"The Edge"

     I have struggled with fear the better portion of my life. Fear of death, and yet, ,a quieter version, fear of life. Self-preservation has transferred to my relationship with God, and I wonder at times, can't I serve Him and still be safe? All the while, God has been calling me out onto a ledge for some time, like the edge of a great cliff that drops into who knows what. He's calling me into radical trust, the cost of a great work.

                          I'm not talking about works. 
       I am talking about a laid down life. I am talking about the price that people pay to serve God in closed countries, or give up familiarity to take nations for the gospel. I know if I raise children that love God I have done a great service, but I want intimacy, the fruit of trust, born of a seed formed by relinquishing control. As I was worshiping earlier, poetry began to brew in my mind.
      I hadn't written poetry in years, but I had to get it out. It's my journey, it's my burden that would weigh nothing if I would give it away. I let Paul read it and he said, "I like it, but it's deep." It came from a deep place. I wanted to share it, to share my "inch by inch" journey and where it has gotten me. I find myself lost in the mystery, still afraid, but my entire life taken up by all I've ever desired- unconditional love. I haven't arrived, and the consensus of those gone before me is that I never will until I meet my God face to face. But, to walk with Him on earth, to have a piece of Heaven in the land of the living, it is what I am living for. To the edge, I will never stop pursuing you.



The edge, it calls to me: “Who are you? And, how will you ever know if you never come closer?”

The edge, it beckons me: “What have you really known until now?"

It intrigues me: “Is safety so fulfilling for you?”

It baffles me: “You hate where you stand, and yet, you will not move?”

It challenges me: “Will you make peace with what lies just beyond?”

I travail. Is death down there?

Yes: The deaths of fear and comfort, not long time friends of any history maker I have ever heard of.
Is there life?
 Would death even exist if not for present life?

The edge of existence is teeming with the thrill of all that is unknown; an invisible force that whispers, “Come closer.” Even if I were to stand mere millimeters from the drop off, it would still not be satisfied. This realization proves the place at which my life has been lived out empty and void of meaning, for it has never asked anything of me.

“Come closer."

 The edge calls-beckons-intrigues-baffles-invites-challenges. For what can safety satisfy but enemies to a soul created for abandon?

The edge is unmoving. It fixates upon my weak will and does nothing more, but it’s enough. I wonder, How is it so captivating? How is it so elusive?

I respond to the storm in my soul, audibly addressing my vantage point, “I can’t do this.”
But, the edge does not define me. Instead, it asks who I am, then I can stay or go, deciding for myself.

Feet planted firmly, I am a calloused and frightened child. Yet I call to it, “Why do you even exist?”
I pretend otherwise, withering within, eternally aware that I was created to defy gravity, with one foot in the realm of the living and another in death, protesting it all the same.

Logic lingers in the depths of me, would you willingly die for a mystery?

After determining nothing eliminates the edge, I acknowledge it once more- or perhaps it acknowledges me? “Come closer.”

My entire body quakes in agony, my feet cemented in familiarity. It’s painful to stay and painful to obey. But, I have to see. I have to know.

     Closer, and closer I come. My heart bursts into vibrant flame, confirming this is the purpose for which I have been created.
      Apathy consumes my mind; it says pain is too great a price. But, I wonder, then, what my life is worth? Pleasure, like life and death, cannot exist outside pain. Standing steps away from the edge I wrestle with double-mindedness. This is why I must respond. This is why I cannot stay in cement for fear of the future. This is why I have to let loose and free fall into the mystery, because certainty is a much slower death.

I imagine myself parched beyond recognition, and in many ways, I am.
I imagine I am filthy, and in many ways, I am that, too.

The edge is a crystal pool of purity, that of which my waste cannot compete. It is freedom beyond my wildest dreams, and yet every step I take towards it I am taming myself to trust.

Am I going to die?, I often wonder as I drop to my knees and crawl through inhibition and shame.
Am I going to live?, I have wondered every other day, charging the former question with energy and ambition.

Though the edge is so often a pigment of my imagination, a portrait of the struggle, and merely a metaphor of my journey, mortality truly exists there. In my cement shoes, I will someday die. Or dangling like a flag from the edge, delighted and free, I will also someday let go. The question is, in my short time on earth, where will I choose to stand? In the unknown or known? In freedom or captivity? In safety or surrender?

My answer weighs a lifetime. It’s the fragment of truth that fear cannot bear, that logic cannot grasp, and even my heart questions in the driest territories- that I am an eternal being, created for the edge of eternity, my existence beyond hinging on how I respond.

