home gives her body for fifteen minutes of glory followed by years of shame. The woman eats her way to high blood pressure and heart disease. The shaman does all kinds of bizarre things to get a god to possess him. The leader slaughters and consumes his followers to fill his ego. These are all perversions of sex. Underneath each, there is this desire to be closer to someone or something than you can be and an impatience for the Day when that veil will finally be removed.

I am longing for that day. Come, Lord Jesus.

But to me it looks like the church is going a hundred miles an hour in the wrong direction on this one. Either she sticks her head in the sand or gets red-faced and screams about our oversexed culture. We are not oversexed. We are undersexed. This culture is way underconnected. We have extremely isolated lives, and it's only made worse by technology—from cell phones to chat rooms to porn sites to ipods, it is so easy to withdraw, check out, and say no to sex. And I'm talking about the church. Most Christians in the burbs don't know their neighbors—don't even know their names. The divorce rate is just as high in Christianity as it is in the general population. And try to find true community among Christians who would prefer one another to the point of laying down their lives for each other. Don't even think about finding a group of people Jesus talked about who are "one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you." As Rob Bell said, "And so we have more cell phones than ever, and we're more lonely and isolated than ever. And we have more chat rooms than ever, and we have people hurting more than ever, because they don't have somebody they can lean on. Our culture is not oversexed. We have no idea what sex really means." I’d go further than saying we need others to lean on. I’d say we need others to come into, to commingle with, to become one body with. And I think Jesus would say that, too. Oh, he did say that.

You can't even talk about sex without using hushed tones, certainly not in mixed company, and then usually only in "accountability" groups with a special time to confess "sexual sins" (which really would be better understood as "sins against sex"). But this just proves that the church really doesn't have anything to say about sex, about connecting, about moving towards one another, about becoming one, about becoming closer than we can be. The church has accepted what the world has to say about sex ("it's something dirty and forbidden and narrowly defined by what those bad people show you on late night tv or during superbowl half-time or on forbidden internet sites or in adult bookstores") and retreated in fear. Part of the reason the church doesn't have anything to say is because she's stuck in the tarbaby. Porn and romance novels and random hookups and other “sins against one’s own body” (which are thriving among church members) will wither away in a connected community—this junk feeds on loneliness and isolation and inferiority and hopelessness.

One more thing. I think all the yelling and protesting and picketing and boycotting also goes to show that the church really doesn't have anything to say about sex. When you are deaf and mute about what is good and true and pure and beautiful, you get loud about the perversions of it, which you don't understand. I know it’s true in me. I will blast the thing I hate in myself when I see it in someone else. If you think sex is good and is God’s plan for humanity then just do it. Connect. Be one. Move freely in and out of each other. Show what sex really is. Be closer than you can be. Reject boundaries that keep people alone and in the dark. Greet one another with a holy kiss. Plant a tree. Plant a garden. Throw a banquet. Live like there is no male nor female, slave nor free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. Live like this world in its present form is passing away. And by all means, reject the perverted, shameful, narrow, definition of sex that is everywhere accepted and learn what it is that everyone falling for that is really craving—the hope that’s tucked away in you and me.

Sex is good. And what is even better is coming.

heart matters

Everywhere I look I see broken hearts. You can always tell a broken heart. The pieces cut you when you try to pick them up. They can’t help it. I think this is the way Jesus saw everyone. That’s why he was Compassion. I don’t accept any portrayal of God if he is not compassionate. To me that is so crucial in distinguishing love from all that parodies love.

I was talking with a couple of friends the other night about the compassion of Jesus, especially with broken hearts and shattered lives. He was the friend of sinners. You never heard Jesus speaking harshly to seedy types like tax collectors or prostitutes or social outcasts like lepers or beggars. You see Jesus dignifying their lives. On the other hand, he was harsh, scathing the religious and the well-to-do types with his fiery words. He didn’t judge them, but he had a mouthful about the way they treated others, particularly the way they kept them under their thumbs. It was like Jesus expected so much more from them, so much better than that from people who had better access to God through education and free time and wealth. His words were meant to challenge them, and I wonder…perhaps even to break their hearts?

Jesus, after all, came to bind up the brokenhearted. And yet here were these people who had so insulated themselves from the world that their hard hearts were there on display—in the form of a whole heart, looking as if they were unbroken, untouched by the great fall. So here comes Jesus throwing rocks. It’s as if Jesus felt like every heart should be broken. Or maybe it was more like Jesus realized that every heart was broken, and for anyone to deny that, to piece it together and prop it up and encase it within togetherness, was to deny the way things really are, to deny the divine narrative, to deny God.

