It was the hump of the week when I had a sliver of time to myself and a flurry of things in my heart that felt a bit like anger. I just didn’t like it and wasn’t sure I knew how to explain it in words if I tried.
I ventured my way between lines of orange and white cones and bumpety roads for the park with her clusters of trees. Trees that know without doubt where their place is to stand. I wandered a couple laps around the walk before sliding down onto the grass at the edge of the creek where the water was leaping in rhythm over the rocks. Where you can close your eyes and hear the song that helps you imagine that there is a place where no discord among persons could ever dampen the unified wonder at dancing waters in perfect roar. Its harmony is this song of the birds that lives free-belonging to the open skies that envelop each note with welcome abandon.
And yet, with eyes wide open to see what is broken and feel the tugs inside, you can lean into the roar of those waters and hear another kind of roar. The roar of words you’ve heard that want to reverberate around and around your head, like a roar at your soul that wants to send your loaves and your fishes away.
And staring at those waters it can feel as if you could simply plunge the diving weight of your hand down into the actual roar and feel it going right through, passing between your fingers while you feel the push and the movement, and are not swept away. A small act, a standing, that helps you find something to do with all that is swirling inside. To feel it on purpose and yet see how you are not destroyed.
And the trees alongside the creek, they know. The wind may blow at your branches, and parts of you may bend and break, but the trees know where they stand. And what keeps them standing is a whole life that they have beneath the parts of them that we can see up here above the ground.
And these underneath parts of us need places to dig into and be covered, given fertile home in our most mattering parts that secure us and keep us standing, firmly attached. Because up above the ground in our growing places, our prayer is to stretch our branches out in fruitful love, yet, when we look at the Jesus who is Love at His own very core, we see a Love that transcends our safe rulebooks and guidelines about any cut-out black and white view of what Love is supposed to look like. It can look impossible to grow into this.
Jesus’ gave Love that showed itself just as it was needed in each situation beyond the bounds of our ideas of what Love must
always look like. He
always gave what Love most needed and He
always knew what that was in its time… whether it needed table-flipping in defense of the sinners who just wanted to come to God in their need without being abused in the process, or whether it needed unhurried, gentle presence that silenced the accusations for a woman caught in adultery.
Love stretched Himself out in ways that nobody saw coming, even giving His body at the proper time, to be mistreated and killed before He would finally rise. And Love cannot be dwindled down to something less than all of what His life showed, with the perfect timing of each part.
My eyes follow the way down the creek to the tree trunks that grow sideways out of the bank of the creek as if they simply forgot which way is up. And then the trees that twist and bend in ways that you simply wouldn’t advise them to grow if they had asked your opinion. How do you let go of wanting your life to grow just so… according to your own idea of what growth in love is always supposed to be?
And my eyes follow the trunk of the tree to her tangled web of roots that partial-protrude from the bank of the creek before they sink down into the earth there by the edge of the water’s roar. Yet still, I can hear the roar of those waters and even within, feel it as those words that want to shame the soul, accuse, condemn and shun, maybe like what they most truly are isn’t flesh or blood at all, but a prowling, seeking someone to devour. For I remember it, and find what the Word says, that the accuser of our souls can be “like a roaring lion.” (1 Peter 5:8) But that’s not what he is, for it’s not his place. There is this rising sense that wants to clench my fist at those waters, though I know that my own fist cannot stop their flow. And there is a part of me that wonders where… Where does my own clenched fist have a place in Love?
I want to hold it to my chest and feel the stories, the ache, the things that I know had to go this way and it can hurt.
Still you could close your eyes to the broken world and still in all that’s becoming new, feel the Healing Roar that is true. Because the stillness bids to know that there is an actual Roar that overpowers the broken roar of shame and it is alive. There is a true Lion-Destroyer of darkness, the Light of the world. He alone gives the genuine Roar.
He is angry for the sake of hurting sinners.
That morning, I had read the words… “His anger, unlike yours, has zero taint of sin in it… His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion.”*
His anger judges justly for the sake of the nations and every people and tongue. It judges justly in defense of needy sinners and every lost and searching soul.
When anger finds my heart, maybe Love invites me into this, this resting and rooting my heart down into the Roar of the Lion who has conquered (Rev. 5:5).
“Be angry and do not sin.” Eph 4:26.
One could take a clenched fist and fall on knees… and still. The Roar of the Lion of Judah is not dead.
He is angry for the sake of sinners and His anger is there to cover us.
Be angry for the sake of sinners who just want to come in their need, yet they find themselves shamed and abused. Be angry for the places where brokenness and death wants to claim that it’s winning the war. Be angry for the sake of sinners who feel stuck under the weight of their sin and the accuser of their souls. Be angry for all who are met with condemnation in their search for healing... for the Love of the Lion is the true healing balm, who perfectly knows how to Roar for He hates both the *sin and the *shaming of hurting sinners. These both that want to war for their claim on our souls.
Be angry and pray where there is a war for the workings of your heart.
For a clenched fist can always find a place in Love through prayer that trusts in the Roar of the Lion. No fist finds a better place to land than when it falls under covering with the Roar of the One who perfectly hates sin, shame and death.
Until the time,
rest in His Roar and use your heart for the ones He roars for.
For you can still hear the echo of the undying kingdom of God that souls are yet rooting down into. Belonging for souls is here:
rest our cause in the Lion.
The water still flowed, leaping in rhythm over the rocks, where you can close your eyes and hear the song that helps you imagine, believe by faith. There is a place where no darkness could ever dampen our wonder together at dancing waters in perfect Roar.
Let the Lion Roar.
*Quote from Dane Ortlund, Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers, p. 112.
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