Anyone as dry as I am craves with compulsion the water flowing through the crevices of the edge.
Anyone as emptied as I am can see that it is an insane place to be at rest, but necessary.
Anyone as desperate as I am can see that senseless surrender is the only choice to make amid a logical graph of countless conclusions.

“Come closer.”

Step by step, I will. I’m coming, sometimes crawling. I ask my legs if they’re moving, and a milli-portion of a millimeter in this place is praiseworthy. I am frightened, but I won’t live in cement. I cannot know joy if I do not know pain, or life if I cannot confront death.

The edge doesn’t exist for pain’s sake, and certainly not death’s either. It is there because it is, because it always has been. And, since the beginning of eternity I have waited my turn to accept or deject its invitation, to respond to its call, and attempt to tame my answers with nothing other than a confident hope that if I fight through the several feet of fear, life’s greatest battle has already been won.

Then, when I get there, I will hang off the side. I will bask in the sun, and rake my fingers through streams of living water. I will rest with no safety restraints, laughing at how death has no mastery over me anymore. My old friend Fear will visit and ask how I do so well, so close to death. He'll challenge me, and I’ll look down and see where I’m sitting, or lying, or hanging off the edge and wonder how I became so reckless a being. I’ll probably cry sometimes, too. It’s better than cement, though. And, if I happen to tip forward, loose my grip, or take a chance and dive into the glory of a glittering, sunbathed abyss, I’ll remind myself I was halfway there all along. That my life was well lived, worth every sacrifice it took to will myself to that edge, where I thought life would end but as it turned out, it had only begun.

Eating the Fruit of Trust

I have needed breakthrough in my life a couple hundred times.  Since I’ve been married to Paul we have many times walked right onto the ledge of what God was asking us to do, and it’s been scary. I am not a faith warrior. I am going to say it again, I have never thought that faith was a gift of mine. I have wept on the couch, locked myself in the bathroom so my kids wouldn’t see me melt down, and in the car when I would be moving to a new house or city, yet again. It’s not all about money. Sometimes it’s been about my health, or my kid’s health. Sometimes it’s been about Paul finding a job that he doesn’t hate, or whether or not we should move again. I’ve had to force myself into the secret place to get the courage to tell my kids that their grandparents had been killed in a car accident. When people would ask me what I needed to be prayed for, I would tell them straight up.
      Pray for the finances to come through
          Pray for my body to heal.
               Pray Paul finds a job.
                   Pray that God gives me the grace I need to do what He’s called me. 
                         Pray that I have strength. 

True to His word, God has always provided. His name is faithful, He can’t help but be that for His people. I know this. God spoke to me before we began our current “warring season” and He told me, “You guys are going to be pushed.” I saw this picture of us being backed into a corner by a sliding wall and at the last second, God said, “Here!” and showed us this trap door we could escape through. I knew it would be difficult, but I also knew He wouldn’t abandon us. Once the season began and numerous unexpected expenses left us scrambling, I went to the prayer house to worship my Provider.

He showed me another picture of Paul and I crawling through the desert, and every now and then we would see a twig in the ground. When we’d stop to question its existence, Jesus would ask me, “Do you believe this twig can grow enough fruit to feed you?” I’d nod expectantly in the secret place and the twig would grow into a fig tree. Jesus showed me that beneath this desert sand there were hundreds of fruit trees that could only  be activated by saying “Yes, we believe, Jesus!” I didn’t know if that was for the season I was in or for another, but I wrote it in my journal. We may be in the desert, but God is going to provide.

In another trip to the prayer house, God showed me the most profound vision concerning my journey with Him. I want to share because it shifted something in my heart, and it called me to a new standard of existing. He took me into a garden of multiple fruit trees. He said to me, “You can have fruit from every tree in this garden, but that one.” He pointed to one and we went there. I asked him what it was, and He told me, “If you eat the fruit of this tree, you’ll know what will happen next in your life.” He didn’t tell me what the consequence would be, but He told me not to go there. He said He had something for me. If I was craving fruit from this tree, I could go to another, and He took me to this other tree a couple steps away. I asked Him what it was, and He spoke to me, “This is the fruit of trust.”  His heart was bare before me, and He said to me something like, “Summer, you don’t know how it would please my heart for my daughter to trust me!”

