“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” -Frederick Buechner

I recently read a really great book on living in the love of God called “So You Don’t Want To Go To Church Anymore?”  In it, a man named John approaches proselytizers on a street corner screaming at passers-by that they will be going to hell.  He nears one of the accusers, and, full of sadness, says to him, “You really have no idea what motivates you, do you?”

It struck me as odd, this comment.  Not because I’m not also put off by the accusers’ remarks, or by their apparent misunderstanding of the Scriptures or even the heart of God, but by the use of the word “motivation.”  Reading through the story, I came to understand John as a man of God, a man who knows Him very intimately.

Over time, I realized that in that question John really cut to the heart of the matter, the same as Jesus often does in His approach to us.  God is always interested more in what is in our hearts, the “why’s” and “what’s” and “what’s up’s” than he is in our actions, those “how’s” and “where’s” and “when’s,” at least at first.  To the man at the pool of Bethesda, Jesus’ first remark isn’t “get up,” but rather, “Do you want to get well?”  In other words, “What’s in your heart?”  Only after the man engages Jesus with something of his heart does Jesus then call him to action.

I recently had a conversation with a friend named Jason where I read him the Fredrick Buechner quote above.  Buechner essentially states that when we are thinking of a vocation for our lives, we should listen to the voice of our heart’s desire and, at the same time, pay attention to what is needed around us.  Sounds good, but that’s actually a very difficult thing to do.  It requires that we actually pay attention to our own hearts and that they become whole enough and free enough to desire the right things.  And then it requires that we engage the world around us, the people we know and work with and the communities we live in.

Jason hates his job and is trying to discover what it is he is called to be doing at this point in his life.  It’s a good thing to be wrestling with, though painful.  Does he go back to school? Change professions? Update his resume and look online at job openings in other cities?  In our conversation, he insisted that it is better to listen to what God says to do, and that paying attention to our hearts and to our own gladness isn’t only unimportant, but might even lead us astray.  His problem, he said, is that he couldn’t hear God.  God just wasn’t speaking to him.

I told him that what I thought Buechner meant by his statement is that Jesus will often speak to us through the desires written long ago in our hearts, that the calling on our lives will be where we feel the most passion and energy and where we hear the Lord speaking to us.  Jason was asking God to talk, but then plugging his ears, shutting down the very organ that the Lord often speaks to us through.  It’s tricky, to be sure.  We don’t “follow our hearts,” which could lead us to do all kinds of crazy things.  We follow Jesus.  But we don’t follow the Lord without our hearts.

Jason could still only see the actions that Jesus calls us to, and not the motivation behind them.  Behavior divorced from the soul.  He just wanted God to give him the checklist, without having to engage his own deep heart.  Possibly the most important question Jason and I were able to hammer out was, “What is it, exactly that God wants for me, not merely from me?”

If only the man known as the “expert of the law” had been able to see that question when he came to Jesus asking what was necessary to “inherit eternal life” (Luke 10).  Jesus, probing his heart, asked him in return, “What’s written in the law?  How do you read it?”  (esus could very well have asked him, “You’re the “expert of the law,” right?  Your identity is in knowing everything about God so that you can lord that knowledge over others, all the while stealing their God-given place of intimacy with me.  So, you tell me.  How do you read the law?”  The man replied as he was taught, with the Scripture to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”

And then comes one of the most confusing verses in all of Scripture.  Jesus says to the man, “Yeah, that’s right.  Do that, and you’ll have life.”

Now hold on.  What is Jesus saying there?  Do that?  Do that?  How does a man just “do” that, as if it were a task you could check off at the end of the day?  For any of us who understand love even a little bit, it is not something you do, it is something that flows.  That statement to us who have tasted love is equivalent of saying, “Yes, water is necessary to sustain life in our bodies.  Do water and you will live.”  It is nonsensical.  How do you “do water”?

In the same way, how do you “do love”?

And that was Jesus’ point.  You can’t.  You don’t “do love.”  You live it.  You live with it.  You feed it.  You abide in it.  You enjoy it.  You let it grow.  And love is not the point.  Our place with God restored is the point.  He is the vine, and we are the branches of that vine.

