because you can't know where you're going unless you know where you've been...

January 29, 2006:

I was going to write a book called "wonderfully devoid" - sounded like a good title somwhere in Israel so I wrote it down, but can't remember what I planned on putting in it, exactly.

It is potentially a concept I am trying to understand. Devoid is not usually one of those words one wants to be associated with, and is rarely paired iwth such an exalted emotion as wonderful. There's something about paradox that is intoxicating, though, something about the fact that two things just don't fit together - but really do, somehow - that puts me somewhere near the pulse of reality.

I wonder if my title came in the wilderness...maybe from the wadis and canyons where the desert fathers were said to have nothing - but lack nothing - because of the faithful provision of their God. I wonder how many moments their souls were heavy, weary or lonely and then quickened in a seemingly unlikely gasp of God's presence. I wonder whether they knew, all the time, about the "lacking nothing"...and how often they focused on the "having nothing." I think I live mostly under the latter, when my heart forgets the truth of the former.

"Some blessings from God were meant only to sustain us for a season..." I'm learning this lesson well, and wonder how long I can live in the paranoia of potential loss or loneliness. I am convicted to try to love well and fully and recklessly, even though it might hurt when the seasons change. And I think wonderfully devoid is that beautiful place where its just God and you and He's teaching you to be unknown.

So this is the stuff of life. Not some breath-defying shock of adrenaline at every hairpin turn, but a slow inhalation of subtle awe that settles somewhere at the bottom of your soul where you know its just right because its God's.