That vision has stuck with me-every time I worry, I tell God, “I don’t want to know what’s going to happen next!” One day, I got discouraged and I asked Him how I could prophesy or even receive vision if I don’t know what’s going to happen next. He told me that my visions don't exist outside faith, and that knowing exactly what will happen next is a faithless existence. It changed the way I thought, and how I expected God to take care of me.
Even though I have still prayed for breakthrough, I’ve changed the logic. I’ve told others,
     Don’t pray for my finances.
     Don’t pray for my health.
     Don’t pray that I will raise happy kids.

     Pray that my faith will endure. 
     Pray that I will stand firm until the end. 
     Pray that I will eat the fruit of trust. 
     Pray that my faith will increase and increase and increase and increase until I am not even tempted to know what will happen next. 
     Pray for me, that even when circumstances look impossible, I will hold tight to the promise that my God will NOT forsake me. 

Even if I pass on into Heaven, the very fact that I believe God's promises means that His plans still come to fruition. It means that even though Paul’s parents are gone, we take up the promises God had given them, and ask expectantly, “We receive what you had for them!” because God’s promises only wither beneath unbelief and performance. God cannot resist reckless faith. The most wonderful quality about our Father is that when we struggle in our faith, if we're pursuing to grow in it anyway, He fashions our lives in a way that grows us in our pursuit. [Welcome to my life.]

If you don’t believe this, read Hebrews 11. It changes me time and time again. Here is a MAJOR paraphrase, and I don't mind if you skip over it, I just wanted to provide Biblical proof:

“Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see. Through their faith, the people in days of old earned a good reputation.
By faith, we understand that God formed the universe at His command, that what we see comes from someone that cannot be seen. It was by faith that Abel brought a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain…It was by faith that Enoch was taken up to Heaven without dying…It was by faith that Noah built a large boat to save his family from the flood…it was by faith that Abraham obeyed God and left his homeland, believing God would provide an inheritance. He went without knowing where he was going, and even when he reached the land God promised him, he lived their by faith-for he was a foreigner and lived in tents. And so did Isaac and Jacob, who inherited the same promise. Abraham was confidently looking forward to a city with eternal foundations, a city designed and built by God [Amen!]
It was by faith that even Sarah was able to have a child….A whole nation came from this one man who was as good as dead-a nation with so many people, that like the stars in the sky and the sand on the ocean, there is no way to count them.
All these people died still believing what God has promise him. They did not receive what was promised but they saw it all from a distance and welcomed it….
It was by faith that Abraham offered Isaac as a sacrifice…Abraham reasoned that if Isaac died, GOD COULD BRING HIM BACK TO LIFE [That blows me away!]….on and on and on it goes with stories of heroes of great faith.


Yesterday, our family has multiple breakthroughs. We had money for food, my husband’s mission trip to Israel, and still as the day crept on I remembered that next week we have bills due. In weeks ahead, we will have rent. Holy Spirit spoke to me, “Eat the fruit of trust, Summer.”

Trust Him. He is so faithful. Trust in His promises, trust what you can’t see, and in a God you can’t see. It activates those twigs to become fruit, it creates pools of water in dry places, and pushes back the enemy’s territory so God’s kids can reside there. It’s our land anyway, He’s just waiting for us to believe it.

More Thoughts on Grace

I have been speed reading certain passages in the Bible this morning in order to provide some Biblical validation for what I want to write about. To no avail, really- well, for the purposes of this blog anyway, elsewhere I am encouraged. I want to write about a theory I have learned through my journey with Him. The mystery that I am no longer a sinner in Christ Jesus evades me, making this post difficult. This is why I pulled my Bible out, because I would never want to contradict truth. To me, truth is plain. It is black and white, and there isn’t a way around it. This is why I am careful. So hold me accountable, if you’d like. I won’t say that Holy Spirit spoke to me these words verbatim but overtime this theory has begun to surface in my soul and paved the way to greater freedom. I hope it makes sense.

Whenever I became a young Christian, my basic understanding was that Jesus died for my sins. Good understanding, right? I don’t remember if I was told this or assumed it, but shortly thereafter I decided that God’s love had to be earned by a righteous life. Is this in the Bible? Absolutely not. But I didn’t know that. Again, somewhere down the line a speaker in college announced that sin is really simple. She held two fingers together, and poked her second index finger into the middle. THERE! Sin is simply whatever separates us from God. I have lived by that simplistic theory for so long, believing that in my weakness, I would be separated from God. He is holy and righteous, how can He dwell near my sin? I definitely did not put it together that Jesus spent His time with sinners [if you’ll recall his question to the Pharisees, “it is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick!] while on this Earth.

