We Never Saw His Eyes Open

A FACT and a reality of experience. We never saw our son’s eyes open.

They were neither ever open, so we could see them, nor did they ever open to this life.

***

One week prior to the anniversary of our second son’s stillbirth we’re gratefully reflective for his life, having done our grieving. We know we will go to him one day. That’s satisfying; a hope beyond needing answers now.

Having never seen his eyes open there’s now the mystery captive in our hearts for what we may still experience: meeting him face to face as God had originally designed him, far from the wrinkles of his (and our) humanity.

We didn’t peer into the windows of his soul, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t have a soul. We’ve just had to delay the meeting of our souls.

Grace has given us the fortitude to plan for a happy day to come — Nathanael’s heaven day — and our heaven day, when we, too, will finally meet Jesus and find our son.

We never saw his eyes open, yet we did get to hold him at rest; his body at timeless peace and his tiny heart in eternal repose.

And though his eyes never opened to us, we did feel his weight, we did hold his hands in ours, we did get to wash him and dress him and cuddle him. We’re so thankful.

The prayers of the faithful — of many in Lakeside church, as well as the church of the globe — held us and our boy and our family aloft before God. We believe in intercession; that power of the faithful to do what only the faithful would do. We were carried by prayer.

His eyes would not open and we prepared ourselves for that eventuality. The day of Nathanael’s stillbirth was not a blur. It was a real day experienced truly in the flourishing splendour of a crushing reality. We’re so glad we experienced it together. It was our day, a precious day, a special day, notwithstanding its horror.

Through Nathanael, though his eyes never opened to us, God gave us a piece of eternity — a nostalgic foretaste — that we shall cherish ever more.

God alone knows our destinies. God alone is to be trusted. He is good. He will not fail in glorifying his holy and majestic name. We’re so blown away by creation, the stars, the universe; these will be as nothing compared to the heavenly realm.

We can wait.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

Love Is Truth In Action, Acted Out Lovingly

Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

— 1 John 3:18 (NIV, 2011)

WHAT is love? An age-old question. My thought here is love is truth in action, acted out lovingly. Let me attempt to convince you, by making the following statements, and by supporting those statements with my understanding of what love truly is — love in and among the common people, as a communicated reality of divine delight in relationship.

Love wrestles with the truth. When ‘truth’ is presented it’s to be wrestled with; this is the antecedent to growth. Many times we shirk the wrestling to be done. We shrink in fear of exposure. That we don’t have the mettle. But just a little more fortitude brings a ton of blessing of, “I can do this!” Love wrestles with the truth because it cannot rest until justice is done.

Love must act on the truth. It cannot sit on by and let the truth meander, pretending that falsity will do. It cannot. Love is courage to speak the truth as well as the courage to face the truth. These are both potentially scary concepts, but they’re never scary when they’re lovingly deployed. But such crucial conversations require great skill; great heart; great empathy and understanding. Truth never damages, only ‘truth’ haphazardly delivered without love.

Truth is wedded to love. Imagine them walking back down the aisle having been through the rites of marriage (from time immemorial). Neither is male nor female, but they’re the accompanying set for life. When we want truth like Jesus did, and we want to love as Jesus did, life has all the right input. God gives us truth and love to give. And our truth and love, wedded together as we use them, both interdependent on each other, come via the vine of God; we are his branches and the life force is the truth-and-love set.

Truth acts lovingly. For truth to be harsh would make truth untrue in character. It would be truth missing the mark: a fatal dichotomy. Truth is lovingly deployed. The hardest of hits, then, so far as truth is concerned, is received well. So truth can be relied upon to deliver in trustworthy ways without undue angst; the ripples of anxiety, shockwaves of harm — that damage trust and respect in a relationship.

Truth is heaven brought to earth. Can we imagine the communications in the heavenly realm? Pure truth. Pure love. Truth, in the heavenly halcyon heights, wedded to love as it is, we imagine being perfect. And there are those moments here in earth as we feel them; moments when we feel genuinely impacted by the sweet touch of God’s holy Presence. Truth cannot fail love; perfectly arrayed it’s inspiring and ever building up in nature and stature.

