DREAMING

My life is beautiful, come to find out.

One of the reasons it’s beautiful is this: I’ve learned the cost and the absolute necessity of dreaming.

I believe that when you put Adam and Eve in the garden you’d planted, you didn’t tell them what you wanted it to look like. You taught them how to garden, and then wanted them to imagine with you. To dream.

If I could face you

What could we become?

“Trust is knowing who I am and who you are.”

After an hour of swimming in your stars, swinging from the rafters of what seemed like endless possibility, I had asked Dave for a definition of trust.

That’s what he said. Knowing who I am and who you are.

Love always trusts.

As man looks at outward appearance, we look with you at the heart. As they measure behavior and fabricate separation, we no longer regard anyone according to the flesh.

“Now I know in part, but then I know fully, even as I have always been fully known.”

“We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”

Trust is knowing who I am and who you are. You - you in me, you in the person in front of me.

And oh, how we want to be one. No matter the cost.

It gives me permission to create space to experience you in the person in front of me. Because I know who that person is. I know you in him. I know that it’s a matter of time before we all fully become - before we live as sons and daughters of God. Could it be that my trust could pull the you into its orbit, into this moment in spacetime, for me to see and touch?

Yet to open my arms to this is to also open them to pain. What if the trust I extend results in betrayal, the false self?

What if the bread you extend results in blood?

When you fashioned your son Judas, you didn’t sculpt a traitor. So he isn’t one. Period.

Trust is a mirror that shows the other who he really is. Either the false or the true will respond. And in that unknown lies the great mystery of this age.

Trust is dreaming, what could we become? And I’ve learned the cost - and the absolute necessity - of dreaming.

What cost. I look back on this life and see that we have spread out our hands again and again to people who have, in fear, crushed them.

I nod. I remember how blinding fear can be.

I sigh. I mourn. I weep with you. And together we say, they know not what they’re doing.

And you smile, tender. And you say, that’s my girl. The dreamer.

What did you call me?

Come on, you know you can’t help it. Couldn’t turn it off even if you tried.

It’s true. You catch me and heal me every single time, and we re-emerge into the world with wider wings.

You take after your Papa.

What necessity. What is life if we don’t dream together? I don’t know. There’s nothing to look at if we can’t see.

“When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all.”

In subduing all things under him, the Son himself in his own submission to the Father will confirm that God is all in all.

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.”

For this reason you can afford to be absolutely settled and rock-solid in faith’s persuasion and always ready to go beyond where you would have gone before. Your doing now is inspired by your knowing that you are in him. If his resurrection is yours, then his victory over sin and death is equally yours.

How is it that we overcome death by dying?

What mystery.

Let’s go practice resurrection together.

1 Corinthians 15:28, 58

BEYOND

Time is on your side.

I’ve fixed my laptop keyboard; my fingers can fly. The universe is before me, and everything that it means. I live immersed in story. Everything I touch is story. The words my fingers could pen are endless, as endless as time itself --

And yet this age is coming to a close.

Time is on your side, baby, you keep saying, as I slow my breaths. The ticking clock shouldn’t set the tempo of my heartbeat. We are reclaiming, together, the art of writing with.

It’s been months. You drew me away, once again, into a season of touching the story without reiterating it. I visited Kremmling every month. I met a man with words on his hands. I stepped into the river, surrendered, deeper and farther each time. I do believe I’ve found the reaches of my humanity, or the measure of it that you want to show me thus far. I’ve not shrunk back. 

I’ve edited little. I’ve written little. I’ve filmed much, with and without my camera.

I’ve immersed myself in Maranatha. My breaths are short. I’m part of building tabernacles, some of the largest that this age has seen. My breaths are short.

Complications abound. How is a woman supposed to rest against your bosom while in labor, when the baby might not make it? Drenched in pain, fear, and diagnoses -- yet there must be a pure light -- somehow visible, if one can only find the right angle --

Robbie sent me a photo of us swimming in green. July 10th, 2023. We were shoulder-high in mountain growth - him, Brayden, Brooke, and I - on the side of Mount Elim. One year ago today, Robbie said.

I felt the overlap on the day I started filming After Eden Talent. It was exactly a year after I started filming Beloved. Last year we strode into Twin Lakes and set up camp; this year we strode into stage lights and set up tripods. A year of story has come to pass. Now, everywhere I look, I see blood and violence - and bricks for building Eden.

I have a commute now and I see them all. Towers upon towers of bricks, while the streets are filled with protesters. I ask myself daily whether I am ready to write a treatise of what I’ve learned in the last year, a statement of what Beloved really is, the breadth it has encompassed. I ask myself daily whether Eden can really be built of bricks.

I ask myself daily whether I believe in a God who didn’t need to create, but desired to.

“The God who made the world and everything that is in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made by hands;  nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things. . . .”

Bricks. Bricks in the hot sun. Compressed, uniform units of processed earth. And if you don’t meet your daily quota, your wife and children will be taken, perhaps sacrificed to pagan gods in front of you.

And I understand; they’re cutting souls and bodies to pieces all around me. Children on my street are growing up in torment while their parents choose numbness; my best friend is in the Golan Heights, a land waiting to be obliterated by the antichrist. What happens if I step out of the race now? Can I really slow my breaths?

I stare at the photo with Robbie. We are swallowed by wild. 

