An Essay on Abundance and Belonging

Two and three years ago much of my writing was focused on head, not heart. I’d even say it was focused on head over heart. Head superior to heart. Head eclipsing heart. I wrote about facts over feelings and truth over emotion. 

But now, I pivot. At best it is untrue and unhelpful, at worst it is harmful. 

I think I wrote in such a way because I so badly wanted the feelings I felt to not impact me. I have written much of our experiences in working to revitalize a dying church. I have written of the absurdity of what we have experienced. The faithlessness, the doubts, the fears—I’ve written of their hauntings, their weightiness. Lately, I’ve been trying to mine through the emotions, sifting through them and looking for flecks of gold among dirt. Because there’s no way that my feelings, for all the hell-on-earth that they have been, have been worthless. I haven’t been able to understand it, and I still struggle with it, but I know there is treasure here. There is purpose.

The pain of the last five years of our lives is too much for a blog post—for that I have written a book which be in your hands soon enough. But today, in the now, I write less about our circumstances and more about the posture of my heart. A heart that never believed it did, or could, belong. A heart that could not believe herself beloved by God.

To move beyond head to heart meant exploring a borderland and acknowledging a boundary I never wanted to explore. Moving toward that boundary, letting myself be led there by the Spirit, could mean that I realize the space and abundance at its edge. Or it could have meant experiencing my fear that there was not enough room for me—that I didn’t belong.

Because, if I were loved by God, how could I feel so low, so far, so gone? If I were adopted into God’s family, a grafted branch to His tree, why did my boughs feel so far and detached from the trunk? Once saved always kept, they say—but it certainly didn’t feel applicable to me. And not by my own departure, but instead from the Lord’s seeming departure from me. An abandonment by the Most High. A solitude thick and neglected.

I could not be beloved. It appeared that the only times I could see God working in my life was pressing my buttons: You’re lonely? I’ll withhold close relationships. Afraid I don’t hear your prayers? I’ll remain silent. You’re spread thin, wound-up like a rubber band about to snap and split? I’ll twist you more. Pain after pain. He’s seemed cruel to me. I couldn’t make sense of why his thumb pressed so firmly on me, so oppressively, like a bug he was trying to squash. At times my faith was strong, but only insofar as my pain seemed to prove his presence. Only one who could know me so well could hurt me so deeply. See my inward parts, he did. And it seemed purposed and bent to harm me. At times I have felt that that the only faithfulness shown to me by God is a faithfulness to obscure, to hide, to ink the waters like a squid and flee from my ever-present questions. 

I don’t like writing about God in this way. And I’m sure it makes you uncomfortable to read it. It was more than uncomfortable to feel it. But it was real, a time of wilderness so barren I was unsure I’d see a vibrant and lush land again. 

I have experienced such a scarcity and I have sickened myself with grief believing I’ve been cast out like a thing unwanted, like a thing not welcomed, like one who entered into the family of God only to be orphaned once more. How could God love me? It seemed as though he didn’t even like me. 

But there is scarcity and abundance therein. Within the pain of lack—lack of God’s voice and lack of resources and lack of hope and lack of peace, there is an anomaly of presence and of plenty. In these spaces where there is nothing, our eyes are prepared to see the plentiful presence of God.

There is enough of me for God and everything he has called me to and there is enough of God—enough of his goodness and patience. There is enough of God’s love to call me beloved and there is enough of God’s own pain, by way of Christ, to join together with mine. There is enough silence that I can hear his voice calling me to the border in order that I might see there is room and space for me in his family, that I might see there is presence amid the real and tangible isolation of wilderness. And being cast out into a desolate place has not been an act of disdain from the Holy Spirit. But an act of divine love and grace. 

 It is only in love that God acts toward us. And by chipping away at the thick veneer of pain, peering at what is behind and before and through it, there is only love to find. A hemming-in of love on all sides.

It seems, to me, that the Holy Spirit sees our empty cracks and fractures and makes a home within them. Within the scarcity, within the desert—there he is, making a home and place for us. A place to live alongside us during suffering. Making space for the two of us to sit alone. To sit in silence. To wait. To work. To grow. To live. To thrive.

As much as I have felt it, I have not been cast into the wilderness because of an expulsion from God’s family. This pain is not an exorcism or excommunication from the family of God. It is an opportunity to experience God presence anew, and to feast at the table that he has set.  I still struggle to believe that can be true. Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit has gathered my hands in his and has walked with me through thorn and briar, leading me closer into the Father’s embrace. He has walked me to a filled table and pulled out for me a chair that I might sit and rest and eat.

I have wrestled with the Holy Spirit, not wanting his help because to let him nearer means to find more pain. And to find more pain means to explore if there’s more space for that pain to be held.

And there is more pain. But the Spirit holds my hands as they throb and ache. 

And so, I appeal to you because I know my experience is not unique. I know there is fear and guilt bound-up in the admittance that there might be more feelings at play in your relationship with the Lord other than joy. I wish to remind you of your belovedness by God, the presence and nearness and inescapability of the Spirit to those who have entered into God’s family. I wish to speak into your pain, reminding you of its purpose, rich and layered. And I tell you that our holiness and likeness to Christ is perfected by way of pit and valley. 

As I practice belonging, I invite you to do the same. This essay, in a way, is a provocation of my own fears and insecurities. In another way it is a declaration that I choose to believe I belong, that I have been accepted by God, an acceptance which cannot be ungranted by him. As surely as I tell you, I tell myself: take heart, you are loved. Take heed, the Spirit rests upon you. 

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From Paul J. Pastor’s Face of the Deep: Exploring the Mysterious Person of the Holy Spirit

“The sacred silence of our interior becomes the void, the good and empty place into which the Spirit can speak. Like a kindly predator, he leads us into desert places—to separate us from the herd, to get at us alone, to approach from the flank, out of the sun, where our peripheral vision is hazy. He pounces, tumbles us in the sand and grit either roughly or gently. Away from the noise he carries or flings us, from the dullness of full belly and full brain. His beak sinks into bone and flesh, he tears us with blessings, tears us open sometimes till the red blood flows out so thick and abundant that we fear our life is leaving, that our bones will be left behind us when we wander on. And for all this, he makes no promises other than his love.”

“If we can believe it, even the bitterest wrestling with the Spirit out in the desert is for our good, the good of his beloved. We must sometimes suffer wounds before we can be bound again, better made and wiser than before, bearing the scars of wilderness as witnesses to the nearness of God. This too is love, if we can accept it.”