Today I’m thinking about the prophets. For the last several days I’ve been working on a study on the Old Testament prophets for my small group. And something that has really stuck out to me is how their lives are so wrapped up in their message. The classic example is Hosea, who God called to marry a prostitute and was doomed to a life of buying back and forgiving an unfaithful wife, to be a living allegory of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God—and God’s relentless love.

Yesterday, I was starting my personal time with God. I asked God to speak to me, to show me whatever it is I needed to hear as I read. I launched my Bible app, which opened to Ezekiel 24. I had turned here when I was working on the small group study, to read the first half of the chapter, when Ezekiel hears that Babylon has besieged Jerusalem. But what my eyes fell on this time was the second half, which opens with these verses:

Then this message came to me from the Lord: “Son of man, with one blow I will take away your dearest treasure. Yet you must not show any sorrow at her death. Do not weep; let there be no tears. Groan silently, but let there be no wailing at her grave. Do not uncover your head or take off your sandals. Do not perform the usual rituals of mourning or accept any food brought to you by consoling friends.”

So I proclaimed this to the people the next morning, and in the evening my wife died. The next morning I did everything I had been told to do.

Ezekiel 24:15-18 (NLT)

I don’t think I could give any adequate commentary on those words, other than to let them speak for themselves. So stop, read that again, and let it sink in.

Um…wow.

I’m reminded of St. Francis of Assisi, who said, “Preach the gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.” If anyone lived that out, the prophets did. (OK, depending on how you define “gospel,” it’s up for debate as to whether their message was part of the gospel, or was just fulfilled in the gospel, or whatever. That’s a whole nother discussion that I’m not going to address, in this post anyways. It’s more the concept that I’m trying to get at.) Sure, they had a lot to say, but often their most powerful messages were not what they said but what they did. And sometimes what God called them to do to make those points was…well, yeah. Along the lines of what Hosea and Ezekiel had to live through.

If you’ve read my last couple posts, are you starting to pick up on a theme here? Yeah, this is what I meant when I said it’s been a recurring theme in my life for the past many months.

But seeing it in the lives of the prophets hits a particular nerve in me. And, now that I think about it, brings a new sense of clarity. You see, my gift is prophecy. I hesitate to say that here. I don’t generally like to “flaunt” it, or tell people that’s the case. I let God speak through me, but I feel no need to make a point of calling myself a prophet or anything. I never would have dreamed of claiming it on a public web page. But I feel like you need that context to really get where I’m coming from.

Because now I think I begin to understand just why God has been driving at surrender so much. It seems he calls his prophets to an even more demanding level of surrender. I remember Jim, one of the pastors of my campus church, saying a couple weeks ago to a few of us that we all need to be ready to obey God when he calls us to do some pretty radical things—and then he added that that is especially true for those with the prophetic gifting. (Man, this is literally everywhere.)

Why? I think these stories, and others like them about these and other Old Testament prophets, shed some light on that: so that our lives are consistent with our message. At the very least. Better yet, so that our lives are the message. And only minimal explanation is needed. “Preach the gospel…if necessary, use words.”

And suddenly it clicks why that quote had such an impact on me when I first heard it. And really, that mindset is more natural to me. Those of you who know me personally know that, for the most part, I only use words when necessary. Or, to borrow a line from a favorite of mine, “It takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish, and we Ents never say anything unless it is worth taking…a very…long…time…to say” (The Two Towers). But living it out—now that I can do. It comes more easily to me, at least.

Why am I saying all this? Honestly, I’m just speaking my thoughts aloud. Well, in writing. At the least, I hope the quote from Ezekiel is as impactful to you as it was to me. Or the quote by St. Francis, for that matter. And maybe some of my thoughts about their application to my own life will be helpful in processing yours.

Earlier this week I wrote about two themes in my life right now—surrender and abiding. Since then they’ve been on my mind a good deal and God has been developing those thoughts further. For a couple weeks now, God’s been pushing me to be more intentional about spending time with him. I try to do it before class in mornings, amid getting breakfast and getting ready for class and all. But I’m usually still asleep while I’m eating breakfast, and don’t really wake up until the last moment when I throw some clothes on and shove my iPad into my bag as I take off for class. And so I’m just not spending the time with God that I should be. And the last couple weeks, as God has been telling me to be intentional about my time with him, I’ve responded by doubling up my efforts to wake up during that hour or so before class. But as Jesus pointed out about this very issue, the spirit is willing, but the body is weak. And, being Jesus, he knew what he was talking about. These past few days, I started realizing that (1) spending time with God is not something I should be doing; it’s something I need to be doing. The way I need to eat and sleep and breath. It’s essential to my survival. (I would have intellectually agreed to this before, but it was in writing that last blog post and thinking more about it afterwards that I began to really get it.) And (2) God’s been calling me to surrender, and the most valuable thing I can surrender to God these days is my time. And so I decided I needed to take clear, concrete steps to make it a major discipline in my life again. I decided I needed to rethink the idea that this had to be the first thing I do in the morning, because that just wasn’t working. I still want to try to at least start the day with a prayer, or sleepy effort at one, to get off on the right foot. But I would get far more out of my time in the Word and in prayer if I was awake for it (for obvious reasons.) So I sat down with a week view of my calendar and blocked out time each day that I could do it. My time with God is now on my calendar alongside classes, church activities, and shifts at the dining hall.