I heard Mako Fujimura say that art is essentially useless. After one has stared at art, what does one have to show for it? And yet he crafts fragile paintings with painstaking intricacy, layering mineral ink sixty coats deep. The uselessness, he said, is the point.

Do I or do I not believe in a God who created out of desire, rather than need? Is this story essentially a creative imagination from the playful heart of God, or is it the solving of a problem in order to restore a machine’s function? Is he dancing or proving a point?

And how dare I ask that question in the face of blood, fire, and pillars of smoke?

I went to the ocean with you. We built a sandcastle. It was slow. It was patient. I knew it would pass away when the tide rose.

I attracted others’ eyes. I was a grown woman acting like a child. I encircled the castle with a trench that led to the ocean, and I kept hearing you say, It will be rebuilt, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress. Over and over. I found myself mouthing the words as I shelved sand with my bare hands. I felt your pleasure.

I get the bricks, I really do. I get the stability, the covering, the apparent long-enduring. Why would we use anything else? Why would we slow down? He wants a meeting place, right? Let’s build tabernacles, we said - and let’s build them with bricks, and hope they turn out looking like Eden.

But I feel the sharp edges and suddenly feel like Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration. I realize, in a moment of horror, that bricks are slaves’ tools. This kind of building might be for some people, but it’s not for me.

Mako called art useless. Yet he gives his life to it. Not as a contradiction, but as a declaration that perhaps it’s uselessness that is at the core of the story.

The CIA classified films as a weapon of psychological warfare. Films are two-dimensional and literally render the viewer completely static. Yet there is undeniable, seismic power in something so useless. What, within us, does it magnetize? What does this reveal about our design - a design born of your uninfluenced desire? 

You had your people make tabernacles from branches. You loved the impermanence, the wild shelter, the dependency. Can I build something like that with you, something that may make no visible imprint on this age, but rather forges an eternal intimacy with you in its building?

Or, as Robbie said, can the process really be the essence?

I think you really are that intimate. That’s my secret. I think you are.

It’s so haunting - that uselessness may be the point because you are a God at rest. You always have been. It’s so haunting that I want to stop everything and stare at it. It’s so haunting that I want to ensure Beloved never reaches wide distribution. 

Shake me free of the doctrine of metrics. What we are building here, with palm fronds, is something beyond. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly - and eternal life is to know you. Perhaps this knowing can be found filtering in through the leaves we stitch together. Perhaps it can be found on a screen, between frames of laughter and high-fives in a softball dugout. Wherever it may be found, I will be satisfied simply to find it with you. It needs not be measured according to outward appearance.

For it will carry on, past the collapsing of time as we know it, and into the ushering in of a new kind of dawn. I see how dimly these mirrors yearn for more. The more just beneath every surface, under every hand. It goes beyond.

I am not falling behind. I have no need of compelling others toward this same aim. Yet it is the aim that I will seek for myself, all my days. No matter how measurable things grow around me, and no matter whether or not I can articulate my position. No matter whether the enemy calls it folly and tells me I’ll grow out of it. 

Growing up isn’t the problem. Forgetting is.

INTERCESSION

Intercession was a mountain I kept circling, always in desire and never in disobedience. But, like discipleship, reading your Word, or signs and wonders, you wanted me to approach this mountain the right way. There are formulas and methods, yes, but you said those weren’t for me. They don’t suit us well, you said. I like it when we have things just for us.

Without faith it’s impossible to please you, because the one who desires to please you must know that you exist and that you reward those who seek you. Wow, what a fresh breath that is. I don’t think this “knowing” that you exist is a cerebral belief, either. I think it’s experiential. 

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. I had to know you, to know who I was talking to. Intercession is a conversation, first and foremost. There’s another person on the the other side, you. Who are you?

Who are you and what do you want? What are your intentions? I had to discover you with my heart. Confidence, hope, and assurance are born from safety. I had to yada you. And oh, what a joy that was. 

You touched me, healed me - I let you touch me and heal me - so that when you drew close like a lover and whispered your desires for the earth, I didn’t get scared of you. Others had drawn close that way before and whispered terrible things. But you became Emmanuel to me, which was the way you always wanted to do this. It was never about intercession. It was about oneness.

Tasting this made it easy to desire for others, easy to grasp why it was your desire. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! You enjoyed our oneness as much as I did. Let’s release it together, shall we?

Oh, but who am I to do that? It can be your desire, but how do I know that you want to partner with me to release it? Who gives me the right to do that? I know verses like Ephesians 2:6, that I am seated in heavenly places in you; I know John 15:7, that I can ask anything of Papa in your name if I abide in you. But somehow, just saying those verses isn’t enough to make me really believe. I kind of feel like I’m using you as a slot machine.

Oh, right, those verses are actually instructions. The authority to ask comes from abiding. I’m seated in you. Looks like it’s time to get to know you even better. 

So I come back to the place where you are. We’re safe together now, and I don’t have any trauma-bound resistance in my heart. That means we can spend time together as friends. You enjoy my company. We’re not in a rush to accomplish things. I spend time marveling at your beauty. I see you in pastel sunrises splintered by dark, bare branches. I see you in the smiles of people who are 880 miles away. I hear you in their laughter. I taste you in lentil soup on a chilly afternoon. It’s like the more I see you in space, the more I see you in time, too - you lead me by the hand into our sweetest memories, reminiscing, building safety. And then we dream. I see you, taking up territory in hearts and land, extended out into the future. 