Immersed in a society that is task-oriented and consumer-driven, most of our ears have been deafened to the call of the heart, much like the expert in the law.  We hear “love the Lord your God” as a call to action, not a call to intimacy.  We’ve all heard the famous Mountain Dew commercials that declare “Do the Dew,” when, in fact, all you can “do” with Mountain Dew is to drink it.  It actually “does” its thing in you – either to hydrate you or to give you a rush of caffeine.

The tragedy of that encounter in Scripture is that the man left thinking he could just add “love the Lord your God with everything you are” as another item on his checklist as something to do to inherit, or earn or get, real life.

Can you imagine if a twig laying on the ground was thinking to himself, “Hmmm.  I wonder how I can get nutrients.  How can I grow?”  He lays there baking and drying out in the hot sun.  The trunk of the tree says to him, “You are a branch of mine.  What do you think you must do to have life?”  “I think,” replies the twig, “that I’ll go down my checklist.  First, I’ll try to bury myself in the dirt…” and on he goes.  The tree knows, of course, that the only way this branch will live again is to be grafted back into the tree so that the life-giving sap of the tree flows into him.

There is much action in the Kingdom of God.  In fact, living the life of God is the most active and adventurous thing we do, but only as an overflow of the life of the heart.  He loved us first, and our love is a response to His.

And then, we have life.  It begins there, in intimacy with God, and it grows and it extends from it.

Picture Elijah.  This fella was a prophet of God, which means that he was friends with God and that God entrusted to him His own heart and words to bring a nation back into fellowship and intimacy with Himself.  And what kind of life did he get to live?  Well, let’s just say he didn’t spend his life in La-Z-Boy flipping through channels.  At one point, God called him to Mount Carmel, where he was about to have a showdown with one of Israel’s enemies.  1 Kings 18 describes that encounter.

But even Elijah drew his life and breath from the intimate time he spent with God.  Just after the encounter with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, Elijah fled in fear and weariness toward a cave.  God tenderly ministers to Elijah, twice bringing him food and water.  He travels to Mt. Horeb to hide and rest in a cave.  God comes to him and listens to his laments.  Elijah is worn out from simply “doing” and needs restoration.  God sends a great wind to the mountain, and then an earthquake, and then a fire.  But God was in none of these.  Then Elijah hears a “gentle whisper,” and it is here in the whisper that he finds God.  There, in that tender embrace from God, Elijah’s life is restored.  He is not doing.  He is, in fact, fainting into the embrace of his God.

In the ‘80s BMX movie Rad, Cru is trying to learn to perform a backflip on his bike.  Bruised and worn out from slamming on his back again and again, and his girlfriend Christian finally tells him, “You’re letting your body move your head.  Let your head lead, and your body will follow naturally.”  On the next attempt, Cru lands his flip perfectly. (I can tell you from experience after watching that movie the first time at 10 or 11, attempting a backflip on a bike isn’t a good idea.)

We’ve all heard the phrases, “Use your head,” or “Get your head in the game.”  That’s another way of saying, “Put your heart into this.  Let this be your entire focus of energy and passion.”  But what if you can’t?  What if you cannot put your heart into the game?  Can you still play well?

In the Kingdom, the answer is no.  The heart is central.  The heart is first.

That is why, I think, Hebrews tell us to keep our eyes focused on Jesus.  We will follow with action and intention what motivates us in the heart.  If our faces are set like flint on the life of Jesus and the love of God, and if we are experiencing them daily as we abide in Jesus, then the effects of love will shine through.  Our motivation will be love.  Love, and the life of God, will be our modus operandi.