Related to that, God’s also been putting intercession on my heart again. It was a major part of my walk with God in 12th grade, and it needs to be again. Fighting for people in prayer is a core part of who God’s made me, but that part of me has been dormant since my “dark night of the soul” last year. It’s time it was resurrected. So I wrote down a list of people and things I want to pray for regularly, and broke it down into days of the week. I set each as a weekly reminder, to go off during the time I’m spending with God that day.

Now let me point out that this is not in my nature to do. I have resisted adding any kind of structure to my time with God, because for one, I am not that kind of person (if you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs test, I am a P) and because I want to be open to the Spirit’s leading, rather than stuck in a rut and missing what God’s trying to do. I thrive on that flexibility. But there’s something to be said for having some basic structure to work from. In this case it was the only solution. And by no means does this mean I’m not open to God leading differently on any given day. It just gives me a new default to vary from. And I realized as I was writing this that, ironically, by implementing this structure, I am being flexible by giving up the way I’ve been doing things and moving with what God is doing.

I say all this not to brag about this great thing I’m doing or anything, but to give an example of taking definite, concrete steps towards this goal. I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one out of seven billion people on the planet who’s struggling with devoting time to God. But like I said, it really isn’t an option. I say that not from a legalistic standpoint. From the standpoint that, as I said in my last post, we can’t do this life thing on our own. We cannot hope to figure it out apart from God. Our only hope is to walk in step with him. Every day. Every minute. What did Jesus say, after 40 days without food, was more necessary for life than bread? And so I encourage you—I beg you—to do whatever you need to do to find that time. It may look a lot like what I described above. It might look nothing like it. It’s OK, God can probably handle it. He wants you. And he wants you to do whatever you have to do to be with him.

Maybe you’re doing well in this area. Well, then, is there some other area that God is challenging you in? That you’ve tried your best in but are getting nowhere? Something that you can sit down and come up with a definite roadmap for? Or at the very least, just a small but concrete step? I get the feeling that what I’m doing is only the first step towards something much bigger. But it’s a step. It’s the step that God’s showing me right now. He’ll light up the next one when he’s ready. Walking with God, remember? This is what that looks like. So ask God, What’s the first step? And take it.

Just how close can I get, Lord, to my surrender
Without losing all control?
Fearless warriors in a picket fence
Reckless abandon wrapped in common sense
Deep-water faith in the shallow end
And we are caught in the middle
With eyes wide open to the differences
The God we want and the God who is
But will we trade our dreams for his
Or are we caught in the middle?

–Casting Crowns, “Somewhere in the Middle”

Yesterday the sermon was on Jesus’ call to his followers to “take up your cross.” The pastor told the story of Arthur Blessitt, who on Christmas Day, 1969, began carrying a 12-foot cross he had made across the United States, from his home in Los Angeles to New York and finally to DC. In 1971, he embarked on a journey across the world, beginning in Northern Ireland, where he shared his faith with soldiers in the IRA. Four years ago, he completed his mission, having walked almost 40,000 miles through every country on the planet, dragging his cross. Because God told him to. He met people from all walks of life, saw for himself the conditions that people were living in, prayed for peace as he walked through dozens of war-torn countries. He said that in all of those experiences, sometimes the cross on his shoulder seemed like the lightest burden he was carrying.

Now, God’s probably not going to ask most of us to literally carry a cross the equivalent of one and a half times around the circumference of the equator. (Probably not—but who knows? If he does, will you?) But Jesus made it very clear that being his disciple would be comparable to having to drag an instrument of torture and execution through the streets of Jerusalem and up a hill, where you would be nailed to it and left till dead. Are you living out your faith in a way that reflects that? I can’t say I am.

This sermon struck a chord with me. Because it was not an isolated incident of God speaking to me about this subject. If I had to pick the single biggest theme that God has been putting on my heart this school year—starting over the summer, really—it would be surrender. He is coming back to this again and again, calling me to let go of everything in complete abandonment to him. And I feel like my efforts to do so are pretty well summed up in the lyrics I opened with. How close can I get to surrender, without losing all control?

