Behold, You Are There

April 17, 2013 Published blog

How could April be half over already?

And more importantly, how is it possible that we've already had to close the windows and turn on the A/C?

We are desperately trying to finish up the video footage for the adoption profile. It is a constant anxiety and I don't even want to write about it.

Hopefully, either today or tomorrow, we will be finished and we will mail that torture device back to where it came from- probably purgatory.

The adoption agency cheerily suggests that we keep both the print pamphlet and the finished video as "keep sakes."

Yes.

Because I want to remember the days and weeks and months of constant worry about how terrible I look in pictures, how I can't talk on camera, how I'm too shy to ask people to film us, how for the past five years, we should have taken like, a zillion more pictures than we did and because we didn't, somehow our chances of adopting are negatively impacted.

Yes. That's what I want to remember. All those fun times.

I just keep doggedly telling myself that this is just how it works- this is not set up for introverts, for one thing- and to just do it and get it over with and at the end of this, there is a baby and a woman in desperate need of help who will see something in me that will speak to her.

I don't know what it will look like or how it will happen. I can't know. I just have to keep on taking one step after another after another.

To be completely honest, when this is over and everything is settled, I never want to remember this part of the process again.

Ever.

The times I want to remember happen well after this point.

We could be active right now, but for some reason, the home study review fee is not reaching the adoption agency. So far, we've sent them two checks.

I don't know where these checks are going. Probably the place where spare socks end up.

If they could just get that two hundred dollars, we could sign the activation agreement, send them thousands of dollars more and then we would be officially presented to prospect birth mothers, via the horrendous pamphlets and video-soon-to follow.

When yet another plan for videotaping fell through, I turned to Jesus with a gesture of complete and utter stupefaction- like, what are You trying to do to me?

It will work out better this way, Jesus assured me.

I have no idea how, but I try to believe Him.

I woke up this morning surrounded by His warm and loving embrace and the word joy kept drifting through my thoughts.

I'd fall back asleep, wake up again to His love and think, what was I was remembering?

And I would remember it again- oh yes- joy.

In particular it seemed to be attached to a snatch of a verse: for the joy that was set before Him.

Then I looked it up and was embarrassed that Jesus was somehow offering that to me, as a sort of comfort for my extremely tiny and hardly worth mentioning discomfort, but anyway.

April 18, 2013 Journal

Jesus has been very close to me lately, holding me in His arms, putting His face next to mine, just all around me.

Yesterday, when in the midst of a distressing situation, Jesus was holding me in His arms, with His cheek against mine.

I realized that Jesus had stood still and silent while people were raging at Him, their rage a thousand times worse, and murderous and evil and Jesus simply stood quietly in the face of it, and loved that person, and knew who He was and what He had come to do.

Afterward, we were resting in a hammock on a small island somewhere, with the waves all white and blue cresting onto the warm beach, under the shade of the palm trees and sometimes He was holding me and comforting me and sometimes I was holding Him and comforting Him.

In the night, I had a nightmare. In the nightmare, I was living with friends in a house and as we slept in a room, we realized a psycho murderer had been watching us and making plans to kill us, one by one, in the room of the house we were living in, according to a script. As the dream played out, it was terrifying. The eeriness, the sheer creepiness of that feeling is hard to describe.

In the dream, I had to do something that required the trust of vulnerability in the face of that fear in order to capture the murderer. At the end of the dream, I suddenly saw that all along, Jesus had been with me and never would have let anything happen to me- I had been safe all along, and I had never been alone. It had only felt like it.

Then I woke up from the nightmare to Jesus' arms, sunk down deep in His heart, safe and sound. But so stressed out by the adoption process. Inwardly, I spread out my arms and said, look, look at this, I can’t take any more- as though my entire spirit was bruised and shaking and barely holding together at the seams.

It was as though He took me in His hands, which was soothing and healing, as though He is holding me together, holding me steady and also feeling the pain, sharing it and so thereby taking the brunt of it, taking the edge off.

At one point, I said, my goodness, You are holding me in Your arms so much lately, and He replied simply, I love to hold you.

And at one point, late at night, I half woke up and Jesus was there and I was thinking again about His Passion, and all that He suffered, specifically, being scourged.

Jesus said something like, does it comfort you? His voice had this degree of humility and love in it that was almost past belief, because He was offering me His suffering as a gift of comfort, because He suffered for me and with me, and will I take this gift? I would have been completely thrown off by the unbearable breaking of my heart- just, unable to answer at all, except that I remembered something I had read.

