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.