***

Love is truth in action, acted out lovingly. In truth and love there are no losers, only winners.

Truth and love, united and resolved, build up and inspire growth, joy, and hope.

In truth and love is both safety and growth.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

Why the Best Prayers Are Inexpressible Prayers

“Right thoughts of God are able to ravish the heart… The life, the glory, the blessedness, the soul-satisfying goodness that is in God are beyond all expression.”

— John Bunyan (1628–1688)

RAVISH is an interesting word. I assumed it meant “dismember,” but it actually means “overwhelm,” “overcome,” and even “delight.” Bunyan’s quote leads us to agree; God is good!

God is good. But what does this really mean? What does it actually say? Perhaps we can only unpack what this actually means and says when we enter into the Presence of the Lord… by prayer; by listening into the Spirit by silent contemplation, by praising him prayerfully in worship, and by being ensconced in the Spirit.

When we meditate on the worth of God within life, and principally within our own lives, we cannot help but be struck with the concordance of goodness and grace under God.

Prayer Illuminates God

Right thoughts and right feelings of God illuminate God in his goodness and grace.

We don’t always come before God in prayer thinking right thoughts and feeling right feelings. But if we can redirect our thoughts and feelings aright, God will illuminate our sense for his goodness and grace.

Think; God can ravish the heart. We want that. We want the experience of being overwhelmed spiritually. When we consider God in all truth we’re quickly sent into raptures of delight for who he is. Focus on God is a matter of prayer. The best of prayer focuses purposefully on the goodness and grace of God.

Prayer, Real Prayer, Is Easier Than We Think

Prayer, I want to suggest, is much more a spiritual media implicit within our being than it is utterances of what we consciously say or even think.

The Holy Spirit is alive and well in us, but we’re not always so in touch. Prayer is the medium of divine connection, by partaking; by the simple observance, contemplatively, within the heart of God. But prayer is also God speaking directly into us, by conviction mostly. And, by prayer of all forms, implicit and explicit, God wants us alive to his goodness and grace, for in such cognisance we can only thrive in hope, peace, and joy.

Prayer, as it resides in practicing the Presence of God, is inexpressible. As our soul spends time getting drenched in the spiritual gaiety of the Lord, we grow in relationship. None of this is doctrinal in importance, because first and foremost it’s an experience of life. But it must be able to be explained doctrinally. It just stands to reason that focus on the goodness and grace of God magnify him to the point our praise is inexpressible.

Real prayer is inexpressible because it’s pregnant in praise. We neither speak nor listen, but abide in thoughtfulness about God; his goodness and grace in our lives.

So the best prayers are beyond expression. The best prayers are ineffable and inexpressible, because praise proclaims a passionately private proclamation.

The best prayers can also be sorrowful. Because they’re so deep these, too, are inexpressible. The deeper we’re touched by God the more speechless we become.

The truest prayers truly surpass words. They reside in the heart and are worn on the soul.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

Just How Much Does God Love Me?

LOTS. I often ask my wife, “How much do you love me?” She always says, “Lots!” And if she can sense I’m being especially cheeky or vulnerable she says, “Lots and lots…” She doesn’t want to make it more than jest because it’s plain that she loves me loads. How can she love me any more than she does?

When we seriously ask God how much he loves us, we need to open our Bibles. In the Old Book there’s verse after verse alluding to God’s loving wisdom; how he designed us from before the time we entered our mother’s womb (Psalm 139); that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for each of us (Romans 5:8).

God wanted us before we were born. Christ died for us that we might live.

Can we even begin to imagine how special to God that we each are; how uniquely designed and formed and blessed of life?

We will never quite comprehend just how special we are to God. But God will reveal that to us in Glory. We may think we’re not that special if another seven billion plus souls are equally special. According to the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) one-hundred-seven (107) billion people have ever lived. That was the 2011 figure, by the way. That means over one-hundred billion are already dead. All those people have gone into God’s care, and many of them are in heaven.