It was the summer of 2003.  I and a small band had traveled across the globe to a small village in what is now the new country of South Sudan where we would be shooting some footage for a film we were making on the life of persecuted Christians.  Unable to sleep early one morning, I flipped through the Bible and landed on a verse that had before given me a lot of encouragement, Jeremiah 29:11, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”  Angry for reasons that I could not explain, I left the hot, cramped hut and walked outside.  Due to the absence of electricity, I found myself enshrouded in a nighttime darkness I had never encountered before.  There, under a billion brilliant stars in a sky that stretched wider than the continent, I lamented to God in despair, “I can’t!  I can’t find you, then, because I can’t seek you with all my heart!  I don’t do anything with all my heart!”  I knew painfully well by that point in my life that my heart was broken, obvious to me by the ways I too often hurt people around me with careless remarks, the way I didn’t love others the way I really wanted to, the way my heart was still so easily caught up in cynicism and defensiveness, judgement and condemnation.  I was broken.

I didn’t expect a response, but I got one anyway.  It was a single word, one that has ricocheted and reverberated in my soul ever since, and one that pierced me with its finality and invitation.  It was simply the word, “Exactly.”

And possibly for the first time that night on the other side of the world, I got it.  I understand what the cross had really done for me.  I am grafted back in.  My primary role now is to simply abide there with Christ, and to let His life and love flow into and through me.  Jesus was telling me that yes, indeed, my heart was broken and yes, indeed, I needed a whole heart in order to live full and love well and yes, that finally, there was a way to become wholehearted, through His active grace and presence within me.

In the years since that night, Jesus has done much to heal my heart, and I am living out of more of it now than I ever have, in a way that feels full and free.  Those old abiding places of cynicism and despair and depression and anxiety are significantly diminished.  I am becoming, in the words of Paul, “whole and holy by his love” (Ephesians 1, The Message), the mission of our God for which He sent Jesus as our Rescuer and Redeemer.  The process of healing and restoration requires an intentionality and deliberate collaboration with Jesus on our part.  But now, that action can be the result of a newfound energy and desire of the heart, a new modus operandi.  “Oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust him — endless energy, boundless strength” (Ephesians 1:19, The Message).

It’s been nearly two years since the greatest disaster in our community’s history, and in fact one of the worst natural disasters to happen to our country, ever.  The Joplin Tornado on May 22, 2011.  No one in our city has forgotten, or even gotten far from that day.  Yes, life continues on.  Homes and businesses are returning to our community — exciting plans are being drawn up to expand and grow and dream big for the city.  Schools are coming back.  Families have discovered how to reorient their lives without the member they so loved that was taken from them.

And yet, there are places in our hearts and memories that haven’t left that day, and perhaps never will.  As a counselor, I still see a handful of folks that were affected by the tornado, by losing their homes and some nearly their lives.  A particular woman comes to mind, and it could be any of a 100 women living in our community, who lost not one but two close family members.  Another gentleman I know watched a friend be taken into the air while he screamed for help.  It was the last he would ever see him, except in that memory that still haunt him from time to time.

So while life marches on, it’s important to recognize that we’re still in recovery mode.  So much happened in two years ago in such short amount of time, and many are still sorting through the debris.  A friend of mine who works at a bank told me the other day that she still has customers come in with jars of change to roll, and when she pours it into the counter machine, it is full of insulation and particulates from that day.

We need times to reflect and allow those parts of us wounded that day to speak, to have a voice, to continue to mourn the loss and allow that process to grow hope in us.  We can heal — that’s been proven again and again by such courages people who are willing to face the painful memories.  But it takes intentionality.  We none of us can pretend it didn’t happen, as if that were even an option.

As a counselor, one of my jobs and joys is to hear people’s stories, to go with them through the twists and turns of life’s events and try to help them make sense of what’s happened, and to learn what the next right step is to take. In May two years ago, removed from the tornado only by a few days, I sat before a man who had been injured so much that it was difficult to know where to begin treating his wounds, where to begin making sense of things.  It was a triage, a short meeting for me to simply check in with him and recommend immediate psychiatric treatment if he needed it.  He was not a patient of mine, and I didn’t expect he would become so, since he was planning, as I recall, on moving away from the city to live with family in another state. But that brief encounter left its mark on me.

My reflection on meeting him is what follows.  In revisiting this blog post, I wonder now where this man is and how much he has overcome these past two years.  And I wonder what wounds remain yet to be healed. In the end, this isn’t about the tornado, but about the heart, and how the heart experiences and recovers from those unexpected and deeply painful twists in the road, whatever they may be and however they may come to us.

