The Formative Power of Presence
Happy New Year! And welcome to the new subscribers who just joined. It’s great to have you along as we explore The Great Omission and how to overcome it.
I was asked to speak on spiritual formation at a church in the Dallas area over the holidays. During the talk, I mentioned that passages such as “Be anxious for nothing” and “Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials” don’t always inspire or encourage me. Sometimes, I feel guilty because I’m not doing or experiencing whatever the passage indicates I should.
After I finished, a woman came up and, quite transparently, told me she had considered leaving Jesus altogether. She had grown up reading her Bible, praying, serving, and doing good “Christian things.” However, she had yet to experience many of the promises found in Scripture. She struggled with anxiety, wasn’t clear on what “abundant life” meant, and hadn’t yet experienced any sort of peace that passes all understanding. For all the times the Bible encourages us not to fear, fear was a regular part of her life.
Her authenticity struck me and, at the same time, resonated with her heart and frustration.
I want to be content with whatever my circumstances are, but my contentment is haphazard. I’d like to be free from fear and anxiety, and I’ve learned to cover them up quite nicely, thank you very much. Yet they both persist. I’m pretty settled if everyone is getting along and there’s money in the bank. But I seem to be as rattled as anyone else if hardship, struggle, or sacrifice comes along. Sometimes, it seems that a life of abiding in God is reserved for the “Super-Christian,” like some saint or mystic.
Thank God for the Psalms. It’s good to know I’m not the only one struggling with the human condition.
Unhelpful Ideas
Perhaps this journey to becoming more emotionally and relationally secure, content, joyful, peaceful, and still in our souls depends more on some intangible, experiential elements than we usually assume.
I’ve asked you to consider that we are often powered and governed by forces beneath the surface of our normal conscious state. These play a key part in our quest to think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus.
Two such forces we’ve touched on are ideas and desires. If we genuinely wish to be spiritually formed more like our king, we must journey inward with Jesus to uncover what or who we truly love and the assumptions from which we function. As we do this, we discover that discipleship is more than learning important pieces of Biblical information or doing good things, such as attending services, praying, or studying the Bible. Those are parts of our puzzle, though becoming more like Someone else from the inside out involves the slow transformation of these powerful, often hidden forces.
Ideas are always at work, both inside and outside of our hearts. Here are a few examples of powerful ideas for you to chew on that may be hindering our spiritual journey, even if we aren’t usually conscious of them:
We are what we think. We are coming to grips with how prevalent this idea is in society, not just in faith communities. The assumption is that, if we simply receive the correct information, we’ll be changed. Yet theologian James K.A. Smith proposes that human beings are not primarily thinkers. We aren’t primarily believers. We are primarily desirers. We are lovers.
If accurate, his conclusion supports the assertion that discipleship isn’t only about instruction. If we are primarily lovers, our spiritual formation is also about all the extraordinary, mysterious factors that lead us to fall in love and grow in that love over time.
Transaction versus Relationship. We briefly touched on this in the last post. For over a hundred years, American evangelicalism has focused on motivating and convincing people to “accept Jesus,” to utter a prayer of salvation, to come forward to an altar, or to make some profession. The hope is that scores of people will then join their local church, where they are hopefully “discipled.” I came into the kingdom through such a service.
But if becoming an apprentice of Jesus is about being welcomed into a new reality and the ongoing formation of our visible and invisible elements over time, so that we live and love like Him, we may need to reconsider our transactional approach to the Kingdom. Greg Koukl once noted that perhaps we shouldn’t be invited to accept Jesus but to follow Him. The first is momentary, while the second is a life-altering, reality-bending, relational adventure.
Escape versus Cosmic Renewal. One of the most potent ideas behind the modern transactional/instructional approach to discipleship is that the primary goal of this life is to reach heaven and escape the earth. If we look carefully enough, we’ll find this conclusion woven into countless churches, movies, hymns, worship music, and other forms of culture. It’s accepted without a second thought.
However, this idea comes with a price. If the primary objective is to get to heaven one day and escape this “bad” earth, it assumes earth has no place in God’s vision of eternity. There is virtually no continuity between this life and the next. Discipleship requires nothing from us beyond embracing Christ’s forgiveness. It has little to do with becoming loving, sacrificial, radically generous, less angry, and relationally shrewd, and more with becoming an effective evangelist.
Yet if Christ didn’t come only to forgive us but also to reconcile with us, to re-establish a deep, intimate friendship between the human and the divine, then the primacy of this idea becomes suspect. If God’s plan is not that we permanently escape His earth (which He declared good) but instead that we join with Jesus in its cosmic redemption right now, that would suggest our current focus may be on the wrong time frame and place. If all four of our relationships are being redeemed right now (with God, others, ourselves, and creation and culture), the implications for modern discipleship are staggering.
These powerful, somewhat Westernized assumptions have real, influential impacts on our day-to-day lives.
Can I Get a Withness?
One commonality between the three ideas above is that they all reduce or eliminate the need for “withness,” which we desperately need to recapture.
Perhaps the path toward abundant life, perfect peace, radical love, relational shrewdness, and inner contentment is more about stillness, presence, and being with God, others, and ourselves than simply receiving correct information or getting a golden ticket to heaven.
St. Theophan wrote,
The essential part is to dwell with God, and this walking before God means that you live with the conviction ever before your consciousness that God is in you, as he is in everything: you live in the firm assurance that he sees all that is within you, knowing you better than you know yourself. This awareness of the eyes of God looking in your inner being… searching your soul and your heart, seeing all that is there…is the most powerful lever in the mechanism of the inner spiritual life.
God often reveals Himself through other people. It’s amazing to contemplate how being with certain people impacts us. A crying baby is immediately consoled and soothed when he feels his mother’s presence, and a toddler is awed and delighted when her father turns his attention to her. Certain people in my life cause me to feel anxious and guarded. When I’m in the presence of others, I’m relaxed and at peace, and I allow myself to be vulnerable. Presence is a powerful formative force.
Can you recall a conversation or interaction with someone truly attuned to you? There is something deeply formative, comforting, and peaceful about telling your story or sharing your heart with someone who is genuinely listening to you. They aren’t listening to give you advice, respond, or even share their perspective. They are listening simply to be with you in your story. They are drawing into you for no other purpose than to give themselves to you. They are fully present, awake, and engaged with your heart.
This “heart listening” may well be one of the most powerful, formative forces on the planet. Someone who is “with us” reminds our hearts that we are worth being known.
Some years ago, after suffering betrayal, abandonment, and rejection, I finally consented to speak with a counselor. I remember little of what he said, but his presence indelibly impacted my soul. He was kind, attentive, and gracious. Though he barely knew me, he cried for me when I couldn’t do so myself. He was with me. And his “withness” brought much-needed peace, stillness, and comfort to my troubled soul.
We are so prone to teach, instruct, correct, and judge that we sometimes forget what our hearts desperately long for: someone to just be with us. There are appropriate times to teach, instruct, correct, and judge. But perhaps what we need most right now in our information-overloaded age is not more lectures but more listeners. More people are willing to sit in our sufferings with us. More people are willing to sacrifice time, power, position, and comfort to come alongside us and help mold our hearts through what God has always promised – to be with us.
