- Soren Kierkegard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. Charles E. Moore (Farmington, PA: Plough, 2002), p.201.

I arise today through the power of Christ Jesus,
My Lover’s tender affection to draw me,
My Father’s delight to affirm me,
My King’s might to comfort me,
My Redeemer’s grace to renew me,
My Teacher’s wisdom to guide me,
My Shepherd’s eye to look before me,
My Confessor’s ear to hear me,
My Omega’s word to speak for me,
My Beloved’s hand to lead me,
My Morning Star to lie before me
My Rock’s shield to protect me,
My God’s Heavenly Host to save me,
from the snares of the devil,
from temptations to sin,
and from all who wish me ill.

May I be renewed by grace this blessed morning,
May I turn my cheek to receive his kisses
May I be filled with the sweet wine of his presence
that I may fulfill His mission
and bear fruit in abundance
never striving, always abiding

Christ behind me and before me,
Christ around me and about me,
Christ on me and in me,
Christ on my left and on my right,
Christ when I lie down at night,
Christ when I rise in the morning,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone that speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
Until kingdom come and His will be done.
On this earth… exactly as it is in heaven.
Amen

http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/im-a-backslider/

I suspect I’m more carnal than most, but I’m stunned at how easy it is for me to “backslide.” I’m not talking about falling into some heinous sin. I just find I gravitate strongly toward an atheistic consciousness. I’ll go for a couple of days easily remaining aware of God’s presence, moment-by-moment, but then I’ll go through a long period of slumber during which my God-awareness is spotty at best. This is how its been with me, more or less, for more than 20 years!

Brother Lawrence, Frank Laubach and Jean de Caussade each speak of experiencing a transformation after which “practicing the presence of God” was as natural to them as breathing. I thought I was getting close to this sort of breakthrough last year when I was writing a book on this discipline (called Present Perfect) but I now suspect this was simply because my mind tends to be totally occupied with whatever I happen to be writing about at the time. This year I’m back to being pretty much the same old atheistic-minded Greg.

One thing I know for sure, however. The question of how successful or unsuccessful I’ve been at staying awake to God’s presence over the last year, or over the last five minutes, is completely worthless. So is the question of when, if ever, I’ll undergo a God-consciousness transformation. God is always in the now, so the only relevant question is: Am I awake to God’s presence now, in this moment?

And now, in this one?

In him we live and move and have our being, Paul says. The challenge is remembering this, moment-by-moment.

Even better, I recently discovered that Xanga never deletes your journal, which means that anyone STILL can read about my life as an insecure teenager.
Here is one of my posts from back in the day, still up for anybody to read.

“Wow this feels weird. Having on online journal that everyone can read. Eeek! What if some freak reads it and stalks me. Worse, what if NO ONE reads it. By the way what kind of name is xanga? Sounds like one of those stupid cartoons that I would never admit to liking. Ok so I just got off of work and I have officially decided that the people at my work are the biggest freaks ever. Let me give you a little run down. First we have my managers. FREAKS! One is a 40 year old black man who wants to be a gangster, wears golden crosses and White pinstripe suits and asks all of the girls if they want to play his pipes. Then we have John who is a skinny white guy who actually was a gangster. He is obsessed with his little baby and my car. Yeah thats right he is obsessed with it. He is actually more attached to my car then his own wife. Then there is Asya, my “hot” manager who is 24 and still acting like a 16 year old cheerleader. She used to be a cheerleader and now she spends all of her time flirting with all of they guys at work. Ok I am getting tired of my list now. The cooks are all freaks who have there tongues pierced with fuzzy balls. Made the mistake of asking why once.. Moving on, One of the cooks is named robo. He look like kelly ardnt on steroids, a lifting program and about 10 years. He talks and acts like a robot and is as scary as you know what. Ok the rest of the crew are all carhops, cheerleaders from different schools. They are all super happy all of the time… hey will how was your weekend! Hey will can you break a twenty! Hey will guess what I got a new boyfriend let me tell you all about him!! Hey will I am going to Cancun this weekend on my private jet! Hey will lets sing a song! Yeah thats right. We sing songs at my work. Shut up. Ashley Simpson actually. I hate to admit it but I actually know all of the words to most of your basic pop songs, britney, ashleee, jessica, you name it. And we all sing them at the top of our lungs. Dont worry i have a girlfriend, i am not gay. Oh yeah. Their is a gay black guy who talks funny is Taller and Skinnier than me. He calls me baby and asks me all the time when we are going to get married. So that is my work. Time for homework.”

How embarrassing.