You no longer call me a servant, because a servant doesn’t know her master’s business; you call me your friend, and you want me to know everything you’re up to. Everything you want to do. Intercession becomes a creative pursuit. I am your friend and we are painting reality together. Like you spoke, I now speak. I expect it to happen because I know who spoke it first. And the best part is, it’s all still a conversation. You didn’t send me out alone.

We are so close. And it’s only with the heart that one can see rightly. It changes everything. I no longer regard anyone according to the flesh. I call things that are not as though they are. I’m so intertwined with you that there’s simply no space for anyone to offend me. I am free to love. And somewhere in between my leaking love and my secret whispers to you, we change the world around us. Seeing not with our eyes, but with our heart.

“When one has struck some wonderful blessing that all mankind has a right to know about, no custom or false modesty should prevent him from telling it, even though it may mean the unbarring of his soul to the public gaze.

“I have found such a way of life. I ask nobody else to live it, or even to try it. I only witness that it is wonderful, it is indeed heaven on earth. And it is very simple, so simple that any child could practice it. Just to pray inwardly for everybody one meets, and to keep on all day without stopping, even when doing other work of every kind.

“This simple practice requires only a gentle pressure of the will, not more than a person can exert easily. It grows easier as the habit becomes fixed.

“Yet it transforms life into heaven. Everybody takes on aa new richness, and all the world seems tinted with glory. I do not of course know what others think of me, but the joy which i have within cannot be described. If there never were any other reward than that, it would more than justify the practice to me.” 

Frank Laubach, Letters by a Modern Mystic

FORM(AT)

Are you really all and in all? Do you fill all in all? Are all things from you and to you and of you and through you? Does eternity dwell within you?

Am I really blessed with every spiritual blessing, chosen, adopted, bestowed with grace, redeemed, part of a mystery, inheriting, hoping, sealed, filled with faith, in you? Are all my fountains in you?

Is this what that looks like? 

I never thought I would ever feel it

But your love gave me all that I needed.

You are filling my five senses. I am in love with the one whose government and peace know no end. Neither outside of me nor within me. You keep coming in further, consuming me. I won’t turn my face away.

The valley blows in the wind like an emerald ocean. We sit here together. I see the fullness of you, feel the fullness of you, and these words are just shorthand. I’m describing these things, but we’re really writing about abiding, oneness, authority, beholding, becoming, harvest, and your image and your glory. We’re writing about Ephesians, Colossians, Job, Genesis 2 and 12-15, John 14-17, 1 John, Hebrews, Revelation.

I can’t even get through the first four verses of Song of Solomon anymore. I set out to read the whole book and I get stuck. It’s like quicksand. How could I ever move past this?

Let him smother me with kisses—his Spirit-kiss divine.

So kind are your caresses,

I drink them in like the sweetest wine!

Your presence releases a fragrance so pleasing—

over and over poured out.

For your lovely name is “Flowing Oil.”

No wonder the brides-to-be adore you.

Draw me into your heart.

We will run away together into the king’s cloud-filled chamber.

But her entire story is my own. I have fallen headlong for you. We have come to the mountain together. You have clothed me. My garden blooms. And now I want all of my brothers and sisters to delight in your fruit in me.

It’s a love I’ve come to know by touch. How do I pour my love on only one side of your face? Everything I love is you, and you are everything I love. I don’t know how to write without filming, how to sing without painting, how to dance without staying up late into the night by the fire, looking deeply into Joy Riley’s eyes and talking about you with you. I don’t know how to talk about your beauty without talking about your glory, how to talk about glory without talking about intimacy, intimacy without vulnerability, vulnerability without hope, hope without faithfulness, faithfulness without goodness, goodness without desire, desire without completeness, completeness without expansion, expansion without rest.

My brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, are all swimming in you beside me. Joy sits on the sofa across from me and we just soak in every sight and sound of you. We blast her wedding playlist and coast into imagination with you. We hear the birds and the most heavenly wind chimes in between songs. We look out at the brilliant blue sky and the glittering aspen leaves. She looks at me while I write, and I feel her gaze, and I know. She is with you, in you.

Scripts, poems, lyrics, essays, journals, field notes, letters. Films, photos, paintings, music videos, memoirs, eye contact. Music, dancing, flagging, singing, shouting, praying in tongues, conversations. What format could I possibly choose? It’s like a table spread for me of the most delicious and nourishing foods. What intertextuality within you.

But my favorite format is life itself.

In you is life, and this life the light of men.

FAITH

I open up my heart to you

I open up my heart to you now

So do what only you can

Jesus have your way in me now

—

Faith is time travel. We are to pull the future into the present. 

Faith is such a big word to us, but what it really is is a distilling word. It’s a funnel through which every frenzied molecule of our vast human lives must pass. It’s a single word that encompasses our entire posture toward God. So much of this story hinges on faith, because faith is the doorway to relationship with him.

It’s as outrageous a concept as one can imagine. To call things that are not as though they are. To be confident in what I hope for and to expect not to be disappointed. To be assured of what I don’t see. To tell a mountain to throw itself into the sea. What would possess me to do anything like this?

See, I have taken my faith - my definition of reality - and I’ve repositioned it. I’ve picked up my faith and placed it in a new location. My faith is inside of a person. It dwells within the borders of God’s spirit, soul, and body. 

So my faith gets to be as big as he is. It’s that simple. 

