“He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.” – C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy
The truth is, sometimes the places God puts us are sucky. He places us into floods, into deserts, into furnaces, into lion dens, into jail. The Bible tells us that He brings us from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18) and as much as we want it to look like the walk from our Camry doors to the doors of our church (strewn with familiar faces, smiles, waves) it looks more like a treacherous mountain range (with valleys full of dead bogs, think the swamp from Lord of the Rings). But if you look at both from a distance, the first looks like every Sunday on repeat (boring and empty). While the other looks like a crown to be placed on a king’s head (worthy of a panorama shot).
The bog of death feels exactly like it sounds…like death. It hurts. It’s not pretty. But we learn more in the descent and the climb than the climax. The other day I was talking with one of the Passport participants. We were crying and talking about why God lets us get into the depths of despair. And I realized and told her that when I think about last year, and about my race, I rarely remember jumping off a bridge in Zambia. It was one of the “best” moments of my race. It was a mountain top moment. A glory moment. But it was a moment. What I don’t forget about my Race is the many many times I was broken, messy, in an ugly pit with my teammates and/or the Lord.
And I asked her, what is more beautiful in the grand scheme of things, the mountains we’re surrounded with or the fact that we’re freezing our asses off and ugly crying on this porch while discussing our Creator? Is the creation ever as beautiful or complex as the creator?
It couldn’t be. No matter the creation, it is only a mirror of what creates it. The organization of the hexagons in a honeycomb holds nothing to the organization of the bees that create it. Likewise, a composer can write hundreds of symphonies each more beautiful than the next. The musical brain being more beautifully complex than the music itself.
This discussion with my teammate was hard. It was amazing. This participant, my friend, was in a pit. She was in one of the many dead bogs of her life. My heart broke for her as she hurt so much. And it still breaks for her and the other girls as the Lord guides them on their journeys. But the Lord is working in their lives…I just wish He would do it faster.
One of the most frustrating things as a leader and a friend is waiting on the Lord and waiting on people to choose the Lord. I constantly feel as if He’s tugging the bandaid off at a glacial pace knowing that it’d be better if He ripped it off in one swoop. And then He tells me, “Yes I could, but you can’t learn from the pain if its only felt for a second.” So is God a masochist, reveling in our pain? Or a physical therapist, hurting us in the name of healing?
If it’s the first then I would denounce my faith without a second thought. But I know the Lord and so I trust whole-heartedly that it is the latter. This however doesn’t make it any less frustrating. And even in the midst of this frustration all I can do is praise the Lord. All I can do is lift my hands and voice, not in spite of, but with the pain. With the frustration. With the sickness. With all of the bad and all of the good.
In A Horse and His Boy, Shasta had done many brave things. He had left his home and everything that he had known. He had traveled through desert to get to where he knew he belonged. He risked his life and plunged himself in the way of a lion to save his friends. And after all of this, after tiring journey and exhausting heroic action, he was asked to run miles to tell the king an army was coming to attack innocent people. He wanted to say no. He thought it unfair. But he did it anyways. His journey wasn’t over just because he had reached a stopping point, a tip of a mountain. So he was sent on yet another leg of the same journey.
On this next leg, after running until he could run no more he was given a horse and sent farther. And it was on this leg of his journey a lion came and walked beside him. The same lion that attacked his friends. The same lion that had attacked him only to protect him at the edge of the desert days later. If you’ve read the stories or know of them, I’m sure you can guess who this lion was. When Shasta asked who this lion was his answer was much like the Lord’s when I ask, “Who are you to ask me to do something else?!”
“‘Myself,’ said the Voice, very deep and low so the earth shook: and again ‘Myself’ loud and clear and gay: and then the third time ‘Myself,’ whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.”
Like Shasta I left my home once, to do great things. And I did them. And each time I did them I felt like though I had done well that my job wasn’t complete. Though I had reached the top of the mountain, there was another. And when I came home from the Race He asked me to go again. Because the Lord doesn’t give us jobs, he gives us purposes, purposes that are irrevocable (Romans 11:29).
And in ways this leg of the journey has been easier (and much shorter), but in other ways it has been much harder. And I know when I get home He will call me into even greater things. Another mountain is in sight. And I will want to say no. I will think it unfair. I will want to rest and pretend like I was called on no journey. But the roar of the Lion beckons me.
The Lion who isn’t tame. He is dangerous but He is good. When we bury our faces in His mane we find our resolve to keep going, to do the thing anyways. When we listen to our fears He breathes on us and with His breath they are forgotten. The Lion who leads us to the mountain top and then back into the death so that we can be raised with Him again in the next glory (Romans 8:17). The Lion who is always asking us to do something harder and better.
I don’t know what my harder and better is yet, but I know it’s coming. And just like Lucy, after ranting and raving at how stupid I will look and how “horrid” it will be to go into the bog of death again, I will say, “I’m sorry, God. I’m ready now.” And I pray His answer, like Aslans will be: “Now you are a lioness, And now all the World will be renewed. But come. We have no time to lose.”