“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world — a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”

-Virginia Woolf.

Introspection is such a uniquely human characteristic. Part of what makes us human is our self-awareness, our ability to look inside, to contemplate.

Worry is also a uniquely human product of introspection. Jesus said the birds of the field don’t have to worry so why should we… but isn’t part of what makes us human the ability to explore memories that don’t exist outside our imagination and to create uncertain futures in our minds to worry about?

Birds don’t have the memory of failing a test and projecting that experience forward to the next one. Birds just are.

It’s hard for us to live in the present, because we spend so much head time exploring the past and future.

I know some amount of introspection is helpful and necessary. But lately I have been questioning how much is really helpful.

Sometimes I feel like the girl in Woolf’s story– my thoughts ever fleeing inward, along dark corridors that never become illuminated. Processing my memories, trying to make connections, to understand myself, to understand my friends. Second guessing reactions and my own intentions. Following hypothetical rabbit trails into non-existent futures. Mind games. Brooding. “Gotta think myself out of this swamp back to solid ground.”

Not healthy, not fruitful.

I hate when I do that, when I wake up and have the vague sense that something is wrong with my life and the solution is to think about it.

Most of us have enough wrong with our life’s that we could sit down and go in circles in our heads forever.

Lately I have been “thinking” about another plan…

Not thinking about myself constantly. Not introspecting. Not worrying endlessly about the ways that I’m full of failure and not trying figure out solutions.

I can’t say it was my idea, I’ve been reading Psalms lately, trying to understand how David works through difficulties.

David begins with introspection. He often begins his psalms expressing his worries and fears to God. But instead of doing what most people do (keeping it inside). David voices his worries and anxieties to God.

And something incredible always happens. Somehow regardless of how bad it is, David ends up praising and giving thanks to God, remembering God’s goodness and promises to him.

But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.
-Psalm 13:5-6

He begins full of fear and failure, he ends hopeful and trusting in God.

I’ve been wondering how that happens. Obviously it is something supernatural and awesome that takes a fearful hearts and brings it back to hope, peace and joy.

I think at some point David takes a plunge and chooses to thank and praise God instead of worrying. In the middle of his fear and failure, he takes a deep breath and wrenches his eyes off himself and onto the person of God.

And when he does that he is brought back to intimacy. He stops worrying because it doesn’t cross your head to worry when you are in your Father’s house. When your a kid sitting on your father’s lap, you feel completely secure and loved.

The truth is that if we are sons and daughters of the king, we are always in His house, and He is always in us.

But when I worry and try to “think it out” on my own, I forget the reality of his closeness. And as I continue to delve into my own thoughts, I move away from trusting and towards fear and captivity to my emotions. The reality was that David was always in his Father’s house, but the worries prevented him from seeing it.

Psalm 100 to me is the perfect guide to lead me out of introspection and into intimacy.

Worship the LORD with gladness;

come before him with joyful songs.

Know that the LORD is God.

It is he who made us, and we are his;

we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving

and his courts with praise;

give thanks to him and praise his name.

For the LORD is good and his love endures forever;

his faithfulness continues through all generations.

The last part especially, “Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise” is like a road map to intimacy.

How do we enter into intimacy? –by giving thanks and praising Him. Thanking him for who He is and what He has done. Praising him for who He is and what is going to do!

My experience has been that in the middle of my worry, God brings small reminders of the way out. He doesn’t expect us to always be full of faith, super-pumped every second to worship and praise him. He understands that we are often fearful.

But when with a grain of faith, I choose to turn on a worship song instead of staying in my thoughts; He always comes the rest of the distance and sweeps me up in his arms and back into his presence.

Sweet name right.

Basically, they picked a tiny spot in the sky and trained this massive space telescope on that spot and recorded all the light that came from distant stars, for days and days. Some scientists thought it would be an expensive waste of time. The picture that emerged was incredible.

The slice of sky they chose was a tiny, tiny “dark” space, between other stars.

If you were lying on the ground looking up at the stars, imagine dividing the sky into 13 million parts and then choosing one of those parts (a dark one at that) and looking at with a telescope. How many stars do you think you’d see? 

The image revealed 10,000 galaxies. Not 10,000 stars. 10,000 galaxies.

And each galaxy is full of millions of stars. 

Our own galaxy the Milky Way, has around 300 million stars. And like our own sun, each star has its own solar system full of planets. 

All told, apparently there are over 70 sextillion stars. 70,000 million million million stars. 

Thats a 7 followed by 22 zeroes.

I can’t even try to imagine how big that is, its so big that I don’t have anything to compare it to.

