The Rest of God

by Mark Buchanan

  This is a good practice all on its own; it trains us in the quirks and rhythms of our hearts and teaches us to track the wind of the Spirit. But it also makes us better stewards of memory. It enshrines those moments, many elusive and capricious, that are probably far more significant in God’s eyes than those moments that rivet or command attention. A wild man in camel hair, a young couple in a stable—these are infinitely more significant than all the grandeur and fanfare of Caesar. But they’re harder to see. We won’t grasp their importance unless we take time to notice.

  Try this. At the day’s end, crawl into a warm tub or your favorite chair, or maybe—if sleep is not too seductive here—your own bed. Get comfortable. Quiet yourself. Reflect on the day. When were you most alive? What were you doing then, thinking, saying, seeing? When were you most empty? What was going on at that moment?

  When did it seem God was close, and when did it seem he was far away?

  Practice that each day.

  Eventually, you might even remember why you walked into the room.

  FOURTEEN

  REFLECT AND ANTICIPATE:

  Stopping to Glimpse Forever

  Who are you? We ask that of God. We ask it of others. We ask it of ourselves. It’s a question that stands at the heart of the reflective life. Deep calling to deep takes shape around a single inquiry: Who are you?

  We keep asking, though we never get a full or fully satisfying answer this side of heaven. To think otherwise is to court misery and tragedy. Down here, we only ever see through a glass darkly. We cannot know God or ourselves or anyone else on earth as we will know God and ourselves and everyone else in heaven. We’re bleary-eyed from the Fall. In this life we never experience pure and unbroken intimacy with anyone. We never have nakedness without shame. We never have a completely blameless motive. This side of the grave, we never solve the enigma of ourselves and others. Between us, within us, there hangs an opaque wall, blurring and distorting all we look upon.

  Who are you?

  We’re meant to keep asking anyhow, to keep looking all the same, to keep inching toward a shore that appears to retreat with our every advance. Who are you? Who are you, God, wife, child, friend, self ? To push ever deeper into this mystery, to pry ever further into this discovery, is the ongoing work of reflection.

  But reflection flourishes only in rest: stopping long enough to coax out and face things inmost and utmost, things hidden, things lost, things avoided. I knew a man who took two weeks to walk in silence and solitude in the Highlands of Wales. He kept company with stones and fields and cold, starry nights. At first, the journey was a reprieve, a needed break from his life’s clutter and scatter. But around the fourth night, something shifted. He grew terribly afraid, but not of wolves, ghosts, brigands, or storms.

  He sensed something shadowy and naked stalking him, edging ever closer.

  He was afraid of himself.

  Solitude unlatched a cellar in him, someplace where memories and longings and fears lay buried, locked up so long he’d almost forgotten them. Aloneness loosed them.

  “I thought I’d gone mad,” he said. “I felt I couldn’t escape. I feared sleeping. I feared waking. I dreaded daytime and nighttime. I wanted to get as far away from myself as I could.”

  But he had nowhere to hide. After many days, he began to see things he had not seen for years, some for a lifetime. He saw how he avoided closeness with other people, the subtle ways he sabotaged this and made it look as if the other persons were to blame. He saw how he had become busy as a way of eluding his sense of emptiness and insignificance. He saw that all his many accomplishments had never removed from him a primal fear that he was a fraud—and soon to be exposed.

  At the end of the two weeks, he knew himself in a way he had never imagined. “It was as if I met myself for the first time. I felt I returned from that two weeks with a soul mate. Or maybe I just returned with a soul.”

  The story of Jacob in Genesis is, at one level, the story of a man like that, a man always on the run: running from his angry brother, Esau, from his angry father-in-law, Laban. But mostly, running from himself. Jacob is a man with a stolen identity. From the outset, when he grabbed his twin, Esau’s, heel in the dark womb and rode out into daylight, he’d been clutching after anything that would complete him, name him, make him, give him an edge. Indeed, that’s what his name means: “Heal-grabber.” “Trickster.” “Taker.” “Artful dodger.”