What he says comes to pass, because he’s so big that whatever he says is already in existence within him. Eternity dwells within him. For him and from him and to him and through him are all things. In him all things hold together. He is the author and finisher. All his promises are yes and amen in himself. He who calls me is faithful and he will do it. He is not a man, that he should lie. 

See, it takes all of these explosive reminder words to stir up faith because there’s still a war on our senses. Ephesians 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 tell me about the world’s lullaby. Many are asleep and dreaming. Because they are experiencing the five senses of a fake reality, they don’t question it. In a dream, lions can walk tightropes between skyscrapers and we don’t question it. Why? Because we’re engaged - we can feel the brisk air, hear the traffic, smell the gasoline and trash. Our five senses are communicating reality to our belief centers. 

That’s why we live by faith, not by sight. That’s why faith comes by hearing, but its fullness comes about by action. Action engages all five of our senses at once in an accelerated, risky, headfirst type of way. It keeps faith alive.

I love that image of a headfirst dive, because in that position, the brain is the most vulnerable. I truly have to step past logic in order to open the door of faith.

See, the action that keeps faith alive is never formulaic action. It’s not a rational conclusion. It’s born out of love. If my faith is located in him, then my action must also be located in him. It’s not strategic or calculated, because those things aren’t him. I abide in his love. My action never leaves the vine of his love. Martha acted from her brain; Mary acted from her heart. She found the better thing.

It’s a big love, one that surpasses knowledge. My action is, first and foremost, trusting what he says because he loves me. I know that he is trustworthy because I’ve tasted his love. In that secret place, that presence, that vine, I am filled with a love that is exceedingly, abundantly more satisfying than the sweetest wine. And suddenly I would do anything for him. But what’s better is that I get to do it with him. 

Hebrews talks about the Mary of Bethany kind of faith. Hearing isn’t enough, says Hebrews. If it’s not united by faith in the hearer, then it can actually lead to striving - the very opposite of what it’s supposed to produce. This is what happens when knowledge bounces off of the heart and remains in the brain. It’s that shallow soil. But we who have believed enter a holy rest. Why? Because I’m not the author or the finisher. My only role is to abide in a God who has rested from his works. He is in motion only because he’s expanding the dominion of rest, not because he’s incomplete. When he expands, so do I. All of my action is unto oneness with an infinite God.

Faith moves the narrative forward. When you say that something will happen, I know that it’s already happened for you. I skip over that time gap by acting now as if it’s already then. Why? Because my faith is in you, and you are already there. So my faith is already there, and therefore my action is already there.

Tonight, my friends and I are gathering for a celebration dinner. We’re going to feast, laugh, sing, and dance. Each one of us is coming with a gut-bursting praise for something that you have not done yet. We are celebrating the fulfilled promise as if it’s already here. Because in you, it’s yes and amen. We’re time-traveling. 

The next months will be filled with action that keeps faith alive. It will be within the vine. We have entered your rest and we’re never going back. Within rest, we get to see the craziest things happen because it’s no longer by our might or power, but by your Spirit - by your very breath.

By faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and through it he being dead still speaks.

By faith Enoch was taken away so that he did not see death, “and was not found, because God had taken him”; for before he was taken he had this testimony, that he pleased God. But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.

By faith Noah, being divinely warned of things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of his household, by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born as many as the stars of the sky in multitude—innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, In Isaac your seed shall be called,” concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense.

By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come.

By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff.

By faith Joseph, when he was dying, made mention of the departure of the children of Israel, and gave instructions concerning his bones.

By faith Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months by his parents, because they saw he was a beautiful child; and they were not afraid of the king’s command.

By faith Moses, when he became of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the [g]passing pleasures of sin, esteeming the ]reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures [i]in Egypt; for he looked to the reward.

By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, lest he who destroyed the firstborn should touch them.

By faith they passed through the Red Sea as by dry land, whereas the Egyptians, attempting to do so, were drowned.

By faith the walls of Jericho fell down after they were encircled for seven days. By faith the harlot Rahab did not perish with those who did not believe, when she had received the spies with peace.

And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak and Samson and Jephthah, also of David and Samuel and the prophets: who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again.

Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented — of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.

And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.

Hebrews 11

REST

The more violently this planet spins, and the more thickly the air hums with megaphones and car alarms, I find a strange phenomenon growing within myself. It’s a tender, irresistible pull toward rest.

It’s not a collapse from burnout; it’s not a last resort. It feels like oil spreading as I’m pressed. It feels smooth and straight. I just coast into it, no convincing. That storm siren is blaring up above, and the sky is green. But isn’t that the color of life? And doesn’t the pressure change make it strangely easy to breathe? Suddenly, I could float.

Dan walked into the studio today and asked me what I thought of today’s episode. I smile, noting the notch on history’s timeline. Not just mine, but yours and ours. It’s true that I don’t know how to compare one generation to another. I don’t have the years to carry into a room where sociologists name each generation and set it apart from the last. Is my generation faithful or faithless? Maybe I’ll never know. Something tells me I won’t live that long.

What is living, anyway? Many have gone before me, who lived when the dollar was backed and the food was honest. They mourn the world I will raise my children in. Dan bets we won’t make it to 2024. He says there’s a day approaching when we won’t be able to walk into the office for an ordinary workday. He says it with fear; I nod with excitement. Anything that seems ordinary is a mirage, anyway. “Maranatha,” I whisper. 

The end of this story matters. It really does. It’s the direction we point in the present. No, we’re not getting zapped from the last great battle. What storyteller removes his characters from the climax? What is this all unto? A love that is as strong as death - and for it to be proved true.

