Life at the bottom - or - the reality of deity as discovered in the trenches

Avalanches begin slowly, a slight downward shift, perhaps in a single snowflake. But it presses and nudges the flakes immediately around it, until they too are in motion. Almost imperceptibly then, mountains crumble into the plain and the landscape is changed.

So it is with me and spirituality. Great motions of realization are often precipitated by barely perceptible nudges against the hidden parts of me. I haven't written here much, mostly because it didn't seem like I had much to say. I don't want to get locked into always having to have "spiritually" minded posts, but I'm firmly convinced that God is everywhere, so every moment has the potential of revealing the face of our God.

But sometimes the face of God is obscured, covered, hidden, out of sight. It's hard to tell in those moments whether He's hiding or the night is just too black around me or perhaps my eyes have been deceiving me the whole time and the God that I thought I had discovered was not the God who really stood crouching in the shadows.

Here's the doozy for me. I go on for weeks at a time, pretending that things are as they have seemed. I'm the ostrich with my head in the sand, sure that if I continue along in what I've seen and heard before then God will stay the same and be the same and I'll still have Him all figured out. For weeks I'll ignore this nudge in my spirit that says, "you're not seeing Me." I continue on with the trappings of worship or study or connection that used to be filled with life and hope, but are ever waning and losing their ability to move me Godward. But I hold on and grip them as if they were all that was left, all the while God is moving forward into something else.

I also notice that in those times where I'm stuck and God is not, I notice in others first what God eventually ends up showing me. This time is was an authenticity issue. I would sit in church and wonder, "is this real? Are these people 'getting it' or is this a Pavlovian example of conditioned response?"

Today that came home. Am I real, or am I a dog slobbering at the ringing of the bell? In a lot of ways I'm still struggling to reconcile what I'm coming to see and believe with what I was taught to see and believe. There seems to be this widening chasm between where I was and where I am, and it scares the hell out of me to consider the ramifications of that. What I think I've been trying to do was just talk as if I had it figured out, and pretend that I knew what I believed. But that doesn't work.

But even as the chasm expands, I find that my tendency to cast away the past as irrelevant or unimportant isn't healthy or good. It's also interesting to note that I'm much more comfortable with my 'secular' past than I am with my ecclesiastical history.

It feels like the valley. The past few weeks have been hell. Not sure of where I am or who I am or what I'm doing, I sunk in my spirit. Yesterday was a boiling point where I cried out.

God answered

The explanation of how and where and why God met me probably wouldn't make much of an impression on you. I think it's actually a very mundane thing in reality. But in His infinite grace and wisdom, He found a way to connect with me and let me know that even though I'd walked off the path, He knew what I loved, and wanted to share. That was very important. So now I begin/continue this experiment in authenticity. It seems there's another layer of stuff that needs to be peeled away.