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I spoke to a gentleman today who had survived the F5 that screamed through Joplin taking out his house on 26th Street.  He held his head down when he spoke.  His eyes were tearful, distant, far-away.  He spoke with a kind of solemnity, a seriousness, without giving eye contact, looking into the pictures he still saw flashing in his mind, still hearing the “horrific roar” of the wind and debris. “I guess I can’t really complain,” he told me quietly.  “I should feel lucky.  I survived.”  Part of his body had been amputated.  His face was still so swollen family could hardly recognize him.  The tornado for him was a monster that ate part of his body and left him crippled.

I listened intently, allowing myself to feel this man’s fear and pain the best I could, while trying to help him feel safe as he retold his story.  It scared him even to think about it, but think about it is all he has been able to accomplish these past ten days.  He retold only pieces of the events, and I didn’t prod him for more.  Since I didn’t spend much time with him, I didn’t feel I’d earned my place to offer much counsel.  I only wanted to let him know that his story mattered.  His pain, his fear, his worry about the future — they are not only expected (“normal reactions by a normal person that’s gone through abnormal circumstances”), but they are also, in a very real sense, important.  They are his, you might say.  He deserves to feel them, needs to process them.  They are his heart’s way of making sense of the deep “why” questions, his mind’s way of dealing with the overwhelming images and smells and pains as the world crashed in around him.  There will be a time when they are no longer appropriate, when pain and fear should give way to hope and joy again, and he will need the help of doctors, medicine, and both physical and psychological therapy to get him there.  But for now, just for a little while, it was my honor to join him in his experience.  He was alone that Sunday afternoon. He doesn’t have to be alone the memory and the recovery.

Of course there’s more to his story, much more.  But it isn’t mine to tell.  The hours and days that have followed since then have been radically different for this man than anything he’s ever lived through before.  They have changed the nature of his life and the relationships he has with everyone around him.  Looking up at me, a furrow in his brow and the same pensive look in his eyes, he told me that everything looks different. “Nothing feels the same,” he said.  “And nothing ever will be again.”

This man has just lost his home, his security and safety, and part of an arm, but he was looking over some precipice that I couldn’t quite yet see.  His brush with death shone light someplace in his soul, and he was trying to see what was there.  Should he have the courage, he has the potential to change things for the better.  There’s hope there somewhere.  The possibility of reconciliation with estranged members of his family.  A fresh glance at the gift of life.

But those changes are still yet to be told.

Those of us who have been affected by this deadly storm have in these days an opportunity to take hold of an incredible gift, something that we normally shield ourselves from with busyness and the small dramas we live in.  It’s the recognition that life is fragile, that life is short.  These are realities that we must hold to if we are to live well.  Those who have lived the greatest lives always seemed to live it with the knowledge that death was only a moment away.  It somehow gave them courage and vision to live more fully and freely.  “Desire life like water,” said G.K. Chesterton, “yet drink death like wine.”

We live in a story that isn’t safe.  It often doesn’t make sense.  The pain and fear can sometimes overwhelm us.  I don’t even pretend to understand what it must be like for some who have survived this horrific event while someone they love hasn’t, or who lost their beloved pet or lifelong home.  But we also live in a story that, above and beyond the tragedy, has the potential to be breathtaking and meaningful, full and true.  There’s much, much more to be told.  It doesn’t end with the tornado, not for any of us.

There exists this model of therapy called Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy.  It’s a complicated title to a fairly simple approach, but one that is profound for a community that prides itself more on professional distance than on entering into the muck and mire of a person’s story to help them find the redemption and way of life in it.

So this approach, AEDP, has in it the basic concept that we learn best by two complimentary steps.  The first is experience.  Another word would be “encounter.”  By this we mean not mere intellectual understanding or learning some rote fact or absorbing some information.  We mean the real and raw process of something, the journey into a new territory somehow.  Therapeutically, we often mean the experience of some emotion and memory as an encounter with another person present who can help navigate and offer life into the usually painful and, because of that, often blocked part of themselves.  A place that is ungrieved.  A memory too painful to recall.  Insight into themselves or the world or a particular relationship that hasn’t been acknowledged consciously.  A thought too threatening to deal with alone.  That gets expressed and experienced in the presence of a salient figure, a person tuned into their experience.  The dragon in the cave that’s threatened them for so long, that they’ve run from and feared, finally gets dealt with.  It’s encountered and slain.

