Field Notes On The Jesus Way

 You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning;in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;in the evening it fades and withers.  Ps.  90:6 (NRSV)

If I’m ever going to live the life God wants me to live, it had better be now. One of the hard truths about getting older is that you have the ability to look back on life and see where you invested your life well and where you squandered opportunity.

I spent the first twenty years of my adult life obsessed with my ministry/career. From age 21 to 41 every moment I didn’t spend playing basketball in various city leagues and backpacking in the Colorado Rockies, I spent pursuing my career. I invested in my family during those years as well, but my wife will be the first to tell you that often while I sat in the stands at the little league ball park, my mind was in other places.

And virtually all my creative investment and energy went to the externals of my world. Knowledge, skills, strategies, networks, accomplishments, etc. I spent literally nothing on the internal world of my soul. I read Gordon MacDonald’s book, Ordering Your Private World and agreed with every word and then flipped the switch of denial and never invested in my private world at all. There is a huge difference in learning about something and experiencing it for yourself. Reading about a kiss and experiencing a kiss are not even close to the same.

Consequently when I needed interior strength, when I needed character that came from a deep place in my soul, when I needed artesian resources to withstand the pressures I had created in my external world—I went to that cupboard I found it bare.

What is the condition of your soul? Anything in that cupboard? Your soul and your life are inextricably connected together. What does it profit a man, Jesus said, if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?

If you are ever going to live the life God wants you to live, it had better be now.

One of my favorite authors is the late Lewis Smedes. I hungrily read his book Shame and Grace 15 years ago and it was instrumental in stocking my empty cupboard of a soul.

Read these thoughtful words:

I bought a brand new date book yesterday, the kind I use every year – spiral-bound, black imitation leather covers wrapped around pages and pages of blank squares. Every square has a number to tell me which day of the month I’m in at the moment. Every square is a frame for one episode of my life. Before I’m through with the book, I will fill the squares with classes I teach, people with whom I ate lunch, everlasting committee meetings I sit through, and these are only the things I cannot afford to forget.

I fill the squares too with things I do not write down for me to remember: thousands of cups of coffee, some lovemaking, some praying, and, I hope, gestures of help to my neighbors. Whatever I do, it has to fit inside one of those squares on my date book. I live one square at a time. The four lines that make up the square are the walls of time that organize my life. Everything I do has to fit into one square.

Each square has an invisible door that leads to the next square. As if by a silent stroke, the door opens and I am pulled through, as if by a magnet, sucked into the next square in line. There I will again fill the time frame that seals me – fill it with my business just as I did the square before. As I get older, the squares seem to get smaller. One day, I will walk into a square that has no door. There will be no mysterious opening and no walking into an adjoining square. One of the squares will be terminal. I do not know which square it will be. (I’ve lost the source for this quote, sorry)

A few years ago at 81 years old, while on a ladder putting Christmas lights up he fell, hit his head and went into a coma and died a few days later. He entered that final square.

You know one day you will enter that square and so will I. Between that day and this day, you have some squares to fill. Nobody knows how many, but you must choose: not your boss, not your corporation, not your spouse, not your kids, not your parents, not your peers, not your church.

Sit with this quote from Thoreau, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

Do you understand what you’ve been given? You fill the squares of your life. Nobody else does that! You will decide how you are going to fill your square.

If you are ever going to live the life God wants you to live, it had better be now. Or as the country song says, “Live like you’re dying.”

Because you are— just like the grass.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence ~ Paul Simon

There are two terms you should know that the ancient Christian writers gave us: consolation and desolation.

Consolation is the felt presence of God. Consolation is that period in your Christian life when you’re on cloud nine. It’s kind of like when you first became a Christian, and everything seems new and everything seems fresh. Every time you read the Bible, you feel like God is speaking to you. Every time you pray you feel His love and presence, and every time you pray something happens. Every time you sing a song you weep. You sneeze and someone says, “God bless you,” and you say something like, “I am blessed indeed.”  (This is the most obnoxious time in your Christian life.)