I can’t say, “its like as many as all the grains of sand in all the beaches in the world.” Hell no, its way bigger than that. 

This helps give a feel for it. Click on the video twice to pop it out.

Numbers that big, make me feel insignificant, they make me wonder about my human-centric perspective of the universe.

Sure we feel pretty important here on earth. We own this planet. But when I think about us just being one small speck on a drop of water in an ocean of oceans, it makes me wonder about things.

A heart question I’ve heard and I’ve asked in a thousand diffent ways is this: Does God love me? Personally, Intimately?

Most people (at least here in the bible belt) believe in God. They believe he is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-encompassing. He could do anything, ANYTHING at the snap of his fingers. But what good is an omniscient, omnipotent deity if he created everything and then left it to do its thing. Maybe he exists but I sure as hell wouldn’t give my time or my life to trying to get to know him.

On the same website that linked to the image, people were commenting on the image. Here are a few reactions: 

“Anyone else suddenly feel really small and insignificant?” -TwoKill

“we are about the size of a spec of dust compared to the rest of what we know of the universe, why do all these religious nuts thinks the entire universe revolves around us.” -Bupsy

“So some super being created all this and then focused on when people should have sex and with whom?” -ICSU

When I look at that image, it makes me think that my God is too small. I try to fit my God into shapes and containers that I can label and understand.

I put limits on his power because I am afraid of what his unlimited power would look like in my life.

I put limits on His love because I don’t feel immersed in an endless fountain of love.

I put restrictions on how He will provide for me because I’m not sure He knows me well enough to know what I need. 

I know He is capable of anything, but sometimes I doubt that He cares. When I look at God through flesh-colored glasses, I don’t believe that He is able to simultaneously love and take care of 5 billion humans on this one planet, much less keep a universe in order. Sure He is the good shepherd, but do shepherds really know and have a friendship with every single one of their sheep?

If God exists, the question is, does he love us?

Again I think about the insane amount of stars and I realize its all about perspective.

My mind can’t wrap around the number 70 sextillion just like my mind can’t wrap around a God who is infinite but who also dwells in me and knows my every thought.

I feel a little like the Hubble telescope scientists. They took a huge risk pointing the worlds most exspensive satellite on a piece of the sky that many thought would be dark, in faith that the universe was bigger than what they could fathom.

The fruit of their risk was an incredible new understanding of the nature of the universe. 

I cast my life into the darkness, not knowing if Jesus was going to be anything like I hoped He was. And I found him to be infinitely more.

The fruit of my faith was an incredible revelation of the loving nature of God. 

Somehow, He’s big enough to make all the stars in the heavens and intimate enough to name them all.

“But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. And the very hairs on your head are all numbered.So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a whole flock of sparrows.”
Matthew 10:29-31

“He counts the stars and calls them all by name.”
Psalm 147

I was recently reading this article by Tim Kreider, a writer for the New York Times.

He writes about his search for happiness,

“We do each have a handful of those moments, the ones we only take out to treasure rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.” One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio. But this kind of intense and present happiness is heartbreakingly ephemeral; as soon as you notice it you dispel it, like blocking yourself from remembering a word by trying too hard to retrieve it. And our attempts to contrive this feeling through any kind of replicable method — with drinking or drugs or sexual seduction, buying new stuff, listening to the same old songs that reliably give us shivers —never quite recapture the spontaneous, profligate joy of the real thing. In other words be advised that Burger King billboards and Van Halen are not a sure-fire combination, any more than are scotch and cigars.”

Reading his article gave me an incredible insight into my own life.

At one point, I was exactly the same.

For so long, I felt mostly ok. Not great, not terrible, just ok. I had bad days and better days, but for the most part, “happy” moments were just as elusive. Elusive in the sense that I chased happy moments from guilty pleasures to foreign countries but never found any consistency, never anything lasting.

My idea of happiness was that you get by, try to have fun, live your life and appreciate the fleeting shivers of happiness while they last.

Back then, I could remember certain moments when I felt truly happy all over.

Standing on top of a giant sand dune in Colorado, tired and hot from climbing for an hour in the sun. Shoes full of sand, water bottle empty, walking stick perched at the highest point on the dune, like I imagined the explorers of old. Sitting, watching the sun set as the sky streaked purple and red. Feeling a deep sense of contentment and then a rush of happiness.

Then I walked down the dune, continued with life as normal and soon forgot about it.
But the nagging feeling in the back of my mind was that I was settling for less.
I didn’t know exactly what more was, but I knew what that moment of joy on the dune felt like and a tiny part of me hoped that I could live IN the full hurricane force of that joy, not just taste it on the wind.