God loved every single one. He oversaw each of them as they were created. He oversaw their lives in every detail. He knew how each would live. He knew beforehand what choices they’d make; for him or against him. And yet he still loved each and every one. He loved each one that much that he gave them their will.

He loves you no less than his own Son, Jesus Christ, of Nazareth. And Jesus loved you that much he went to the cross for you. You’re not common. You’re singular. You will meet God one day, all on your own. It’s just us and God when we depart this life. Of course, it won’t remain that way; we imagine that we’ll reacquaint with many we know and love who’ve departed.

Recording artist, Nathan Tasker, says in his music, “God cannot love you more, and will not love you less.” God’s love is the fullest possible expression of unconditional love; and, especially as we consider how sinful we are, God’s love is crazy. It makes no sense to us, except if we’re a parent — then we have some idea of the craziness of love that becomes unconditional.

God’s love: a crazy mystery. Crazy: how much we’re loved. Mystery: why we’re loved. Jesus explains both.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

Meditating in the Living, Breathing, Walking Flow of Life

INCORPORATING the Word of God, and the Presence of the Holy Spirit, into the living of our lives: taking a word, a line, a sentence, a verse, or even a passage of text, and building it into our daily life.

That’s what this is about: drawing the eternal Word into the experience of our lives.

… And that experience is the Presence, being with us, us God-conscious, living real.

As we blend a sunrise or a sunset with God’s divine narrative, or consider a cooling breeze in the shade on a hot summer’s day with the grief imparted from loss, God speaks. God enters the truth with us, and we receive by listening. God is sensed real. Experience is ever pertinent.

By our experience of reality, with his Word listed on our hearts, we live existentially in the rawness of life, which commands the reformation of our character; grow or die.

Meditation is to be our existential mood. A prayerful kind of God-consciousness, meditation in the living, breathing, walking flow of life is the reflexive space within reflection that we all need. By reflexive space, I mean self-reflection as we observe ourselves as others or God might (through his Word), but not in a harmfully judgmental sort of way. We’re after unique insights that only God can elucidate. Our Lord never speaks in a condemning way; only for our learning.

Even in the busy swarm of life there are moments of surreal silence, where a loneliness is ever real, even where life is noisy and chaotic. This is why a living, breathing, walking form of meditation is the crucial stratagem for adding God into our emptier life spaces so otherwise fearful stimuli may be removed. When we have a moment’s respite it’s easier, actually, to enter into a heart space with God than wallow in our darkness. We all have a darkness that we’re tempted to go into.

The living, breathing, walking meditation considers how bizarre life is; it wrestles with the cogency of reality without fighting it. What is may be accepted. A Word of hope is introduced or conjured up from a previous reading. Or, there’s a Word carried in our heart. We learn early on, as we bring a cognisance of God with us into and through our daily moments, that we’re free to conjoin meditation with our moments.

Here are some of the ways that I’ve been able to bring God-consciousness to bear in my living, breathing, walking moments:

Ø Out in nature, on transport, in a new environment, or when imagining other parts of the world, I ponder the wonder in the plainly observable. Pondering wondrous things elicits praise. Nothing of us is in the way.

Ø Downtime is key reflection time for me. I try to think creatively. Even times in the bathroom can be put to good use.

Ø When we’re able to disappear from life in the world for a short time we’re in prime location for a Spirit encounter (and may they be plural!).

Ø Times of exposure, where there’s the flicker of embarrassment, or when the emotions are piqued, I ask God mindfully to still my heart before responding. Reflective space, where God makes himself real in our experience, can be found even at times of great pressure.

Ø I try to see what I do not readily see. “Lord, show me what I’m missing.”

Ø When my responses are intuitively graceful I know they’ve not come from the unhealed hurt me that dwells in me. I’m reminded these responses are from the Source of grace, himself.

Ø Reading my Bible, I seek direction on where to look and what to look for, and I try not to be swayed too much by human logic.

Engaging momentarily in meditative reflection enhances our experience of the Presence of God.

Meditating was made for the unclaimed moment. Accept those moments. Create those moments. Fill those moments with God.

Take a Word into your moments to make your moments worthwhile.

