THE TETHERING PLACE

A theme has been emerging this past week – and if I am honest, it has been a salient theme for the past two years of my life: surrender.

I listen to this song and every bit of me revels in it, craves for it to be true in my deepest parts. But it simultaneously makes me a liar. One only has to witness my tone with my husband or children over the course of a day, look at my calendar or my checking account to see how little is really and truly surrendered.

But I want it to be so.

I desperately crave it to be so.

For years now, every time a song or scripture or sermon speaks of surrender, or some form of “laying my life down to take it up again”, something in me breaks. The spirit in me weeps. My tears don’t feel like they are elicited by pain or sadness, but rather by some unknown, not yet understood emotion; my tears are emerging from a deeper well.

Deep cries out to deep…

Psalm 42:7

Do you feel this way? As if there is a resonance in the depths of you, called out by some deep truth out there?

When I hear Gods voice, when I sense Him moving in me… it is coming from deep within, but is at the same time not a part of me. Wild.

Ecclesiastes speaks of the fact that God has set eternity in the hearts of his people. There is truth set at the very core of your being, that when a note is struck out there in the same pitch and frequency, the spirit in your inner core “rings true”.

Augustine paints this picture: “My soul is restless until it rests in you, O God.”

I think about in the book of Luke when Mary, pregnant by the spirit of God, goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth to find refuge and care as her husband is trying to quietly divorce her for fear of infidelity. I can only imagine the chaos of life Mary was experiencing–young, pregnant, poor,unwed, scared though visited and assured by an angelic being… and she shows up to Elizabeth, who was also promised a baby by an angel of God.  And the moment the women meet, the spirit of God IN John, IN Elizabeth LEAPS in response to the spirit of God IN Jesus, IN Mary.  Deep crying out to deep.

So when some part of me, deep within, cries out in response to the invitation to surrender, I know that I need to pay attention. In God’s economy, surrender is the way to victory. Death the way to life. A broken and contrite heart the way to joy everlasting. The way of Jesus is opposed to my flesh–to my conscious mind. And yet is right with my soul. And it has been proven again and again in my life.

My faith in Jesus, my trust in his word, is not just based in empricial evidence and historicity and moral virtue (though all are compelling and worth considering). No my my faith in Jesus is rooted in experiential knowledge of His love and grace and personal investment in my life. It is confirmed by the miracle of lives changed around me and his voice continually speaking to me.  It is sparked everytime I draw near to him to listen to the still small voice that emerges from deep within and yet comes from somewhere not a part of me.

He is so thrillingly, gloriously good. And he is FOR you.