Encouragement

Today, Sara and I leave for a bit of a working vacation out to Hawaii. We’ll be sharing with a fellowship in Honolulu next Sunday (April 30), but we’ll mostly be on Maui, savoring God’s work in this last season of our lives and preparing our hearts for what lies ahead.

Before we go, I wanted to leave you with this amazing dream, which can be of great encouragement when you find yourself facing one of your greatest fears. It was sent to me by a good friend, Harvey Mast, who lives in Ohio. He had this dream nearly four years ago while volunteering with a ministry helping women who had been sexually trafficked. He sent it to me recently, and it deeply touched me. It can be interpreted at so many levels and can redirect our focus to the only thing that matters in times of fear. With his permission, I’m publishing an edited version to see what Father might want to reveal to you.

(And my dear sisters, please don’t be put off by this male-as-rescuer story. I know that is a struggle for some since it can be a tiresome cliché. However, Harvey is a man, and this is his dream. I hope you can put yourself in the same place of fighting through your worst fears to help others trapped in theirs, male or female.)

I stood with a group of friends in front of a castle. This was a magical castle, but dark magic ruled inside. There, your worst fears become your reality. Two young girls had wandered into that castle decades ago, and now fear held them captive at the top of the tallest tower where it was so dark no light could penetrate except the warmth of real love.

Many well-meaning, brave young men had tried to rescue the princesses over the years, but all had failed. Entering two at a time, they went to the winding staircase with their romantic ideas of love. Eventually, their fears would overwhelm them, and their screams would echo through the castle as they made a hasty retreat.

With each failed attempt, the lowest section of the staircase would crumble to ruin. Only time would repair the stairs enough to try again, which could often take up to ten years.

As we stood at the castle entrance, time was mending the last step after another failed attempt. “Who will go now?” The question reverberated off the walls. A great silence fell on the crowd. Would anyone risk their greatest fears and another ten years in hopes of rescuing the two lost princesses? It would take two, for each girl needed a separate escort out.

I looked around for someone else to step forward and face his worst fears for the love of another. To my dismay, no one did. Tears began to form in my eyes as I thought about those two young girls trapped inside, and I couldn’t stop myself from stepping forward. “I will go,” I said and waited for another to join me on this quest. Would the love of my Father burning inside me be greater than my greatest fears? I believed it was true, but this would test that for sure.

Soon, a good friend stepped forward to go with me. We entered the castle and started climbing the staircase like many others had. The first fear that came was the fear of failure. “What if we fail and these precious little girls are lost in this hell for another ten years?” I halted at this thought, and this gripping fear weighed heavy on me. I could feel myself shrinking in size.

I continued climbing, now a bit slower. “Who am I to think I could rescue one of them?” was my next fear. I had all but stopped now, and the castle walls seemed to close in on me. “I don’t even know them; what if they are afraid of me?”

Soon I was standing still, paralyzed by these gripping fears. I could no longer see anything in the pitch-black air, not even my friend I knew was beside me. I could physically feel the darkness.

“Father, help me,” my heart whispered as fear roiled inside.

Why did I even come? Oh yes, it was his love inside my heart for those girls. I could feel that warmth again, still burning in my chest. As I paused, I looked down at my feet, hoping to see the next step. I could see it. A warm glow about my feet illuminated the step before me, and I knew this was the way forward. As I took that step, another appeared and another, and before long, we were moving upward again.

Every fear I had ever faced, and even new ones, seem came at us with a vengeance the further we progressed. My focus had shifted to the warmth of His love inside of me, and it was more significant than all the dangers surrounding us. Eventually, we could hear the girls’ voices as we approached the tower’s upper levels. We called out to them, explaining that we were coming and encouraging them to hold on to hope. As we did, this hope grew in us as well. Our pace quickened.

Soon, we reached the top of the staircase and found the room that imprisoned them. We could hear them but not see them until we ran into them in the darkness. We exchanged names, and the glow brightened slightly. I could see one was of Asian descent. She looked up into my eyes and spoke her greatest fear. “How do I know I can trust you?”

An answer came out of my mouth before I had time to filter it. “Why, it’s simple; this is where love led me. Right here.”

“To me?”

“You needed help, didn’t you?” Her fear receded slightly as she hugged me around my waist with her tiny arms.