I remembered that and immediately threw my arms around Jesus and kissed Him and held Him close and I said, over and over again, “Yes, yes, it comforts me. I love You. Come here. Be comforted. I love You. Come rest.”

And He rested with me and received all my comfort, and we were comforted together.

April 22, 2013 Journal

Last night was quite a night. Lately I’ve just been so emotionally exhausted and last night was no different.

Sometimes the feeling of freedom to move into that inner room is strong and present and sometimes it’s muted. If it’s muted, I let it be and just rest in the moment and know myself to be sunk deeply into the heart of His love regardless.

If it’s strong and present, I move into the inner room. Last night, I knew I was free to move, so I came through and as soon as I did, I fell to my knees and then to my face on the stone floor.

I knew Jesus was on the couch. I could see Him clearly- seeing Him clearly was His loving, open invitation for me to come to Him. But I told Him humbly, “Let me have the floor, I just want to be here.”

And I did. I just wanted to lie there with my forehead against the stone. It was wonderfully refreshing and healing to my soul, in some way, to be on the floor of that room. I rested there for a while, letting myself be there.

I knew Jesus would come to me, if I stayed there, and He did. He knelt down and pulled me up into His arms and I said, again, no, let me just lie here in Your lap. I was resting with my head on His knee, which He had drawn up, the other foot tucked under. Jesus was bending comfortingly over me, overshadowing me, almost like a weeping willow tree, with the branches sweeping down; it was deeply, deeply comforting.

We talked about how much I longed to go through to Him and how much this life was bruising me. When I sat up, I was filled with extraordinary love and I wanted to name Him and name Him, and this name came up from the deep places of my spirit, but I couldn’t form or speak or hear this name, so I called Jesus the Word and the Wisdom and the Glory of God and I thought about calling Him Yahweh, and we talked about that, and I knew He wouldn’t mind, because He and the Father are One, and the things that the Father has, He has and the things He has, the Father has, but it made it too clear to me, how close, how familiar, I must be with the Father, and my mind cannot get around that, so we agreed not to use that name.

“But I know who You are,” I said, picking up His hand and kissing His scar. "You Word of God, You Son of God and Your living humanity," I said.

Then I wanted to get up, and Jesus put Himself back on the couch and I came to Him and looked at Him with love.

“Hello You,” I said. “You beautiful. You lovely. The Word.” Then I whispered “Yeshua,” and then I grinned because I felt shy and I placed my cheek against His. “Maybe I’m not pronouncing it right. But that is what they called You, on those dusty streets. That is how they called You.”

Then I curled up with Him, but the seeing buckled as I was settling in, but I let it go to Him and then I tried again, because I wanted to be wedged in safely where I loved to be. And as soon as I was with Jesus, the current of love was more than ever before. It grows with each choice of trust under duress, each act of obedience in the face of fear, every time I choose to rest in His faithfulness above everything else, choosing to offer Him love even when I am inwardly trembling with the fear that this offering of myself will be rejected as deficient. 

And I felt as if the space were too contained, as if this communion of love were greater than the current space, which is a feeling I have had before, so I said, let us have another place. Then I was caught up in the love, and then Jesus showed me another place, but then I doubted and felt that I was comfortable where I was. However, Jesus kept offering me the room and I thought, let me accept; let me see where this goes.

So He took my hand and I saw how the room was behind that opening that I sometimes come through and the opening was curtained back and there was a room inside there, quiet and still. There was one window that looked out into the green lawn, but was shadowed by deeply green ivy, as though there was a trellis over the window. The light came through filtered and green. There seemed to be green, living plants in the room, and beautiful hangings on the wall and carpets on the stone floor.

It was comfortable and refreshing to my spirit, safe and pleasing. I made myself quiet in the room and looked out the window and drank in the still green light. Jesus came and was there with me. Being there was quiet and slow.

Jesus seemed to have long dark, thickly curled hair, and I was all lovingly teasing Him, the way sometimes that I do. I don’t know why I do this, but it seems perfectly natural at the time. I said, “What is this, You darling? What is this hair?” His beard also looked different from before, darker and shaped, but I’ve gotten used to Jesus’ appearance changing from time to time, so I said, “Be that way if You like, I know who You are.” It was certainly an attractive look in its own way.

Then it was as though Jesus showed me all the different ways He has been portrayed- in movies and in pictures, and it was as though both of us understood that none of them captured exactly how He really looked, but that He could appear that way if He wished, and that appearing that way was almost an act of graceful love and accommodation.

And Jesus said, how would you like Me to appear?

