Until the Day Breaks

Pouring rain and a cloudy afternoon in the quiet of naptime’s hush. Ahhhhh. Jesus loves to slow us down with the weather and somehow my heart always is surprised to find a lifting of a certain pressure whenever the clouds roll in and the rain begins. I’ve always loved the rain. When I was little I remember I saved up $7 to buy my first umbrella. I couldn’t imagine a more worthy purchase. And then I would wait…sunny day after sunny day…waiting for the rain. Across the street from my house was an empty lot that just so happened to overlook the little town I lived in (very little actually—who’s ever heard of Moscow, Idaho?). When the rain would finally come I would take my little umbrella and go stand overlooking the town for as long as possible. To me, there was nothing like the “quiet” of pounding rain upon my umbrella, drowning out every other sound and surrounding me with solitude on every side. I think I still feel that way. I love the sound of rain and the silence it demands by its musical and restful rhythm. I love the slowness it insists upon in its dripping and shadowy skies. It makes me feel a sense of solitude and a sense of being surrounded by the Sender all at the same time—alone with Alone says it well.

That’s where I am today, in the center of that solitude…breathing and drinking deeply as my Jesus surrounds me with His love on every side. Oh how I love Him…and how He loves me…even in the sending of the rain.

From my book Entirety on Personalizing God’s Pursuit in Creation:

I’ll never forget when I first believed that God was actually pursuing my heart with the mission of love in a personal manner through His created order. It happened for the first time with a flower…actually several of them. Over ten years ago now, it’s like yesterday in my memory. In those days, I lived with several girls in a duplex in a not-so-great part of town. Affordable? Yes. Safe? Well, let’s just say that we were all glad to graduate from those times. Behind this duplex was what I called “my field.” It was where I went to pray and be with God. In truth, it was an overgrown lot, a mess of weeds so thick that there was little draw for anyone to walk through it. Thus, it was mine, all mine. And in all of my trampings through my field, I never saw anyone else back there, only ever confirming to me that this was the place where God waited for me, the place He wanted to meet me.

It was one very hot day, as were most of the days spent in that field. I was pacing in prayer back and forth, up and down, sometimes with words, sometimes with a little song, sometimes with silence. I remember I wanted to make an actual visible path through those weeds that I could call my own, and so on this day, being not the first of the path-plowing endeavor, back and forth I walked in my trail, up and down in the same straight line, over and over and over and over again. This day was also like most others spent in this way in that there was not a lot happening in my prayer time in the perceivable realm. I didn’t feel much movement in the Word. I wasn’t hearing anything from the Lord. My heart seemed to be a bit stuck, not moving in tenderness or any distinguishable breakthrough. A bit discouraged, yet sure of God’s desire to be found by me, I kept pacing and praying, praying and pacing, back and forth, over and over, eyes to the ground, as the weeds beneath my feet slowly came into submission, and my path became ever so faintly discernable.

It was on one particular stride down the path when I was suddenly struck by something. There alongside my ever-so-faint footpath were a small group of wildflowers, lifting their heads up to greet me. And then and there I was struck by a possibility. My mind started reasoning. Why are these flowers here, right alongside this path of mine? Who knows about this path except me…and the Lord? Who is here to enjoy these flowers except me? Has there ever been anyone else back in this overgrown lot except me? Then would it be so far-fetched to assume, that these flowers are in fact planted right here along my path for none other than I?? In all the silence, am I imagining God might have wanted to voice His love to me this day through these flowers, right here along my path? Hmmmm…And the reasoning went on as my ever-so-small faith sought to sprout from its seed form, fighting against my “better judgment” that I was being childish and seeking to overcome my skepticism that Love could actually be made manifest in such a way.

I’m not sure I fully believed those flowers were for me that day, but something faint changed in me, and my eyes have never been the same. Though I might have begun with mostly skepticism fighting against a tiny bit of faith, as the days went on, the percentages soon changed, and faith and love began to win. Soon I began to see new flowers that were not there the day before, and I was certain of why they were there on these later days. And it wasn’t just the flowers. The rain became a signature telling of God’s love for me. Every time it rained, no matter what I was doing, I became arrested by God’s tender love that He wanted to voice to me. In fact, I was such a believer in this divine-rain-giving that my roommate at the time used to say, “Every time it rains I just think, ‘Wow. God sure does love Dana.’”

In those days one of my big events of the evening was to get in my car right before nightfall and rush up to the top of my favorite hill to watch the sunset. The whole event was all for me. And God’s love was so loud through it, so real, so near. I used to watch all of the cars driving on the highway far below and wonder if anyone else in the near vicinity was catching this, if anyone else was claiming what was so readily being offered. And near nightfall, I would watch, as in extreme unnecessary proficiency, God painted the sky with a blaze of color and light, just for me. As the heavens declared the glory of God once more in the descending of the sun, I took my place as one receiving this personal expression of God’s love—a testimony of His nearness unto me (Ps. 19:1–6).

“Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool. Where is the house that you will build for Me? And where is the place of My rest?…But on this one will I look: on him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word.” Isaiah 66:2

The dwelling of God comes only to the poor—the contrite in spirit. There are no exceptions to this rule and no escape clause for the many western believers such as myself who happened to be born in this day and age. Poverty, deep contrition of soul, is the only small door of entrance to the promise of God’s abiding presence. And such poverty cannot be contrived. It cannot be pretended or even willed into being. One becomes poor in spirit not by will but by revelation. And that revelation must be continual or it will quickly yet subtly fade into the ever-present enticement and colorful hues of human strength.

To become poor one must dwell incessantly in the discomfort of inability, weakness and insufficiency. One must be what he is—an innate inadequacy fulfilled only in the Transcendent One—and he must be this perpetually not periodically.