Oh, how I long for that moment, that week of years. I sit on the edge of my seat, relaxed. The satisfaction you’ve sculpted in my heart. The way we’ve ventured to its utmost horizons, hand in hand. The terrifying glory I’ve beheld in your irises, your eye-flowers. The way it passes by me, through me, like a breath now in this coffee shop. I move slow. I smell summer. I hear melodies in the wood of the stairs. This river spills from me unkempt. Come, all who are thirsty. Won’t you drink deeply of this life, the light of men?

When a virus ensnared the world three years ago, this love became real. I could touch it. It was no longer the stuff of Sunday mornings and scholarly articles. It’s no coincidence that this was the year you ushered me into family. A love I can touch is a love that will keep. It invades my thorny places. It beats a path up the mountain. It wrestles me to the table and obliterates my enemies. I am my beloved’s, and he is mine, and neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will take him from me. He’s mine. And I get to feel the fire of how real that is, unlike any of those who went before me into the cloud of witnesses.

Your breath is hot. My steps become heavy, weighted by love. There’s a whiteboard littered with the names of drugs laced with fentanyl, and the thousands of children that are dying and being sold into sex slavery. There are voices moaning for the lost, and drawing up battle plans. I sense your gentle breeze. Come up here, you say in my ear.

I tuck into the hallway. What is it? I ask you.

I think your hair looks especially lovely.

You say it with the breath that will slay the lawless one.

I could write, I could dance, I could sing. I could train, I could lobby, I could rescue. Lately all I want to do is sit down with you. All the words and melodies bursting in my skull, and it makes me settle into this sure rest. I smile warm, my head on your chest. This is where we’re heading, toward an eternity of this closeness.

All the compassionate calamity of today and the gory glory of tomorrow. It sounds like your heartbeat. 

CHILDLIKENESS

“Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” Luke 18:15-17

The kingdom of God is not something that we can muscle our way into. It can only be accessed by complete surrender and trust, two things that the world despises. Transitioning from childhood to adulthood usually means a gradual extraction of surrender and trust. Maturing in the world is a process of indoctrination by constant voices teaching self-reliance. But the kingdom of God is not the kingdom of the world. They are ruled by two different kings.

The weeds and the wheat will mature together until the day of harvest. We are given the choice of what kingdom to mature in. Will you water the seeds of the tares, and grow up to choke the golden grain beside you? Or will you lean back into the nonsensical, invisible, backwards and upside down kingdom of God, bearing a harvest to feed the multitudes?

I’m watching the sparrows as I write. They bounce and flit around the brick patio of this coffee shop. They seem to be drawing closer to me, as if they know I’m writing about them.

Because to be a child is to trust your Papa for everything. And I mean everything. The sparrows can’t feed themselves, and just like them, we’re not supposed to think twice about whether our Papa will feed us. He provides for our every need, and even for our desires, because he’s a good Father who loves to give good gifts. 

Kids trust with abandon. If given the safe love they are designed to receive, they don’t waste a thought on how to protect or provide for themselves. The disciples were bringing infants to Jesus and he called them the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. They had nothing to offer except for love, which was actually unadulterated obedience to the Great Commandment. 

Kids run to their parents for everything, even when there’s not a dire need. Last week I was sitting with a mom, and her two-year-old ran up to her and interrupted our conversation with “I love you, Mommy.” Then she flew back off to her play. 

Kids - and I mean real, messy children, not just the “concept” of childlikeness - but real children minister to me. My friends’ children minister to me. I observe and study them. I make a practice of learning to be like them. They haven’t been taught to be embarrassed or afraid yet. One of the most profound prophecies I ever received was from a five-year-old. Children only know how to relate to God as a safe, trustworthy person like their mama and papa. Lies introduce themselves later down the line, and you and I are in the process of unlearning those lies.

Kids have the faith we want to return to. They have innocence, which is a lack of the world’s influence. Yes, the world lies to us when we get older, but we are called to believe the truth even if the opposite is right before our eyes. Oh, our eyes deceive us. Trusting our eyes is trusting ourselves. No, we live by faith, and not by sight. Faith and sight are at war with each other.

So let’s learn from the kids, who don’t know better than to trust. As an adult, I can choose to be like a child. I can choose to be born again. I can choose, when I’m looking at a near-empty bank account, to purchase a meal for a stranger because I know my Papa provides. Faith shows me a full bank account every time. I can choose, when I see a friend in a hospital bed, to speak healing because I know my Papa heals. Faith shows me a healed body every time. And if I have even the faith of a mustard seed, I can literally, literally move mountains with a word.

Faith is relationship, calling myself a child and calling him my perfect Papa. I surrender the mirage that my eyes see, I choose to trust him instead of my own understanding, and suddenly the world explodes with the color and life that he sees. 

The disciple John got this revelation. He called himself the beloved one; he set aside worldly notions of propriety and rested his head on Jesus’ chest like a child. This was a non-negotiable for John, not simply an optional expression of Christianity. He writes the book of 1 John to adult believers, but he’s audacious enough to call them “little children.” John said that when we become children again, we can love the way he loves, and this is no small matter. He actually goes so far as to say that God’s love is not perfected until it is seen in us. The same way Paul claimed that Jesus’ sufferings were incomplete until we carried them in our own bodies, John says here that God’s love is incomplete until we carry it in our hearts. 