A Word is a caption of God-life for overwhelming perspective.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

I have written this article for use on Mustard Seed Associates’ Godspace.

Zechariah 9 – Abundance of the Kingdom

A meditation to Zechariah 9:1-17.

WHOSE king looks to God alone? The people most blessed.

The Davidic hope of Zechariah — ultimately Jesus of Nazareth — is that humble king, not seeking his own glory, or to reign in his own strength, but to reign under God’s almighty power, by submission… submission to God, so all of life may be ordered as the Kingdom decrees.

Jesus came not to show us how to rule and reign in power, but how to reconcile and restore everything in weakness. For, in weakness is power. A gentle and compelling power.

Zechariah 9:1-8 is a message of God’s righting of wrongs; of the justice he was exacting over the nations for his Kingdom’s sake. From verse 9 we see the ushering in of the King.

Jesus, the coming King, is bringing peace, and, through him, the “prisoners” will be restored to double their original estate, highlighting the principle of Job (v. 42:10).

He will give to those who call him by Name every good thing of power, but only through weakness will they be able to access such power. Only in humility, and honesty, and in adroit humiliation. But their power will be to them as a sword, able to strike wonderful blows of loving truth for the Kingdom, for this sword is about the truth, and justice, and fairness. And through truth, justice, and fairness is peace.

***

The power of the Lord is his own power. And when Jesus was here, on this earth, not even he used his own power how he could have.

The Lord will come! His Judgment will “appear” according to his timing and his way. Not one moment sooner. Not one iota different to the original design.

Yet his Judgment comes into each of our lives. We accept it and are blessed. We resist it, and, spiritually, we’re banished. The Lord’s Judgment is truth. It’s right. It’s appropriate. And, it’s designed for our growth and betterment.

The Lord reigns!

When he reigns over our hearts, he reminds us that his power is not a power for us to use or abuse. But when we are his, and we respond by a notable submission to his will, which is to allow the Lord to defend — in his own way — we’re blessed ultimately in our weakness.

The King who rides into Jerusalem on a lowly donkey shows us how to allow God to judge. He who is the bringer of peace focuses on peace, and he leaves the foolish to war.

God is no Lord of violence, but of peace. But the violent will one day be judged.

What matters most to God is that we respond like Jesus.

The abundance of God’s Kingdom is peace. Peace God gives such that we would give peace to others. God’s Kingdom, come.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

Words and Prayers of Comfort for Today

THERE are times and seasons where life is terrible, lamentable, unbelievably painful; tragic beyond previous experience. Times and seasons where we’re learning the sheer cavernous depths of seeming death in life. Times and seasons where a life ending precedes a life beginning. Times, prior to, ‘when life can begin again’.

There is a sanctity in the pain if we take the Lord there with us. Fondly we’ll reminisce over such times; but that is destined locale for a time months or years away. Let it come without pining for it. But let us be empathic in the pining.

A personal prayer for the person whose prayer needs to be heard and answered:

Lord,

Allow me to be comforted by your prophets, your apostles, your Job, and your David. Show me in the pain of those biblical exemplars that I am, indeed, in esteemed company.

Help me to know your Presence by feeling you present there with me, as I bear these trials of helplessness, hopelessness, travail, and despair.

Revive me the day after my despairing.

Breathe your Holy Spirit through me, afresh, from within my inner being. Make hope rise inside me. Protect me from further attacks of the enemy.

And make me to hope upon your deliverance — that soon, someday very soon, I would overcome this grief. Help me a little more with each passing day to accept the realities that face me. Help me to face these realities with your grace empowering my patient, enduring response. Help me to be still in this crisis.

Amen.

There are many circumstances of life that can floor us. The gentle and therapeutic Presence of our Majesty-on-High is inside us as believers. That sweet therapy of his Presence is constantly available. We must be God-conscious, which is a consciousness of belief that he, Father-Son-Spirit, is with us, indelibly and with Spiritual reality, helping.

The comfort of him who comforts us is comfort enough for the moment. And for each moment, hence, faith is in resting in the comfort of the Comforter.

