Monday, November 23, 2009
Yawn.
Battling apathy is a common theme for the last six months and something I'm really struggling with lately. Have I always been this lazy?
Sunday, November 15, 2009
No Peace
There is so much that I am thinking about right now in regards to the future....there is not a lot of peace in thinking about these things, which causes me fear. The thing is, I don't know whether that lack of peace is just a result of fear of the unknown that I am afraid to jump into, or whether it's an indication that I should stay the present course and not do the things I'm thinking about doing.
Is that ambiguous enough? Haha!
Prayer would be appreciated.
Is that ambiguous enough? Haha!
Prayer would be appreciated.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Ruby Beach
OLYMPIC PENINSULA - October 16, 2009
The rain had started in Seattle and had not stopped nearly the entire trip. It pounded with a ferocity I had rarely seen as I drove out of the city, as though pushing back against the car to prevent my departure. The wind drove the rain with even greater force and whipped through the trees, bending their tops.
Eventually the rain subsided and even stopped for a while; now, hours later and as I rounded the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula and turned south on 101, it was diminishing to little more than a drizzle. I passed through dense forests and through Forks, where I saw the word “Twilight” at least two dozen times in three blocks.
After stopping for gas and coffee, I continued into the forest, guiding the car through the foggy drizzle and lazy curves of the two-lane highway.
The sign for Ruby Beach came out of nowhere along the straight stretch of road between the evergreens, and without thinking I slammed the brakes and jerked the wheel to the right, flying off the main road and onto the dirt side road that hugged the cliff’s edge. This was not a planned stop and I was still sixty miles from my destination. Through the fog and the trees to my left I suddenly saw the ocean, churning violently and so close it seemed to threaten to scale the cliff.
Parking the car at the trailhead, I rolled up my jeans, not bothering to trade flip-flops for shoes, and stepped out into the rain, which was now nothing more than a mist that filled the air and smelled of sea salt. The trail down to the beach was surprisingly short, but the sight that greeted me at the bottom was even more surprising.
A rushing, silt-laden river spilled out of the forest at the base of the trail, its banks completely concealed by the overhanging evergreens and fiery deciduous trees ablaze with fall colors. It looked like a Northwest version of the huge brown rivers on the Discovery channel as they flow lazily through the Amazon.
As it approached the beach, the riverbed suddenly banked to the right, flanked by the massive driftwood logs that had floated down the river and then been forced back up the beach by the superior strength of the Pacific in a war of waters. River pushed; ocean pushed back. The result was that it was impossible to reach the beach without climbing over the tangled mass of cedar and fir that formed the cease-fire line between the river and the ocean.
Smooth, polished stones formed most of the upper beachhead, crafted and then deposited by the river and making for an unusual but beautiful look; I’d seen rocky beaches before – this is the Northwest – but this was much different.
Scattered along the beach, as though tossed from the cliffs by giants, were huge scraggy rock masses that stuck out of the water and received the brunt of the Pacific’s angry pounding. Their rough tops sprouted green moss and small trees and their bases were polished astonishingly smooth by the waves, giving them the appearance of slowly oxidizing gray metal; they changed color from brown to gray in a seamless, shiny wet gradient, finally blending with the sand at the bottom. Other smaller, equally smooth rock formations littered the beach, leading me to believe that just under the sand must lie a vast expanse of solid rock, likely volcanic.
Enshrouding it all was the thick fog rolling in from the Pacific, giving the entire scene an eerie but somehow peaceful quality. I was dumbstruck. The expanse of nature in front of me screamed of the awesome power of God displayed in His creation.
The most impressive element in the scene – and the one that got my attention immediately – was the ocean. I climbed over the logs and made my way to the confluence of river and sea, totally in awe of the might that felt as though it rushed outward from the very water itself as it pounded the beach.
And I instantly felt very, very small.
Standing on one of the smooth, flat rocks, I stared out over the Pacific in silence. The only distinguishing feature between the horizon separating cloudy sky and steel water was a slightly darker shade of gray. The ocean’s foam was a light brown that frothed and spit in all directions as the breakers slammed into each other with such violent force that occasionally a wave would burst unexpectedly through the throng and rush up the beach, forcing me to retreat. There was no distinguishable in-out, peaceful wave lapping pattern at the beachhead. The ocean just churned and frothed and leaped with rage as the wind howled.
God, this is so like you. The thought came from nowhere as I stared out at the water.
I’m standing here, this little man confronted with this massive ocean so much bigger than I am – I want so badly to run into it, to experience it, to get more of it; but if I rushed into those waves I would die. You’re the same way right now – so close, so incredibly powerful, but just out of reach. Why can’t I feel you? Where is my heart? Why can’t I seem to get near you?
