The following
has its stimulation in a 2003 article by William Willimon.
Some people, in order to get close to God, go on
retreats. They take time off from their daily work and get away from the daily
routine in order to get with God. One person has a small cabin in the mountains
of North Carolina. He goes there once every few months for nearly a week. “If I
don’t get up there every so often,” he says, “I lose the sense of the presence
of God. I wake up one day, find myself buried in the routine of life, and fall
away from God.”
A pastor is on the evening before he
was to leave for two weeks away in the desert of New Mexico. A person asks, “What
are you going to do there?” “Sometimes I get so involved in the life of the
church, I have no time to be with God. I am going there to be with God,” he
said.
We are called to such times of
voluntary disengagement by the names of Sabbath, retreat, meditation,
subtraction, sanctuary. In such times, we step back, take stock, reassess our
lives, and look at things from a new perspective.
There can also be times of
involuntary disengagement. There are times when the routine of life is brought
to a forced conclusion. We did not plan for our lives to be interrupted, but
they were. Then we have the opportunity to learn an important truth. In these
times of forced, involuntary sabbatical, we are made to step back, take stock,
and reassess.
Many of us have heard friends say
something like this from one who has had a heart attack: “It’s the best thing
that ever happened to me – I’ll never be the same again. I woke up to the
reality of my life, to God, to what is important.”
What an amazingly positive thing to
say about a heart attack! As pastoral commentator, Eugene Peterson writes:
Suddenly,
instead of mindlessly and compulsively pursing an abstraction – money, or
happiness, or the elusive “good life” – the person is reduced to what is
actually there, to the immediately personal – family, geography, body – and
begins afresh in love and appreciation. The change is the direct consequence of
forced realization of human limits. Pulled out to the limits by a God who is
conditioned and confined to the reality of the human condition, the person is
surprised not to be living a diminished life, but a deepened life, not a
crippled life, but a zestful life. God – intensity begins to replace
self-importance.[1]
Sometimes, in those confined places
in life, when we are trapped, nowhere to escape, we are pushed close to God and
to what really matters in life. For instance, it is fascinating to consider how
much important biblical material was written by people in jail – by Paul in
prison, by John in exile on the Island
of Patmos Birmingham
Eugene Peterson says that we also
have times of “forced imprisonment.” We go through some great loss –
unemployment, divorce, or bereavement. It is like exile, as if we are being
forced to move out of our accustomed home into an unaccustomed new place. Not
that these circumstances produce new life and good by themselves, but it is
amazing how they can be the condition necessary for new life.
I have constantly been surprised by
how often people will report how situations in life, situations that by all
accounts ought to be terrible, turn out to be good.
I Corinthians 10:13 says that God
will test no believer beyond what they can endure. However, we usually hear
something like that God will not give us more than we can handle. Yet, most of
us have seen people crushed by the burdens that life sometimes places upon
their backs. Nevertheless, it is fascinating how often those burdens become
opportunities whereby we experience fresh and new the power of God.
When her husband of 30 years
suddenly dropped dead from a heart attack, more than one person in the
community said, “Sarah will be devastated. I do not know how she will go on;
she was totally dependent upon John. This will kill her,” or words to that
effect. However, it did not. After John’s death, people saw a side of Sarah they
had never seen before. As it turned out, Sarah was not a weak, dependent
person; rather Sarah turned out to be a very strong, potentially independent
person. John’s death, while something she would never have wished or desired,
became an occasion whereby we saw a new Sarah, a very different person. Sarah
said, “Who knows? Maybe this was the real me that I never knew existed until
John’s death required the end of my life as it was, and the beginning of a new
life?”
It takes time, space, and a place
for God to work in our lives. In a way, it is rather sad that we have to wait
for this involuntary retreat, this unwished for, but badly needed, Sabbath.
Maybe this says to us that we ought to be more intentional about seeking out
times, places, and opportunities for this practice of the presence.
A man, when he lost his high paying
job, at last had the opportunity to develop himself to the art of bird carving.
He was even able to say later, “My getting fired was one of the best things
that ever happened to me.”
[1] (Eugene Peterson, The Unpredictable Plant: An
Explanation in Vocational Holiness, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992, p. 89.)
Wow! George, you are talking directly to me with this post. Thank you so much--I needed this. Great Message
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