  Jacob had never really met himself. He took so many things from Esau—Esau’s strength in the womb, his birthright, his clothing, his blessing—and took so many things from Laban—two daughters, his best livestock, his household idols—that Jacob forgot who he was. He ensnared himself, then lost himself, in all his conspiracies and double-dealings. He played impostor and trickster to dupe others so often, he duped himself.

  The defining moment of Jacob’s life—we looked at this scene in an earlier chapter—was when he dressed in Esau’s clothes, covered his hands and neck in animal skin to mimic Esau’s hairiness, slipped into his blind father, Isaac’s, chamber, and stole from him Esau’s blessing. Isaac asked Jacob, “Who is it?” And Jacob answered, “I am Esau.”

  He was lying. But maybe, as well, he really didn’t know.

  This for sure: it’s doubtful Jacob could have answered that question straight under any circumstances. Did he know who he was? Was he able to face it?

  But a night comes when Jacob is left alone. In the morning, he must face Esau. The terror of that encounter haunts him. He must be skittish, coiled tight, jumping at every sound coming from the darkness—the owl’s hoot, the coyote’s cry, the snake’s rustle. All seem to him omens. But there is a worse terror to face than Esau, a more frightful encounter afoot.

  Something’s stalking him.

  And then, with cool suddenness, a man steps into the ragged circle of firelight and grabs Jacob’s heel. He grabs his wrist, his neck, his arms, so fast, so strong, so agile. Jacob is at first taken off guard. But he’s done this before, grappled and hung on for dear life. He’s writhed and twisted to win advantage, yes, done it all his life. And so the fight goes on, all through the night’s long darkness, until a gray light smolders at the earth’s far edge. It is a deadlock, this battle. So the man does violence with a single touch: he maims Jacob, plucks his hip from its socket. And then, pleading for his own sake, pleading for Jacob’s, the man says, “Let me go, for it is daybreak” (Gen. 32:26).

  Jacob refuses. This is a fight like all the others. This is a fight like none other. This is a fight he cannot afford to lose, and a fight he cannot afford to win. This is a fight that can cripple him and mend him. It can end his exile and make good his homecoming, even if ever after he limps.

  But first a question: “The man asked him, ‘What is your name?’” (Gen. 32:27).

  Who are you?

  Jacob can’t run, can’t hide, can’t fight any longer.

  “‘Jacob,’ he answered” (v. 27).

  And then a miracle happens, a miracle greater than the reconciliation about to take place between Jacob and Esau, a miracle that perhaps had to happen before that reconciliation was even possible.

  Jacob finds out who he really is.

  “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome” (v. 28).

  Jacob then has a request, the same one the man had of him: “Please tell me your name.” But the man refuses: “Why do you ask my name?” is all he says (v. 29).

  Yet Jacob knows who this is. Somehow—a tone, a gesture, a touch, something—the man discloses his identity. “I saw God face to face,” Jacob declares afterward (v. 30).

  On that night before meeting Esau, Jacob met himself, really for the first time. And he met God, really for the first time.

  I don’t think I’m making too much of this story. I have sat more hours than I can tally with people who have avoided themselves so long—often by indulging themselves, by playing Jacob, by coveting what others
have and amassing wealth at others’ expense—that they have no idea who they are. And almost without exception, these people are going so headlong at life that they have no time, or so they’re convinced, and usually no inclination to be alone, to listen, to wait. To reflect. To ask, Who am I? Who are you?

  I think they’re afraid, many of them. They fear the man who stalks them to wrestle them, to wound them, to bless them, to ask them their names, to name them anew.

  They fear meeting the men who are really themselves.

  They fear meeting the man who is really God.

  And, I suppose, more than this, deeper than this, they fear not meeting either.

  When are you left alone? When do you step back far enough from all your pressures and possessions, your titles and demands, to truly, deeply reflect?

  To meet the man?