This is where my theology may get shaky. I am not a sinner, I am a saint. Jesus is both the High Priest, and himself the great sacrifice. My sins have been atoned for. There is still the charge to live by the Spirit- this is walking out true freedom, in step with the Spirit. So while I do not consider myself a sinner, allow me to confess here-I have certainly fallen short of His glory. I am pretty sure the Bible says we all have, but I carry the condemnation further than I should (since I have chosen to carry it at all). Hey, my life is a journey! I have had people who hardly know me straight up prophesy that I believe lies about the nature of God, and if any of you want to give the enemy a bee line access to your life, just believe a couple of lies. That is for another time though.
 
Recently I prayed for a person that I know, someone I do not like and is quite frankly a chore to love. I asked God why this person doesn’t like me (our distaste is mutual) and God told me that I hate their sin [and they know it]. I guess I was raised up under another adage, “Love the person, hate their sin.” Now, I am not saying this adage is a lie, and God didn’t say that to me either. God told me that when I look at this person through the lens of hating sin, I am actually giving his sin power. Basically, what if I looked at this person through the lens of God's love? What if I believed that his life could be redeemed simply. This really had me thinking for weeks about sin. God is very jealous for His people, so please do not hear me say that sin is of no consequence to God. I wouldn’t say that, and certainly God never has in His word. He sent His own son to deal with sin, so it's a big deal. What I felt like God was telling me is to understand that sin can be dealt with through Jesus. For years the sacrifices given by priests were not even enough to cover the sins of the people. The law of Moses wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough until Jesus died. When that happened, the sacrifice required was more than fulfilled {Hebrews 10 is a good place to start for this}. God has a plan for redeeming sin.

Moving on.

Several weeks ago I was praying with a friend. I was allowing my imagination to respond to God and inviting His presence. I had this vision of God wanting to visit me at my house but I didn’t want Him to come in because my floor was filthy. Our kitchen floor in particular. In the vision, I finally allowed God to come in (but I was really ashamed!) and I was surprised that as He walked along my floor, it became spotless. He makes all things new. It reminded me of His great kindness towards me, even in my weakness. It reminded me that His grace is sufficient. It reminded me that He is patient and kind.

This morning I was grieving my nature, my human nature. It was surfacing, a lot. Prayer and purposeful worship usually kicks it out, but in the past that has been my last resort.

Why?

Well, because I thought sin separated me from God. I would hide when I found myself being tempted. Even when I gave into that temptation. When He would call for me I would tell Him ‘no’ because I didn’t want to be seen. It’s human nature [reference: Genesis]. I have this picture in my head of an old Egyptian playing his whistle, the cobra slithering upward from the bag. It is so temping to respond to that invitation to evil, I can hardly believe I would actually tell God to give me a day or two to conquer it on my own. I won’t quote scripture here, but I have been reading through Hebrews 4, 5, 6, 7 [just read all of it]. It reminds me that God wants me to invite Him into my mess. He invites me to come BOLDLY before the throne of grace to receive mercy in my time of need. This morning I was so needy, absolutely brawling in the spiritual realm for my sanity and peace. In the past I have thought God would have me back into His presence when I had sorted out my mess, but this morning I showed it to Him.

     It's true. I thought of something absolutely horrible and I asked God if He saw it too. I wanted Him to see it. I asked God if he would take it. I told Him how much I hated it, and how I needed Him to help me. I continued my wrestling match this afternoon but I committed to writing this blog because God’s promise to me is that nothing will ever separate me from His love. He is love.  1 John 4:18 says the only reason we could live in fear of God is if we fear His punishment, and if we fear His punishment, we have no idea how loved we really are. I have always been so afraid to let God see me in my weakness.
     Somewhere in the midst of my attempt to justify every word of mine with scripture, I searched the reference section in my Bible for all scriptures containing the word grace. It put my entire life into perspective. I am feeling beyond humbled right now for the sacrifice Jesus made for me, for this “anchor for my soul” that ushers me into God’s inner sanctuary when I’m weak. Especially when I’m weak. It is silly to remove myself from God while I am being tempted because the only way to live outside the law is by living according to the Spirit. The answer to righteousness is the Spirit of God living in us. The combatant to human nature is grace.

     I am not a sinner because I believe Jesus died for my sins. I am not a failure because I share in His death and resurrection. I am not condemned for being weak today because there is no condemnation in Him.
     I am loved. I am welcomed into His presence. Thank you God, I am victorious.