When I was kid there was a book called “The Bridge” that I read over and over again.  I couldn’t get enough of it.  Now I understand that it fed my spirit.  It said something about God that moved me out of the realm of the soul and into something eternally powerful.

The story was about two kingdoms on either side of a river.  The larger of the two was called Folger, and it fit the sound of its name to a T.  The smaller kingdom was called Bracken, and its persistent prosperity drove the larger kingdom into a fury.  The lord of Folger wanted to swallow Bracken like a snake swallows a frog.

Invasion, however, was tricky business because of the river.  It was wide and swiftly flowing, so the only tenable point of access was a large wooden suspension bridge.  For many years, the bridge was successfully guarded by the smaller kingdom.  But one grim night, through an act of betrayal, the guard was compromised and the enemy stormed the castle.  A large invasion of thousands of soldiers was to follow.

The story follows the adventures of the Princess, who through the ingenious and sacrificial strategy of her father’s advisors, escapes.  By a providence much kinder than her spoiled disposition deserved, she connects with a wise woman who has more than patience, she has a key to victory for the little nation.

The key is in the form of a song.  It was a ballad sung by the castle guard of Bracken for hundreds of years, but out of tradition, not an understanding of the meaning.  Here are the words of the song:

“Come war, the soldier earns his trade.
Beat the drums; my heart inspire.
Bring me my iron blade,
My helmet rivet on.
Bring me the prancing horse
Gird on my sword of fire.

Nay, come there many boots,
On cobblestones that ring?
Disarm me where the waters course.
My iron helm unhinge.
A riverboat shall be my horse.
One axe shall overthrow a king.

In the night the soldier creeps,
Midway from shore to shore.
High above the murky deep
He finds a slender wooden floor.
‘Twill one man safely keep,
Whose axe shall end a war.”

The song was about the bridge.  It spoke of a soldier who discarded his armor and horse when he realized that the army was advancing over the cobblestones of the bridge.  He goes instead to the river, to a place halfway in-between.  There he ascends above the water to do something to win the war that only requires the power of one axe.

When they follow the instructions of the song, they discover a hidden platform with a single small beam.  When chopped through, an entire section of cabled suspension was weakened.  No way could it hold the force of an army’s marching feet.

And indeed, it did not.  When the full invasion came, the bridge collapsed.

The beauty of this story is that the builders had planned ahead.  They knew the lay of the land and the nature of the two kingdoms.  They knew the day would come when the smaller kingdom would be faced with utter defeat.  So they built into the bridge a mechanism for overthrowing the strength of the enemy and securing the victory.

It is this picture that so captivates my spirit because I see a reflection of the nature of God.  The enemy often shows himself so powerful.  He rages against us and he can wound us deeply.  But God is out ahead of him.  God is the master strategist, planning and placing leverage points throughout the structure of time, in anticipation for the day when they will be revealed, like the meaning of the song.  Our God doesn’t do blocked.  He doesn’t do defeated.  God is a God of victory and He builds triumph into the timeline of our lives and of all mankind.

For us individually, time and again, we discover some unscathed piece of design that spoils the enemy’s attempts to utterly crush and destroy.  A partial victory is never safe for him because God can suddenly uncover a piece that was there all along, or give us some truth that turns things right side up, and the enemy’s strategy disintegrates.  Throughout history, from Adam and Eve, to Moses and the Hebrews, to Reese Howells and his intercessors, God has demonstrated His incomparable skill of triumphing over the enemy with a plan that was set in motion before the crisis came.  The greatest illustration is the person of Jesus Christ whose incarnation was built into time before man was even made.

Everywhere around us are these masterfully designed bridges, waiting for the moment of use by our undefeatable God.  We may not see them because we are limited in our view of time.  But they are there.  They are in our lives, and sometimes we sing the song before we ever know what it means.  But the day will come when we understand, and the enemy will lose another battle.  God has built them into the fabric of time, and ultimately, when the enemy believes he has finally achieved a complete victory, the King will come again.  His mighty sword will fell the final bridge and His saints will triumph with Him forever.

