Divine Discontent: October and Counting

As of today, I am a year and a full week over a quarter century.

It was exactly a year ago when I submitted my thesis, packed and went off to Mongolia and Siberia, expecting a short hiatus. Back then, I had very different ideas of what I should next be doing. Weeks turned into months, and a year later, I'm on the oddest journey conceivable. Much like Bilbo Baggins, I tumbled out of the door onto an adventure of divine proportions. Where this road - which runs ever on - will lead I do not know, except there is rest and promise in the goodness of my Guide. And what mighty sleeves He has!

How much of it is resignation? Sure, there is painfully little control over most things in life. However, there is rest, and joy, and peace! It is the little things that nibble away our senses, our vigor, our convictions. Hence I will not settle for the status quo; there must be more! A divine discontent; a sovereign hunger for true reality, a paradigm of Hope and Faith and Love.

We are such weak-willed, wretched creatures on our own, cobbling together snatches of existence borrowed from images of glory long faded. We conjure up smoke-and-mirror tricks in attempts to hide our fallen, perverse ways. Yet His Spirit calls us, stirs us, gnaws at the back of our minds in the quiet moments of the night- beckoning back to Him. Deep calls to deep. Over and over again, we are pursued by God into deeper intimacy, greater vulnerability and trust. How will we answer?

CS Lewis suggests that the reason why we are unable to obey and trust, isn't because we are not strong enough, but rather, that we are not weak enough: not weak enough to let go and let him come through for us. We cling, we clamber, we try to make it on our own. The story isn't so much about ourselves, but about our Author. Its His story we're telling.

"The first word that Jeremiah heard from God was "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jer 1:5). The verb formed is yatzar. Now, as Jeremiah is prepared to set an image before the people by which they can understand themselves in relation to their God, he standsd in the house of the yotzer, the potter. The word by which Jeremiah first learned to understand his own life, yatzar, is the word which is now used to let the people understand their lives: God shaped Jeremiah; God is shaping the people. God is a potter, a yotzer, working at his wheel on Jeremiah the lump of clay, on the people who who are a lump of clay; he forms, yatzar, them...

"Jeremiah experienced his life as the created work of God. He was not a random accumulation of cells; he was formed by loving, skilled hands. He wasn't a potentiality of material just waiting for the lucky time when he could, by asserting his will, make something of his life; he was already made something by God, formed for his purposes. The life of faith is very physical. Being a Christian is very much a matter of the flesh - of space and time and things. It means being thrown on the potter's wheel and shaped, our entire selves, into something useful and beautiful. And when we are not useful or beautiful we are reshaped. Painful, but worth it.

"Our lives become the pottery that makes possible the emergence of civilatization - what Jeremiah called the "people of God," what Jesus called the "kingdom of God," what Augustine called the "city of God." We are containers, "regions of being" in Heideger's words, in which love and salvation and mercy are conserved and shared. Everything is connected and makes sense now - the shape of creation and the shape of salvation, God's shaping hand and the shape of my life. "

Excerpt from Run with the Horses - the Quest for Life at Its Best, Eugene H. Peterson, pp. 80-81, InterVarsity Press, 1983.