  I mentioned that I’m writing this book during a sabbatical. In some ways, this sabbatical has become a journey in austere and lonely places. It has been a night encampment by the river Jabbok. It has forced me to be alone with myself often enough that I have tasted a terror greater than meeting wolves, or ghosts, or Esau.

  I have had to meet myself. I have had to meet my God. I have had to wrestle the man.

  Some of that has been a homecoming. It has been consoling and redemptive. It has allowed me to live more fully in my own skin and to inhabit the world with clarity and honesty. But some of it has been otherwise. It has been a wrenching, bruising encounter that’s left me with a limp. God has revealed things about himself that have pierced me. Things I thought I knew but didn’t. His holiness, for instance. In my increased quietness and watchfulness, I have glimpsed afresh God’s holiness, and it is a quality of harrowing beauty. I am ashamed at the times I have trivialized it. I am grieved at the times I have not stood still to let it scour me clean, sear my lips pure, burn me, and heal me.

  And God has revealed things about me—or rather, hammer-locked me and forced me to reveal these things about myself—from which I would rather have kept running. These are things where he can’t bless me unless he also wounds me. He can’t rename me unless I tell him my real name first, speak it like a confession.

  Some of this is deeply personal, and I will keep it that way. But let me share one revelation. I have only now come to see how closely I have tied my sense of self to my abilities. I had no idea how deep this connection was until I stepped back from it. In this time, I have had to understand myself as someone other than pastor, preacher, leader. I have had to relinquish those titles for the time being.

  Usually I am so immersed in what I do that I know myself only in relation to it. Who am I? I am pastor to these people. I am the one who opens God’s Word for them. I am the one entrusted to lead and to serve them.

  And what if all that is taken from me, for a season or forever, by my choosing or in spite of it? I have had now almost three months to ponder that in my heart. I have seen the shape of my own dispensability— a creed I always believed in, but only in the abstract. I now see it in the concrete. The church and the staff thrive in my absence. I occasionally hear of things going on—good things, bad things—and I am powerless to influence any of them. My opinion is not sought. It is not needed.

  All this I chose. All this I prayed for. All this I rejoice in.

  Still, it startles me. It startles me, not because I thought my colleagues incapable of leading well, but because I thought myself capable of relinquishing leadership well. I thought my identity stood cleanly apart from my gifts. It turns out, me and myself, we’re just getting acquainted. Maybe Jacob limped after his encounter with God, not only because God wounded him, but because God pulled from him his crutches, his props, all the external things with which he supported himself. God stripped him of an identity that appeared strong to the world but that was, on the inside, flimsy as moth wings. He clothed him with an identity that looked weak to the world but was strong as an angel’s grip.

  I’m glad to be shown all this, but a part of me would have rather remained in the dark.

  This afternoon, I stood on the sidelines of a muddy field, stood in cold, gray drizzle until the wetness of it soaked my jacket and touched my skin, and watched my son, Adam, play rugby. The brawl of the scrum. The grunts of young men shoving their weight against one another. The almost incandescent cleanness of jerseys getting grass-stained, mud-caked, mired. The ancient instincts of war awakened. My son came off the field bruised, his lip bleeding. He was black with mud, peering out from it like a mummer from his shoe-polish mask, dripping with it like his namesake just plucked from the womb of the earth. He was tired and happy. We got in the van—I covered the seat with an old blanket to keep the mud from the upholstery—and drove home. “Good game,” I said, and not much else. We sat together in the sanctuary of that silence, deep calling to deep.

  Who am I? I am this man, standing at the edge of that field, sitting in the intimacy of that silence, father to this son.

  That’s enough.

  But that’s not all. Both remembering and reflecting bear a certain fruit: anticipating. Anticipation completes the journey that begins with memory and sojourns in reflection. Anticipation is that journey’s destination. Apart from this—apart from a nurtured expectancy about things unseen, a growing certainty about things hoped for— some truths about both God and self will remain obscure. Who God really is and who you really are: this is understood, not just in light of the past and the present, but in light of the future too. Who will you be? This is as crucial to your full identity as who you have been or have become. The future shapes you as much as the past or the present, maybe more. Destiny, every bit as much as history, determines identity.

