Tag Archives: II Corinthians 3:18

Blank Spaces

Posted on by

Some of you know that I’ve been retired for two months and have been wondering what I’ve been up to. Well, some art, some grandchildren and a lot of silence.

Over the past 12 months, God has erased three significant responsibilities from the white board of my life and brought me into a season of stillness and solitude – a blank space, so to speak. I was surrounded by people to help, problems to solve, answers to give, meetings to run to, places to go, projects and deadlines. Then I woke up July 1 and, poof, I was nobody and didn’t need to be anywhere. At week three, I felt a downshift and slowing on the inside. It’s very disorienting and redefining but gloriously freeing. And it’s an odd mix of grieving losses with joyous anticipation.

A dear friend recently reminded me of a quote from Oswald Chambers: When God gives you a blank space, don’t fill it in. So, I have been doing a lot of listening and contemplation and leaving the blank space blank.

Yesterday as I read from II Corinthians 3, verse 18 jumped off the page and grabbed me: And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

David Benner wrote, “Contemplation is a way of opening our self to the ineffable – to something that is beyond us and upon which we gaze with awe.” He described it as “leaning toward God in faith with longing, openness and love.”[1] This contemplative quiet and openness to the ineffable has been transforming. God has brought me into a deeper knowing of Him. But, to my surprise, the path also wound through hidden places of my own soul.

I sought an encounter with God, but I first encountered the unwhole parts of me hiding in the shadows. Yet it was the encounter with my unwholeness that revealed how truly wide and long and high and deep is His love for me. He gently embraces me just as I am in my weakness and insecurity, and loves me too much to leave me there. His unconditional compassionate love for all of me is absolutely staggering.

In the contemplative quiet, He transforms me from the inside out to look and think and live more and more like Christ. So, I wait in the blank space and listen and gaze with awe upon the Eternal Majesty. In His perfect timing, He will show me the next step.

When God gives you a blank space in your day, your week or your life, you might want to resist the temptation to fill it in.

[1] Benner, D. G. (2010). Opening to God, Lectio Divina and Life as Prayer. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press.

Brush of Glory

Posted on by

There are places and times when the hungry soul is so staggered by God’s majesty that she feels His beauty deep in her bones. It changes her from the inside out, her face shining with the brightness of His face, her life becoming more and more beautiful as she becomes more and more like the One she adores.
 
My frail earthen vessel is filled with the transcendent Glory of the Eternal Majesty. The core of my innermost being contains the uncontainable God. He chose this vessel as a personal dwelling for His Name and inscribed Yahweh upon it. He is both infinitely beyond my highest thoughts and infinitely closer than the marrow in my bones. Such is the deepest mystery of heaven and earth.
“…the absolute glory of God is revealed in Jesus as absolute love, and we can only be brushed by it. Nevertheless, we are made for that which is too big for us. We are made for God, and nothing less will ever satisfy us.”[1] So, my soul longs to know Him more and trust His love for me.
In my pursuit of knowing the shining One within, I come face-to-face with Jesus Christ, the image and glory of Yahweh. Even when my surroundings are dull or grievous, He floods this clay vessel with an intensity that would burn the eyeballs out of my head but is sweet to the eyes of my heart.
A brush of His glory is overpowering, overwhelming and undoing. Even a fleeting glimpse of the blinding trail of His passing glory reduces my intellect to speechless wonder and buckles my knees. The proclamation of His Name – His ever present utter goodness and tender compassion – shakes the foundation of my very soul. My mind falls dumb and my mouth cannot express where my spirit soars, carried into the heights and depths of the incomprehensible uncreated limitless One.
So, I’m drawn into the secret grotto of my soul where He has written His Name, and stand in the light of His glory. Sometimes I stumble into the secret place half awake and distracted, but He shows up every time bathing me in His light even if my mind is dark with self-preoccupation. And it still changes me.

LORD, show me Your glory, take me into the secret grottos of Your mystery. I ask for this grace and deserve none. But I cannot resist Your tug upon my heart and the ache you have put in my bones. I yearn to see Your unseen beauty and know the unknowable…to be ravished by unquenchable love and brushed by Your glory.
[1] Manning, B. (2000). Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin’s Path to God. New York: HarperCollins.