Comfort means “with strength,” or to strengthen, support or console. The Holy Spirit, as Comforter, breathes life to strengthen us through consolation — meeting us wherever we’re at. We cannot lose even in this loss.

Comfort is safety and a no-lose situation. We get what we need when we need comfort, knowing that getting comfort from God is what we need.

God knows the needs of our moment, and our moments are helped when we accept he will meet our needs.

A personal prayer for the person whose prayer needs to be heard and answered:

Oh Lord, comfort me.

Bring about your sweetest understanding ear, your warmest delight in me, and your cosiest hug. Meet me. Warm me from the inside out. Make these things I pray for, real in me, this moment.

In Jesus’ compassionate name, I pray, Amen.

One day soon hope will return, and, without effort, joy and peace will prevail. And love will again be foundational upon our hearts, where fear, again, finds no place.

One day, soon. Tomorrow, even perhaps today.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

God Is At Work Through Us When We’re At Work For Him

PURPOSE is big on everyone’s agenda, yet it’s bigger on some people’s than it is on others. If you’re someone who’s constantly driving forward on a pilgrimage of purpose, compelled through the maze toward meaning, then this article might be helpful.

One thing I learned from a pastoral mentor, a good old-fashioned supervisor, was this elementary truth: what might seem basic, or easy, or what can be done nonchalantly, is not necessarily insignificant. These following thoughts are my reflections on that kernel of an idea — what seems basic is not necessarily insignificant.

What seems easy to us, perhaps what we’ve honed into an art form over many years of practice, may be mastery to others; mastery they marvel at. They receive so much more at times than we expected to give them. God makes us feel blessed, yet we may scratch our heads… “I didn’t do much.”

But there’s a second truth latticed into the first: what might seem basic, plainly ordinary, involves also the Holy Spirit.

God is at work when we’re at work for him. Trust his Holy Spirit to do something surprising, unexpected; miraculous. God works ceaselessly, yet with such peace that his loving creativity is pure divine joy. God works always, yet he works as if he were resting. Love is pure joy.

So, when we come to the truth of God’s work in the work we do for him, we acknowledge that he knows what the other person or people need; those needs we can know nothing truly about. This is why we can preach a sermon and someone can be blessed by what we did not say. The Holy Spirit took our bidding and made it his own — what a blessing that is for all parties!

What we do in our proud moments — to downplay what is significant as insignificant — because it seems so basic and uninteresting — is we don’t acknowledge the role the Holy Spirit plays.

What a wonderful thing it is to do something kind for a person, something rather easy that blesses them. Such a kindness is a blessing to them, but it boomerangs back to us as well. We, too, are blessed.

The Holy Spirit is engaged whenever we begin to do God’s work. He makes the simplicity of what we do into something elegant in another person’s life.

The Holy Spirit, alone, God’s Spirit of Jesus, is to be praised when he makes what is so simple into a blessing.

God is at work through us when we’re at work for him.

Likewise, God is at work in us when we’re at work for him.

Nothing we do for God is ever insignificant.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

Haggai 1 – Repentance Reconciles Revival

“And the people feared the Lord…”

— Haggai 1:12b (NIV)

Revival is always preceded by a great repentance (2 Chronicles 7:14). As people, or as the people, respond to God’s eternal voice — for righteousness and justice over the land — they’re blessed in the earthly realms by a blessed obedience for their acts and impetus for further obedience — the means of revival, be it personal or corporate or national. In other words, they’ve been given more power to obey for their obedience of repentance.

The obedience to repent brings about God’s Spiritual power to continue to obey.

The people of Haggai’s time were too busy building their own houses and their own lives to build the Lord’s house. They were inwardly focused and it dismayed the Lord that his own people would be so self-centred.

Haggai prophesies to Zerubbabel (the Governor of Judah) and Joshua (the high priest), admonishing them as representatives of the people — both in terms of secular State and spiritual State. Judah is a State of the Divine — a people of God. Their leaders (Zerubbabel and Joshua) are both addressed. This oracle goes out to all the people. And all the people respond. The nation responds. And something special happens: revival. Something is stirred in their spirits… Zerubbabel is stirred to repentance and action. So, too, Joshua. And “the remnant of the people.”

