Brokenness, Harlotry, and the Example of the Glowstick . . .

Lately, I have been broken. My barely alive heart has been driven through with a knife and twisted in circles again and again and again. I have gone more emotions and feelings than I knew existed. Most of you know this from either just conversations with me or from the last post I wrote. Regardless, in the matter of two days, my brokenness and weakness have turned into being my greatest source of joy, peace, and comfort.

I'd imagine most reading this post have experienced some varying degree of brokenness in life. Sometimes one comes to a point where he or she emotionally and spiritually cannot go on . . . it literally becomes impossible to do so alone. That is exactly how I felt for most of this past month and a half. A verse to the new Demon Hunter song "Fading Away" illustrates exactly how I felt throughout this nightmare:

"It’s in this wake that I find myself
Losing the will to resume this hell
When every breath is a dying wish
It’s harder to follow the point of this . . .
This broken place that I call my home
Is deep in the sorrow that I have sewn
And I can’t erase what is in my heart
I want it to finish before it starts."

I had never seriously entertained suicide, but there were definite moments in this past month and a half where my "every breath [was] a dying wish." I just prayed for God to take me home and end all my pain. Obviously, I am still here, and I am now thankful that He did not answer those despairing prayers.

Johnnie Moore just finished a series a couple weeks ago in Sunday morning Campus Church about the book of Hosea. I have never had a sermon or a series of sermons so impact my life and so directly speak to me as this one on Hosea has. I won't get too much into the details of the book, you can read that yourself, and I highly suggest that you do.

The basic premise of Hosea is that Israel as a nation goes astray from God and literally prostitutes herself to other gods. So in an attempt to woo back His wayward beloved, God appoints the prophet Hosea to deliver a message. It begins with listing everything Israel has done to offend God's perfect love, but goes on to fully display God's perfect love in His taking her back as His bride once again. Ultimately, God displays His love for His people in the only way He can. Since Israel wants to prostitute herself to other gods, God lets her have her way, and reap the consequences of her own decisions. God allows Israel to self destruct in order to draw her back unto Himself again. Hosea 2:6-7 entails God speaking to His chosen prophet:

"Therefore, behold, I will hedge up
Her way with thorns,
And I will build a wall against her so
That she cannot find her paths.
She will pursue her lovers, but she
Will not overtake them;
And she will seek them, but will not
Find them.
Then she will say, 'I will go back to
My first husband,
For it was better for me then than
now!'"

Verses 14 and 15:a go on to further explain:

"Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
Bring her into the wilderness
And speak kindly to her.
Then I will give her her vineyards
From there,
And the valley of Achor as a door of hope."

God is saying that He will lead His wayward people into the desert in order to offer them hope - even hope from the valley of Achor! The valley of Achor was the place where adulterers were led to be stoned to death by their people. It was a place of no hope for the sinful. It was where they were taken to meet their end. God is saying that He will even use the valley of Achor, a place of absolutely no hope, as a very door of hope to His adulterous people. He will show them mercy and love.

God then goes on to proclaim in verses 16 and 19-20:

"'It will come about in that day,'
Declares the Lord,
'That you will call Me Ishi (my husband)
And will no longer call Me Baali (my master) . . .
I will betroth you to Me forever;
Yes, I will betroth you to Me in
Righteousness and in justice,
In lovingkindness and in compassion,
And I will betroth you to Me in
Faithfulness.
Then you will know the Lord.'"

God seeks to have such a relationship with us where we can call Him our husband. He wants that intimacy with us, and that is the true relational intimacy we were created to exist for. If we rebuke that intimacy, turning away to other lovers (anything else that we allow to take God's place in our lives), God will break us in order to save us. Hosea chapter 5:14b-15 declares:

"I, even I, will tear to pieces and go
Away,
I will carry away, and there will be
None to deliver.
I will go away and return to My place
Until they acknowledge their guilt
And seek My face;
In their affliction they will earnestly
Seek Me."