But they were both still afraid to leave. Their fears had captured them and did not want to face them again in this horrible place. We tried to reason with them, assuring them we would be with them the entire way, but they were reluctant. We could only invite them, realizing we may very well be going back down alone. I don’t know how I would have been able to leave them alone in this place.

We explained that this warm light around our feet was the Father’s true love’s light coming from within us. He is the Father of Light, and he loved all of us so extravagantly. It had shown us the way step by step as we made our ascent and was always greater than our greatest fears.

Though they, too, would be facing their greatest fears as we descended the staircase, they could also have the warmth of his light. They both agreed to come with us if they could walk alongside one of us and learn to focus on love.

“Of course,” we answered.

One step at a time, we made our way downward. Fear assailed each of us unrelentingly, but we simply followed the glowing warmth until we found our way out of the castle.

The girls, whom we thought to be around ten years old when we met them, transformed to their rightful ages as they crossed the threshold into the sunlight.

Instead of being overwhelmed by the voices that scream at you from the uncertain darkness, focus on the warmth of Jesus’s love already inside you and see what next step illuminates for you. Then you, too, will discover that Father’s affection is stronger than our greatest fear. It’s a journey that will not only set you free inside from anything this life can throw at you, but it will also show you how to be a part of God’s redemptive work for others.

We all know the power of fear and how impossible it is to ignore it or manufacture more trust through our own strength. And we all need someone to go with us, not just telling us to “trust more”, but willing to sit alongside us as we learn to let love rule our hearts.

And when you need help, follow this advice from a young woman whose book I am reading at the moment, Cole Arthur Riley’s This Here Flesh:

Find those who tell you, “Do not be afraid,” yet stay close enough to tremble with you. This is a love.

It truly is…

(The graphic above was taken from the cover image of A Man Like No Other, art by Murry Whiteman with text by Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings)

It’s hard to imagine that these words would describe the most authentic personification of love to ever live on this planet, but this is how Isaiah foretold it:

“He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. (Isaiah 53:3)

The fullness of God’s love was despised and rejected by many who knew him. Incredibly sad!

Jesus often talked about joy, and he wanted his joy to be in us so that our joy would be complete. Nevertheless, he also felt the pain of a fallen Creation and suffered from it himself. Even loving to the full, that love proved disquieting to the agenda of many, and thus he knew the undeserved rejection of those he loved. When I think of Jesus and suffering, I’m so immediately drawn to the events of his Passion that I skip over the pain he held each day while he was here, much less the pain he and his Father have held since Creation’s fall.

Only recently (for reasons I’ll share in the future) has my heart become attuned to the agony of God that beats through the cosmos beneath the strains of the joy and victory of his redemption. Oh, he will win, and one day the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our God and of his Son. I can hardly imagine what that day will be like! Until then, God’s joy is also accompanied by undertones of anguish that he feels for the lingering injustices of humanity, the war and conflicts that devastate countries and destroy friendships and families, the sexual abuse of powerless victims, the despair of suicide and its impact on loved ones, malnourished bodies, natural disasters, and the betrayal and greed some trade on to the exploitation of others.

The writer of Hebrews told us that Jesus’s agony went beyond the crucifixion and was laced throughout his days. “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears…” This was more than Gethsemane; this seems to be a regular undertone to his life and may well explain his weeping at the tomb of Lazarus and his anguish in Gethsemane. It certainly was not for the loss of his friend whom he would momentarily raise from the dead, but for death and suffering in the cosmos itself. And if so, he may still carry that agony of a lover for the wounds of his beloved.

Redemption was always in sight, but that did not mitigate his empathy for the wounds of his Creation. The Redeemer comes to our rescue with tears in his eyes, and an ache in his heart for all that “fallenness” has done to us. And when redemption happens, his ecstasy overwhelms his agony. For those of us living before the days of the restoration of Creation, we taste that agony as well in what we suffer and what we behold in others. So when I hear of the devastation of earthquakes in Syria or Turkey, starvation throughout East Africa, needless destruction in Ukraine, or delusion throughout the West, I have a place to put that now. I can hold the world’s pain with God in the hope of a victory yet to come. It has changed the way I pray and the way I walk with others through their own difficulties. You’ll hear more about that in future articles here.

