A Spirit Not Of Fear

Rambling... because the thoughts of Tonight are too awake to sleep until Tomorrow.

I cupped my hands about my face, blocking out the glaring lights and blinking owlishly up at the dark unfurled sky as I sought the stars. I found them, glinting like shrouded diamonds in the scattered white-gold dust of clouded moonlight. With each glimpse and glimmer my heart bounded with delight, captured in the sort of childish enchantment that only emerges once a heart has grown old. Painfully old, perhaps: attuned to beauty through an aching fierce and terrible.

But even as I counted the sky-diamonds, I felt a thrust of a disappointment as childish as my delight. The stars were beautiful, yet still my heart sank at the sight of them. It seemed that their sparkling was tainted, as by a veil draped mockingly between earth and sky, letting through only the barest glimmers of reaching starlight. And as though what meager light did manage to squeeze through was forced to linger far above the earth, too far to touch, near enough only to spectate quietly on the happenings of a wretched world: a world deprived of starlight.

Frustration nipped within my chest like a dog rounding upon a frenzied hare. I half-reached a hand toward the sky, wanting to tear away the shroud that hung there and unveil the burning light of the stars, to let them fall upon the earth like flame to candle and watch the trees turn to quicksilver. To set the whole world alight… perhaps it would be too glorious, too beautiful a sight for us even to go on living. But it would be enough, if only for one blazing moment, to have seen the world in molten silver.

Yet as my hand parted from my face, the church lights darted back into my vision. Slowly I lowered both of my hands and turned to the light, blinking uncomprehendingly as the dim starglow fled before a flood glaring yellow-white. I wilted before it. Though the stars' dimness had pained me, at least they had been gentle. This light was cruel, stabbing through my eyes and into my mind until its brightness washed out the memory of gentler things. 
Still, I did not turn away. I gazed, like a mesmerized owlet, at the crowd of people before me. They were dark shadows against the brightness, milling about the sidewalk and lingering within the glass doors through which the light shone. Voices, laughter, shouting—sounds I had not noticed when my mind was consumed by the stars—all came rushing into my ears. Mocking, they surrounded me in a depth of loudness and confusion: loud for the strength of them, confusing not only for their clamor, but for their joy. I could not understand the laughter, nor the voices which spoke words I could not decipher, but were full of carefreeness. They lingered in the harsh, false light, embracing the setting as though it was beautiful. As though it was… home.

I turned away suddenly, tearing my eyes away from the light. Still the glare of it burned in my vision, a brand upon my eyelids. I felt my way around the side of the large church van parked beside me and pressed my back against it, sliding down to sit upon the ground. There, with the van between me and the brightness, I pressed my hands against my closed eyes and was still. As the light faded away I lingered still, huddled beneath the moon with the cold wind chasing my wrists and the murmur of voices muffled in the distance. I hugged my knees against my chest and stared upward, seeking the stars once more; when I found them this time I rested back my head and trained my eyes upon them, drinking them in. It might have been dim, but at least the starlight was real.

Real… oh, yes, it was real. But it was dying, too. I blinked, remembering what I had always known, and yet had somehow managed to forget. For I knew that the dimness of the stars was not merely a veil between earth and sky, but that the stars shone with a fading light, because they moved with the heartbeat of a fading world. Just as the vanishing moon reflected the light of a dying sun, and the oceans the glimmering glow of both; and just as every part of creation knew the groaning of death and sorrow—as with all of these, so it was with the stars, and so it was with me. I held no bitterness for the others and their comfort in the light. But somehow, in the aching that had made me a child again, I had glimpsed a beauty worth aching for… and when I had, my view of the things of this world could never be the same.

At last I heard the falling of footsteps and voices growing louder and nearer. I scrambled to my feet as the others wandered over to the place where I waited, finally having said their good-byes. They were still talking and laughing, and they took no notice of me, though somehow I didn’t mind. As the cold wind drove the shadows closer, everyone clambered into the van, ready at last to go home.

The cloud-wreathed moon hung above us as we drove through the darkness, and I huddled by the window and stared back at it where it loomed above the night like a lesser sun. I leaned my head against the pane, suddenly realizing that I was tired. Still I gazed at the moon as our journey went on, my thoughts wandering, as my mind grew more tired, to when I would at last be home.

