Christ was despised on earth by men, and in His greatest need, amid insults, was abandoned by those who knew Him and by friends: and you dare to complain of anyone? Christ had His adversaries and slanderers; and you wish to have everyone as friends and benefactors?
Whence will your patience win its crown if it has encountered nothing of adversity?
The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a KempisWilson fell into a deep depression after his friend left. He describes the crisis point in that depression. “I still gagged badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just
for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, ‘If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything; anything!’
Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on a bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, ‘So this is the God of the preachers!’ A great peace stole over me and I thought, ‘No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are all right. Things are all right with God and His world.’”
Wilson never took another drink!
From Tim Stafford, The Hidden Gospel of the 12 Steps, Christianity Today: July 22, 1991.
“As murder storywriters assume, and as most of us learn in experience, we have in us the capacities for fury, fear, envy, greed, conceit, callousness, and hate which, given the right provocation, could make killers out of us all – baby-batterers or Bluebeards, professional thugs or amateur hit men. G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown explained his method of detection by saying, ‘You see, it was I who killed all those people’ – in the sense that he looked within himself to find the mentality that would produce the crime he was investigating, and did in fact discover it there.
Chesterton lets him moralize: ‘No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might
be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering and talking about criminals, as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away … till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.’
Brown, though fictitious, states fact. When the fathomless wells of rage and hatred in the normal human heart are tapped, the results are fearful. ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ Only restraining and renewing grace enables anyone to keep the sixth commandment.” – Ed. “or any of the commandments for that matter.”
J. I. Packer, I Want to be A Christian
During these days of Lent and reflecting on the Suffering of Our Lord one of the critical disciplines that will deepen our understanding of Christ’s Journey to our cross is “listening.”
Several years ago I read the following insights into this often neglected Spiritual Discipline.
The first is from Experiencing Prayer: Three Settings, by Mark Lind. Lind writes, “During the Depression a young man saw an ad in the newspaper for a telegraph operator. He hurried to the building and room listed in the ad. When he got there the room was jammed with applicants. They young man was crestfallen. As he stood there wondering what to do he heard a steady flow of dots and dashes over the heavy drone of conversation. Suddenly, the young man’s eyes lit up. He dashed over to a door marked ‘Private,’ turned the door knob, and went inside. In a few minutes he came out smiling. He had the job. The employer told the rest of the applicants that they could leave.
As you might imagine there was an angry outcry from the group. ‘We demand an explanation,’ someone shouted. ‘This young man comes in late, bucks the line, and you hire him.’ The employer paused a moment, and then said: 'You have your explanation. All you have to do is listen to the dots and dashes.' Everyone stopped and listened. They couldn’t believe what they heard. Over and over the dots and dashes repeated the same message they’d been repeating for an hour: ‘If you hear this, come in. The job is yours. If you hear this come in. The job is yours.’”
The second insight is from As for Me and My House, by Walter Wangerin, Jr. “At the beginning of his reign, King Solomon prayed for one superior gift from God. Not wealth, not long life, but something far more valuable – he asked for ‘an understanding heart,’ which may be translated, a hearing heart. He asked, we say, for wisdom. But the genius of wisdom … is the ability to open a room in one’s heart for the talk – and so for the presence – of another. Wisdom is none other than the ability to listen.”
“After washing their feet, he put on his robe again and sat down and asked, ‘Do you understand what I was doing? You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and you are right, because that’s what I am. And since I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you. I tell you the truth, slaves are not greater than their master. Nor is the messenger more important than the one who sends the message. Now that you know these things, God will bless you – bring you into a well-being like He Himself enjoys – for doing them.’” (John 13: 12 – 17 New Living Translation)