For now, it is enough to be reminded that those who love deeply will hurt deeply. Every lingering pain can be a reminder of the as-yet unredeemed Creation and a touchstone with God’s passion for redemption. When we hurt with others, we are reminded that God bears our pain as well. When we are rejected by people we love, we find comfort that God knows that too. Jesus knows that all too well. Sharing my pain with him as he shares his with me is also part of living loved.

You cannot love and avoid pain. Love allows you to sit in the suffering, your own or someone you care about, and watch for how God moves redemptively. If you run from pain, you’ll find yourself often running from love, and, ultimately, from God. If you can embrace the reality of God-with-you in your suffering, then it will not consume you. It will also allow you to see more easily his way forward until ecstasy triumphs over agony.

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Other Items of Note 

• Our next Wrestling with Trauma conversation will be Sunday, February 26, at 10:00 am. PST. Email Wayne if you’d like to join a small group to provide a place for people to explore their trauma or to find ways to help others they love deal with trauma
• The next Jake Colsen Book Club session will be held Saturday, March 4, at 1:30 pm PST. You’ll have to work that out in your own time zone. We will explore Chapter 10: Won to Trust, as we consider how Jesus teaches us to trust him and what he wants for us, rather than trying to get him to give us the outcomes we want for ourselves. We will stream it live on my Facebook Author Page, but if you want to be part of the conversation, you can get a link to the Zoom Room by emailing Wayne and asking for it.

Jesus promised us so much joy and victory following him that it can be disorienting to encounter enduring times of pain and suffering. I’ve known many followers of Jesus who wrestle more with the perplexity of how God could have “allowed” them to suffer than the suffering itself would have demanded. It at least adds another layer of pain to whatever we face.

In our quest to live comfortable, happy lives, we forget that plenty of Scriptures also talk about suffering and how God inhabits them to further his work in us and his purpose in the world. Why else would we need a refuge, a deliverer, and a Redeemer? When the Psalmist said that God delivers us from all of our afflictions, doesn’t that mean we had to be in them first? And that deliverance almost always has more in mind than just removing it.

Any follower of Jesus needs a worldview that includes pain and trouble as much as joy and laughter. It doesn’t mean God causes our suffering or even allows it in any volitional sense. They are the result of living in a world out of sync with its Creator. You will no doubt encounter both along your journey, and learning how to rejoice in good times and how to lean into him through difficult ones will be critical to God’s unfolding love in your heart.

As part of ours this summer, Sara and I read Waymaker by Ann Voskamp. We found a lot in this book that touched us and expanded our view of God. This brief section was one of those, talking about the complexity of love and pain in a fallen Creation.

Love lives at peace with pain, and the two will never divorce. Because to love is to be tender enough to know suffering, to be vulnerable enough to know hurt, and the only way to divorce your way from pain is to divorce yourself from any love.”

The destiny we all ultimately dream of is a destination where we are ultimately seen, safe, soothed, and secure! Even nightmares of loss and tragedy and grief can still become an unexpected awakening to tender dreams, if there are ways—even in the dark places—to be seen and known, safe and secure . . . Wherever we are always accepted and never alone, never abandoned, our deepest dreams can come true even in the midst of nightmares.

I had high hopes of waking to a dream different from both of our mothers. No graves. No slammed doors or cold wars, no lightning-bolt diagnosis or stalking depression, no abandonment or estrangement, no cascading job loss or piling bills or empty arms. No trauma from the straight-out-of-nowhere tragedy, the unlikely addictions, the turned distractions, the knife-in-the-back betrayal, the flat-out rejection, or the entirely suffocating personal failure you can’t escape because you can’t escape out of your own skin. Why do we think that our life will be the one that finds a way to easier roads? Why in the world did I? It’s when we expect life to be easy that it becomes hard.

Buy the lie that your life is supposed to be heaven on earth, and suffering can be a torturous hell. But life is suffering, and suffering is but the cross we bear, part of earth’s topography to cross on our way to heaven. I wouldn’t know it for years: Screens sell pipe dreams. Every screen is trying to sell the lie to you-from Hollywood to Netflix to Instagram–the lie that all you have to do is buy this, work out like this, wear this, style it like this, believe this, pursue this, get a career like this, find someone like this, and you, too, can find the way to a perfect life, just like this. But buy any perfectly filtered and marketing-framed illusion, and you end up painfully disillusioned. Regardless of what Instagram or all the glossy ads are shilling, your suffering isn’t some unique anomaly; suffering is the universal experience of all humanity. Suffering doesn’t mean you’re cursed, suffering means you’re human. The question isn’t “Why is there suffering in my life?” but “Why wouldn’t there be suffering?”