“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” 1 John 4:12

We have an irreplaceable role in the completion of God’s love. And we cannot do it unless we become like children. John continues with the well-known, hard-to-swallow verse:

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:18-19

There is no fear in love because our Papa doesn’t punish us. Maybe you had a dad who did. Becoming the greatest in the kingdom of heaven requires you to put that earthly dad aside. “Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.” (Matthew 23:9) Choose not to trust what your eyes have seen. It’s a mirage. Your true Papa isn’t like that.

And when we are perfected in love through faith, we overcome. “For everyone who is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world - our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

“Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.

“I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie, just as it has taught you, abide in him.

“And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming.” 1 John 5, 2

DES[i]RE

Desire is a law of physics. I say that because the book of Ephesians does. It is a book of cause and effect, of motion, velocity, direction, and formulas. It outlines constants, variables, and solutions. 

How outlandish for Jesus Christ to say that he is the desire of the nations. There are Middle Eastern nations who mutilate those who even speak his name. But, you see, will and desire are different. The human will can actually override the human desire. But he himself, the man Jesus, is the innermost desire of every person in every nation - whether they consciously know it or not. He weaves this desire into the core fibers of each soul when he forms it in the depths of the earth. But then he gives the soul to the body at conception, and that’s when the journey begins.

My journey begins mid-dream, in Ephesians 2:1. I find myself walking along a path I’ve often questioned, but subliminally. The softest, warmest blinks of light have occasionally filtered into the corners of this darkness, but I’ve ignored them. There is no other path; I haven’t even considered that there could be. I’m just walking, one foot in front of the other, a march to the sea. Walking according to the course of this world.

This journey started with my soul joining my body because I ate the fruit in the garden. My body was never supposed to digest that fruit. My body got poisoned and started telling me it had its own desires. Desires to lust. Desires to consume other bodies. Desires, ultimately, to abuse -  just like I had been abused by everyone born into this poisoned body before me. I was born a child of wrath, the subject of God’s jealous vengeance. But I didn’t even realize it. I was blind.

But this part of the story only got three verses, three days, 2:1-3. Those three verses were hemmed in, behind and before in the other chapters, by the body I was always meant to have - Christ’s. 

God intersected my walk. He was the outside force that stopped me while I was in motion. His desire was perpendicular to my path. I’d long since left the shore, and by now I was eyeball deep in the ocean. I’d forgotten what breathing was like, and didn’t even realize the danger of being underwater. “But God, being rich in mercy.” Mercy split the waters, and love was his motive. A great love whose dimensions cannot be quantified. It was the cause. He himself, the God who is love.

Suddenly I found myself face to face with a violent light. It stopped everything. I knew I was seeing like I never had before, but I felt blind. It was so opposite of my previous vision that it disoriented me. I fell and crumpled on the road. 

Lifting my head, I looked behind me and saw the road I’d traveled. Oh, it was so long. How did I not notice the distance I’d covered? How did it not feel exhausting? Yet, oh, it did - I remember now. But I’d just never really let myself feel it.

It came over me like a sickness. Exhaustion. Pain. Weight. Dizziness. A weary rage. Something new had been introduced into the gravity formula. A constant. Light, [(1 Å = 10-10 m) f], moving toward and through me at a frequency that was shaking everything up to the surface. It burned. Gravity was altered and I didn’t know how to understand it. Was I really on the ground? I didn’t feel attached to anything.

I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon behind me, the one I’d come from. It was my anchoring point while I tried to figure out where I was. But then I saw, through this sight that felt like blindness - I saw a brilliant green wavelength that had covered the distance from that horizon to where I lay. It was like a laser beam, as long as the path was, a burning thread. It hovered six inches above the ground, and I was caught beneath it, unable to rise.

That’s when I realized I had been in chapter 1 this whole time, and the weird weight of this light was the downward force of lavishing from verse 8. It had chased me down like a harpoon and now it was pressing me down. This green light was grace. And I was to feel its weight.

This grace was space itself. It was a single dimension, length - the first thing that indicated distance between two points. It stretched from the previous horizon to the point I found myself in now. A line.

I only saw the grace in my periphery, because I was fixated on that anchor point of the horizon behind me. I was so dizzy that I couldn’t stop staring at it for fear of falling further. But then I heard a voice. 

It sounded like thunder. It sounded like roaring water. Actually, it was roaring water. I heard words, simultaneously a poem and a command:

MANY WATERS CANNOT DROWN LOVE, 

NOR WILL RIVERS OVERFLOW IT!

And as the roar sounded forth, the water knew what to do, for the voice was the water. I saw the walls of the sea that had split before me and landed me here on the dry road. They had been towering over me in my periphery, to my right and to my left. But at the sound of the poem command, these waters flooded in a wild crash over me. 

At first I was terrified, but this water felt different. I knew it was the same ocean I’d been walking right into before, the one I’d found myself standing eyeball deep in, unable to breathe. But now this ocean was forcefully lifting me up. I was no longer standing; I was floating underwater. And I knew I was moving forward, past the place I’d fallen. 

The ocean had become a river. It was different from the green light that had had weight. I no longer felt exhaustion, dizziness, or that empty anger. I felt held. I knew that the gravity formula had changed again. This time, I was in a river that had four dimensions. It had width and length, yes, but it also had height and depth. I was moving forward, but I also had space to swim right, left, up, and down as I did so. Because there was no longer any bloodless place. I couldn’t chart this river; it exceeded every graph. It was infinite.