Then I met Jesus.

How simple, how cliche it sometimes sounds. But a few days ago I was sitting in my house, after a long day at work and with absolutely nothing going on. And I felt incredibly happy. And I realized that I feel happy most of the time now.

It blows my mind that a simple morning spent with Jesus makes me so intensely happy that I don’t want to go out of my room.

In comparison, those fleeting moments of happiness I used to settle for would never satisfy me anymore. I’ve found the fountain of true joy.

The one that has been rolling around in my head lately has been this one.

Why does God need us?

What if anything, could the God of the universe need from frail little people like us?
What do you give to someone who has everything? 

If God is powerful enough to create time, matter, our planet, rainforests and the human brain; what can we possibly build, create, produce or provide for him that he couldn’t already create in a moment?

Sometimes I talk about wanting to “build his kingdom,” as if He needed help. 

Sometimes I talk about wanting to bring God glory, as if He needs somebody to give it to him.

The thing is, 

If God is omnipotent, he is entirely capable of destroying every fortress and stronghold and advancing his kingdom to cover the earth in the time it takes me to brush my teeth.

If God wanted to he could appear in a blaze of light and a thunder of trumpets to every single human on the earth and they WOULD be forced to bow and worship Him.

God doesn’t need me to build anything for him. He is the supreme builder.

God doesn’t need me to bring him Glory, he is the King of Glory and his Glory already fills the earth.

What the heck are we doing then? What good are we to him?

The fact of it hit me right in the gut yesterday:

I am so inadequate, so incapable of returning a billionth of what I owe him. 

Human history is the story of us squandering his wealth, destroying his beautiful creation, scorning his name and committing every kind of evil towards each other. If God’s plan was to create a kingdom of peace and righteousness on the earth, he would have been better off populating it with some fluffy white sheep. 

Right after that humbling blow came a soft whisper that I had to strain to hear. 

I need your love

It pretty much undid me.
I realized that He needs us for the same reason that he created us. He desires our love, and all the peaceful sheep in the world don’t excite his passions the way that one of his children does when they say, “daddy I love you.”

God actually desire something desperately from us. It is literally the only thing that he is incapable of summoning at a word.

God’s very nature is love and because He created us in His image, we are able to love him in return.

Usually when I think about God being love, I think about His love for us. But it doesn’t stop there! If we receive His love, and if we are created in his image, then it is also in his nature to receive our love. Sometimes I forget that Jesus said the greatest commandment was to,

‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  Matthew 22:27

Which means that I have something of incalculable value to Him.

I have something that he desires so much that he has bent over backward, been hurt to the point of breaking on the Cross and taken every kind of imaginable risk to obtain.

Why do I slavishly try to obey his commands, build his church, convince other people to follow him, sacrifice my time, tithe my money, memorize scripture or even read the bible if am not giving him the one thing he desires?

How is that I get so distracted from the focal point of my birth and existence,
to love God and to be loved by him.

Everything else has to flow out of that beautiful interaction, everything else is shallow and meaningless unless driven and propelled upward by a fountain of love originating from Him and returning back to Him.

There are times when I worry that I’m failing God. When my life seems pretty messed up and I can’t get anything right. 

Times when I’m lazy, angry, bitter, lustful, confused.  
Times when I am so exhausted that all I want to do is lie on my floor and cry out to him
Broken times when life seems to be falling apart and sitting at His feet is all that brings me peace. 

But its in those times that I forget to do stuff and instead just spend time with Him.
Its those times, that I fall in love with Jesus again.

What does it feel like to fall in love with Him? 

Times when I forget to do stuff and just love him:

His name spoken outloud makes me almost cry. My heart goes soft, my eyes water, I feel a rush of compassion and excitement. Stories from the gospels come alive in my mind and fill me with hope and longing for nearness with him.

Life seems more vibrant, sunsets, friendships, snow cones–a flurry of windows into His abiding love for me. 

When I am wrapped up in loving Him, everything changes. I change, without even understanding how. 

 Nothing can stay the same because I’m running hard after what I was created to pursue and sin is a backpack full of rocks that does nothing but slow me down.

Doing stuff changes. I do stuff because I love, not because I know I am supposed to. I’m fruitful because I am being watered by the fountain of life, not because I’m concentrating on being fruitful.

I’m fruitful because I’m a lover of Jesus, not a slave. 

