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forty years walking around the grindstone of the Sinai, maybe we should be looking up to behold our first love with longing in his eyes for us. For me. For you. As individuals. What I discovered or rediscovered today is that God wants me to want him and wants me to want him to want me. I know, it's as absurd as engaging in a "discussion" with a woman undergoing PMS, but there is something very disarming in it nevertheless. And so I am strangely, peculiarly justified in my nine month time-trial of life life-ing me. Life "lifes" you from time to time. Things happen. What happens next is anyone's guess, especially when one decides to not just talk about control as an abstract, but to actually let go of control completely riding out to the end whatever beast life turns out to be. Come hell or very high water.

Putting it another way, D.H. Lawrence describes men panting like dogs after "the bitch goddess, Success!" day after day, prostrating themselves to her every self-centered whim. I have chased her too, and it is my opinion that that potentiality lives in all of us, in varying levels of strength.

It's a fine line we attempt to walk between our need for adult responsibility and our obligation to the God with whom we supposedly have relationship to follow through on our commitments. Remember when you came to the cross and laid all of it down? I sure do. I remember how that felt as if it happened an hour ago. My question for us, all of us, is: What happened between that glorious moment of transformation and the life we now live, ostensibly "In Christ"? Did we take up the controls somewhere? Did we begin to pant like dogs for something besides the person we met at the cross? The immensity of my own insecurities feels quite naked to me-I have sought control in my own life because I have a need to be pursued; but I warped it into a need for credit, acknowledgment, appreciation, and respect. All of it wore a groove in my back into which settled the attendant burdens of fear, abandonment, bitterness, and fury over how poorly my pet relationship with the creator of the heavens was going along. If it seems one-sided it's because that's what we have created for ourselves. That's my own indictment.

Dawn comes slowest for those who long for it most. It has been a long dark watch, the enemy romping unfettered among us. To paraphrase a lecturer who taught April and me in South Africa, if we all suddenly gained our sight after a lifetime of blindness to discover the sun on the horizon, would it be sunrise or sunset? We choose to speak out into the darkness that it is sunrise time, to cast off the fear that so easily entangles us, to embrace the possibilities, and to walk by faith instead of by sight. It may appear to be the end, but it is just the beginning. As my mother-in-law informed me the other day, there is a big difference between a peacekeeper and a peacemaker.

Learn more about this author, Chris White.
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