Why is it important that you are with God and God alone on the mountain top? It’s important because it’s the place in which you can listen to the voice of the One who calls you the beloved. To pray is to listen to the One who calls you “my beloved daughter,” “my beloved son,” my beloved child.” To pray is to let that voice speak to the center of your being, to your guts, and let that voice resound in your whole being.
–Henri Nouwen
Kananaskis
How lovely is your dwelling place,
Lord Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God.
(Psalm 84:2)
Photo: Dusk in the Elk Valley
Do not fret because of evildoers,
Be not envious toward wrongdoers.
For they will wither quickly like the grass
And fade like the green herb.
Trust in the Lord and do good;
Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
He will bring forth your righteousness as the light
And your judgment as the noonday.
Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him;
Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way,
Because of the man who carries out wicked schemes.
Cease from anger and forsake wrath;
Do not fret; it leads only to evildoing.
For evildoers will be cut off,
But those who wait for the Lord, they will inherit the land.
Yet a little while and the wicked man will be no more;
And you will look carefully for his place and he will not be there.
But the humble will inherit the land
And will delight themselves in abundant prosperity.
(Psalm 37:1-11)
Phto: Turtle Mountain, east of Frank Slide
“I love you, God— you make me strong.
God is bedrock under my feet,
the castle in which I live,
my rescuing knight.
My God—the high crag
where I run for dear life,
hiding behind the boulders,
safe in the granite hideout.
I sing to God, the Praise-Lofty,
and find myself safe and saved.
The hangman’s noose was tight at my throat;
devil waters rushed over me.
Hell’s ropes cinched me tight;
death traps barred every exit.
A hostile world! I call to God,
I cry to God to help me.
From his palace he hears my call;
my cry brings me right into his presence—
a private audience!
Earth wobbles and lurches;
huge mountains shake like leaves,
Quake like aspen leaves
because of his rage.
His nostrils flare, bellowing smoke;
his mouth spits fire.
Tongues of fire dart in and out;
he lowers the sky.
He steps down;
under his feet an abyss opens up.
He’s riding a winged creature,
swift on wind-wings.
Now he’s wrapped himself
in a trenchcoat of black-cloud darkness.
But his cloud-brightness bursts through,
spraying hailstones and fireballs.
Then God thundered out of heaven;
the High God gave a great shout,
spraying hailstones and fireballs.
God shoots his arrows—pandemonium!
He hurls his lightnings—a rout!
The secret sources of ocean are exposed,
the hidden depths of earth lie uncovered
The moment you roar in protest,
let loose your hurricane anger.
But me he caught—reached all the way
from sky to sea; he pulled me out
Of that ocean of hate, that enemy chaos,
the void in which I was drowning.
They hit me when I was down,
but God stuck by me.
He stood me up on a wide-open field;
I stood there saved—surprised to be loved!
God made my life complete
when I placed all the pieces before him.
When I got my act together,
he gave me a fresh start.
Now I’m alert to God’s ways;
I don’t take God for granted.
Every day I review the ways he works;
I try not to miss a trick.
I feel put back together,
and I’m watching my step.
God rewrote the text of my life
when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.”
(Psalm 18:1-24 The Message paraphrase)
Photo:Mt. Fisher from Bethesda Pool
“God is not a man, that He should lie,
Nor a son of man, that He should repent.
Has He said, and will He not do?
Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?
Behold, I have received a command to bless;
He has blessed, and I cannot reverse it.”
(Numbers 23:19, 20)
Kootenay River
You visit the earth and water it; you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water.
(Psalm 65:9)
Kootenay Lake
Bluer than Blue
The artist leading the workshop in the desert city looked at my paintings and asked, perhaps facetiously, “You use a lot of blue. Are you depressed?”
I looked around at the other participants’ work mostly done in earth tones –beiges, browns, greys –with occasional splashes of red and yellow. Desert colours.
“No,” I said, “Not anymore. I just come from a place that is mostly blue.”
When I arrived home in the Rocky Mountains of Canada a few months later, deep lavender blue skies, shifting azure-blue lakes, paler and paler layers of blue mountains and sparkling blue snow shadows seemed even bluer than the paintings.
Bluer than blue.
I come from a place that is mostly blue.
To some blue communicates serenity. To some blue communicates depression. I come from a place that was mostly depression.
A while ago I was told in a dream, “Look to the area of your greatest failure, for therein lies your greatest success.”
There was that night.
That night I bowed on a stage before a large audience jumping up to shout “Brava” and throw flowers. Most of them didn’t know that underneath a gorgeous costume I was balancing on one leg the whole time. I had broken the other one only a few days before.
Then there was that night.
That night, I cowered in a locked ward where a silhouetted person behind a flashlight peered in my room every fifteen minutes to make sure I was still alive.
That night on the stage, the night of “my greatest success,” was actually my greatest failure. That was the night when I identified myself as a strong-willed, disciplined overcomer. That’s when I was foolish enough to think that if I just worked hard enough I could earn love, respect, and adulation.
The night on the ward, the night of “my greatest failure,” was actually the night of my greatest success. That was the night when I admitted it took more courage to live than to die. I was fresh out of courage. That was the night when my tank hit empty, when I had no will power, no self-discipline, no hope. That was the night when grace pulled me deep down into those depths of blue and began to show me that freedom means nothing left to lose. Freedom means letting go of self-sufficiency, self-righteousness, and self-promotion. That was the night when Jesus Christ took me by the hand and lifted me up toward the light. Drowning in emptiness and being lifted up to a new life of hope was a kind of baptism.
It took a while to get on my feet. I had a lot of forgiving to do. Forgiving myself was the hardest test of wrestling pride, reputation, and the albatross of potential to the ground. I still have to remember to punch it in the beak regularly.
Blue means freedom, revelation, and serenity now. I understand better what Paul meant when he wrote:
Yet every advantage that I had gained I considered lost for Christ’s sake. Yes, and I look upon everything as loss compared with the overwhelming gain of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. For his sake I did in actual fact suffer the loss of everything, but I considered it useless rubbish compared with being able to win Christ. For now my place is in him, and I am not dependent upon any of the self-achieved righteousness of the Law. God has given me that genuine righteousness which comes from faith in Christ. How changed are my ambitions! Now I long to know Christ and the power shown by his resurrection: now I long to share his sufferings, even to die as he died, so that I may perhaps attain as he did, the resurrection from the dead.
Yet, my brothers, I do not consider myself to have “arrived”, spiritually, nor do I consider myself already perfect. But I keep going on, grasping ever more firmly that purpose for which Christ grasped me. My brothers, I do not consider myself to have fully grasped it even now. But I do concentrate on this: I leave the past behind and with hands outstretched to whatever lies ahead I go straight for the goal—my reward the honour of being called by God in Christ.
(Philippians 3)
Only Someone who knows the plans He has for us has the courage it takes to show us how to die so that we might live.
Photo: Tam O’ Shanter Creek
Since then it is by faith that we are justified, let us grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Through him we have confidently entered into this new relationship of grace, and here we take our stand,
in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have only a hope of future joys—we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles.
Taken in the right spirit these very things will give us patient endurance;
this in turn will develop a mature character, and a character of this sort produces a steady hope,
a hope that will never disappoint us.
Already we have some experience of
the love of God flooding through our hearts
by the Holy Spirit given to us.
(Romans 5:1-5)
Charis: Subject to Change 