I accelerated forward through the width and length, but suddenly, I found myself sinking through the height and depth. My chest tightened. The nausea came back, because even though I was moving forward, my eyes were still fixed behind me at the previous horizon. I was getting motion-sick. I wanted to rest in this river, but I couldn’t breathe. I started to panic.

But then I felt hands grounding me. Others in the river touched my skin. They were unafraid, unabashed, holding me. Sweeping away my hair from my forehead. Gently resting their fingers against my cheek. Pressing my shoulder, my knee, the back of my calf. Someone was massaging my feet. I felt the tangible touch of family.

A tender hand turned my jaw 180 degrees, so that I was facing the same direction as the current. Then she leaned her lips up to my ear, and I heard her inhale beneath the surface of this river.

Then she whispered:

It’s not just the water anymore, beloved;

It’s the water and the blood.

Your eyes have been opened.

So breathe through your eyes.

My eyelids widened. Whoa.

This river was red. A river of both water and blood.

The woman giggled; her name was Maranatha. 

We’re all one body now, she said.

We’ve been crucified together.

She rested a hand in the inside of my elbow.

You’re just missing one more thing from the gravity equation. 

It’s an imaginary number: 318. The number of the Spirit. It unlocks everything.

Once you solve the equation, you’ll be able to breathe through your eyes.

Come on, you’ve already moved through all of chapter one and up to 3:17. 

But here comes the riverbend - we move now into a new geographical space. It’s called mystery.

Oh, such strange formulas abound in this new space, beloved, and none of them will make sense if you’re not breathing -

“A three-stranded cord is not easily broken;”

“Death in us, but life in you;”

“Has come = coming = will come;”

“Whole in part + whole in part = fullness;”

“One with one with one;”

“Face = face;”

2=1; 4=3;

< = >.

She paused and shook her head, smirking.

This part has to be done together with all us saints, beloved.

In order to make it around the bend, you must be filled up to breathe. 

Oneness begets truth.

So see. Let the blood wash your open eyes and trickle down into your lungs.

I did it. It’s easy.

Then she giggled, pulled her lips away from my ear, and began to sing, clutching my elbow even tighter. It felt intravenous, but painless. I was stunned by the sound of her song. 

She sang only one word: 

WORTHY!

I realized that my eyes were open, and the blood was already flowing past my eyelids, past my lips and teeth, all going down into my lungs. I just had to expand my chest. 

So that’s what I did. And it felt like the most familiar thing in my entire existence, like the core desire I’d had before conception, before I entered my mother under the apple tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The familiarity had a tactile weight between my breasts. It smelled like myrrh.

I knew it would have made no sense before the river had become blood. There was nothing about a bloody river that I would have consciously desired before. I had been far away - but now, oh now I was near. Now that I had entered into it, now that I had chosen to expand my chest and not my mind, I had found a love that surpassed it all. It was what I had always desired without knowing it. Knowledge had only gotten me so far. Grace had covered that distance and led me here, then permeated the river with light. Now the many waters had crashed over me, deep calling to deep, the breakers of Jesus Christ breaking my reasonings and calling me onward.

I knew that this river was one of suffering. Suffering was the unit by which one measured the extent of the four dimensions. But the weariness and rage had washed away. It felt right. Somehow it was a glowing blood. 

Maybe the fact that I couldn’t explain it was what made it more real than anything else.

“Father, my desire is that they would be with me where I am.”

“They will come to the Desire of All Nations.”

The gravity equation is this: 

[The spirit + the water + the blood = All goodness + righteousness + truth]. 

It is the fruit of the bloodlight coming into our eyes, into our lungs, into our very being, curing the poison of the old body through co-crucifixion, making all things new. A love that surpasses the knowledge of good and evil - a new knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. Everything that was so strenuous before - unity, worship, consecration, marriage, authority, even spiritual warfare - it just comes naturally in this river flow. The nonsensical mystery of oneness makes everything make sense. This was the gravity equation all along, the thing pulling heaven to earth. They lied to us when they said it was unsolvable. Love is the dimension cross.

It was what he wanted from the very foundation of the waters. He chose, before it all, us in him. “For” him, “through” him, and “to” him are fruits of the seed of “in him.” Us in him - this was his formula in chapter one. It was the desire that set everything in motion.

Everything’s rosy under the blood.

I’m awake now. I’m a child of light, and everything has become a light. And the wavelength of grace followed me here.

Grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ with incorruptible love, the love that originated in him, the one that rivers will never sweep away.

The Spirit and the swimming bride say, Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

FAMILY

I call him Papa. I know the word sounds foolish coming from the lips of a 25-year-old woman, but wait until you hear it spoken by a man in his mid-40s. It takes you a second before you realize we’re referring to God. 

No, it’s not childish ignorance, not a sign of stunted relational development. It’s a deliberate choice made by adults who have been re-introduced to our Heavenly Father - and we’ve found that he means what he says. “What we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands . . .” The God of the universe. Otherwise known as Papa.

Offended? I was. My dad was a legalistic man who believed that love was control. I learned to view God that way. But then I met two Colorado ranchers who were raised by an alcoholic father. I met a man whose dad was vulgar toward everyone, especially women. I met a woman whose father had never believed in her or encouraged her to grow. All of them still called God “Papa.”

