It Would Work without Me

The word “faith” itself connotes an ultimate confidence in things we cannot possibly understand, much less control.

I can tell you that it’s there. I can show you what it does to me when I touch it. My words just might have some meaning for you, but I can’t even point out the path you have to take. There is no uniformity about it anywhere. The real thing is beyond such concepts. Indeed, it’s rooted outside our universe, so if you can’t get there in your own way, you can’t get it at all.

My work is the exact opposite of encryption and the often attached politics. I struggle hardest to produce a message anyone can read, with the broadest potential that it can be understood. The only thing I keep from you is the impertinent details of my own encounter, things that could not possibly be meaningful or useful to you. Even then, I might try to answer if you ask about such things. The whole point is that you come away, not with equal knowledge, but with equal moral power.

I want you to hear all Creation singing to you of God’s glory. I’m striving to get folks to understand that Paul meant it quite literally in Romans 8:19 that Creation as a living thing longs to see you fully connected to God’s intentions for you, as written into the revelation of His divine character. If you can develop that divine sensitivity to the moral imperatives God built into all Creation, whatever else you take from that interaction is not even a part of my considerations.

It’s the most subversive act of all in this world. I’m connecting you to the source of existence itself with the full expectation you will not end up with the same answers as mine. And you darned sure won’t have the same perceptions and answers as most of the rest of humanity. You will become alien to the rest of the people in this world. In particular, I will have helped to alienate you from Western Civilization and it’s overwhelming numbness to God’s real Presence in this realm of existence. If I can just get you connected to Him, nothing else matters.

His Creation consistently serves His moral purpose. Like Sister Wildcucumber, I want to tell you that if you piss in your yard, walk barefoot every chance you get and even lie in the grass, what grows there will be the best medicine that nature could provide. Sure, you’ll have to learn something about what grows out of the ground and how to make use of it. Yes, I’ll tell you that it also hinges on faith in such audacious acts and a prior commitment to live the moral character of God in this world. I want you to understand that this is but a tiny sample of how our Father made this world to operate. It’s a world most of humanity will never know.

Now maybe that’s simply not appropriate for you. That’s okay. There are jillion other ways you can connect to your best friend on this earth, which is the earth itself. No other friend within the universe will be so consistently in your favor as nature. The ground calls your name, the birds sing His praise, the grass rustles of His glories in the breeze and the trees wave their hands in praise. Maybe you’re stationed in the high deserts of Afghanistan — the grasses and shrubs, the rocks and dust and patches of ice and snow in the mountain passes sing His praise, too. Sure, you can lock yourself inside a man-made structure and might not hear all that, but if you aren’t nearly overwhelmed by the consciousness of it all when you step outside, then your heart is dead.

There is no one path to awakening your heart. Just know that it’s very literally true that your heart is a sensory organ superior to your mind. It has its own logic and reasoning that the mind cannot comprehend. As long as you can swallow that fact, you are half way there. Just learn to reconnect with your own heart, not as some useless poetic metaphor, but as a solid reality of your existence, and you’ll find yourself in a world the rest of humanity cannot comprehend. Once your brain is aware that it has a built-in boss and that it is supposed to serve, not rule, everything changes. You pass over into a parallel reality. Nothing else will connect you back to your own body and your own humanity in the same way.

You and God can take it from there. I’ll be glad to fellowship over as much as we can find in common, but you don’t really need me in the sense of dependency. I’m not your leader, just a cheerleader hoping you’ll do well in your own game. I’m here to help you shed your own limitations, nothing more. I want to offer what I can to build your faith, not implant mine inside an army of clones.

My God is able, and I’m so privileged that He lets me play along.