I am sick to death of people pretending they are fine. I am also sick to death of people telling others to get over it, as if a broken heart is something you just shrug off and move on. Time doesn’t heal, and there is no strength to be found in the shards of shattered hearts. If time healed, Jesus wouldn’t have come to bind up—God would have kept out of our business and just let the magic of time heal all wounds. And to suggest that it’s good for someone to charge forward with half a heart laying on the ground as fine people pass by and casually crush it under foot is evil. That is not the heart of God for broken hearts. At all.

It is odd how Jesus came speaking and doing. He taught that if your eye or hand causes you to sin to pluck it out or cut it off, because it would be better to enter eternal life without that part of your body. Yet Jesus was constantly healing blind eyes and withered hands of known sinners. On the other hand, Jesus came telling people to love with all their hearts. Yet when he saw hearts that weren’t broken he threw stones at them. When he verbally assaulted the Scribes and Pharisees about their practice of religion, that was very hurtful. You could imagine being a banker or financial planner who had devoted your life to helping churches get their finances in order to be right with God and man, and Jesus came accusing you of knowing nothing of money or God, and of mishandling both. I don't think I'm overstating this—they were well aware that Jesus was a teacher come from God, as one of them said. It is almost like Jesus wants to make sure that everyone feels their chest cave in, and tastes those bitter tears that trickle out of a collapsing heart. It is almost like Jesus wants to make sure that everything that can be broken is broken.

The struggle for me is to see that when Jesus breaks my heart it is his compassion that motivates him. When my dreams lie in pieces all around me, when my desires fade into a mist and burn off in the heat of cruel daylight, can I believe that the God who let this happen to me (or makes this happen to me!) loves me still? Could I even believe that this is the proof he loves me? When I wonder if my heart was created just so it could be broken, can I be satisfied when the answer is yes? Can I accept and even believe that my broken heart is the cornerstone for a relationship with the healer of broken hearts?

If anything of me matters to God it is my heart—more than my actions, more than my words, more than my mind, more than my body, more than my soul. It’s hard to believe that when my heart breaks once again. I don’t know. Maybe it’s in these times that God wants to show me some more of His compassion—some that my heart wasn’t ready for until it was broken.

a Son

God had a lot of ways to express his demands on humanity. There are a lot of ways to say that we need to be good or to be baptized or to keep a law or a tradition. There are lots of ways to let us know that God expects us to behave a certain way or worship a certain way or live by certain principles. But there is only one way for God to say that he is reconciling the world to himself. There is only one way to say that the beautiful work of art that flowered from the stalk that is God and fell was being raised from the dead, exalted, reconnected with the divine, and given power to shine with the glory that was meant for it ere the foundations of the world. To do that, you need a Son, a Message made of Flesh. And the Message of Flesh has to do more than lipservice. The Son doesn't deliver the message. The Son is the Message. And the Message is here. This story didn't happen somewhere else, in some other universe, or in some other reality. The magic was made in this garden, and that means that this garden is the home for both stalk and flower.

God wanted to reconcile all things to himself. To do this he first bound himself to his creation. He bound himself to the human race by burying his seed in a woman's womb and fathering a son in us. That son then bound himself to the earth by dying and being buried in her heart. And when the father raised the son up, he exalted not only him, but the earth and humanity with him, for the bonds were true.

If all God wanted to do was tell us what was true or how to live or what pleased him, he had many ways to do that. And, in the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made eternity, who is the brightness of glory and the very flower of the divine seed, sustaining all things by his powerful Message.

We are not instructed. We are reconciled.

We are not told. We are Sonned.

drink to remember

Last year I took some guys camping, kind of a men’s retreat. It was a manly campout—lots of fire, lots of smoke, lots of meat, and a little ale. Oh, and shotguns. Yeah. Our theme was the journey of desire. We talked about how desire is essential for the Christian life, even how Jesus’ style of evangelism could be called evangelism of desire (“Come to me all you who are thirsty…”). We also talked about the dangers of desire. Dare we desire? And we talked about desire gone bad. We talked about the Divine Thwarter , how God intentionally blocks our desires, frustrating our attempts to find heaven on earth, drawing us to Him (I always think of that angel sentry guarding the way to Tree of Life with a flaming sword flashing back and forth). And we talked about mishandling desires. And oh are desires mishandled. Afterwards, I had kind of a revelation on a verse in the Bible that I had talked about around the campfire. It’s in the book of Proverbs. Chapter 31. So I sent this message out to the guys, and it went like this…

I just had a revelation going back to our campout, and it’s blowing my mind, so I thought I would see if I could blow yours as well. You’ll remember when I quoted from Proverbs 31,

Give beer to those who are perishing, wine to those who are in anguish; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more.