Did you know that there are multiple “fools” in the Old Testament?  Well, I know there are many people who were foolish, but did you know that there are different kinds of fools?  In other words, our English does a poor job of translating the Hebrew meaning so we keep using the same word over and over again, even though the concept is different.

One of the reasons for this is plain old poor (or lazy) translation.  Another is a deeper and foundational difference between the two languages.  The Hebrew language creates pictures with their words.  They have several thousand fewer words in their vocabulary than we have in ours.  Each word captures a complete image instead of being a single element in a string of descriptors.  Sort of gives me goose bumps thinking about how much closer their language must be to the sound that actually created the earth.

So far as I can tell at the moment, there are at least five different fools in Proverbs.  In my recent study, I was grappling with one of them in particular, and in that grappling, crossed an important threshold in my thinking.  I became aware that I was tempted to do exactly what many of us do when we read Scripture.  We leave it in the abstract.  The person or action being described stays unknown and unfamiliar.  There is no picture, no comparison to anything we recognize or already know about.  We try to take those abstract yet terribly distant concepts and apply them to our lives.  But these efforts so often underperform our expectations.  Why?  I think one reason is because the concepts never come alive.

For us to really integrate what is being communicated, we have to enter into the world of word pictures.  Let’s take it out of the realm of Scripture for a moment and look at everyday life.  There are two tools continually used by the human mind to understand and relate to the world around them.  One of them is metaphor and the other is simile.  Both of these tools involve creating pictures.  When you use a metaphor such as “he’s a lion in battle”, you create a picture of how that man behaves on the battlefield.  You think of courage, strength, and tenacity.  He’s not actually a lion, nor does he tear the enemy apart with his teeth.  But we use the picture of certain characteristics associated with the lion to describe the man.   Similes are used even more often.  Think of this phrase: “he moves like molasses in the winter”.  You are trying to describe the friend I don’t know, and to bridge the gap, you create a picture of something I do know.  If you tell me he’s like molasses, I know EXACTLY what you mean.  I can imagine him oozing down the sidewalk, slowly, on his way to the car, with me impatiently snorting behind him because I am ready to GO already.  I know that if I am going to do anything with him, I will need to pad the appointment with an extra 10 minutes so he can toddle his way along and not make us late.  He will be one of those slow going people who make me practice patience.  I still haven’t met him yet, but your comparison made him real.  In both of these examples, there is a richer connection to the concept because of the picture created by the comparison.  These are the kinds of tools we need to use when we read Scripture.

So, in that moment during my study I realized that I couldn’t go another step until I knew what this fool was like.  Just like you described your friend by comparing him to molasses, I needed to understand this fool by comparing him to someone I knew.  There needed to be some flesh on his bones to make him real, breathing, and alive.  Who WAS this guy?

It took me two days to find him.  But find him I did!  In fact, I found him in a couple of places.  I found him in the form of an old boyfriend of my cousin (glad she didn’t marry him!) in a character from a favorite book, and in a couple of secular applications.  Given the condition of the world today, I am SURE he exists in a few other places too.  Now the story was coming alive.  I was beginning to see the Word as the language intended it to be – as pictures.

It takes work to do this.  While we often use comparisons in our daily lives, we are terribly out of practice using them to dig out the treasures of Scripture.  It takes time.  I camped on that one description for two days until I got the picture.  But has that Scripture ever come alive!  I can SEE it in real life.  I can feel it and taste it, and the exercise of finding it in the real world has made it a part of me.

What do you do when you read Scripture?  Do you take the time to find the comparisons that engage your mind and emotions, not to mention your imagination?  Do the stories breathe with the breath of real men and women, or are they two-dimensional words on a page?

There are always the times when God will ignite our spirits in a moment’s notice and we’ll feel the rush of heavenly insight.  But there is something significant to be said for the discipline of deepening our thinking process.  Those heavenly moments will be richer for it, and so will all the days, weeks, and months in-between.

