God of the In-Betweens

Someone gave me a book I will forever treasure. A Testament of Devotion, by Thomas Kelly, is one of those tiny books which has a powerful impact on your life. The longer you own the book, the more ragged the pages, the more scribbled the margins, the more tattered the cover. Each time you open it, you find new truths, new layers of reality, new insights into your soul. Books like this one become your travelling spiritual director, a wizened counselor, and a trusted friend whose wear and tear testify to the intensity of conversations over the years, conversations of the heart, secret conversations filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit.

The list of quotable phrases and memorable word-pictures gets longer with each reading. In one of my first walks through the pages of A Testament Of Devotion, I stumbled across this:

"Learn to live in the passive voice - a hard saying for Americans - and let life be willed through you. For "I will" spells not obedience."

"Learn to live in the passive voice - a hard saying..." A hard saying, indeed. Seven words that turned my everyday living upside down. Passive is a way of life I do not understand. When I say "understand," I mean that every part of my being is the opposite of passive. I mean that every corpuscle, every gene, every part of my brain, my emotions, my soul lives in the active mode. The automatic pilot of my life is in "active" mode.

I am a highly stressed person. Stress and I are constant companions. To be honest, we are friends. I thrive on stress; it is the motivation I need to live my life the way I do. Crisis defines my days (and nights), and I have spent 52 years refining my dependence upon stress. As a result, every decision I make, every activity I participate in, has one goal in mind - results! Life, for me, is a series of problems to be solved, a series of lessons to be learned. Solutions, answers, understandings, insights, conclusions, definitions, and clarifications are the destinations of my living. I want to know, and I want to know now. Process is my constant enemy.

I am haunted by the questions of life. Why is this happening? What does this mean? Where am I going? What is God doing? I am obsessed with fixing, knowing, solving, understanding, and seeing.

Then I run headfirst into the wall of the passive life, these brick words - live in the passive voice - without a seat belt to protect me. Without warning, my reading has catapulted me into the hospital of my inner life, where my injured soul is forced to recover.

Let life be willed through you. I wake up in the ICU, my heart in critical condition, my soul facing surgery from a lifetime of active living. As I lie in my bed, my mind screams its rebellion, "What do you mean 'let life be willed through you?'" Isn't that what life is all about - willing? I have a will and I should be using it. God has a will and it's my job to find it, to chase after it, to understand it, to participate in it. No answer comes. Only silence. Only quiet. Only the faint whisper of understanding.

Recovery is a long, painful process - a process made more difficult by healing. Contrary to common perceptions, spiritual healing is a battle, a struggle. It is the clash between the injured and diseased part of our soul, and the relentlessness of Truth that bombards our weak and battered soul with life-giving energy.

From the moment Kelly's words crashed into my life, I have not been the same. I have been experiencing a differentness that is difficult to describe. But let me try:

Living passively is seeing God in the inbetweens of life.

Beginnings and endings. Starts and finishes. Those are the parts of life that grab my attention. But the passive life is the life of inbetweens, life in the middle. "God," the passive life says, "is found in the everydayness of life, in the middle of life. God is sneaking around in the ordinariness of each day, longing to be noticed, longing to be discovered. It is tragic that much of my life I have looked for God in the momentous, and instead He's been waiting in the moment."

The passive life liberates us from a God of decisions to a God who is between decisions. No wonder my relationship with God is stunted! I have spend most of my life looking for God instead of being with God.

Living passively is embracing God in the "allness" of life.

Mystics always talk about God in strange ways. They talk about living into the mystery. They talk about embracing one's brokenness, embracing one's pain. Strange words for someone who has lived so long seeing God as the way out of pain, seeing God as the way to fix brokenness. It is strange to find God in the brokenness, in the pain, in the "allness of life," and to meet God there, converse with God there, rest with God there in the restlessness of the unresolved. To discover the sweet strangeness of a relationship with God is the unexpected reward of a passive life.

I cannot say I am living passively, but I can say I have stood on the precipice of it for moments at a time...and it has been exhilarating. It has been a breathtaking look at the adventure of intimacy with God.

By Mike Yaconelli, author and founder of Youth Specialities, Inc.. Used with permission.

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