We talked about the narcotic of pleasure, how “pleasure isn’t nearly so much about true enjoyment as it is about anesthetizing ourselves.” Mostly when people drink it is to forget their poverty and misery. Ask any recovering alcoholic why he drank and he will tell you, “I drank to feel normal like everybody else.” Drinking made him forget that he was inadequate, that he didn’t have what it takes, and how miserable he truly was. Those drinks did not create joy, but suspended misery. They made him forget how impoverished he felt in his soul.

I came to the very edge of saying something but withdrew because Brent earlier had made a comment about the song Hotel California (something about evil song, drug-trip-inspired). But the thought has come back to me:

Some drink to remember
Some drink to forget

Ok. Is that not the test of purification of our desires? It is certainly not wrong to drink wine (“all thing are permissible” and “do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink”) and Jesus himself “came eating and drinking”, but why? I can’t imagine that Jesus drank to forget, but rather He drank to remember. He drank to remember the eternal joy that is only echoed in this place we live.

Praise the Lord, O my soul…

He makes grass grow for the cattle,
  and plants for man to cultivate—
  bringing forth food from the earth:
wine that gladdens the heart of man,
  oil to make his face shine,
  and bread that sustains his heart.
The trees of the LORD are well watered,
  the cedars of Lebanon that he planted… (Psalm 104)

Each time Jesus took wine, bread, and oil, did He not remember His home? Every time Jesus healed someone did he not remember what it was like in the New Jerusalem? Every party, every banquet, every deliverance, each scourge, every moment He spent with His Father in solitude, every adventure that Jesus set out on was to remember His Father’s joy, not to forget His own misery.

And He made that available to us. Jesus said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” Jesus wasn’t giving instructions on how to drink from one cup, but from every cup, nor how to partake of one body, but everybody. In every “drink” we take and every “body” we receive we are to remember Christ, to remember our Life that has come but is coming. We use the word adventure and think of many things, but isn’t adventure simply the word for what becomes of our desires? We desire something so we go on an adventure. And every adventure we embrace, whether within or without institutional walls, we are either drinking to remember or drinking to forget. I like the way Jude left it.

But, dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold. They said to you, “In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires.” These are the men who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit.

But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. (Jude 17-21)

Isn’t my attempt to forget just following the instincts of my fallen nature? And isn’t my attempt to remember just keeping myself in God’s love as I wait for eternal life? Lord, help me to remember and not forget. I will drink the cup you drink and be baptized with the baptism you are baptized with. I am longing for a better country—a heavenly one. I want to follow the example of Christ—whether I eat or drink or whatever I do, I want it to be to remember your glory, not to forget my shame. I’ll be remembering you.

open fields

Sometimes I daydream about William Wallace running across highland ridges with pack and sword, more like dancing really—such grace in that hard place—with bagpipes and percussion playing in the background, nipping at my heels, making the rocks comes to life, springing me up to the summit for the most breathtaking view of mountain, sea, sunbeam, cloud, and forest. Birds flying below. I stop to take it all in—to let my breath catch my lungs, my blood catch my limbs, my mind catch my heart.

Or better, I’ve just stolen Murron away from her hovel for a ride in the rain through forest glen, then the day breaking through the night, the sun breaking through the clouds, the sweat breaking through the horse’s powerful brawn, and we breaking through the trees into open fields as we gallop away from it all, running for that place where it’s not duties or expectations but romance that orders time.

Sometimes I just want to steal away, get as far away as I can. But if I’m honest, the thing I want most to get away from is me. And when I do take off, I usually realize that fairly quickly. I remember seeing the movie, City of Joy, where this guy was running away from his life, but he got some advice, “You can’t run from your demons.” They go with you.

That’s one of the things that’s so appealing about Jesus to me now. I have this me that I know can really drag me down. The dilemma is how to get away from me. It’s a paradoxical problem, and it seems like I need a paradoxical solution. And maybe it’s found in Jesus. He said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” That describes me. I want to both lose my life and find it, all at the same time.

I have this conflict. I want to go but I also want to stay. I feel like this world is not my home and that I was made for much more and better than this, but I also feel very grounded and secure, like this beautiful and strange place somehow was made for me. I feel like blowing this joint because this fallen world and everything in it is passing away, but I also feel like loving and saving it. I feel like this life I am living is one big trap of hopeless dreams, but I also have this sense that I am able to touch it and bring hope even so. And I feel like I have to make a choice. But maybe not.