I sighed. That was exactly why I’d come out to the peninsula – to get away from all the noise, all the static, all the responsibilities, all the commitments. Each day felt like a slogging ordeal that seemed to never end, and yet I was not making enough time for myself nor, more importantly, for Jesus. I felt drained, exasperated, tired, and constantly on edge. I was beyond dysfunctional at work, completely unable to focus, and stumbling around in every other area of life. I desperately needed time alone with Jesus so that I could examine my heart, talk to Him, try to sort out priorities and plan for the future.
I had lost my passion for everything – including the Gospel, a fact which scared me more than anything else. I could not shake the extremely discomforting suspicion that I was nothing more than a religious Pharisee, trying to use God to get what I really wanted and getting angry when He didn’t give it.
A great weight of inauthenticity was pressing upon me and getting heavier every day; and it was eating away at my soul and my passion like a slow and steady acid drip. Fake, fake, fake. Liar, liar, liar. You don’t know Him. Stop acting like you do. Even if you tried He wouldn’t care – He knows you don’t really want Him. You just want to be a better version of you – admit it. You make Him sick, you know that? Look around you – you know why you don’t have passion like those people? Because you don’t know Him. And you’re never going to have passion like those people, because you’re never GOING to really KNOW Him. You’re going to spend the rest of your life fooling yourself into thinking you know Jesus. And sooner or later everyone is going to see you for what you really are . . . and someday, He’ll see it too. And then it will be far, far too late for you. Can you hear it already? “Depart from me . . . “ Fake, fake, fake.
I was terrified.
And so the peninsula trip had thus been planned a month and a half ago, a desperate and last-ditch effort to cry out to God with my whole heart – and all its inauthenticity – from the best place I could think of – the edge of my known world. This was quite literally it – nothing but the mighty and vast ocean stood before me. I prayed silently. Here I am, God. I’m on edge, literally and figuratively. Please come and meet me here. I’m not even sure I’m here with a pure heart, but I need you to make it right.
For a while there was no answer. I simply stared out in silence at the leaden water and waited.
My thoughts drifted back to the Genesis sermon I’d listened to earlier that week. Mark had made a point that I had not expected or ever heard before: God is a God intimately involved in His creation, not some kind of watchmaker who made a clock, wound it up, and then stepped back to let it run. He speaks and the sun rises, the wind blows, and the waves crash. He speaks over it still today, not just at the time of creation.
And then suddenly I knew why I was here and what He was quietly whispering to my heart.
My hands have made this ocean, this beach, this surf. With my hands and with my words I cause the waves to crash and the tides to change, the wind to blow, the sun to rise and set. I tell the waters to churn or the seas to calm and they will obey me. This ocean before you is mine. If I am so involved in my oceans, why do you believe I am not involved with you? Do you not know that you are more precious to me than my seas?
I felt hope flare up like an ember in wind.
Do you remember when you were a boy and you stared out at this same ocean and realized that I made it to reflect my glory and to show you my love for you? Why do you now doubt my love? You tremble rightly when you look into your heart; but do you not believe that I am capable of purifying even that which is impure? If you have been justified by my Son’s blood, will you not also be spared from my wrath through His blood? No, your heart is not pure, and no, you have not sought me – I sought you.
Motion in my peripheral vision caught my eye. I looked up just in time to see a bald eagle alight on the top of one of the scraggy rocks, less than a hundred feet from where I stood. The eagle preened itself briefly and then stared at me for a moment before also turning its gaze out over the waters, blinking in the wind.
This is my ocean. All of this is my creation and so are you.
Peace rushed like the river slamming into the ocean.
The God who had made the limitless ocean stretched out before me was the same God pursuing me. The same God who desired a relationship with me. The same God who was intimately involved in every minute detail of my life.
I had been meditating on Romans 5:5 on the way out to the peninsula, longing for such an outpouring of the Spirit. I longed for the hope of the joy that would spur me to persevere. And so I continued to mediate and pray.
Father, please send your Holy Spirit and pour out your love into me. Do verse 5! Please! I don’t even know what that means, but please just do it!
It occurred to me that at the root of my terror was something that I had felt ever since I was a child. It was my view of God as a Father.
God, to me, was a strict, serious, not-to-be-trifled with Father who was not particularly fond of me as a son. In fact, I was probably His greatest disappointment. He was usually angry and would withhold Himself from me if I was disobedient – and sometimes even when I wasn’t, just to make me squirm. He loved me out of obligation and not out of selflessness; he longed to punish me, not lovingly correct and prosper me; and He was probably very, very sorry that I even existed.
And so I lived in constant dread of disappointing Him through my perpetual failures. Obedience on my part, then, was not out of love or joy but out of fear. And I doubted that God would help me because, in my view, I was not loved.
And is that what you see here, at my ocean? He whispered again. Do you see obligatory involvement? Disinterest? Punishment?