The book of Haggai teaches us that there’s a blessed empowering in our turning back to God.

The blessing we automatically think of is we’re rightly oriented to life again. That’s only part of it. Being blessed in the returning means not only are we rightly oriented in life again, we’re also empowered to obey.

We cannot obey God unless we have repented, but repentance, in itself, is a kind of first fruit of obedience.

The people of Judah learned that, in fearing God once again, in returning their hearts back to him, his Holy Spirit would empower them to be rightly motivated to work on the rebuilding of the Temple. Their obedience to turn back was blessed by God through an empowering for further obedience.

Obedience is blessed with power to obey.

The more we obey God, the more we can obey him.

To repent is to experience God’s power. To repent is to advocate God’s truth. God’s truth is magnified in us in our repenting, and God’s truth bequeaths power to us.

When we obey God we receive God’s power to do what he wills us to do.

When we repent, God makes us willing and able to do the things he’s planned for us from eternity to do.

Revival depends first on repentance.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

2 Reasons Why Your Life Has Purpose and Meaning Today

YOU may have had enough of life to this point. You may be having a wow of a time. You might have landed on your feet eventually or suddenly. You may be so over life as it stands. You may be ready to move on. You may even find yourself in that extraordinary position of being where you never dreamt of being.

The truth is you are where you are, as am I; as each person in the rest of the world is.

We have little say over where we’re at in life, now, as we need to accept it this moment, but we’ve had a say in where we’ve come to be. Still, life is what it is, and we hardly had a say over the vast majority of things that characterise our lives, to this point.

Notwithstanding the things that we cannot control — those things we’re wise to simply accept now, and moving forward — there is great purpose and meaning to your life… to all our lives.

There are two compellingly irrefutable reasons:

Your Day — This Day — Is Yours — Is God’s (See Psalm 118:24)

This is such an amazing fact you’ll hardly believe its simplicity as you begin the journey of exploring it. This day, this very time of your life, as one twenty-four hour period, is where history is written.

Your personal and remarkable history.

Think of the power of your choice. You’re writing a book, this very day. Every choice, every thought, every act, word, and deed is written in the history of you and your life. That is significant. That is worthy of your attention. That impels you toward purpose and meaning. Nothing you think, say or do is void of significance.

That may bring pressure, but equally it brings hope!

Your Destiny — Coming to You — Coming to All — Soon (See Revelation 21:5)

This is something that can be taken from no one: one’s eternal destiny. We shall all die. And we all get to choose not if we’ll return to God, but where and in what capacity. We’re far from home. Yet home is just over the horizon. Your life is fleeting. Mine or yours could be over today. We just don’t know.

A decision for Jesus is purpose and meaning for the very minute, even the second. We make that choice and we blessed in all eternity, because we start to live not simply for now, but for the now to come! That now will last and last and last. It’s so opposite to this now. And that now will not only last eternity, it will have no pain, no tears, no suffering, trials, and suffering; just blissful joy.

Your day and your destiny: an eternal purpose and meaning for eternity.

Your day is pregnant with possibility and your destiny heaves with hope.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

God, What Are You Like?

“WHAT are you like, God?” I said in my mind as I sat in a theology seminar. God didn’t answer. Not audibly on any account at all. But I mused that if God were to speak in a language that we know, he might say to us, “I’m incomprehensible to you, and always will be… as I have said, I am that I am.”

He might also say, “Does that help you?” And, (God already knowing our answer), we might otherwise say, “No, that doesn’t help much at all,” to which he might be expected to answer without an answer. Silence. We’re left in a conundrum.

But we’re looking in the wrong place for the answer. Perhaps the answer is self-evident in history. We look to the cross. We look to the resurrection. We take a look at Jesus’ life. We look to the Holy Spirit’s work in preparing the way of the Lord through the Prophets. We must also look to the Lord of Creation.

“What are you like, God?”

God says through the history of the world, in his Word, “Look at my Son.”