Because such is life in a broken world. The question is, “What way will you bear your suffering?” I didn’t know it then, and I am still learning this now: Life is really hard because that is the reality of being alive.

When you can face suffering, knowing it does not prove God loves you any less or is punishing you for some reason, then you are ready to grow through your darker seasons and love others more fully in theirs.

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Other Items that might be of interest:

• Sara joins me on the podcast this Friday since Kyle was out of town. We’ve got news about where we’re going to live next and, more importantly, how Sara’s journey has continued to unfold.
• Sara and I are now making plans to host a trip to Israel in late January and early February 2024. It will be a ten-day trip in Israel, with an option to add on 3 days in Jordan and a visit to Petra. We hope to have the details out in a week or two. If you’re interested in going, please email me, and I’ll send out more information to you as we get things nailed down.
• The next session of the Jake Colsen Book Club will be held Saturday, February 18, at 11:00 am PST. You’ll have to work that out in your own time zone. We will explore Chapter 9: A Box by Any Other Name as we talk about humanity’s relentless attempts to put the living, breathing bride of Jesus into a box we think we can manage for him. We will stream it live on my Facebook Author Page, but if you want to be part of the conversation, you can get a link to the Zoom Room by emailing Wayne and asking for it.
• The next Wrestling with Trauma conversation will be Sunday, February 26, at 10:00 am. PST. Email Wayne if you’d like to join a small group to provide a place for people to explore their trauma or to find ways to help others they love deal with trauma

Sara and I are currently in Arlington, TX, for a couple of days, and then we’ll begin writing the final chapter of our RV trip around the U.S. And what a trip it has been. The team is still together; the joy continues to grow. If you haven’t listened to Wayne’s Happiest Day Ever, you might want to give it a listen. It sums up better than I ever could here what is transpiring on this journey.

We appreciate all those who have been praying for us, following our journey here, spending time with us at various spots, and most of all, for your encouragement and prayers. We have had some magnificent conversations on this journey, including one I recorded with a friend in Oklahoma about A Caring Heart and a Listening Ear, which you’ll be able to listen to this Friday at The God Journey.

The confirmation of Father’s work continues to come from so many places. One lady sent this to me after an evening in her home with a group that gathered for conversation:

In listening to Sara tell her story over a relatively short amount of time, I noticed from the first podcast to the later ones how much you could tell her story started to make sense just by how she was talking. It was as if the pieces coming together caused her sentences to go from slightly disjointed fragments of thoughts to beautifully cohesive sentences.  It was like a timeline of healing represented in gramma.  “Sara the Brave” is my new forever perception of her. Keep healing, Sara!

Mine too! For her to tell her story so openly and honestly has opened a massive door for others to trust us with their stories and unresolved pain. The Creation has so much brokenness—people wounded by abuse or delusions. This is why Jesus came, not to give people a get-out-of-hell card, but to save them from broken-heartedness, to free them from oppression, and to dispel the lies that drove them into the darkness.

This experience has been a Godsend for us this season and reshaped our hearts for whatever is next. We begin the last leg of our trip this Friday as we depart the Dallas/Fort Worth areas for our apartment in Southern California. We still have some stops on the way home, but our trajectory has changed once again due to the unseasonably cold weather. We’ll be cutting across the bottom of the U.S. with a stop to visit Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico and catch up with some dear friends along the way. Our final stop will be near Phoenix, AZ, November 21-22.

As we make our way home, we will complete this chapter and be ready to begin another. What will that look like? We have no idea at this point. We set out on August 22 from our former home in Newbury Park, CA, without a plan or itinerary. We thought we’d be home by October 18, but as it turns out, we won’t get there until November 24.

This entire experience with Sara has deepened our walk with God and each other. I’m hopeful that will continue as this story continues to unfold. We have both discovered so much about ourselves, his life in us, and how to hold people’s pain in an entirely different way. We have learned to live more in the present than trusting our familiar patterns and rely on Jesus’ direction rather than our plans. (If you’re curious about some of that, Kyle and I have been talking about most of it on the podcasts this fall.)

