Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Flat Light

OK. Lots of stuff in the past 10 days including: healing, euphoria, depression, attack, victory under attack...just wears me out thinking about it. But the last couple days have been different. They haven't been great, but they haven't been horrible, either. And the funny thing is that I find that my prayer life and time in the Word is suffering more than ever. What the heck is up?!

So as I'm processing this, I start thinking about skiing. Maybe it's because some really good friends just got back from a ski/snowboard trip. I get to thinking about all my different adventures on hills, bluffs & mountains, and an interesting analogy came to me: light. We all love beautiful, bright sunny days. The colors just pop, and the mountain is so clearly defined. There's also dark. I've been night skiing, and under the lights of the slope, the details become so easy to see. Or it's a blizzard in which case either: A) POWDER DAY! Who needs details?! Just blaze away; or B) Head for the lodge! Everything seems so clearly defined, and whether it's bad or good, God is so easy to see. But there's one more light condition which just sucks: flat light. You can't see any detail to the hill you are skiing, and you're likely to hit a bump or dip that about knocks your teeth out of your head. There is no definition. There is no detail...just flatness. That's been my life the last couple days.

Revelation 3:15 & 16 reveals that God's not a big fan of this as well. His warning to the Church that is neither hot nor cold is that He will spit them from His mouth. Some translations go so far as to say that He will vomit them out of His mouth. One implies disgust, and the other implies revulsion. As St. Joe will attest from the healing session last week, it's pretty much a combination of the two, and it just is really bad. (Sorry Joe.) How, then, do I live my life when life feels just so...blah.

Well, continuing the skiing analogy, I can't control the light, and there are times on the mountain when everything is just flat. I can whine about it. I can stand in the cold in indecision and get hypothermia. I can fly at breakneck speed (there's a reason it's called "breakneck") down the hill to get out of it and more than likely launch from an unseen ridge or hit a tree. Or I can just carefully make my way down the mountain taking it just one turn at a time.

The last couple days have been nothing but flat light. I don't feel depressed. I don't feel joyful. I don't feel sorrow. I don't feel fear. I don't feel peace. I just plain don't feel, and it's harder than any other time to feel connected to God. But just because life is blah doesn't mean that life stops. Far from it. All I can do is simply and carefully make my way turn by turn, verse by verse, and prayer by prayer. What does God see in this? Obedience. And once again, even though the emotion isn't there, the victory is, and that's enough.

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