To cease from striving

Before last Saturday I had never been in a place I would call God-forsaken. But somehow drinking the "welcome to Laos" snake whiskey felt equivalent to internalizing the sin that separates me from God, like eating the fruit in the garden of Eden, and then getting kicked out. This garden was flat reflecting pools in rice paddies which gave way to dusty villages, banana trees in fields burnt out of hillsides, and valleys that dropped off below the road as we wound our way up into the mountains into the late afternoon.

For hours as we drove I watched the scenery go by and thought about how Adam walked with God in this same cool of the day when everything is gilded, and how I was far far away from such a place. Doubts settled deeply in me and stuck like layers of dust and sweat and truck exhaust as we finally all piled out and stepped into the village. It was beautiful but heartbreaking. I didn’t want to be a tourist anymore; I wanted to run out of there and get away from God and my thoughts on a hillside somewhere, like Adam and Eve when they became ashamed and tried to hide from God in the heaviness of sin. Why is it that evil in the country seems to settle down like cool air into hollows? My little god-box was broken and I wondered: Where is the God I know here? Who is he really? Does his hand reach even this far? Can he see me even here? Does he apply at all here? And I was afraid.

But O Glory! Sunday morning back in the city I heard a message preached on grace which was really nothing that I had never heard before, but somehow this time I GOT IT! (Maybe the different translation of my little pocket-sized Bible that I packed to save space allowed me to pay more attention to the words and not just skim over them like another old memory verse: yadda yadda yadda.) What I knew before is still valid, but now I have this deeper understanding, and it is essentially this: that grace is a gift, that in striving to earn it I loose it, that by faith alone I am a child of God’s, and by clothing myself with the righteousness of Christ I CAN walk again with God, just like Adam did in the cool of the day, every day.

And so everything ties together back to the word which resounded with me at home over Christmas: I can “cease from striving” and fall back into grace. Hallelujah! This must be what it means to go farther up and further in to God. And who I am continues to be stretched.