A lover will go to the ends of the earth following his beloved. He will climb mountains to pick her flowers. He will plan the most elaborate dates, he will sing completely off-pitch to her at their wedding. Does he ever think about the work? Does he ever stop while climbing the mountain to ask himself if the climbing is earning her love? Jacob worked for seven years to be able to marry Rachel “but his love for her was so strong that it seemed to him but a few days.”

Some people say that love makes you do crazy things. I do crazy things for Jesus not because I’m following a rule written in a book, and not because I’m afraid to go to hell. I do crazy things for Jesus because I love him. 

And when I am doing nothing for Him except loving Him with a fierce passion, I imagine Jesus softly says to the Lord,

“Truly, this is why We made them, this is why I died, this is the most precious gift anyone could give Me… this is one in whom I am well pleased!”

The fact that I, a random college student at OU can literally have as much access to direct information from Iran as the best reporters in the world is incredible to me

If you have been reading news from any of the major news agencies, you should realize that most reporters are staying up all night, reading blogs, twitters and facebook accounts from people posting in Iran. With a few exceptions, all the reporters in Iran are stuck in their hotel rooms.

News from Iran emerges from a chaotic and confusing mush of twitter snippets and photos that manage to make it past the Iranian censors.

A Moussavi supporter was injured in a demonstration.

Trying to understand what is going on in Iran by reading blogs and twitters is like trying to drink from a fire hydrant.

What emerges from an onslaught of frantic messages is a hazy picture of confusion, chaos and uncertainty.

-The Basij are waiting at the hospitals to kidnap protesters coming in for treatment.

-Helicopters dropping acid on the crowds

-Government agents are tracking cellphones and arresting protest organizers

-Basij militia are driving motorcycles straight into the crowds

-Plainsclothes militia are waiting until the cover of darkness and then breaking into houses and killing people

The question everyone is asking is: what happens next?

Another revolution? Brutal repression? Will the government compromise? Will the protests grow regardless if lots of people start dying?

It sickens me that in my gut, I feel that many more  innocent people are going to die in Iran before this is over.

It sickens me not just because people getting brutally murdered makes me sad, but also because over time I have really come to love Iran.

Growing up I had a decidedly negative view of Iran. My understanding of Iran was basically this:

Iran= Crazy Muslims had a revolution and created an “Islamic Republic,” turning a friendly country into an evil, scary, democracy-hating monstrosity which needed to be stopped.

Axis of Evil. Evil. Satan. Muslim. Iran. VS  Democracy. Freedom. Christian. USA

Of course, my understanding of Iran was birthed in ignorance and solidified by news stories on the “existential Iranian threat” that networks like Fox “News” produce on a daily basis.

A couple classes, a bunch of books, and numerous conversations later, my understanding of Iran has become decidedly more nuanced.

No country is “evil.”

people may be evil. Countries may do evil things. Iran is not evil.

It turns out that Iran is a breathtaking example of how democracy can look completely different from our Western understanding of it and yet function surprisingly well.
Regardless of the many setbacks, civil society and democracy is flourishing in Iran.

I recently spent most of an eight hour flight from Capetown to Amsterdam talking with a woman from Iran.

She grew up during the 1979 revolution, spent her college years in France and now lives half the year in Tehran and half the year in the US with her daughter. Her children are brilliant, photographers, painters, graphic designers. She spoke eloquently about democracy and the need for Iran to change and allow more freedoms. She hoped and prayed that Ahmadinejad would lose the election.

I saw in her a depth of character, creativity and intellect.  In another body, with another face I could have mistaken her for a liberal college professor.

Yet she was something different and far more interesting then a Middle-Easterner fed on Western ideas and perspectives.

She spoke with deep religious conviction, unafraid to display her Shia Muslim beliefs.

She described the beauty of Tehran, the way the flowers bloom in the spring

She spoke with fierce passion about Iran, the country she loves so much and would never forsake

She was refreshingly Iranian, unique and totally different from what I expected.

This snippet from a post by a young woman in Tehran captures some of these qualities to me:

“We feel so vulnerable, more than ever, but at the same time are aware of our power. No matter how strong it is collectively, it will do little to protect us today. We could only take our bones and flesh to the streets and expose them to batons and bullets. Two different feelings fight inside me without mixing with one another.     To live or to just be alive, that’s the question.”

A female supporter of the leading reformist Iranian presidential candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, flashes a victory sign. Green is Mousavi's campaign color, a symbol of Islam and progress in Iran.

Massive protest in Tehran

My thoughts and prayers are with the Iranian people, may God protect them.

“Even when I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will not be afraid,
for you are close beside me.
Your rod and your staff
protect and comfort me.”

Psalm 23:4