I knew He meant, which of these appeals to you? And to be honest, the classic picture of Jesus does appeal to me; the one I was familiar with as a child. I find it comforting. Jesus appeared that way, and it did fill me with love- I threw my arms around His neck and kissed His face, but I said, “I want to see You as You are.” Which was of course, a bold and impossible request.

Because I can’t, yet. But He loved me for asking and I know I will see Him one day as He is, and in the meantime, I will be with Jesus in these passing and fluid images that only hint at the full reality of Him.

It was just a delicious time. We were laughing often. It was comfortable and full of love and good humor and just mutual delight. Worship and adoration of Jesus rose up from within me and I was just so grateful even to exist- because I exist in Him, I’m His because He made me His.

So I tucked my face close to His and I said, “Thank You for thinking of me,” which we thought was too funny, but also true and marvelous and I meant it from the very depth of my being.

Then we were talking and Jesus was sitting, and He was His usual self- that is, the way He usually appears to me. We were talking. We were talking about freedom, about how, when Jesus invites me to that space, I am free to choose to come or not to come.

And just as He said this, the seeing buckled (instead of the current image remaining steady, I saw suddenly something else, in a way I could not control or anticipate). That is the worst buckling, or static down the line, that I have ever known.

I mean, sometimes these images, or visions or whatever they are, change unexpectedly into weird things, and I have let that go to Jesus, just as a matter of course. (The phrase “let that go to Him,” is shorthand, and what I mean by it is that I let the mystery of what was happening and why it was happening remain in Jesus’ hands and to trust Him no matter what I was seeing. Another words, I was giving it to Jesus, for Him to deal with Himself, instead of trying to fix it myself, which would have been a disaster, because I had no ability or understanding to do so.)

This has happened from the beginning, and that is what Jesus taught me to call it- static down the line, and not to pay any attention to it and I have gotten better at doing this.

But this! I could not ignore this and I can’t begin to describe the incredible amounts of shame that flooded into my spirit and I simply sunk down through the stone floor and down and down and down into my physical self where I lay in the bed and I just lay there, stunned and ashamed and horrified and appalled and frozen in shock.

It was such a loss, because I hadn’t yet come to the end of enjoying being with Jesus and that new room, but the shame lingered all night long and I couldn’t come before Jesus, even though I knew He loved me and He knew better than I whatever it was that had happened.

Jesus invited me to come and speak with Him about it- and Jesus reminded me of other times when I trusted Him in particularly deep ways, with gaping hurts that had been struck from the abuse I had endured- emotions and thoughts and expectations. I had trusted Jesus with emotions like intense anger at Him, and feelings of being betrayed by Him, and Jesus had been brilliant, compassionate and loving. He has a deft healing touch.

Jesus reminded me of His compassion which had understood exactly what had happened and why, and had reassured me that He knew my heart all the way through. Jesus was not fooled by the distortion of hurts and the way they could cause unwanted reaction. Even then, I just simply couldn’t come before Him.

I just keep wishing that my visions could be solid, like physical reality, instead of a fluid, inner spiritual reality that is changing like water. But I guess it has to be that way because it’s a mutual creation between Jesus and I. It’s intimacy is born from the spontaneous and generous giving, and that means that we must have space and that means that things are changing as we communicate and listen.

And the soul is broken and hurting and often carrying pain, and that pain sometimes breaks through.

Jesus presented the idea to me, in a quiet and gentle way, that it was the freedom He had been pointing out, that had caused soul to react as it did- as if freedom to accept His invitation to fellowship was terrifying and that part of me didn’t want to accept it- but to completely reject it and in rejecting this frightening idea, the seeing had buckled in such an embarrassing way.

That did make sense, and as I write it out now, it makes even more sense, and that is how Jesus is- so gracious to explain to me my own self, in a way that allows me to forgive and understand myself in the way that He already has.

Because the idea of rejecting God is terrifying. It’s especially so right now, because many people that I love and care about, and with whom I am close, are talking about and openly exploring the idea of atheism and agnostic philosophies and I find it disturbing.

It causes me to wonder, am I holding onto God, or is He holding on to me? Of course, the answer is, He is holding on to me.

But I think, what would happen if I ceased to accept these visions, these invitations? What if I closed my heart to Jesus? What if I chose to doubt all this entirely and walked away and determined to know nothing except what my mind and general society could easy accept?

What would happen then?

Then I would find you, Jesus just whispered, as I was writing this.

*

"And they told about the things that had happened on the road, and how He was known to them in the breaking of bread."

-Luke 24:35 NKJV