I thought for a moment. No, Lord. I see power. I see orchestrated beauty in creation and your hands in it. And that means You are good. That means you care for me.
Then why do you doubt me, Matthew?
I could say nothing but no response was needed. And so I looked out over the Pacific as the wind howled and the leaden, frothy waves churned, confident in His power and fully assured of His trustworthiness.
The rain had started in Seattle and had not stopped nearly the entire trip. It pounded with a ferocity I had rarely seen as I drove out of the city, as though pushing back against the car to prevent my departure. The wind drove the rain with even greater force and whipped through the trees, bending their tops.
Eventually the rain subsided and even stopped for a while; now, hours later and as I rounded the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula and turned south on 101, it was diminishing to little more than a drizzle. I passed through dense forests and through Forks, where I saw the word “Twilight” at least two dozen times in three blocks.
After stopping for gas and coffee, I continued into the forest, guiding the car through the foggy drizzle and lazy curves of the two-lane highway.
The sign for Ruby Beach came out of nowhere along the straight stretch of road between the evergreens, and without thinking I slammed the brakes and jerked the wheel to the right, flying off the main road and onto the dirt side road that hugged the cliff’s edge. This was not a planned stop and I was still sixty miles from my destination. Through the fog and the trees to my left I suddenly saw the ocean, churning violently and so close it seemed to threaten to scale the cliff.
Parking the car at the trailhead, I rolled up my jeans, not bothering to trade flip-flops for shoes, and stepped out into the rain, which was now nothing more than a mist that filled the air and smelled of sea salt. The trail down to the beach was surprisingly short, but the sight that greeted me at the bottom was even more surprising.
A rushing, silt-laden river spilled out of the forest at the base of the trail, its banks completely concealed by the overhanging evergreens and fiery deciduous trees ablaze with fall colors. It looked like a Northwest version of the huge brown rivers on the Discovery channel as they flow lazily through the Amazon.
As it approached the beach, the riverbed suddenly banked to the right, flanked by the massive driftwood logs that had floated down the river and then been forced back up the beach by the superior strength of the Pacific in a war of waters. River pushed; ocean pushed back. The result was that it was impossible to reach the beach without climbing over the tangled mass of cedar and fir that formed the cease-fire line between the river and the ocean.
Smooth, polished stones formed most of the upper beachhead, crafted and then deposited by the river and making for an unusual but beautiful look; I’d seen rocky beaches before – this is the Northwest – but this was much different.
Scattered along the beach, as though tossed from the cliffs by giants, were huge scraggy rock masses that stuck out of the water and received the brunt of the Pacific’s angry pounding. Their rough tops sprouted green moss and small trees and their bases were polished astonishingly smooth by the waves, giving them the appearance of slowly oxidizing gray metal; they changed color from brown to gray in a seamless, shiny wet gradient, finally blending with the sand at the bottom. Other smaller, equally smooth rock formations littered the beach, leading me to believe that just under the sand must lie a vast expanse of solid rock, likely volcanic.
Enshrouding it all was the thick fog rolling in from the Pacific, giving the entire scene an eerie but somehow peaceful quality. I was dumbstruck. The expanse of nature in front of me screamed of the awesome power of God displayed in His creation.
The most impressive element in the scene – and the one that got my attention immediately – was the ocean. I climbed over the logs and made my way to the confluence of river and sea, totally in awe of the might that felt as though it rushed outward from the very water itself as it pounded the beach.
And I instantly felt very, very small.
Standing on one of the smooth, flat rocks, I stared out over the Pacific in silence. The only distinguishing feature between the horizon separating cloudy sky and steel water was a slightly darker shade of gray. The ocean’s foam was a light brown that frothed and spit in all directions as the breakers slammed into each other with such violent force that occasionally a wave would burst unexpectedly through the throng and rush up the beach, forcing me to retreat. There was no distinguishable in-out, peaceful wave lapping pattern at the beachhead. The ocean just churned and frothed and leaped with rage as the wind howled.
God, this is so like you. The thought came from nowhere as I stared out at the water.
I’m standing here, this little man confronted with this massive ocean so much bigger than I am – I want so badly to run into it, to experience it, to get more of it; but if I rushed into those waves I would die. You’re the same way right now – so close, so incredibly powerful, but just out of reach. Why can’t I feel you? Where is my heart? Why can’t I seem to get near you?
I sighed. That was exactly why I’d come out to the peninsula – to get away from all the noise, all the static, all the responsibilities, all the commitments. Each day felt like a slogging ordeal that seemed to never end, and yet I was not making enough time for myself nor, more importantly, for Jesus. I felt drained, exasperated, tired, and constantly on edge. I was beyond dysfunctional at work, completely unable to focus, and stumbling around in every other area of life. I desperately needed time alone with Jesus so that I could examine my heart, talk to Him, try to sort out priorities and plan for the future.
