I believe God is much more unknown than He is known…yet so very knowable.  In order to know Him I must be willing to embrace that which I can’t fully understand.  “The spiritual life cannot be made suburban.  It is always frontier, and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed.” **  I must be willing to live on the edge; the edge of the known and the unknown, the edge of unspeakable joy and insanity.  When I step deeper in the darkness, and find I still only possess traces of what I desire, I must push further into the wilderness, into the frontier of the knowledge of God.  The dark night spoken of by the mystics is the point at which you have burned all bridges and been ruined to the extent that the world has no longer appeals to you.  The false lovers have perished as you have run into the wilderness to find your one true Love…all the lesser lights have gone out; the voices of distraction have been silenced.  Yet your soul still lives in a place of emptiness and longing, desperately searching for the living God, your only hope being in One you cannot see and cannot find.  This is the wilderness of John, the place of encounter, and the place we are unwilling to go.  We must not turn back from these misty border lands, where the fringes of illusion begin to meet the fringes of reality, to seek again the comfort and contentment of the multitudes.  Embracing the journey of discovery, and taking up arms in this war, we must choose to forge into the unknown, risking all for the chance of truly finding Him. 

This is something my Stephen wrote many years ago and one of the reasons I fell in love with him in the first place (and I’m still falling)… he’ll probably be mad that I’m posting it for all the internets in blog-o-world to read but I’ll ask for forgiveness later.  With this fast, these words have been so near to my heart lately, so tonight I thought I would vulnerably share them with you, hoping that they might encourage your heart as much as they have my own. 

May we forge into the frontier of discovering the unknown, but oh so knowable God… throwing off everything that hinders love and risking all for the sake of truly knowing Him.

…but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.   (Phil 3:12b-14)

 

** “Spirtual life cannot be made suburban” is a quote by Howard Macey