Tongues of Fire

27.10.12

I sat in the dark and was filled and bullied with winds inside me. I lifted my head upward and yelled and I flew into pieces.

I was wracked with emotions: big slimy ones and huge red slippery ones, enormous green heavy things.  I couldn’t handle them. I was filled with helium that was rocking and needed attention.  I sat down and lifted up my hands. My head broke open and a wind and smoke came in, pushed apart my halves and sifted out the debris in me. I confessed I wasn’t my own, even the thoughts the emotions stemmed from were not me. The smoke passed over my hand and left bullets, teeth, small bones. And the emotions were lifted. 

There was still weight. I was cracked open again and a giant tongue slid into the crevasse, past my brain and heart to the center of me where things start. The tongue was warm and it filled me – I was an ear and it was speaking to me. I could hear his voice. The tongue became fire and burned and burned – it remained and was lit on the oil of me. 

I was rocking and couldn’t shake something. A voice began in my core and from the roots of the earth, it grew in a steady roar that shook the room, the world, it was my voice and the sound of everything and it developed into the words ‘YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW STRONG MY LOVE IS’.

Standards and Dreams

Our fathers really are our models for God: they teach us who we are, how to be men, how to be humble, how to be a steward, how to accept grace, how to draw the line, how to love. Your father never gave anything away; He taught you how to question everything, and to do so, but he didn’t give you anything to stand on and no sense of self. To build your life around arguments, pushing one way and then the other, is to be forever on unsteady ground because you construct a ‘best-of’ sort of existence, if you construct one at all. Without a line, something sturdy to stand on or measure from, an absolute, everything is arbitrary and relative. People say nothing in life is sure, but  speaking with you these last days, looking at how my life of learning to see absolutes speaks for itself, I have no problem saying ‘you might be absolutely right’ and be done with it. God’s ways are higher than man’s and they cannot be figured out. They must be heard and received; they must be walked out and then scoured roughly for understanding; they must be walked out again and then polished; they must be applied and applied improperly so your idea of ‘getting a concept’ can be smashed. God is all in all: your ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ (set-up according to a world’s standard), your application and not applying, your love and hate and servanthood and ‘I’m a good person’ acts, your malicious intent and the murder in your heart - - God uses it all for your growth. So walk free from doing yourself into any worth. The idea is that you’re worthwhile regardless of what you do. When you can hear that, then receive it, then live like it, you’ll be something new, seeing the world with new eyes and a new perception. We change every day so we can see more clearly what is real. We’ve just been trained in the habit of telling others to see how we see instead of seeking greater clarity for ourselves.

I had a dream yesterday: we were Arab (thank you Aladdin), working and living in a palace, trying to overthrow a complex and lying “democratic” dictatorial government.  We tried to establish the collapse of the economy or some such nonsense many times and always failed, but this time, with the palace guards right on our tails, the plan we set in motion succeeded! I remember being exultant. We used the Japanese Yen as the standard against which the state of our economy somethingsomething was measured and just when the national news related our financial collapse (which would lead to reform), the phone rang, and one of our leaders answered it. His face fell. He looked at us ashen-faced and said ‘the Japanese Yen has fallen’, and this large LED board behind him illustrated that dramatic point with numbers that dwindled. It was instantly evident that the government had manufactured and somehow controlled this standard the whole time, and that there was no hope.

-Of course it was all cinematic and breathy, like a Bourne movie, all drama and lighting and running and suspense…and all that stuff told in just a couple quick scenes. Anyway, the whole measuring-against-a-mobile-standard thing applied.

We judge ourselves constantly because we see and remember all our mess-ups and wickedness. But God doesn’t remember any of it – he says our sin is cast into the sea of his forgetfulness.  So we can walk free right now into what we want to be or where we want to go. 

Who your dad was or is and what he did or didn’t do doesn’t matter – where are you at now? What serves you? You’re free to choose. That’s the point. You can argue all sides of an issue, pros/cons, merits/demerits, and come to some conclusion, but freedom lies in your heart, and you know with more than logic when you find it. Our choices are rarely based on logic, anyway.
 
Satisfaction is not circumstantial because circumstances change. Emotion is not satisfaction because it’s so elusive it’s often hard to name. Satisfaction has to come from some standard that does not change and can always be revisited. That’s why the bible’s a big deal: when you can say ‘I believe the bible is the final authority’ you have something that doesn’t shift like sand. We get in arrears about interpretation and blind reception, but that’s where faith in GOD and not in man comes in. So believing the bible could be a faith in anything if one is to believe it by faith in God. The thing is just the symbol, like a torch in a dark night: you don't believe in the torch, you believe it'll lead you the right way. But people believe in the things: money will make the way easy, or relationship will save them, or looking good will make the world know their worth. We all believe in something – the bible simply has answers and illustrates a WAY that, like God (go figure), is self-propagating. Once you’re on the way simply being on the way helps keep you there. And when your heart is set on the way falling off it isn’t such a big deal because the trajectory you’ve set yourself on brings you right back to it.

