The Right Drip

I attended Stillwaters last Tuesday. In one part of the message the speaker talked about Jacob and his tendency to run away. You all know the part where God corners him one night and they wrestle. Dawn comes and Jacob dude is left with a limp because God touched him on his hip. After that the speaker said something about how God still does that today, that cornering thing when we run away. How he might not touch us and give us a limp but God is still definitely down with pursuing you and cornering you. Well, when I heard that I looked down at my leg and cast and I just cracked up. God has the craziest sense of humor.

Seriously now, going to Stillwaters felt like coming home for me. I've been running away from church, fellowship and basically God for a long time. I don't know why I've been running. I know where it started but now it's all so confusing to me. At the same time that I've been running, I've been searching for... I don't know. Searching for only God knows what.

For a while I thought I was becoming agnostic. I mean, I know some stuff about God. Okay, precious little about God. I know that he loves me and that he cares deeply about my past, any and all injustices that have occurred, all the wounds and pains, everything. I know that being in this relationship with my Creator isn't like being buddies where we continually pay each other back for favors done. I know that God isn't asking me to earn his love. But my mind can't seem to communicate that to my heart.

I'm one of those people who have problems with grace. I have struggled with grace and stuggle with it immensely. I have lived with this entire vocabulary of faith for almost half a decade now. I've read it, heard it, spoken about it, sung about it and even danced about it. But sometimes it doesn't make sense to me. It's like a foreign language I'm not down with. "Grace" is on top of that list. Accepting grace is an entirely different thing than just talking about it. I wrestle with God constantly over this. It gets so crazy at times, like a steady stampede on my pride and emotional barriers. But a voice tells me that maybe that's good for me.

Rox told me the other night about how much she sees Jacob in me. Not the lying and conniving part of Jacob, thankfully. But the wrestler in Jacob. She sees me everyday and she sees how I wrestle with God. When she saw my reaction, she quickly said that this wasn't a bad thing. Think about it this way, she said. Wrestling means an awful lot of contact with the other person. Contact isn't something you can have too much of with God.

You're familiar with white noise. To stat majors, I'm not talking about the white noise of time series analysis. I'm talking about white noise from the TV. And I'm talking about white noise because for the longest time that all powerful Gospel Paul talks about in Romans was white noise in my life. It was white noise then it was nothing.

I said earlier that going to church was like coming home. It was like the Truth stepped into that room and wrapped it's powerful arms around me. It felt like Jesus was holding me still and prying off the goo of lies and sins, cleaning me up. I felt like God was crawling through my mind and throwing out the junk. You know when you have this really bad cold and you go around talking funny and never breathing with your nose? Last Tuesday felt like my first breath of air after a terribly congested cold. Almost like the relief of my first clean breath after a terrible asthma attack.

I'm still going at turtle pace here. I feel like this "little thirst" (as my mentor put it) for God is such a fragile thing. I can't manufacture it myself so I'm going to take it slow. Maybe the limp and the cast on my leg is showing me how to rely not on myself but on God, like I would rely on a crutch if my fall was worse.

I don't feel such a strong urge to look for anything or anyone to latch on just so I can feel something. It's like my poor sick soul finally got hooked up on the right IV and that IV is the Truth and its bringing Life and Light into me.