Desolation is the felt absence of God. This is when you do not see God working in your heart. This is when you are praying and praying and praying…and no answers. This is when you’re reading and reading and reading…and getting nothing out of it. It is completely bone dry. These are desert times. These are winter times. This is when God is painfully absent.

Honestly, it is an arrogant belief in the minds of immature believers that consolation and desolation are up to me. It’s about what I’m doing. So if I’m experiencing consolation, the felt presence of God, I must be doing something right. I’m praying the right prayers, I’m singing the right songs, I’m reading the Bible in the right way, I’m going to the right church, I’m in the right programs. I must be doing something right.

Therefore conversely, if I’m experiencing desolation, the felt absence of God, I must be doing something wrong. I’m not praying enough, I’m not reading enough, I don’t have enough faith, and I’m making the wrong choices. God is punishing me.

The ancients said, “What if consolation and desolation aren’t so much about what you do and what you’re doing, but it’s more about what God is doing? What if consolation and desolation are both intentional moves of God in your life?”

Sunrise on the Sangre De Cristo Mountains, Colorado.

The writer Thomas Merton said, “God, who is everywhere, never leaves us, yet sometimes He seems to be present and sometimes absent, and if we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He’s absent than when He’s present.” Or to put it another way, God may be most powerfully present when he seems most conspicuously absent.

So, if you feel as if God is ten million light-years away remember—it is a feeling. And as a friend of mine says, “Feelings are damn liars.”

When God feels absent from you, just smile and say, “Hello darkness, my old friend. “

“How are you doing today, pastor?” he asked.

“I’m doing Okay.”

“You seemed a little discouraged last Sunday,” he said.

“Yeah, no pastor spends hours preparing a sermon only to preach it to more chairs than the people he loves.”

“It was a good sermon, pastor. I needed to hear it,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Then for the next hour we just talked about the stuff of life.

My friend is about ten years older than me, maybe more than ten years. He has a shock of white hair, a soft and smooth face and speaks with a deep and warm Texas drawl. He laughs often. It is easy to be in his presence. No posing, no pretense, and no pissing contests.  Just the simple, quiet presence of a good man.

We didn’t talk about politics, theology, or literature. We just skipped from topic to topic in a random and ricocheted way and told each other stories from our lives.

I’ve only known him for a year, but he feels familiar, like I’ve known him longer. As if he has always been here. Or maybe I sensed that he was coming my way down through the years for such a time as now. All I know is that day, in that coffee shop, I needed an old soul to sit with me for a while.

Later that evening I mentioned to my wife about the coffee and said how encouraging it was to me. She asked me why it was so encouraging.

“What did he say that picked up your spirits?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

There are friends that you seek and cultivate. I have friends like that. I think of my friend Scott and Cameron. I saw them from a distance and said to myself, “Joe, you would do good to have them as your friends.” And now they are great friends. Growing deeper as the months and years roll by.

But then there are surprising friends. You didn’t see them coming, but they showed up at just the right time. That’s the way it is with my coffee-drinking friend from Texas. He came along at just the right time. And I have to say that while I was deeply and darkly discouraged that day, my friend didn’t TRY to encourage me. He didn’t even buy my coffee. He just sat with me, listened to me, and laughed at anything remotely funny.

Sit. Listen. Laugh.

Pretty good ingredients for buoying a sagging soul.

Friendships are such simple things and yet we complicate them when we bring our own soul-disease into the relationship. Our insecurities, our need to fix each other, our need to make the pain go away, our dysfunction. Even our need to impress each other with our intelligence or humor. It is so winsome to sit with someone who has no agenda save being in your presence.

A young lady that grew up in the youth group with my sons, but who is developmentally delayed and suffers from severe epilepsy, wrote on a childhood friends Facebook wall the following post:

Happy Birthday, Jake! I’m so glad that it is your day for joy. I am always going to be a great friend for you.