Will I finish the book I started before all of this, or travel as I had been before? Will we settle back in Newbury Park? What will become of Lifestream or The God Journey? All those questions are still in Father’s hands. We may come back to those things, but it will be with very different hearts. And we are also open to an entirely different way of living to accommodate what Father has for us in this next season of our lives.

We are excited to see how that will turn out and probably won’t know for some time. We know this—we will continue to follow Jesus as best we see him and love the people he puts in our path so that they can come to know Jesus the way we have and experience his freedom for them.

There is no greater joy than the adventure of following him and encouraging others as they seek to do so as well.

Just a couple of quick notes before we get back to life on the road—

First, the need for $168,000.00 in Kenya has been met. A dear friend called me to say he’d pick up whatever we lacked for those children. I’m deeply grateful to all who again contributed to this dire need. Two nights ago, Sara and I watched an NBC news story about the horrible drought and starvation occurring in the northern reaches of Kenya. We are grateful to have been a small part of God’s provision in such an impoverished region and thankful to hear that other resources are coming into the area.

Second, as you think of Christmas gifts for family and friends, keep in mind the possibility of sharing some of the books I’ve been involved in. Live Loved Free Full is a daily devotional with inspiring thoughts to invite people into a relational engagement with God each day. He Loves Me continues to touch new hearts every year with the relationship people have wanted to find with God. In Season offers a farmer’s view of John 15 to help people discover what it means to abide in Jesus organically. And, A Man Like No Other is a powerful portrayal of the life of Jesus in art and prose that invites people to see Jesus outside the distortions of religious interpretation and fall in love with the person he is.

Finally, Sara and I want you to know that the joy and freedom we find in Jesus are available to each of you. He is no respecter of persons. His course may be very different for you, but he is the Way for you too, and he can carve a path through the pain, fear, and struggles you endure.  To that end, you have our prayers and support.

Two nights ago, I sat among giants.

Five people, each of them, had come face-to-face with a conflict between their consciences and the system of power that held the keys to their salary and advancement. And they each chose to follow their nudging consciences growing deep within them. For three of them, it was a recent experience.

And it cost them—relationships with “friends” and family, reputation, salary, and immediate fulfillment of their ministry aspirations. They were threatened by people they had previously admired, ambushed by those who could easily use deceit as a weapon, and rejected by those who had previously affirmed them.

Their choices led to dark days of pain and agony. Falsely accused and isolated, they second-guessed their consciences and questioned the God who had not intervened on their behalf against those acting in unGodly ways.

But in those long days of darkness, their hearts grew. They began to see the difference between human power and God’s authority. They came to see the full fury of a religious system more obsessed with power than truth and healing, even for their own people.

When they saw through the illusion of power and how far it would take them off course from the passion they held for Jesus and his people, they discovered that grief and disappointment can lead them into a rich vein of God’s wisdom and that enduring the affliction of others would only increase their compassion for the broken and wounded.

Some were still in the throes of that process, but I was touched by each person’s heart and honored to hold their stories and honor their choices. Two were black men who expressed the added pain and exploitation of the racial realities behind the choices of white leaders who had exalted them and then turned on them. One was a woman with little power to resist the manipulations of the men who decided her fate. Their added powerlessness multiplied their pain and negated their attempts to be treated graciously.

And yet, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of their desire to choose authenticity over expedience and truth over comfort.

I heard the exact words reverberating in my mind that Jesus spoke to the disciples one afternoon in Matthew 13, “To you it has been given to know the secrets and mysteries of the kingdom. . . . ” Others would have to content themselves with parables they didn’t understand because they choose the illusions of reputation and power over the pathway that leads to life.

I’ve been honored to meet many such people throughout the last thirty years of my journey. Each time, I’m reminded of Jesus’s words,

Count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds.

I know it doesn’t feel like joy, which I suppose is why he said, “Count yourselves blessed.” At the time, it doesn’t feel like a blessing. However, being lied about, insulted, or excluded by those you love is not the end of your journey; it’s the trailhead into a journey for which your heart has truly hungered.

Follow your conscience beyond the wall of illusion, and you will find the rich, fulfilling reward of a life well-lived that will be worth whatever price you had to pay to get there.

And all of heaven applauds.