And this semester, God’s stepped it up a notch. Over Christmas break, the books I read were pointing to surrender. But in a different way. It seemed not so much like a general call, but more like preparing me for something specific. I got the sense that this semester, at some point, I would be faced with a very specific decision about a very specific matter. One road would be to continue in the status quo, comfortable in the way things are. The other: to give up all control. And carry my cross. And since then God has kept bringing me back to it. I still don’t know how that will manifest itself, or when. Given the whole taking up my cross thing, I suspect it will not be a pleasant choice to make. In the meantime I need to be listening and watching for it. And preparing myself. So that when it comes, I will recognize it, and have the courage to take the leap of faith.

I mentioned preparing. How am I supposed to prepare for something like that? I get the sense that a major part of it is abiding. Which, now that I think about it, is the other major theme that God has been talking to me about. And it just now clicked, that these are not isolated from each other. I’ve learned all too well that we cannot do this life thing on sheer will. All of us who have accepted Jesus know that no one is capable of living a life without sin, and that we are dependent on his grace. But sometimes we get the idea that once we become Christians, our sins are accounted for, but now we start trying to clean up our lives on our own power. And that just doesn’t work. In John 15, Jesus says to abide in him. He’s the vine, we’re the branches, all that. Apart from him, we don’t stand a chance of producing fruit. But if we’re connected to him, through us he produces fruit. Think about that analogy. What does a branch do? All it does is hang off the trunk. And the fruit comes. When we try to fix up our own lives, and try to live out the fruit of the Spirit and all, it’s still us trying to exercise our control. Just in a different way. But that’s missing the point. We’re supposed to lose control, remember? That means we have no control over the good things, either. If we stay plugged into Jesus, and let the Holy Spirit work in our lives, the good things come.

To bring it back to my impending fork in the road—maybe the key is just to make sure, above all, I am plugged into Jesus. And let him transform my life. And when I am faced with that choice, the Holy Spirit, who has been working in me, will lead me down the road less traveled. The road to Calvary. And I will follow. And looking back, it will be totally worth it.

What about you? What control do you need to let go of? What is holding you back from reckless abandonment to God? What is he asking you to do about it?

“If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?”

–Jesus (Mark 8:34-36, NLT)

The first thought of starting a blog came to me over a year ago. God spoke to me a couple different times, within a few weeks of each other, specifically showing me things that were meant to be shared. They ended up as notes on Facebook. But it got me thinking. What I really wanted to do was code the site from the ground up myself, as well as write the posts. It was a cool way to bring together two interests of mine. But being an engineering major, I just don’t have the time to do both. And so the idea ended up on a back burner for well over a year, coming to mind once in a while, but as something that I would just have to do one day when I have time to do it.

Then yesterday, a friend suggested I start a blog—as far as I know, having no idea that it was something I’d wanted to do for a while. The heavens opened, a shaft of light came down, angelic choir and all. Not really…but that comment was enough to make me decide to finally do this. I realized that not having time to build my own website for this didn’t have to mean I don’t do the writing part. WordPress was a good compromise. This way I can use an existing framework, and do as much or as little coding as I want or have time for on top of said existing framework. I may as well use the services that plenty of other people use so that what time I have (or make) can be focused on actually writing stuff.

Which brought up a question. Does this universe really need one more blog? It’s so easy to start a blog. Anyone can do it. The blogosphere is the place to be these days. And I’ve never been one to follow the crowd. And I don’t really want to be one more voice on the already bloated Internet. Which is why I’m going to try not to post just for the sake of posting. I have no idea how regularly I’m going to post here, but I’d rather write far less frequently, and only write things that people actually think are worth reading. (And hopefully I’ll be a good judge of that.)

Finally, there was the issue of a title. Or lack thereof. I spent a good deal of time trying to come up with some creative name for the blog. Something that would convey what this blog is going to be about. The problem with that is, I’m not entirely sure what all this blog will be about at this point. Certainly—primarily, I should say—thoughts about my faith and things God is showing me. But being a TCK (third culture kid) whose family is still living overseas, traversing the globe has been a huge part of my past, and is definitely in my future, and is bound to present plenty of things to share here. Not to mention anything else that comes up that I think the world needs to hear. Almost any name I choose could prove to be limiting in the future, as this blog progresses and evolves. And what names I could come up with that seemed to do the trick were already taken. Besides, I learned years ago in the realm of email addresses that what sounds really cool one year may not seem quite so cool a few years down the road. But you can’t go wrong with your own name.

So there you have it. I have officially entered the blogosphere. Hopefully I’m not just adding to the noise.