What home? Only God knew which would gather me first: the home that claimed my wandering, or the home that stole my heart. Yet I knew, somehow, that my feet had longer yet to wander here, in the paths that wind between bitterness and brokenness and bind them in the end, at last, into some finished thing of Healing.

Until then, in the stealing sleepfulness of  the night, perhaps I would dream; if only for a little while, of the lights beyond the night -- stars that blaze like fire, as quick and fierce as a stab of silver.

 I was huddled over my psychology book, precariously situated up-top the stool beside our kitchen island. My window reflected the same near-autumn view it has framed since this morning; all of dove-gray and charcoal. A few feet from me, the dishwasher gargled menacingly from its own little corner, loudly proclaiming the fulfillment of its duties as the backdrop for my studies.

Until suddenly, it stopped. Stopped, utterly and completely. I was left with nothing but the sound of... nothing. From a gurgling, muted sort of roar to absolutely nothing at all.

Nothing.

Nothingness.

Nothing.

I lifted my eyes and looked out the window at the gray sky swarming over the trees, heart beating amain as my ears waited breathlessly for the trumpet sound to pierce the utter silence. For surely, that was to come next...? The awful blast, the terrible rending of the sky and the furling of it as a curtain, and then our longing fulfilled; our stealing away into the deep, beautiful mystery that is all of God's splendor, to be secret to us no longer. No more the jeweled veil of the heavens to stand as a shield between us and the terrible beauty of the Almighty, as the glory of our rapture ushers us into His infinity... no more the aching of this world, no more the shadows; everything, everything swept away in the mighty gust of the Eternal's beckoning. All the echoes of eternity to erupt in splendor in the mere breath of one beautiful, awful moment.


A single moment of silence.



Had I held my breath until the trumpet blast, my heart would by now have stopped beating. It never came.

 The house soon returned to sound, my heart to its sighing rhythm, and as soon as this is posted I shall return to studying for my Psychology exam. Yet, I find that I cannot do so quite the same. For in me is a heart within which beats something of eternity, that ever-aching thrum of longing, of tiredness, of yearning... of hope. Oh, the fluttering rhythm is always there: it never leaves, but it is so often lost beneath the mutterings of the Temporary Reality. Only when these mutterings are stilled may it again be noticed, standing out suddenly as a smattering of paint on a blank canvas or the plucking of a single harpstring. The moment of remembrance is pierced with an aching like nothing I have ever known, yet which is more familiar to me than anything, because I have always known it.

 Yet nothing, not even the aching, can quell the bursting joy that slashes through the numb shadows of our temporal existence when we seize the knowledge of Reality. For the reason we long, the reason we ache, is because we are straining for something Real—a beauty beyond our tactile mirrors and smoke. It is the ardent longing for the truth of Eternity that is not only our sorrow, but our solace. What we long for will not be held away forever: it will come, in a bounding, leaping dawn of Jubilee.

A single moment of silence—may every moment be so full of eternity.

I've seen the shadowlands. I've touched them, tasted them, known them, been a part of them... and all I want, all I want, is to hold the hearts that are breaking from the shadows. To love them with all the ferocity of my heart where no one else loves them at all; to bind up the broken pieces, to draw them into my arms and to keep them there. To keep them safe.

But I can't. I can't keep them safe, because I can't save them. And when the One who does save them draws them away from the reach of my arms, back into the brokenness that tears at their heart, it seems so wrong. It hurts to let them go. It hurts to let them hurt. And it doesn't stop hurting, because the love doesn't stop.

But it hurts my heart more than anything to realize that the reason I cannot willingly surrender them away, trusting them into the hands of Jesus as He takes them beyond the reach of my own, is that I don't love them enough. I don't love them enough to let them suffer through the pain that leads to their greater healing. I don't love them enough to let them be sharpened by the hurtful things, and smoothed by all the rough sandpaper edges around them. It's my own selfishness, my own weakness, that wants to hold them close and not let them experience the beautiful redemption of the shadows around them - because, for the time being, it means letting them experience the darkness.

I am learning to love them enough. And when I can't, Christ does. And as they walk away, back into the darkness of the shadows that will break for their light, I know that they go with a God who is greater than all of this - the beauty and the pain. No matter what.

I love you, Amber.

I search, search, here and there -
I search around everywhere.
I search, search, here and there -
There's no one, there's no one like Him.
(Oh, no!)

There's no one, there's no one like Jesus,
There's no one, there's no one like Jesus.
There's no one, there's no one like Jesus -
There's no one, there's no one like Him!

