I need direction because I'm aware of the journey, but not of the turns. The turns are perhaps decisions. Left or right? But then there's also pace, slow or quickly? And leisure plus work, should I step with enjoyment or with utmost efficiency? The journey I'm on already has my destination set and unchanging. I am going to God, and that is home.
So why all fuss about turns and pace or efficacy? Perhaps I want the Father's nod of approval at my having stayed on course, but I think it's more about me remembering that I'm heading home. I think the turns and my pace are so presently before me that I forget there's somewhere I'm going. It can feel like this is all there is, each turn is my "last one" rather than a sequence leading home. The turns in life, my decisions, can feel stronger than they actually are. They are subject to the destination for which has already been given to me, so why must the turns still occur? Why can't I just zip line my way home and avoid these seemingly unnecessary turns that just scare the crap out of my feeble self?
Why do we get to make decisions for something already given to us? I think it's the experience as created human beings made in God's image that we have the freedom to know we are kept for God, but yet given our turns in life to experience Him the way Christ and the Holy Spirit do when either incarnated or dwelling in bodily temples. By that I mean, Christ experienced God through his incarnation, He talked with God in Gethsemane, gave thanks and did miracles by God when feeding the 5000, and He cried out to God on the cross at His crucifixion. He experienced God as a man. The Spirit, on the other hand, experiences God the Father as the one who dwells in the hearts of believers. As such the Spirit knows our minds and relates that to Christ who then intercedes to the Father on our behalf, by the Spirit.
"And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God."
-Romans 8:27
The Spirit perhaps experiences God as a conduit of connection. A bridge or something like that, so that the Spirit's experience is not one without intricate details, or one might say not without turns, and as such the Spirit experiences God in a way much like we are in this life. With turns.
We have time and we have bodies. We have turns and we have paces because of time and bodies. However, we have at the end of these means the same destination as Christ and the Holy Spirit, which is union with God. A God that provides us with rich experiences of Himself, with turns. Each turn provides some kiss or touch of the Father that without might leave us as awkward souls standing before a most Holy and magnificent God at the moment we arrive in His presence, our home.
So what about the man who died on the cross next to Jesus? What about him and his soul? Did he have turns? I think so. I think his life up until that moment must have had turns because it led him to see Christ as beautiful while the other did not. In some way God had already given him a home with Him, and he was experiencing kisses and touches of the Father, even if unaware that this was happening, all up until the moment Christ was next to Him and it all perhaps made sense. The turns in His life led him to seeing Christ as beautiful and as seeing home with Father as most excellent.
The turns.
I need help with turns because they frighten me. Yet at the end of each and every turn I forget that God has my home set in all of eternity, not to be mistaken as conditional. But if the turns give me an experience of God I cannot wish to not have them. If the turns are how we come to love and know God I cannot say that they are dreadful, even if that's what they feel like at times.
The turns in life, on this journey with God (the Holy Spirit in me) and Christ (interceding on my behalf by the Spirit to the Father) are what most give me kisses and touches from God that I would otherwise not have. Should I wish that they were gone and that all my choices be made for me, I would be .....I don't know what I would be. I would be an awkward soul standing before my Father upon arrival. That might not sound that bad, but actually it is if that is who you love! How strange it would be to meet your love and stand awkwardly as if you don't know one other intimately! How....impossible to then say that you love one another.
So turns are a means to love, to love God and be loved by Him.
These choices and paces that we come across in life are all kisses and touches of the Father's affection on us, decreasing our awkward distance from Him, closing the gap of what we do not know about Him, so that upon arriving Home we might find our souls so cleaved to Him in glorious rapture!
I am reminded of the turns, and that home is being prepared by them, but not depending on them. They are choices and paces we make freely, knowing that our final arrival is home not because of them, but deepened by them. They experientially give us the capacity to love so greatly, infinitely deep, and in every turn God is drawing our hearts eternally home.
Thankful for the turns Lord.
"And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him.
For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.”
-Hebrews 12:5,6
Be receptive to God's love in the turns, and know your home is with Him.
Jmegrey
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