So how does this relate to my brokenness and suffering, and how does this practically apply to the life of you the reader? I fully realize now how much I had prostituted myself to other lovers. I had exalted God's creation above God Himself, and had replaced His space in my life with something else. I was also involved with some things I should not have been involved in. In order to save me from the sinful road of bad consequences I was following down, God had to take me into the wilderness. I was led through a spiritual desert. I was in the valley of Achor, but God took me there in order to provide me with a door of hope. I was taken to a place of no hope in order to arrive at an opportunity for new life. God had to break me and tear me apart, and then turn His back on me in order to grab my attention until I acknowledged my guilt. That was the missing element. And now that I know and acknowledge, for the first time in a month and a half, I have hope and joy. Not happiness, mind you, but joy, which is even more encompassing and more lasting. C.S. Lewis once wrote that pain is "God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." The book of Hosea stands as illustration of this principle, and my life now exists as a testimony to this concept.

Sunday night I attended a 10:30 prayer vigil on the lawn in front of the little campus chapel called Glowstick. I did not really know much about it prior to going, and I really had no clue what to expect. I was invited by a co-worker, but had heard my SLD mention it before. So I went just to check it out.

Glowstick is a group of students who meet weekly to pray for brokenness of hearts for the things of God. As soon as I was told this, I knew it was where I needed to be. Firstly, we prayed for a student Robert who's grandmother was just diagnosed with cancer, who's best friend just died in a car accident, and who on top of all that is shipping to Iraq in a week for a second tour of duty. I felt so selfish after meeting this young man. Why was I of all people complaining so much. I felt like I almost did not have a right to ask for prayer after hearing that.

Anyway, the name Glowstick comes from, ironically enough, the concept of a glow stick. You need to break a glow stick in order to make it shine. Not just a little bit either, you must totally twist and turn and break that glow stick in order to get it to glow. God breaks and bends and twists our hearts, if we earnestly seek Him, so that we may know our own weakness apart from Him. It truly is when we are weak and broken that God gives us strength beyond what we ever dreamed possible to endure. He prunes us so that we can grow out into an even more beautiful vine - He breaks us so that we can brightly glow with His message of hope, love, and salvation to a dying world.

~Insense

Existential Despair Revisited

Sometime ago I wrote a post on existential despair and what Albert Camus has termed to be the "absurdity" of life. I was at a point in my life where I was just fed up. Life seemed dull, mundane, and bitterly painful in the area of relationships.

Things have now come full circle, and I again am experiencing the same troubles and hurts. Life really is absurd. Unlike a year ago when I visited this topic, I did not have to stand and watch a good friend walk down the street as he ran away from home, but I nonetheless am becoming familiar with life's absurdity once again.

I'm 250 miles away from home on the side of a remote mountain with no really close friends or family within a five hour drive. I'm alone in a strange new world where I wake up every morning, go to classes, go to work, go to classes again, then do homework, then finally sleep, only to repeat the cycle all over again. My university learning experience has reduced from a starving hunger for knowledge to a boring drudgery in order to maintain the necessary honors program 3.5 gpa (which might not be possible thanks to BIO 200).

My friends from home and high school are now scattered all across the country, some never to return to sleepy Dallastown, PA. There are some very friendly peers here at Liberty, but I have yet to connect with anybody in a deep, long lasting friendship. Many students here already know others that they spend time with and stay in their own little "cliques."

Worse than anything I have experienced thus far in my life, however, is how I still cannot seem to find that one meaningful relationship with a young lady that I so desperately crave. I thought I had it. I thought my future was secure, my life set in place, and the perfect best friend that anybody could ever ask for by my side. I turned out to once again be sorely wrong.

I expected that when somebody made a promise, they'd keep it. I kind of had this thing where if somebody said something, I kind of took it for granted that he or she actually meant it and would abide by it. I never in a thousand years imagined that everybody is the same. I sincerely thought that some people were different . . . one person in particular.