I remember the first time I heard it, from the lips of a pastor whose own dad had never attended his church due to doctrinal disagreements. The pastor said it so plainly in the middle of a conversation. “Papa.” Based on the context, he could only have been talking about God - but he said it so matter-of-factly, without bothering to explain it. Like I would innately understand. I realize now that I was designed to.

The entire body of Kremmling Community Church, it seemed, knew God as Papa. It seemed out of place for someone to call him “God” - like sawdust on the tongue. I was dumbfounded. It was one thing to hear middle-aged adults use such an infantile word. I almost felt embarrassed for them. But then to learn what their own experience had been with that word, with that broken human being they had called Papa from childhood - so much pain and confusion in each story - how on earth would they now assign that name to God? Why would they not delineate as much as possible between God and their earthly Papa who was nothing like him?

I can see Krik’s face now, contemplative, as he sits on the piano bench. “I feel like Papa is inviting me into a season of rest,” he says. Simple, solemn. Just like any other sentence. He doesn’t stumble on the word. He doesn’t smile sheepishly as he says it. He doesn’t wade through traumatic flashbacks. It’s like this Papa he speaks of is sitting right there in the living room with us, and it would be ridiculous to call him anything else.

“Abba.” The word I’d always seen suddenly jumped off the page one day. “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’” I knew this was the Hebrew word for Papa, or better yet, Daddy. I’d even heard a few men call him that, too. It made my skin crawl.

But I knew these men and women weren’t contriving anything. There was no piety, no posturing. This was simply a reality that couldn’t be stolen from them. For they had been fathered by God.

Adoption is actually a spirit, I realized. And it produces the gut-bursting cry of a vulnerable child. The greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

It flowed through them like a river. The moment I met Robbie and Kelsey, I felt I was meeting the father and mother I’d always wanted. They invited me and the other Bible school students to lie down on the chairs and soak in Holy Spirit’s presence. Then they prayed over us - but not from a distance. They touched me. They looked into my eyes and laid their hands on my shoulders, my arms, my head. Kelsey’s hand brushed aside my hair as she whispered a heavenly tongue, whispered God’s promises for the future. I still feel the syllables sparking along my spine. My eyes stung hot. Robbie locked with them and smiled, “Welcome home.”

I didn’t know how much I’d wanted this. I felt the pull in my innermost being - Abba? Father? Who are you?!

I washed up on the shore of that tiny ranching town, battered and bruised, frantically clinging to a thread of hope that this was real. I’d been hunting real my whole life. The Spirit of adoption had to permeate my thick skin slowly. He used many hands. Hands wiping my tears away, anointing my forehead, pressing my palm, braiding my hair, cradling my head. Arms holding me safe for a long time - longer than I felt I deserved. Eyes seeing me, seeing past my fear and sabotage. Ears listening, even when my words were weak and awkward. Voices asking me questions no one had ever asked. Speaking life into things I thought were dead. Calling me a daughter, a sister. My callouses melted. These hands surrounded me, and I felt the touch of Papa. 

I had nothing to offer, but he found me. I experienced Yahweh as my father, my mother, my brother. These people protected me, fixed my car, took me shopping, played broomball with me, stayed up late to talk, visited me at work. I was adopted into a family. And in four months, Papa healed years of brokenness. His Spirit burrowed its way into places that had been governed by fear. His perfect, tangible love drove it out.

I was surprised on the day that the exclamation marks erupted from my belly. Abba! Father! I suddenly found it natural to cry out to my Papa. I found myself lost outside of his presence. I had forgotten how to not abide in the vine. The life I now lived, I lived inside of him.

Why had I had such a visceral reaction to this word? In truth, adoption was the place of deepest vulnerability. I had figured out how to claim the position of daughter through my words, my actions - everything external - but had no clue what the experiential reality was like. I’d had no reference; in fact, I’d only had a pain model. 

But isn’t the place of deepest vulnerability also the greatest horizon of redemption? What an abyss for Yahweh to fill, and what glory when he proves to be more than sufficient. For he is not only wide enough and long enough, but he’s high enough and deep enough. The gaping caverns of our suffering are the very prize he’s after.

I remain convinced that his chosen way of driving out the spirit of slavery is through family. Perfect love drives out fear. It’s a scientific law. Our rawest wounds and our true resurrection transpire within the space of family, because we were made from and for family. I was cut from the cloth of Yahweh, a family within himself in three persons. He expanded into a fractal physical form when he made my flesh as a dwelling place for his spirit of adoption. My enemy came against that spirit before anything else, trying to rob me of my very design. He started speaking lies even through the walls of my mother’s womb. That’s why surrendering to the spirit of adoption, to Papa, is the most vulnerable thing I can do - and the greatest gift I can give Jesus. The very reward of his suffering.

God as my father, as my mother, as my brother was never supposed to be something I understood intellectually. It surpasses knowledge. It is practical, not positional. It looks like something. It looks like real human beings surrendering corporately to the spirit of adoption and allowing him to transform their “church community" into a family. A family that derives its name from the Father himself. First receiving his love and all the workings of his tender undoings, they then look to each other and reckon with the repercussions of this boundless love jointly. They dive headfirst into the messiness of life on life. Covenant. A white-knuckled promise to one another - “I will not leave you -” digs trenches for the river to flow through. The dams are broken and the flood lets loose. And in that torrent, souls are washed white for their wedding day.

So bring the shattered. Bring the flowers with bruised petals. Watch him fiercely mend the unmendable with the healing touch of his physical temple. 

Exodus 34:29