(Still glad my cousin didn’t marry that guy!)

The study began on July 1st with the blank walls of my office.  At the end of last year I moved my office into the bigger room of my apartment and set up my desk, production area, and stained glass station.  We painted the walls a beautiful deep purple.  And that was it.

You might ask what blank walls have to do with studying Scripture or preparing to write a book.  Well, very little, really, unless you are planning to cover them with Post-its.  Or unless you are God and You see connections between things that we mortals never had the sense to suspect.

It turns out that my blank walls were a statement about my insides.  I did not have permission to decorate my workspace.  I could do all the rest of my apartment, and have.  But here … it is something different.  It must be a creative expression and I was terribly afraid that my creativity would say CHEESY to anyone who walked in the room.  Do you think that such inhibitions might block me in a spot or two in my explorations?  Just maybe.  God knows His stuff.

So, I decorated.  Well, I dealt with some issues, and THEN I decorated.  Freedom is sweet in its growth.  You know, I kinda like the results so far!  Score 1 for God.  He is not prone to forget the unbreakable tie between personal growth and fruit.  The steady tearing down of the barriers will have great impact in the coming years.

But He wasn’t done.

At the beginning of the year I planned a trip back to Michigan to spend a week with my family at my grandparent’s cottage.  We grew up going there as kids, and the place is packed full of good memories.  And it has a sort of magical effect.  As soon as you cross the threshold you immediately become hungry and tired.  That’s what you do at the Lake.  Eat, play in the water, eat, and take a nap.  Good times.

This year there was a caveat.  We made a trip to a small city called Ludington on the west coast of Lake Michigan.  We spent many summers camping there for a weekend or a week at a time.  I had not been there for years, but felt a strong sense that I needed to go back.  It felt like something huge was waiting for me.  And so it was.

It was a gift God had been keeping there for 20 odd years.  It was a piece of myself that the land gave back to me; as if I had looked into the mirror of the past.  I had not known that Ludington represented the beauty of a core piece of my design.  It was a part that I had cast aside over the years as I tried to be everything else.  Ludington held on to it, kept it safe, waiting for the day when I was ready to accept the goodness again.  It was like visiting a secret place of your youth and flooding back comes the missing piece of yourself that you left in safekeeping there.  I was staggered by how hungrily my spirit received this healing and how joyous my heart was as a result.

But even then God wasn’t done.

Towards the end of the day we went down to an old favorite beach on the shore of Lake Michigan.  There is a river that dumps into the lake at that spot and it provides all kinds of fun … and warmer water!  Lake Michigan is for children when it comes to temperature.  Adults have too many nerve endings.  After playing around for a while, I wandered off to sit on the beach in relative privacy.  It was pretty crowded that day, but I have sufficient practice at getting lost in my thoughts not to be too bothered.  As I was sitting there, God brought back a picture He gave me years ago in England.  I have held on to that image for all this time, never feeling like it was really me.  Now, He was telling me, it is coming.  Because of what He did in Ludington, the two persons of myself were becoming one.

God’s timing and strategy is exquisite.  The trip to Michigan was planned long before the study time.  He knew it had to happen this way.  He knew that what He was going to do with my creativity and then with Ludington would be crucial to the journey I am taking.  He seems to be even more vested in this than I.  So like Him.

Believe it or not, in the midst of everything going on I have actually done some studying in my study time.  Have you ever thought about Proverbs 8:22ff where it talks about the Creator’s craftsman?  Wisdom.  Wisdom was the first of the Lord’s works.  The idea of wisdom as a living essence captivates me, and is most certainly related to my exploration of the Ancient.  We see the living properties of the created universe, and credit the heavenly creatures with structure and volition, even when we can’t see them.  But what about wisdom?  How does wisdom behave? What would it be like if you could see it?  So, this is where I am focused right now, studying verses that talk about the nature of wisdom and what it says about the nature of God.  Not only will it teach me some important disciplines, but I am already rejoicing over the things I have seen.  And when there is something concrete to share, you can rest assured that my keyboard will have job security.

