an exercise of the imagination

I’ve tasted such a life in the Spirit before, but it’s been quite a long time. I remember the joy, the peace, of a dynamic union with God. Remembering the days of life in the Spirit is like looking far back into the past, and I remember the joy that made my face glow (people constantly commented on how joy seemed to exude off my person), and I remember how prayer marked my life, morning and night, and I heard God’s voice, experienced his presence, and I toyed with the idea of becoming a monk, wanting nothing more than to continue falling in love with God and being conformed to Christ. I long for the faith of my youth: the passion, the zeal, the purpose, the intimacy of life in God.

“What happened? What launched me off-track?” I place the blame on my anxieties, my fears, my insecurities, the disillusionment wrought by unending disappointments. I make it psychological, but what if it’s something far more sinister?

In the days of my youth (cue Led Zeppelin), everything was so clear: my mission was to advance God’s kingdom, through teaching and writing, and to be a good husband and a good father when God brought those things to fruition. Not only did I know it, in the way you “know” vocation, but I was sure of it; I believed God called me to “prepare the Way” and that God had a woman he wanted me to be with, and that he would bring us together at the right time. But, over time, all of that changed; the surety became vague, and my heart of passion and purpose morphed into one marked by hopelessness and despair. Those early days are fresh in my mind: wanting nothing more than to take my own life, to bring an end to the misery, and cutting my arms with a razor to feel something other than the gaping cavern of emptiness and loss I felt inside me. There was a switch, and I felt as if my life, everything I knew and believed, was a lie. And therein lies the deception; the “powers and principalities” seek to throw God’s children off-course, and their primary weapon is lying. The Accuser is an anti-human force, “The Father of Lies,” and his lies, his damning accusations, about God and my own person, too root in my fragile state and spread like gangrene.

The lies are cleverly-told, subtle at first, and vague, and thus able to take root. “God doesn’t like you. You’re not good enough to be loved, and you never will be. God loves other people, and he delights in blessing them, but not you: not only does he not like you, but he’s against you. He takes pleasure in tormenting you, in teasing you with your desires and then taking them away as soon as you thank him for them.” These lies are coupled with lies about who I am: “You’re a shitty person, no one can love you, you have no future, you have no hope.” These lies sank deep, cutting at my very identity as God’s beloved child, chosen by him, called by him to advance his kingdom, and the result has been a disordered life marked by grief and escapism. My faith became marked by trying to appease God to make him love me and care for him, and knowledge of my own sins and failures prompted a resignation to a life cast off and abandoned by God because of my inability to be good enough.

The goal of these lies is simple: to throw us off-track. The Accuser is anti-God and anti-human, and he uses lies to thwart God’s good intentions for us. Succumbing to these lies gives birth to a loss of self, a fragmented identity, a life of wandering and escapism. I’ve bought these cleverly-worded lies, and I’ve wandered off-course, much to my own detriment. The fallout is atrocious, but in prayer and meditation comes the voice of God: “I’m not angry with you. You’re my child! My heart breaks for you. I want so much for you, and hope isn’t empty: your story isn’t over.” God’s anger is focused on the one who has fed me the lies, the one who took God’s child and goaded him down a dark and lonely path. God’s love spills out for me, and his anger spills out on the Accuser. I may have found myself in a dark and grimy alley, but God’s pulling me back to where I’m meant to be.

The nostalgia for the faith of my youth isn’t a nostalgic escapism but an echo of who I truly am and what God intends for me. People have prophesied over me, strangers, even, have told me that God has spoken to them about me, and it’d be weird if they didn’t all say the same thing over the course of the last eight years. I’m a firm believer in coincidence, but sometimes coincidences seem to stretch far beyond the normal state-of-affairs. The passion, purpose, and life in the Spirit that I’ve tasted and known is what God wants for me, and that’s precisely what the Accuser has been fighting against. The devil (to go the Medieval route) doesn’t want me to experience and know what God has for me; he wants me to be but a shadow, if that, of whom God wants me to be. The lies must be naked and condemned for what they are, and they must be fought in the Spirit and with the truth of the gospel. My prayer is that God will continually expose and eradicate the lies so that I can walk fully in the “newness of life” he wants for me. The life God wants for me is a life marked by a vibrant faith, ruthless trust, and passion and purpose.