  We lay hold of this future through anticipation.

  Helping people anticipate their future has become my favorite pastoral counseling technique. I am a poor counselor on the best day and mostly have given it up. But not entirely. I used to default to the technique Freud and company bequeathed to the world of therapy. I tried to dredge up the counselee’s past, to excavate it in all its rawness and messiness, and then somehow, by some mantra or another, tried to banish the thing. I know dealing with the past is important, and I know many people who are good guides for it. I’m just not in their company. I always seem to botch it. My attempts at it remind me of those old silent horror movies, where the mad scientist creates or awakens something, something green and gooey and fanged, and then loses control of it. The monster wreaks havoc, smashing all the glass things in his lab, terrorizing his assistant, and stalks away in fury to create mayhem out there. That was me: awakening what I couldn’t placate, spinning disaster from what was supposed to be deliverance.

  Then God reoriented me. I sat one day with a young woman who had a desolate past, a blighted landscape of childhood neglect and sexual abuse and, stemming from this, the many broken pieces of her own bad choices. She poured out her story, and I sat speechless. And now I should say what? I prayed one of my desperate prayers, “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God!”

  And then God slipped me an insight, timely as manna dropped from the sky. He showed me that her past was beyond repair, at least on my watch. If there was any good thing there to salvage, I knew not how. But in the same instant God showed me she still had her future. And it was vast, unbroken, pristine, radiant. It was pure promise: a glory that would be revealed in her, a glory that far outweighed her “light and momentary troubles” now, the glory of the One who was coming to redeem her and transform her (2 Cor. 4:17). Her past was a tragedy to lament. But her future was an epic to anticipate. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul says, “and we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Phil. 3:20–21, emphasis mine).

  Which is simply to say: what will happen matters more than what has happened.

  I shared all this with that young woman, and it became manna to her too. I watc
hed her put on the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, the oil of gladness for the ashes of sorrow. I watched her rise and greet the day as it truly was—a day the Lord had made, a day to be glad in, a day to rejoice in, a day new with mercy. And I know the unfolding of this story beyond that day: how that young woman learned to greet each day likewise, how she learned to dig always a little deeper, travel always a little farther, into the hope and the future that were hers through Christ. I know how she met a man, fell in love, married, and had children. And I know how, though some days her past mounted its best attempts to reclaim her for its own, she learned to keep taking hold of her citizenship in heaven, to nurture again and again her eager expectations, and to refuse surrender to anything less.

  Since then, this is mostly what I do when I counsel: I help people anticipate. I recognize the value of the other kind of counseling. I just lack skill for it. What I do best is describe, as much as human words allow, the hope to which they have been called, the glory we are to receive. I describe how Jesus has power to bring everything under his control, and how he exerts that control on our behalf, to take us at our lowest and change us into people who resemble him.

  This is worth waiting for. This knowledge is our secret treasure, hidden in a place our enemy can’t find. But we know where it is. We have the map to it. Maybe now all we hold from it is one small token, a brooch, a coin, a clasp, something so small we can enclose it in a fist. But it is enough to remind us that one day, when we need it most, we inherit all. And then, no matter how wide we spread our arms, it won’t be wide enough to hold the overspilling abundance of God’s full redemption.

  We truly know ourselves only in light of God’s future. We truly know God only in the same light. Apart from a compelling vision of things unseen, our lives shrink to things as they are or things as they were. Is the problem you face right now, the family issue or business fiasco or church quarrel or financial dilemma, really as large as you’ve made it out to be? Seen from the perspective of eternity, does it not scale down to more modest proportions? It’s the same with your past. It’s easy to let the hurts and slights of yesterday, like an unruly child coloring on the walls, mar all our days. What would happen if instead we let our future loose with a roller and a paint can?