I have been hurt when I have held onto things that didn’t serve me. Pride, for example. I can have these conversations with you now when I couldn’t a year ago because I wanted and NEEDED to have an understanding of God, so I would have defended my stance and who I was sure He was and would  have told you you were wrong about this and that and that. But now I just have me and my experience of God, and it’s so light. It gets heavy again when I have an idea about who I am or how I stand or how to be in God or what’s good and right and all that, but it just goes to show me where I still think like the old me – then I can put that off and grow light again.

We make identities, like you said, by seeing people and determining ‘I am that’ or ‘I am not that’, and we find names to call ourselves and behaviours to integrate or maintain and when one day a friend kindly lets me know I’m ‘not acting like myself', the internal crisis in me comes to the surface: I am in conflict. Conflict is in me. We learn who we are because we were made for certain things – building relationships, understanding and becoming Love, walking free of the world (in it, but not of it). All of those are active things in process and to be done now. The bible says ‘Now is the moment of salvation’ because God is HERE RIGHT NOW and to recognize that is to come under something that doesn’t hold you down or torment you, doesn’t demand anything of you, but blows all the fowl of the air away so you can breathe again. Then, once you’re quite recovered, he teaches you how to shoot the damn things down, those violent and consuming thoughts. How to take them captive to something that doesn’t change and is proven true (all day long if you look for it). When everything’s relative, all these ideas that crowd your mind fight for voice and because everything has merit to some degree, there’s no reason to clear the air. So the murder of crows remains. And kills you all through the day and more so at night.
It is necessary to hold something True, whether it’s that God is, or that He is not, because to be in the middle is to be in chaos. The bible says be either hot or cold, that is, choose a side – you can always change sides, but to try-to-want-to-be or to think-you-ought-to-be or to try-to-act-as-if are all weak postures that keep you stagnant long enough for the carrion to come in. The idea of faith is movement, because what you have faith for is where you will move. You go to work because you understand that if you don’t work, you don’t eat. Your faith is that your work will provide for you, and more than that, it gives you something to be about all day long. Somewhere to test your energies in a different field, under the same master in a different form, to work out your salvation under the harsh, the hippie, or the yuppie taskmaster.
God's all one.

Didn't Believe

I didn't believe you knew me
I didn't believe you could see right through me
to the depths
to the pitfalls
and endless wayward wanderings,
to the darkness
the shadows
and the irredeemable ugliness of all I held close.

But you gently lifted my chin
and through tear-filled eyes said
no, son,
I do know you,
I know where you've been and it matters nothing.
I made you light so light up those dark places,
turn from those paths that brought you so low and find
new heights in me.

"Throw away your fake peace, dive into the endless world."

Letters for Edification II

Excerpts from email of Sept. '10

We talked about each man's walk with God turning to 'bad' things, the unprofitable and wasteful. How from their very formation it would take 'this, this, and this' for them to realize that God is True. Like a class, or a process: first we'll study foundation, then walls, then roof. This, then this, then this, and there's the house. Listen the first time (or the second or third) so you don't need to lay again the foundation of Grace.

I spent yesterday in this weird place where I was super tall, with a vision that encompassed all that God has given me, moving in stewardship over the world God created for me. I saw myself walking up to people and saying 'welcome to my world' in love, finding things upset or off-kilter and saying 'Oh, this is righted because I am steward here - be healed. Tree, be reformed. Mountain be cast into the sea.' This isn't far off. It's in that place, that eternity, that we just slip into when we move behind the veil. I see it just to my left, shift aside the curtains and sidestep into...right where I am. PLACEMENT POWER WIND UNDERSTANDING ORDER VISION HEARING COMING ALONGSIDE WHERE THE FLESH DOESN'T RULE AND BEING FORGIVEN IS THE SOLE OF MY FEET BECAUSE MY HEAD IS UPRAISED AND GOD IS THE GLORY FOREVER AND EVER. I say it's not far off because the disparity between my understanding of the location of eternity and my perception of when I'll understand it is but a small thing.
I see more and more all things on something like a fortune cookie fortune:

[    eternity/time    ]

they're so close together and so far apart - but God is the wrinkle in time that translates me from one to the other in a shffp! that I only recognize after it happens though my heart bears witness to its approach.