I had lost my passion for everything – including the Gospel, a fact which scared me more than anything else. I could not shake the extremely discomforting suspicion that I was nothing more than a religious Pharisee, trying to use God to get what I really wanted and getting angry when He didn’t give it.
A great weight of inauthenticity was pressing upon me and getting heavier every day; and it was eating away at my soul and my passion like a slow and steady acid drip. Fake, fake, fake. Liar, liar, liar. You don’t know Him. Stop acting like you do. Even if you tried He wouldn’t care – He knows you don’t really want Him. You just want to be a better version of you – admit it. You make Him sick, you know that? Look around you – you know why you don’t have passion like those people? Because you don’t know Him. And you’re never going to have passion like those people, because you’re never GOING to really KNOW Him. You’re going to spend the rest of your life fooling yourself into thinking you know Jesus. And sooner or later everyone is going to see you for what you really are . . . and someday, He’ll see it too. And then it will be far, far too late for you. Can you hear it already? “Depart from me . . . “ Fake, fake, fake.
I was terrified.
And so the peninsula trip had thus been planned a month and a half ago, a desperate and last-ditch effort to cry out to God with my whole heart – and all its inauthenticity – from the best place I could think of – the edge of my known world. This was quite literally it – nothing but the mighty and vast ocean stood before me. I prayed silently. Here I am, God. I’m on edge, literally and figuratively. Please come and meet me here. I’m not even sure I’m here with a pure heart, but I need you to make it right.
For a while there was no answer. I simply stared out in silence at the leaden water and waited.
My thoughts drifted back to the Genesis sermon I’d listened to earlier that week. Mark had made a point that I had not expected or ever heard before: God is a God intimately involved in His creation, not some kind of watchmaker who made a clock, wound it up, and then stepped back to let it run. He speaks and the sun rises, the wind blows, and the waves crash. He speaks over it still today, not just at the time of creation.
And then suddenly I knew why I was here and what He was quietly whispering to my heart.
My hands have made this ocean, this beach, this surf. With my hands and with my words I cause the waves to crash and the tides to change, the wind to blow, the sun to rise and set. I tell the waters to churn or the seas to calm and they will obey me. This ocean before you is mine. If I am so involved in my oceans, why do you believe I am not involved with you? Do you not know that you are more precious to me than my seas?
I felt hope flare up like an ember in wind.
Do you remember when you were a boy and you stared out at this same ocean and realized that I made it to reflect my glory and to show you my love for you? Why do you now doubt my love? You tremble rightly when you look into your heart; but do you not believe that I am capable of purifying even that which is impure? If you have been justified by my Son’s blood, will you not also be spared from my wrath through His blood? No, your heart is not pure, and no, you have not sought me – I sought you.
Motion in my peripheral vision caught my eye. I looked up just in time to see a bald eagle alight on the top of one of the scraggy rocks, less than a hundred feet from where I stood. The eagle preened itself briefly and then stared at me for a moment before also turning its gaze out over the waters, blinking in the wind.
This is my ocean. All of this is my creation and so are you.
Peace rushed like the river slamming into the ocean.
The God who had made the limitless ocean stretched out before me was the same God pursuing me. The same God who desired a relationship with me. The same God who was intimately involved in every minute detail of my life.
I had been meditating on Romans 5:5 on the way out to the peninsula, longing for such an outpouring of the Spirit. I longed for the hope of the joy that would spur me to persevere. And so I continued to mediate and pray.
Father, please send your Holy Spirit and pour out your love into me. Do verse 5! Please! I don’t even know what that means, but please just do it!
It occurred to me that at the root of my terror was something that I had felt ever since I was a child. It was my view of God as a Father.
God, to me, was a strict, serious, not-to-be-trifled with Father who was not particularly fond of me as a son. In fact, I was probably His greatest disappointment. He was usually angry and would withhold Himself from me if I was disobedient – and sometimes even when I wasn’t, just to make me squirm. He loved me out of obligation and not out of selflessness; he longed to punish me, not lovingly correct and prosper me; and He was probably very, very sorry that I even existed.
And so I lived in constant dread of disappointing Him through my perpetual failures. Obedience on my part, then, was not out of love or joy but out of fear. And I doubted that God would help me because, in my view, I was not loved.
And is that what you see here, at my ocean? He whispered again. Do you see obligatory involvement? Disinterest? Punishment?
I thought for a moment. No, Lord. I see power. I see orchestrated beauty in creation and your hands in it. And that means You are good. That means you care for me.
Then why do you doubt me, Matthew?
I could say nothing but no response was needed. And so I looked out over the Pacific as the wind howled and the leaden, frothy waves churned, confident in His power and fully assured of His trustworthiness.
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