Look closely at those words. Read them again—slowly.

Those are two great affirmations. She didn’t write them to me, but like the drawl of my Texas friend’s voice, I found comfort in them that gray day.

Birthday or no, I’m glad this is your day for joy.

The dove’s lonesome coo played in the distance as we walked on the sand-filled road across the back side of the Baca Land an Cattle Company access in the San Luis Valley of south-central Colorado. Pinion’s and junipers stood at attention like centinentals. Our packs were the lightest we’ve ever carried into the wilderness.

His pack was heavier.

We both limped—me from miles of trails and years of running on pavement. He limped because of two knee replacements and even more miles on faded trails in the wild.

We talked little at first light—as if on an early big game hunt or, perhaps, entering the most ancient of cathedrals.

 I love walking in the wild with my father. There are faster men; there are even men who know more about the wilderness than my father, but no one, and I mean no one, knows more about the wilderness of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the wildness of the soul of Joe Chambers than my father. Thus I would rather walk in those hills with him than sit in a coffee house with Billy Graham any day of the week.

We both struggled with the overgrown trail of deadfall Cottonwood, Aspen, and wild rose bush of Deadman Creek trail. From time to time we found a log that had been cut decades ago which indicated that we were on what once was considered a trail. The going was slow, arduous and painful. I could hear the creek dancing down the canyon on my right, but the thatch was too thick save only a few fleeting glimpses of the tumbling water.

We camped and ate our Spanish rice, shooed mosquitoes away from our faces and he told me he fell three or four times that day.

Climbing out of the cross-hatched creek bottom was our top priority. Scaling the canyon wall on all fours in the loose scree, prickly pears and yucca plants we found a thin but better trail and our pace picked up.

The next day he slowed down even more. We came to the idea at the same time that he should stay at the beaver ponds three fourths of the way to the lakes and that I make the final pitch up and into the basin alone. I wanted to be there with him. He took me the first time over forty years earlier and we both were thinking this may be our last trip to the sacred lakes.

I pushed on to the lakes assured that we made the right decision. It was a brutal climb through more thick brush, deadfall, and dark timber with a labyrinth of game trails obscuring the ancient trail.

 I arrived at the upper lake at 7:00 PM as tired as I have ever been in the wilderness; too tired to eat my supper, I sipped a cup of berry drink, snapped a selfie with alpine glow splashed on the cirque holding the alpine lake behind me and crawled into my sleeping bag.

I fished all the next day. The cutthroat trout were as plentiful and beautiful as at any time in the 40 years of our pilgrimages.

I prayed.

I wrote.

I sang.

I breathed deep the 11,071 foot air.

At noon of my second day I reloaded my pack and descended to the camp where I left him. He had caught fish in the creek and enjoyed a meal of trout fried in bacon grease. We broke his camp and hiked miles and hours down the canyon to a previous camp site. We enjoyed our meals, talked and laughed.

We talked about God. We talked about regrets in life. We talked about our hopes for the future. The ease by which conversation flowed between two old men who have walked in the wild with a holy God for so many decades was smooth as a banister in grandma’s house.

Finally, just as it was getting too dark for old eyes to see, the reading of Psalms came bubbling to the top of our conversation.

“Let me read to you the Psalm God gave me to read every day this week,” I said.

I read in entirety and aloud Psalm 29…

Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings,     ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.  Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name;     worship the Lord in holy splendor.

“Let me read to you my Psalm,” he said and turned to find his Bible.

He read in entirety and aloud Psalm 141…

I call upon you, O Lord; come quickly to me;    give ear to my voice when I call to you.  Let my prayer be counted as incense before you,     and the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.

We talked about what we might imagine God telling us from our respective Psalms. We talked of the mystery and the whispers of God. We talked about the wrinkled contours of our lives and how these ancient words find their ways into our souls.

Two old mountain men sitting on a gray log, reading Psalms aloud to each other as the dark closed in on us. The darkness of the day, and the twilight of our lives—

…in the holy wild.