It was prophesied over me that I'll be so in-tune with God that everything I desire will be given me; which is purely natural, man. So organic. That's just the way it is. Of course hitting a certain frequency will make the birds flock to you; it's a matter of course that finding who I am and what I was made to be will illuminate everyspark in this heart with a clarity for pursuit of God's government; why but yes! to everything my God has proffered.

Clearly, here is a man of faith.

So you, being unremoved and holy, bear witness to the Light of the World, the one who shines and does not disdain but loves in faith, and fear Him by reverence this Most Holy God. With trembling, for we understand his power, we submit all things to the one who has made us and in truth we ride aloft, a scented wind carrying us to the ends of our very being; he brings us to that place where we find our insubstantial edges and there we feel the frayed ends of lies and little-t truths; then we dive beyond, willing, obedient, with Joy and Expectation.

Being Real? Beans.

I jus' gotta be real. I'm in a place of decision. Where am I going, what do I want, will I give up my life for it? If I don't now, I can later, but the time...has been spent proving something I already know. Cut out the middleman and move direct.
What does my spirit want? More spirit.
What does my soul want? Satisfaction.
Where does the 'my' come into it? I am not my own, but I am governed by the hand of the one who made me. Have I not prayed 'not my will but yours be done'?
I am free to choose to run and play or stay and study, to hang with friends or work the fields. I am free to make up things to satisfy me or I can go to the source and find out what satisfies Him, because his heart's for me! What does he desire for me?! What magnanimous things! The dreams I've dreamt are all mine because He thought of them first! He dreamed them up! Travel? Yes! Alone? Probs not. Success? That idea is earthbound. Everything's life in God, so yes! There is no falling short and nothing missed because He has enabled me to do everything i want to do. It's just a matter of season.
My soul has been a runaway big dog, but now it is being trained, being pulled into line. I'll ignore it when I must, and apply discipline where there has been none.
...
I don't know what to do. This a matter of doing or not doing, inaction. I keep invoking God to break this, destroy this, destroy me.. if I can just get closer to you, God. I'm dimly aware I'm speaking of mindsets and limitations, of the edges of my faith where God Almighty becomes this gray light in the mist. Write, cruise, teach, learn french, get a degree, get married, save the world. Break me to pieces, God. These questions are stupid and I don't think anyone knows me. Enough. To see something worthwhile....
...
Here's a fissure between what I need and what I want. Not even what I want or desire, but what I want to do, like that's some big idea separate from God and his plans. What I need is God - I don't breathe without him. But taking him for granted like air, I have become accustomed to His mundane presence. ...
Something has changed lately, some sort of promise, flame, has come alive, so I'm at the cusp where the crunched up paper is giving up it's will to the sheer heat around it, the second where it drops it's last touch of moisture, the last defense, and lets go. There's an instant of transition there from what the paper was to what it will become, and that inevitably. Once in the fire you cannot come out unchanged.
I cannot worry about the future, what I will become, all I can do ever is trust that God is. He does what he says. It's not convincing myself he's real and reciting the things I've heard, none of this anymore. He just is. And I'm with him. That said, to worry about the future is to remove myself from him. It's like when you're on a spiritual high and you're experiencing the moving holy spirit as something you couldn't explain. You love it and want it to last forever but the second you think you might lose it it begins to dissipate and then you just sort of freefall out of it. But God and his presence are constant and consistent. We doubt that we can be high all the time because we spend so much time NOT high. But why aren't we high minded? If all my thoughts are stayed on God, am I not with him? Will the eyes of my heart not be opened to who he really is? If I'm willing to put off title, precedence, popular idea, and move with the spirit then I am with him. The emotional, semi-physical high is a sign of his presence, but the faithful don't need signs because they have Faith. They live on something else, yearn for something else, require something other.
...
I believe in God, and that belief has no limits. I speak that which is not as if it were, in faith that it IS and is coming to pass. I don't care whether you believe in God or not. I'm  not going to argue with or convince you of anything. All I can do is witness what has happened in my life and how it could not have come any other way.  I could never help myself, I could never use witchcraft to achieve hopeful ends, I could never lift myself out of a hole I couldn't perceive. But God, life, love, grace, has lifted my head.
For all I complain (less and less), I am a Son of Faith, called in order to uphold and take on the robes of Righteousness, those tailored to suit this spirit. In assuming this position, I receive an eyesight that saves me daily from terror and destruction because it sees the heart of my Father: purpose in all things.

Amen Amen