So, the first month has been a whole lot of unexpected and a whole lot of good.  Wonder what God has planned for August?

#6 in the Mysterious God series

“Charles Wallace’s drive of dragons was a single creature, although Meg was not at all surprised that Charles Wallace had confused this fierce, wild being with dragons.  She had the feeling that she never saw all of it at once, and which of all the eyes could she meet?  Merry eyes, wise eyes, ferocious eyes, kitten eyes, dragon eyes, opening and closing, looking at her, looking at Charles Wallace and Calvin and the strange tall man.  And wings, wings in constant motion, covering and uncovering the eyes.  When the wings were spread out they had a span of at least ten feet, and when they were all folded in, the creature resembled a misty, feathery sphere.  Little spurts of flame and smoke spouted up between the wings … “*

I like imaginative stories. I am drawn to them because they often depict the blending of the spiritual and natural realms in a way we don’t otherwise see.  But I am also very aware that imagination can easily cross the line into dark and defiled and that is not my idea of a good read.  By the time I got to this point in the story, my soul was sending some warning flags.  What was this entity being described?  I could almost see it in my own imagination, and it was more than a little disturbing.  I wasn’t about to expose myself to some defiled spiritual being.  The part about all those eyes was rather disconcerting.  Can you imagine?  Still makes me shudder a bit to think of it.  How weird would it be to have something looking at you with eyes everywhere?

In spite of my caution about what I was getting into, I decided to keep reading.  Something in the back of my mind said that this picture wasn’t entirely new.  Somewhere I had heard of a creature like it, even though I was still rather fixated on the idea of all those eyes.

Maybe some of you have already guessed what it was.  I didn’t guess until I read it in the story.

The author was describing a cherubim.

Granted, it is an author’s rendition, but clearly had characteristics from Scripture.  This wasn’t a scary being from the dark side, it was a scary being from the Kingdom of Light.  And in all honesty, her description was a good deal less disturbing than the real thing.

You see, I have read the book of Ezekiel.  That’s how I knew that the description wasn’t entirely foreign.  But I didn’t really believe what I was reading until I read it in the fictional story.  The story wasn’t in the Bible so I didn’t have to accept that it was God who was behind it.  This creature could be anything, and I clearly suspected it wasn’t good because God wouldn’t make something so weird, would He?

It was a bit of a jolt to realize that not only was it God, but when I refreshed my memory on what He had made, His version was even weirder than the story!  I was forced to see God in an entirely new light and also forced to recognize that I had filtered an awful lot out of my Bible reading.

How easy it is to disconnect from what we read – to take the preachable facts and separate them entirely from the color, texture, and fabric of the story.  We make them fit with what we want to believe about God.  I had read Ezekiel before, that’s why I knew that something was familiar about this creature.  But I had never READ Ezekiel before.  I had never really thought about how strange these creatures were and how much it messed with my head to think that the God of rainbows would create something so seemingly grotesque as a creature with four heads and eyes all over.

God isn’t supposed to be so weird.  Why do you think we prefer the picture of fat little babies with wings and a halo?  Or angels with harps and long flowing robes?  He isn’t supposed to create things that are so fearsome and hard to comprehend.  Nor is He supposed to behave in ways that aren’t exactly our idea of neat and clean.  A sneaking, conceiving, polygamous man as the father of Israel, a murderer as the liberator of Israel, and an adulterer and murderer as their heroic king?

I wanted God to be a certain kind of God.  Clearly I can’t read the Bible and deny the existence of things I don’t understand, but I can refuse to engage with them.  I can read Ezekiel and say, “well, yes, that is a bit odd” and just keep on going.  I can read Daniel and his experiences, or go to the ultimate weirdness and read Revelation and still never really believe it.  I can glaze over all the crazy human dynamics and endless paradoxes and just accept the bits that already make sense.  And what else has God made or done that doesn’t fit into my nice little worldview?