Such feeble living does not arrive at one’s doorstep as though it were easily ascertained. To live continually in what Jesus called “poverty of spirit” requires the radical resistance of “putting on” spiritual strength and the day by day pursuit of the only One Holy and Beautiful—He who’s existence alone fulfills my gaping deficiency and transforms my innate poverty to eternal riches (2 Cor. 8:9).

Jesus’ continual coming to and residing with the poor and the outcast was not some generous act of compassion He exemplified for us—a sort of mercy ministry on the side that He benevolently added to His good works. It isn’t as though He heroically “opened the door” of His Kingdom also to the poor, but rather that He narrowed that door to these and no others. He did not come for the rich, for the healthy or for the strong but for the poor, for the sick and for the weak.

And thus, as a believer living in the western world in this day and age, I must agree with Jesus about the difficulty of the rich man for entering the Kingdom. And if it were not for His strong statement of hope—that with God all things are possible—I might be given over to despair (Matt. 19:26). Yet these words—and more specifically the One who speaks them—keep my heart in hope and as they resound in my heart I pray for grace, perpetually, to find that small door of poverty and there enter. Instead of so quickly saying, “O God, how kind You were to help the poor” I set myself among the poorest and say, “O God, here am I. Come to me.” Instead of looking at His tenderness toward the sick and commending Him for His compassion, I say, “O Jesus, I am deeply sick beyond even my knowing. Be moved in Your heart to heal me.”

“It is to your advantage that I go away…” (Jn. 16:7). Oh words in red, so inarguably true for do they not spill forth from the mouth of Truth Himself? Yet just the same, these words have been at times so difficult for me to swallow in their so seeming contradiction to my experience. O Jesus, You have left the dusty roads of Israel and gone away to Your Father where You sit even now at His right hand. And to the ones who knew You so closely as You walked upon those roads, those who greeted You as friends in the morning and accompanied You in every coming and going until the closing of each day, You uttered this promise so perplexing. It is a promise of a proximity far closer than gazing on your every expression, a fellowship far superior than hearing your every word to the peoples. Somehow the coming of the Spirit was to their advantage and to every redeemed heart “better” than the nearness and imminence of Your earthly life.
How often I have read these words and felt the great divergence between my own experience of fellowship with the Spirit and the near access the disciples knew in companionship with Jesus in His earthly life. How could what I know be advantageous to me over and above what the disciples knew in their relationship with Jesus as He walked the earth in His humanity? These words have wounded me in their indication of my spiritual lack. For how could the fellowship with the Spirit I experience be so great a communion as to call it better than walking with Jesus in the way the disciples did? And yet…a light of truth brings clarity to some of the cloudiness of these questions. The light is the possibility that I have a far greater fellowship and experience in the Spirit than I might realize and what seems so often to be
“far” from my expierence might be deeply near–in my mouth and in my heart.
 
I do not know what Peter and John knew so well as to the great divergence of pre-indwelling and post-indwelling of the Spirit in one single day nor do I know what many believers know in heightened conversion experiences in their adult years–being brought from darkness to light in one sweeping salvation experience. Having known and believed in Jesus since childhood, such distinctions are not part of my remembrance. I imagine Peter and the way he loved Jesus before the Spirit was given at Pentecost. Though affections soared high, they were limited by the strength of his own love and faltered under pressure. But what of after Pentecost? What about when the groanings of God began to ascend from within his own inner man, the lovesickness of God Himself began to burn from within him? What of when Peter knew the love of the Father for the Son coursing through his own person by supernatural strength? With such a spectacular gift, oh how Peter would agree of how advantageous, what a glorious gain was the Spirit in the absence of Christ bodily. Though as a friend of the Bridegroom, his heart would mourn in lovesick yearning for Jesus’ return, how precious beyond a thousand gifts were these groanings so supernatural, these lovesick affections of God loving God, that Peter would energetically agree with the words of Christ: it is to your advantage that I go away.
 
And this is where the light has come on for me. How often have I known what it is to be such a dwelling place of these God-awakened and God-sustained groanings? How my own person and heart has harbored affections and hungers for God that I could not so much as lift a finger to evoke myself. I am admittedly yet greatly immature in this wondrous mystery called fellowshipping with the Spirit and daily the words of Scripture and the historic mystics of old remain before me as a continual provocation of deep oceans I have yet to descend in the whole reality of communion with God. Yet even so, could I not agree with personal experience and familiarity—be it ever so small and immature—with these words of Jesus: it is to your advantage that I go away?
 
How much better is it to love Him by the strength of His own love moving inside of me than to love Him as a person would love a strange phenomenon on the outside of them, a love more of speculation than participation. I have only ever known Jesus as a New Covenant believer. I have only ever known loving Him with the indwelling Spirit as my continual companion. As a believer, I do not know what it was to not have such inhabiting nor will I ever. And though my experience in the Spirit is yet so minimal and my immersion in that ocean yet so shallow, there is something real enough and supernatural enough to already find personal identification with these words of Jesus. I have already touched the advantage even in these beginnings. I have lived the gain of having Christ within over and superior to the limitation of just having Him bodily present without. And this gain is the only way that I will be prepared for the fullness of loving Him and communing with Him by the Spirit within while He is bodily present on the earth.
Each hunger I have for God is part of the fellowship. Each longing lends itself to the mourning of love. Each action done and word spoken in love is infused by a hidden Source of strength and life, springing from the indwelling God within. Yes Jesus, how great the advantage of Your Spirit indwelling…how precious the Presence of Your Person so near…how great the gain of God within…ever increasing my cry for the ultimate fullness—God indwelling by the Spirit while simultaneously dwelling among us as a Man, as the King over all the earth.