Jesus’ witness gives us some clues. Yet there is something of a limitation to how much we might know Jesus’ life. There are the limits of our understanding and there’s the limit to what might be understood. We read of Jesus’ compassion for the vulnerable so we know he’s compassionate. We read of Jesus’ merciful forgiveness so we know he’s gracious even (especially even) when he’s the one being assaulted. We read of Jesus’ grip on justice, so we know he’s righteous. We read of his miracles of healing, so we know he’s got divine power, and even actually Divine.

Our compassion, forgiveness and justice wavers, yet God’s never does. We have never seen God, but we have seen God’s works. We have never touched God, but he has touched us. And, though God has transformed us from old life to new, we have no idea how his power has wrought such a thing. As life is a mystery, so, it seems, is God. Yet creation tells us that God created the world and sustains it.

God has made himself known in and through the person of Jesus Christ.

Everything we know about God will line up in the Lord Jesus. God cannot disagree with himself. God is both simpler than we imagine — by far — and so far beyond our comprehension. God is the simplest being and comprehensive beyond comprehension. More completely mysterious than any concept or thing, ever. But realer than anything.

We can know God if we know Jesus, but we cannot know Jesus unless we read and study the Bible. God reveals Jesus to us through the Word. God reveals his will to us through prayer. All other things may be conjecture. But anytime we think we know God better than another person we ought to check our thinking.

***

The more we know about God the more we may feel we don’t know him at all. But that just makes us what to know him more.

We cannot know God unless we’ve been gifted a personal relationship with him. (A gift is given and it cannot be acquired any other way, so it’s no real credit to us.)

It’s a healthy question to continue to ask: “God, what are you like?”

The more we know the less we feel comfortable with what we know. And that’s okay. May God ever be a mystery. A thrill in the chase of wonder until life makes way for death and we hence met him face-to-face.

When we continue asking “God, what are you like?” we can expect to continue to be led by his Holy Spirit.

Oh, to know the Father’s Jesus,

And the gospels, trustworthy and true,

Oh, to know this Jesus,

And to follow him no matter what I do.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

Holy Spirit – Companion for An Untenable Soul Loneliness

GRACE has an answer for every suffering that threatens to level us. Grace. Simply grace. Grace is the murmur of the Holy Spirit spoken irretrievably out of the heavens, into the created spaces of earth, into the spaces of peace and holiness within our experience, articulated into our hearts resting in our souls.

Grace flees every vexatious situation with an exilic eternality, but as soon as humility returns via repentance grace returns as if it were eternally present — as it is.

The beauty of this grace is it’s the portent of the Holy Spirit — a transactional dimensionality — where God is immediately present, there, with us, in our spaces.

The Holy Spirit is irretrievably there, right there, with us, eternally, as we seek the solace of God in our soul loneliness; this is the soul at rest in its existential truth, for ever away from home, given a home of transience on earth.

Being alive has the characteristic of being away from what is truly home. We’re never truly at harmony with our experience, yet, with the Holy Spirit indwelling our experience, grace makes something pleasantly urgent of our experience; call it hope.

Hope makes out of our soul’s loneliness the abiding belief that all will be good.

When such a feeling abides we’re graced with the contentment that surpasses all understanding. Finally, there is the felt promise of the Holy Spirit. Felt. Acknowledged. God with us!

Again, it is hope that we may call it. Peace is its by-product. And a joy unattained otherwise. There is no gold nor silver over the face of the earth — any wealth of possession or fame — that could compare with what has now been deposited within our hearts, resting upon our souls.

Beauty is amazing when we have the cognisance of God’s Presence, there, in us, activating our spirit sense. Beauty is captivated and approached and apprehended.

Beauty has at last graced our shores, and our experience of life — abiding even in the soul’s acknowledged loneliness — is grand from then on. Such is hope.

Hope is that piece of beauty that transcends all experience. From hope come peace, joy, and a satisfying cacophony of blessing.

The Presence of the Holy Spirit magnifies hope and brings it to bear over our existence. The indwelling of such an experience for life has dramatic effect. We’ll never be the same ever again. Praise God.

A blessed companion for life and loneliness is grace; the felt Presence of the Holy Spirit abiding within.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

Photo Credit: David Campbell.