Limbo

Last night I listened to a young musician play a song. At the end he said, with a lament, "well and the reason for the song is past." The song was created out of the limbo of unrequited love. He no longer felt the pain of it and so he was questioning if the song had lost the power it had when he wrote it. I could see on his face that he was struggling with no longer being in that emotional tension. He seemed to desperately want the pain back. So I said to him “But you can’t stay in limbo for the sake of a song.”

And the other day, a good friend said to me “I use to cry during worship every Sunday, I don’t anymore. I really miss it. Is that weird?” She thought it weird because the source of the tears was from being in a season of great fear and anxiety.

I know these questions too. I've experienced the loss of powerful experience both with my own songs and in my worship at church.

I use to come as a hungry beggar every Sunday and I would miraculously be encountered and filled. The contrast of being empty in the week and full on Sunday was intoxicating. The power I experienced in church was obvious.

But lately, its begun to quiet and the power of Sunday has become more subtle, and sometimes Sunday feels rote.

Now there is a good reason for my experience to have changed. I’m not as empty anymore during the week. Life has begun to get fuller all the way around. There are more things in my life that bring satisfaction more of the time, through the grace and work of the Lord, by the way.

But something in me misses that experience. The wash of relief, the release of emotion, the utter sense of feeling God was communicating something specific to me and giving me hope.

We all want to stay in the power. We all want to stay in the moment of being deeply touched. But it seems we are called to let it go. God in his mercy hides his power from us. He doesn’t want us to worship this sort of experience, but to worship Him. We are tempted as the song writer was to try and stay in that sort of misery that brought us the song or the cleansing tears.

So what about the state of his song now and what about the meaning of my friend's tears? Did their power leave? What do these more dramatic experiences do for us?

Truly no light is as bright as the one that comes in the dark.

In the dark we have the chance to learn the best truths about ourselves. We are set up to take hold of things in a more profound way than when we feel well. (And I do think in great pain we can also get a hold of some profound lies, but that’s another blog.)

Though it seems cruel, I’m willing to say that God allows a long dark for a chance to speak deeply to us. He endures with us, so that he gets the chance to say to us over and over that He loves us. It’s when we are feeling at our worst that we most need to hear the I love you, otherwise we might be tempted to think we had something to do with it. When we are feeling fine we might be tempted to believe that we had done something to make ourselves worthy of receiving love.

Don’t take that to mean I don’t think we aren’t worthy, that some how I think we are just wretched, wretched awful miserable scum. The fact that God created us in the first place is enough to know that he finds us exceedingly valuable. But yes, we have messed things up profoundly and yes there is no reason to think that one would want to forgive a traitor. But just remember that traitor was never ever our original name.

And I think in large this is the battle God is up against with His enemy. The enemy wants to tell us that we must improve ourselves and can earn love, but that is simply not true. We are loved no matter what even when we are failing, even when we are unbelieving, even when we are hurting others and ourselves, we are always loved and that never changes. And the dark of our lives is a chance for God to show up and prove it to our hearts.

So the song and the tears and the power. If it is true light and true power that is coming to us in those moments I believe that somehow they have turned deeper in, that they become a lasting mark and record of God's love. In these moments of His coming we begin to know that God’s Holy Spirit has become a deeper and truer part of us when we receive the love he offers.

So we don’t sing the song in the same way, but we sing a new song. We don’t weep for ourselves anymore, but we begin to weep for others. We lift up our heads and into His eyes and we grow some more. He opens the door and we walk out into the light. We walk out in the security of His love, we walk out into who we really are.