Maybe traditional Christianity has something to say about this. It talks about God being three persons yet one, or three personalities yet one being. This is the Trinity. There is God who not only created everything but contains everything. The stars, the heavens, the ages, and the worlds all find themselves contained in him. And while that is unfathomable to me, it still makes me feel very secure, like I’m in a great big womb. The second person is called the Spirit or the Wind or the Breath or the Presence, and is just that—God as close as my breath. It is somehow by the Breath that I feel God, that I perceive something of this transcendant being that is so unfathomable. So not only am I contained by God, but I am a container for God, too. But there is still something lacking, something that could become very sterile and religious otherwise, another Person that makes life passionate. Messiah is the third Person I am introduced to. He is my savior, my rescuer. He is the friend who sticks closer than a brother, next to me on the battle field when all hell in unleashed. He is the lover who rides in to steal me away. He is the one who enjoys me and is enjoyed by me, the one who so romances me that I can’t wait for our next embrace. John felt this way about Jesus I think, when he wrote of himself, “Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of His disciples, whom Jesus loved.”

If God is somehow three persons then maybe I don’t have to choose. I shouldn’t have to choose the stability of being grounded and content with the tiny home and tiny life that is chosen for me. And I shouldn’t have to choose the dignity and prominence that comes from being the mouth and finger of God, empowered by his very Breath. And I shouldn’t have to choose the romance of the escape, the rescue, being cherished, and being challenged by my friend and lover, Jesus. I should be able to accept from his hand whatever comes—to me, in me, and around me. But I think that I have to wait for him and trust him, because I don’t always see what’s really going on, and even when I do, I don’t see it fully.

But today I am longing for those open fields.

want to be free?

We all want to be free. But do we even know what that means? Jesus announced his calling by reading from the ancient text of Isaiah. The heart of it was that he intended to set captives free. I don’t think we Americans have a very good handle on this. I don’t think we can relate to Jesus very well here. We talk about freedom more than anyone else in the world—because we can—but we don’t talk about it the same way as Jesus did. We talk about freedom as if it’s a right. Jesus talked about freedom as if it’s a gift. If someone encroaches on our freedom we hire an attorney. But Jesus came for people with no advocate. We live from the premise that the natural state of man is to be free. But Jesus came to set people free because we are naturally slaves. We believe that people are born free and that freedom must be protected from all forms of bondage. Jesus believed that all people were born slaves and needed to be delivered from bondage.

But beside all that, what does it mean to be free anyway?

We always associate the word choice with freedom. Heck, we even think we’re free to choose God or not. For us freedom means we're the decision maker, we’re the judge, we’re in control. It happens for us when we don’t have to answer to anyone or anything: our choices are our own, they don't lie in someone else's hands. That’s freedom. I read in a book called, The Millionaire Next Door that most millionaires are not actually flashy, Thurston Howell the Third types, but normal people who have made it their goal to save enough money for a “go to hell fund”. That means having enough money that they are financially free, and if their boss or customers were to finally push them over the edge, they could tell them to go to hell because they could live without income for a year or two—they are free of financial dependance on them. They can choose to walk away. For that matter, they can choose a lot of things. Free.

I think Jesus meant something else when he talked about freedom. I don’t think he ever expected our freedom to set us apart from others—in a “go to hell” kind of way. I don’t think he ever intended for us to be so blessed—financially, emotionally, spiritually, or any other way—that we were independent of one another or God. I also don’t think freedom means choice. Choice in many ways is an illusion because the god of choice is the god of self, and “a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.”

Somehow I think when Jesus talked about freedom it came from his compassion on all us slaves. Somehow I think that even as Jesus read those words he felt the pain of realization that for our freedom someone would have to bleed and die, and it would start with him. Somehow I think that Jesus wanted set us free from selfishness, pride, competition, and isolation—that somehow those were the very demons that were tormenting us. Somehow I think that the chains Jesus broke were actually chains that kept us alone in the dark.

And now I think the kinds of questions Jesus would ask, “Do you want to be well? Do you want to be healed?” were not cruel or even rhetorical. Do I really want to be free? It’s available. But it probably looks very little like the freedom that has been marketed to me in full color slicks. True freedom probably looks very little like the freedom that the god of self desires. I suspect that true freedom does very little to put me above my circumstances and in the center of my life. Is suspect rather that true freedom allows me to go beneath any circumstances and lose my very life without fear.

Who wants to be free?