Naughty, incorrigible, hopeless, wayward, delightedly naughty Sparrow, sneaking away from the looming mountains of writing and music that must be attended to in order to curl up on the tippy-toppiest of them and watch the stars instead. Please rest assured that these ill manners are not common traits in her; no indeed, she displays a most perfect resilience in the face of responsibility, meeting such mountains politely while obligingly wielding the polite pick-axe and rubber grip boots so necessary to do the job correctly.

…Actually, Sparrow is quite certain that pick-axes are far outdated in the event of mountain-climbing, and wholly unconvinced that rubber grip boots have ever had any part to play in the activity whatsoever. Whatever the case, she has lately found herself far from resilient when facing her duties. Oh, dear, quite the opposite: early this week she suffered through a bout of exhaustion, attempting a heroic plunge into her creativities and accomplishing only a dismal slog. Once she had slogged (slogged! Slogged emphatically, I say!) for a number of days, her energy suddenly made a roaring comeback. She rose! She laughed, spitefully, at the plagues of yesterday; and turning staunchly to the sunrise, vowed she would not see the end of the week unaccomplished.

But instead of increasing her productivity to glorious heights, as such strokes of energy are known to do, this one instead gave Sparrow into the throes of a curious plight. She found, much to her dismay, that the energy would not content itself with any one endeavor. Upon sitting down at her keyboard with the idea of polishing up a song, she felt the distinct urge to run downstairs and pound out more of her novel. Once situated for the latter task, she discovered a discontent that would not be fulfilled until she had returned upstairs and extracted the details of her mother’s activities in the kitchen. This completed and on her way back downstairs, she was suddenly overwhelmed with curiosity as to what sort of weather the day held, and toddled out to the porch to amend her ignorance. When satisfied, she returned to her novel, only to be greeted by a nagging guilt; thus, convicted of her sins and repentant in the extreme, she returned to the music she had abandoned, to shower upon it all the love and nurturing it deserved. However, she was not seated for long before she was caught in the throes of hunger, and traversed to the kitchen in order to devour the result of her mother’s exploits.

…So the day continued, and such was the productivity of Sparrow. She ended the day with a whopping few sentences of her novel rewritten, a bit of work done on a song recording which, in the end, was lost in a sudden departure of electrical power due to a thunderstorm, and plenty of exercise as she traipsed restlessly from one end of the house to the other. Oh, and a new post on her blog, which highlights her most recent (and despairingly unproductive) activity—that is, stargazing.

Unfortunately, the clouds have been too rampant in the evenings for her to properly look at the stars; but she has done the next best thing, if not the greater thing, because in so doing she has gone beyond the limits of what she could see by herself. Whenever she is feeling particularly small or full of longing, Sparrow is fond of curling up to flip through pages upon pages of photos taken by NASA, pictures of stars and galaxies far beyond our little world. It gives her shivers, looking into the blackness filled with stars beyond stars, and beauty, and loveliness. It feels as if she will fall right into the page, into the spaces between the stars, and fall forever. Which is a very small feeling indeed.

But Sparrow will not keep the feeling all to herself. Here, though only a little, is some of the beauty in which she has  immersed her mind while remaining decidedly unaccomplished:

 This is Christ’s Kingdom within us, the hope and the longing combined into a burning purpose. We are made for more. We live for more, for something far beyond ourselves. We live for love beyond the offerings of this world, and in the hope of a beauty beyond the broken shadows that surround us. For we exist in a dim reflection, a world made of shattered mirrors that cannot compare to what Really Is—and yet we are so certain, so convinced in our brokenness that we see things clearly, heartbreakingly confident that we know things for what they really are.

 But when comes the New, and when all is Remade, the filthy, broken glass will crumble away to nothing, the shadows to Not; and the fog shall be rent as a curtain torn away and we shall see, finally see things for what they are. Beauty we have never dreamed of, the reality of Love finally felt by our bodies made new, the sight and sound and scent and taste and touch of eternal Newness; the murkiness of this shadow-world finally torn away from our eyes and the light of what is True bursting forth into our souls—breaking the dawn of a day that will never, ever end.

 But there is more to the restless longing. Because we, through Christ, have been redeemed from the shadows; ransomed from the captivation of the darkness, drawn back into the original purpose of our Creation—back into the More that is God Himself. But Fully More is still a promise, a promise for when Christ returns and we and the world are remade. For now, we remain here, left in the darkness in order to spread the light.