The second step is reflection.  Apparently, and research seems to support this, we cannot learn or grow by mere experience.  We need to take time to reflect on it, to put words and meaning to what it is we’ve been through.  Wisdom, it might be said, is comprised of these two crucial elements — to first enter in and deal with whatever is at hand, and the second is to find the meaning in it, to ask the tough questions regarding it, to see it for what it is.  This is the “dynamic” part of the model’s name, AEDP. And we might add one more piece to the therapeutic approach that is included as a fundamental aspect — community.  That’s a given.  That’s what therapy is all about, the journey through difficult stretches of the trail with someone who can offer a hand-hold and a familiar and hopeful voice when the light grows dim.

I think the developers of this model, building on more than a hundred years of clinical practice and deep thinking about what it takes to help people change and grow, have landed on something profound.  Of course, I always want to equate these things back to Scripture and ask, “Does the Word of God support that?”  Is there evidence that this is truly a way we are made as people that we need to think deeply about and incorporate somehow into our daily living and our spiritual disciplines.  The first person that comes to mind is Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, after Jesus.  He did quite a lot of reflection, and fairly deep if you consider the Proverbs he wrote and potentially even Ecclesiastes.  A philosopher, really — and one that, incidentally, was instrumental in leading me to the Lord to begin with.  And then you have David, who experienced quite a lot in his life, suffering as well as glory.  Maybe more than anyone else in the Old Testament.  And he reflected on everything.  Then you have Paul, whose missionary exploits are the stuff of legend.  And then he reflected on them.  Just take a look at Acts or his letters to Timothy.  Teaching for him was a way of reflecting.  Oh, and Jesus.  This seemed to be one of the ways he instructed his disciples in the art of living in the Kingdom of God.  He would teach them something, then demonstrate it through action.  Reflection and experience.  Sometimes he reversed this and would help them experience something totally different than what they’d ever thought, and then reflect on it, tell them more about it.  He did this occasionally with his parables.

I’m a reflector — I like to reflect on things.  It started way back for me when I would crawl onto the roof of my house as a kid and stare as deeply as I could into the stars.  That for me was when experience and reflection kissed, and wonder burst through.  I’m not sure we can do both at the same time, but I would feel myself to be so small against such an immense backdrop, and then reflect on the expanse of the stars and be filled with awe.  And then I would do it again, always trying to feel myself get smaller and smaller.  It was a wonderful feeling to experience, especially when at other times it seemed as if I was the center of my little world and all orbited me.  Finally, I wasn’t.  And I have carried that practice on in my spiritual life, even now considering it something so crucial that withholding it is like holding my breath.  Last night my wife and I watched a Discovery channel documentary on the ocean and ocean life.  Narrated poorly, it still showed some of the extremes of creativity that God employs in creation.  I’m flooded again with wonder and awe, and now internally reflect on how immense is this Heart behind all hearts.

I think the first time I ever really heard something related to my calling was when I heard Amy Grant talk about Rich Mullins, posthumously.  She said that he would go to the edge, look over and see what was there, and come back and write a song about it.  That’s exactly what I’m talking about.  Experience and express.  And by doing so, extend our concepts and understanding of this Lover God and the life He’s invited us into.

I don’t know if many read this blog.  I’m okay with that either way.  I’m not sure I would read it myself if I didn’t write it.  It’s a chronicle of my journey, and it’s as much for me as anyone else.  I’ve written professionally before, and it was something I did for others to read, not necessarily something I wrote for myself.   If I ever write a book, I think my MO will be to write something that is meaningful to me, meaningful to write, something I need to read, something I need to hear and experience.  And, hopefully as a byproduct, something others will as well.  I want it to be a reflection of my experience with God so that others will be compelled toward experiential interaction with Him.