Perhaps that is why Jesus said we must be like the children.  Truth is always real to them, no matter how strange it may appear.

God is mysterious in His creation.  He is mysterious in what He shares and how He shares it.  I don’t understand some of the things He has made or why He considers them worthy of His creative power.  But the limits of my understanding cannot be allowed to block me from always seeking to understand more, to know more, to see His ways a little more clearly.

What do you see when you read Scripture?  Can you engage with what is really going on, even if it blows all your circuits and leaves you wondering if you really do know this God you serve?  Can you allow Him to sanctify and expand your own imagination so that it can take you places in His presence where your mind will never let you go?

It is no small thing to say we serve a mysterious God.

*Excerpt taking from “A Wind in the Door” by Madeleine L’Engle

#5 in the Mysterious God series

The person of Jesus Christ was a pretty mysterious representation of God.

He was born into a poor family, so poor that they couldn’t secure a decent place for his birth, he grew up in Nazareth as the son of a carpenter, was nearly invisible for most of his life, and then heralded as the Son of God by a scruffy aesthetic from the desert, amassed a Messiah-happy following, taught in parables, infuriated the religious leadership and died a brutal death on a cross.  Yet with paradoxical simplicity he was also born of noble lineage, heralded by the stars themselves, visited by Magi from the East, affirmed by the voice of God, and resurrected to ascend into heaven.  How could one man fulfill all the prophecies and so few expectations?

Expectations are an interesting sort of emotion.  At times they can be insightful and profound.  At times they can represent some vestige of hope, or fall away into bitterness and pain.  At any time, I believe they carry the threat of confinement.

Think of the people in Jesus’ day.  Many of them felt the desperation for a Messiah who would restore Israel as an independent power.  Roman rule was a crushing weight and there was political and social unrest everywhere.  The corruption within Israel’s own leadership could hardly be ignored and perhaps there was the hope that all would be made new.  How many of them were blind to Jesus’ divinity because He didn’t meet the expectations they held most dear?  How many more fell away when He died because they had only held out hope that their expectations would somehow still be met?  What about the religious leaders?  Their expectations were even more closely defined – one of the dangers of knowledge without life.  Here is this man from Nazareth who claims to be the Son of God, yet breaks the rules, heals and does miracles, yet won’t keep the Sabbath, and has the extreme audacity to call them what they were?  Unthinkable.  The Messiah was not to unseat them, or gain his authority outside of them, or any number of threats to their legitimacy and position.  They were not ready for a Messiah who led in a way they never could.   Their expectations were like towering walls around them, blocking out the light of revelation.

It has been quite a fascinating process to ponder what I might expect God to do and why.  It is easy to point out the error of the Jews, but I think we fancy that time and culture separate us farther than they really do.  God moves in different ways in different seasons.  Do we reject him now?

We will never know God well enough not to be surprised by Him.  He is, after all, mysterious!  And we do God a great dishonor and ourselves harm by boxing Him into a world defined by wrong or too small expectations.  So, this is the question we need to ask ourselves.

What is the basis of our expectations?  Is it need or desire – like the Jews who so desperately wanted to be free of Rome?  Or is it legitimacy and position – like the religious leaders who were threatened the instant Jesus challenged them?  Are our expectations based on ourselves or on Him?

Expectations that are based on our own needs or woundedness have a way of becoming hard and brittle.  They don’t bend and grow, they resist or break.  It is when we look to His nature and His heart that we will find we can meet Him in the places of wonder and surprise – of unexpected behavior and abundant life.  We can reframe Him, the world, and our own lives around this new manifestation of the nature that is always the same.  We can more easily let go of what we thought was going to be when what we thought isn’t tied to our needs and value.

How small our expectations can be!  How much bigger is our God than we ever imagined.