 …No, not left. Never abandoned. For though we long, though we ache, we cannot truly want. Wanting exists of emptiness, of absence, of need. We do not exist of emptiness; we exist because we are filled. Christ has filled us, freed us, redeemed us, and, in so doing, fulfilled us: already in Him our souls are made new. In Him we have the strength to endure, the love to survive, the purpose to go on. We have everything we need, and without need, we cannot truly want. But still we long; oh! we long, and we ache, and we break for the beauty of what is, for now, beyond our touch. The loveliness of everything we were created for.

 But it is not time. Not time, yet, to see the precious wonders limned by God’s hand far beyond the curtain of our sky; not time, for the Resurrection and the Remaking; not time, for full awareness of everything that Truly Is. God Is. This we know. And until the day when everything changes, knowing this is enough.

And until that day, my soul will sing itself to sleep: "The LORD is my Shepherd, I shall not want..."

I am so unworthy of grace.

In the light of all that God is, my imperfections cast shadows that cover everything I see. The frailty of my humanity stands out starkly, like a dark, twisted blemish cowering in the light. Cowering, but unable to hide—caught like a deer in headlights, stilled in the brilliant expanse of His righteousness.

And each time I catch a glimpse of myself, the brokenness is like a stab in the heart. How can I bear it? I long for the gloriousness of the light, the beauty of His Righteousness, and wish—oh, how I wish!—to reach out and hold some of it within myself. Not to claim the glory of it as my own—but to somehow, anyhow, belong to the glory. Instead of this wretched shadow that I see.

And yet…

Compared to the shadow of everything I am, the light, the utter radiance of my Jesus, stands out like a beaming beacon in the fog. Looking out of the darkness, my darkness, a single glimpse of His beauty steals my breath away. The very imperfection that makes me broken is the shadow that sets off, in some small way, the utter glory of the light.

And somehow, because of Jesus, the light overcomes the shadows. Chases my darkness away. I can never deserve that. Jesus knows it—but He died for me anyway. And these shadows that I cast, broken and imperfect as they are, are no longer shadows of wretchedness.

Instead, by the perfect love of God, they have become shadows of Grace.

What is more difficult than the unknown? It is a darkness, a taunting darkness that tempts the idea of hopelessness and baits the selfishness of human hearts. It knows it can win; it can, it can, because darkness is only the birthplace of fear.

But it is the aloneness that cuts the deepest. The loneliness that crumbles like a castle built around you, shimmering like stone and then sifting away as shifting sand. When pieces fall, too small to be captured, to broken to be put together again — because even if they were, the walls rebuilt would not be unbroken. They would only be hiding their brokenness.

And it is now. Now is when I desperately need my Jesus.

I’m out here in the dark, all alone and wide awake—
Come and find me.
I’m empty and I’m cold, and my heart’s about to break—
Come and find me.
I need you to come here and find me,
‘Cause without you I’m totally lost.
I’ve hung a wish on every star,
It hasn’t done much good so far.
I can only dream of you—
Wherever you are.

I AM NEVER ALONE.

I live in a world where people are experiencing harm and hurt at every turn. Devastating circumstances, frightening realities, self-destruction, chaos... this is the world we live in. And in the middle of it am I—nestled never-precariously in the arms of God, never having been touched by some the darkness that some people face, currently held safely away from the black-hole battle for life and hope that some people are fighting every day of their lives. I have been wrapped in a cocoon of tender mercies as I have changed and grown; ever sheltered, ever… safe.

And yet, I feel always a connection to the hopelessness. Trudging through these shadowlands, I am not alone, and every day is a journey of encountering souls. Some of them are beaming beacons of light, drawing my gaze ever forward to eternity and Jesus. These friends are truly treasures of God, and they bless me beyond imagining. And though they are touched by the shadow, as am I, as we walk through these fleeting lands together, we walk in the light of Christ that shines through one another.

It is the journey of a lifetime, this walk through the shadowlands. But it is not of eternity. And when the shadows finally fade, and we have made it past the final frontier, our weary feet will be done with wandering, and we will be swept up in the everlasting embrace of Love Himself.

Until then,

We bear the light of the Son of Man,
So there’s nothing left to fear.
And I’ll walk with you in the shadowlands,
Til the shadows disappear.