Rejoicing

Friends, rejoice for me. I have had such an experience of God. I am so spoiled by God. The minute I laid down my straining after a God I could address as "Thee", a personal God that could communicate, He rushed in to fill my soul. There are many things that came together to give me this experience as it has unfolded over the last five days, but the crowning glory was Kelly's Testament of Devotion which my Friend Bryan lent to me this First Day. I suddenly know, beyond any doubt that there is a real, personal, experiential God. I had lost that sense so drastically. More recently I had rediscovered an intellectual and even spiritual understanding of God, and a hunger for more, but just could not experience God/Christ as a person.

No matter how I tried, I felt like I was lying to myself, trying to talk myself into believing something I "knew" was untrue. Whenever I felt the presence of God, I told myself it was my imagination and religious hysteria - I realize now those are my ex-husband's words, not mine. I thought I was being rigorous in my search for the truth by rejecting the movements of my heart towards God, but really I was just being scared. I didn't want to open myself to God again because I feared that tragic loss. It's funny how some people have a fear of intimacy with other people after a traumatic break-up...well, I had a fear of intimacy with God.

Whatever God intends for me, I feel so much peace and such a desire for obedience. I know that if I am faithful in this way, there will be no rushing, and much discernment, and God will not allow me to fall or to make another terrible mistake. All this time, I've been so afraid because I know I cannot trust myself, with all my faults and old injuries, not to make a mess of things. Finally being able to hand everything over to God in holy obedience, begging him to take all control from me, leaves me with so much peace. It is shocking how I can feel so sure in my love and faith but so unconcerned with what comes of it, because I know that the power of God is over all.

I finally feel like my old self who could throw herself in the arms of God, but a grown-up version of her, ready to step off into the void of God in a way I was still too afraid to do when I was 18.

From Testament of Devotion...

You who read these words already know this inner Life and Light. For by this very Light within you is your recognition given. In this humanistic age we suppose we are the initiators and God is the responder. But the Living Christ within us is the initiator, and we are the responders. God the Lover, the accuser, the revealer of light and darkness presses within us. "Behold I stand at the door and knock." And all our apparent initiative is already a response, a testimonial to His secret presence and working within us. The basic response of the soul to the Light is internal adoration and joy, thanksgiving and worship, self-surrender and listening. The secret places of the heart cease to be our noisy workshop. They become a holy sanctuary of adoration and of self-oblation, where we are kept in perfect peace, if our minds be stayed on Him who has found us in the inward springs of our life. And in brief intervals of overpowering visitation we are able to carry the sanctuary frame of mind out into the world, into its turmoil and its fitfulness, and in a hyperesthesia of the soul, we see all humankind tinged with deeper shadows and touched with Galilean glories. Powerfully are the springs of our will moved to an abandon of singing love toward God; powerfully are we moved to a new and over coming love toward time-blinded human beings and all creation. In this Center of Creation all things are ours, and we are Christ's and Christ is God's. We are owned beings, ready to run and not be weary and to walk and not faint.

But the light fades, the will weakens, the humdrum returns. Can we stay this fading? No; nor should we try, for we must learn the disciplines of His will.

The Inner Light, the Inward Christ, is no mere doctrine, belonging peculiarly to a small religious fellowship, to be accepted or rejected as a mere belief. It is the living Center of Reference for all Christian souls and Christian groups - yes, and of non-Christian groups as well - who seriously mean to dwell in the secret place of the Most High. He is the center and source of action, not the endpoint of thought. He is the locus of commitment, not a problem for debate. Practice comes first in religion, not theory or dogma. And Christian practice is not exhausted in outward deeds. These are the fruits, not the roots. A practicing Christian must above all be one who practices the perpetual return of the soul into the inner sanctuary, who brings the world into its Light and rejudges it, who brings the Light into the world with all its turmoil and its fitfulness and re-creates it.