Now I'm left with all the shattered pieces of my broken heart on the floor. I'm left with a soul merged and fused with the soul of another person who is through with me. Like a festering wound in an arm or a leg, I need to amputate that part of me out before I'm wholly infected with a disease that can kill me. The hard part is, I cannot do it myself. The universe was created in such a fashion that something about a deeply attached relationship actually does fuse the souls of two people together. The process was created by God Himself, and it was never meant to have to be torn apart. Man cannot do it himself. It takes the strength of God to undo something He created to be.

It's so hard amputating that wounded part of soul out of me, because the only way it can be done is if I allow God to work at it over time. It can't come overnight unless there was never anything fused together to amputate in the first place. God is the only one that can do it, and all I can do is sit back like a helpless, wounded soldier in war and watch the Master Surgeon work. Like an infantryman who must just lie there and endure the pain of a limb being sawed off, all I can do is sit back and endure as God is at work sawing a festering, wounded part of my soul off.

Healing is going to take some time. It is a slow, gradual crawl towards normalcy. I find that my problem, though, lies in actually letting God do the healing. My heart is in pieces on the ground. I try to gather the fragments up in my hands to lift them up to God to let Him work, but my hands are too weak. They shake so much that all the pieces quickly slip out of my hands and spill back onto the floor again where they came from. When I can actually get all the pieces and lift them to God, some part of me at the last minute wants to hold on and do it myself. I know it will never work, but I can never seem to make my head knowledge apply to my heart and my actions.

I do not change my originally presented view a year ago that absurdity and pain are meant to stir us to search and desire something deeper. In the long run, all I can hold onto in my loneliness is that any earthly relationship is ultimately merely a Platonic shadow of God's love for me. It's the only thing that keeps me going and the only reason I'm still here.

I have, however, finally realized after a year of thought, reflection, and experience what exactly it is that causes life to be so absurd and painful in the first place - sin. It is like a disease that has slowly worked its way through the cosmos. Everything it touches turns to dust and crumbles to the ground in decay. From dust we are made and to dust we return. It has even left its damaging impact on earthly romantic relationships. No earthly relationship is ever going to equal or substitute God's love and desire for us His creation.

One thing I have come to realize about God more than anything in this past year of ups and downs is the nature of God's relationship with us. I credit this discovery almost wholly to the genius of Mr. Cleary, but I am sure he would say (and probably correctly) that the idea existed long before he was aware of it. The idea is this: that God's relationship to each of us is like a romantic love relationship.

In Eden, God and man were in perfect unity and fellowship - God and man were quite literally married to one another (in fact I would argue that the earthly version of marriage between a man and a woman is another Platonic shadow of this original form). When man sinned, he was unfaithful in marriage, and was forced into divorce from God. The rest of scripture then is the love story of God trying to woo back His unfaithful bride once again. Israel is His chosen people, the group through which He would work to eventually woo back the entire world (or at least try to). Christ's death on the cross is the ultimate show of romantic love ever experienced in the created universe. Indeed, it is the greatest possible display of romantic love ever, everywhere.

His bride spit in His face, cursed Him, exalted herself above Him, and He does the last thing one would expect of an abused husband - He gives His life in order to provide hope of reconciliation to His wayward beloved. He is that obsessed and in love with humanity that He paid the ultimate price in order to restore a degree of union and fellowship once again.

That is what's keeping me going anymore. I have nothing else. I'm alone on a mountain with 10,000 people who mostly don't even care that I exist. I've been left by the one person who had meant everything to me, my absolute closest friend; my family and other friends are a five hour drive away (providing I don't get lost in the dark woods again with a dead GPS and a dying cell phone - there's some absurdity if you're interested in that story). I have nothing or nobody except for God Himself. At least I can say that there is no better lover, and there is nobody who has done more to show me His love than God Himself.

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"To live without hope is to cease to live." --Fyodor Dostoevsky
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~Insense