Living on the Edge
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— Romans 5:12 NASB
Death – “The death of the soul is never quick. It is a slow dying, a succession of little deaths that continues until we wake up one day on the edge of God’s voice, on the fringe of God’s belovedness, beyond the adventure of God’s claim on our lives.”[1]
Where is the fringe of God’s belovedness? Where do you or I step off the adventure of His claim on us? Where is the fence around the Tree? The first step in answering these questions is to know where I am now. And the answer to that question is actually pretty straightforward.
Is your present experience filled with the joy of the Lord? Are you discovering His contentment? Do you feel His embrace?
Take a fearless assessment. Don’t pretend. This is far too serious a matter. Look in the mirror and ask yourself the real questions. And if your completely honest answer is, “I’m not sure,” or “No, I’m not,” then sing praises. You are ready to find the edge. [For all you spiritual giants who have never been close to the edge, we salute you, and you can go back to living without reading any more.]
The problem most of us have is that we don’t see the fence around the Tree until we are on the wrong side. Death is disguised in small defeats. We discover the geography of sin after we have crossed the invisible line. Then we know what it means to be without His presence and it is not a good feeling. As a result, we first try to recover the good feeling. But it’s too late. We are standing on the wrong side of the fence. The feeling we seek can’t be found here. We must stop trying to recover the feeling and move back to the right side of the fence. We have come to this place through dozens of tiny steps, none of which seemed so terrible at the time, but all of which add up to death. Now we have to retrace our steps, backing away from the path we have taken, until we return to the place where we first made the wrong choice on the road. Far too often we attempt to simply skip this recovery process. We want to feel better so we think we can just jump back to the beginning. But that leaves all the tiny steps still there, still hidden from our sight, still luring us back. In order to prevent the slow dying, we must make the slow journey back to the first wrong step. We must recognize each part of this journey to the edge of life, acknowledge it as our deliberate choice, renounce it and step backwards once again.
It took God forty years to bring Moses through all these steps, back to the place where Moses was ready to be used as the Lord commanded. It took forty years to unravel all the plans of Moses, the pathos of Moses and the confidence of Moses so that those essential elements of leadership could be replaced with God’s ways. Forty years training to be Pharaoh. Forty years untraining. The path back is as long as the path that got you here. But you have time. God will see to that.
There are no shortcuts on this road. Yes, we are inclined to think that repentance is the shortcut to presence. It is not. God’s presence will be with you while you step backward but it will not exempt you from stepping backward. If you attempt to shortcut the process, you may soon discover you are right back at the edge. Some things must be dealt with over time.
Death is a process. So is life. Choose today to start the journey back home. It is the direction that matters today. All the steps of a man or woman who journeys toward home are ordered of the Lord no matter how long it takes to get there.
Topical Index: death, journey, Romans 5:12
[1] http://today.reframemedia.com/archives/rooted-in-christ-2007-04-16
There is a good argument to be made (and I am not the one who proposed it) that almost all mental or emotional illness has, at its root, a pattern of wrong thinking and wrong choices that culminate in a disordered brain; a pattern of habitually processing life according to an incorrect focus, resulting in a fear-based projection upon reality. The labels of mental and emotional illness then become descriptions of the SYMPTOMS of the attempt to recreate order and homeostasis in that disorder. For example, OCD is a description of an attempt to superimpose external order over internal chaos. Well, anyway, this is my attempt to interpret the summation of the Christian brain specialist, Dr. Caroline Leaf, on the subject. It is her contention that disorder in the brain mirrors disorder in the soul, and that the brain will rearrange itself back into order upon a new and better set of choices of what to believe and how to act. It is her contention with the psych establishment that a disordered brain is overwhelmingly an end result of a whole lot of wrong choices made by someone. Usually it is by the person themselves, but even if it is the result of the choices of someone else; say, by an abusive parent in vulnerable childhood, it still can be walked out by the victim deciding to make a new set of choices that are based upon the truth that has been given to us. The brain is wired for love, along with the rest of us, and will always respond to love. We can rewire at any time! Neuroplasticity is the new scientific buzzword for the way we were designed to be able to change from glory to glory. We can retrace the steps back to Eden. Halleluah!
All sin is insanity. I like to call it insinity. Chaos in the choices results in chaos in creation. To unravel sin, then, is to, in terms of brain processing, recall the memory back up into consciousness, thus becoming able to make a new set of choices about it, and cementing that new thought by revisiting and meditating on it until it supersedes the old one. It can be really hard to face a fear (or unforgiveness, or whatever) flat-footed over and over until it doesn’t look like a fear anymore, but there is Someone to hold our hand until we do. This really does not happen in our sleep, or even just because we choose to repent. Repent is the word for turning around and walking the other way, but if you are a week’s walk in, that is a lot of steps back out! It is like Skip says: just be prepared!
It is true that most things we are guilty of we have to renew our minds on, just like we are instructed, and the only way to renew the mind – other than a miracle, that is – is to rethink the thought, and make a new choice about how that thought is registered and processed, ever and over again, until it no longer has the meaning it started out with. We get to decide what something MEANS, and that meaning is determined by the choices we make, and the resultant actions we take. That wilderness experience – that dying on the stake of Self – can either look like a fall from grace, or the entrance exam for paradise. The meaning is going to be determined by us. Helpless used to mean I was about to be eaten. These days, it looks to me more like a place where I have permission to fall down as many times as it takes to learn how to walk. Inside the Fence is sure a whole lot different than outside! Halleluah!
“There is a good argument to be made (and I am not the one who proposed it) that almost all mental or emotional illness has, at its root, a pattern of wrong thinking and wrong choices that culminate in a disordered brain; a pattern of habitually processing life according to an incorrect focus, resulting in a fear-based projection upon reality”.
Laurita, I agree and have experienced this in my own life. Only G-d knows how many steps I need to walk back, to recover from many years that were fear-based and anxiety ridden, with a forced smile-on-my-face, before hitting the edge. It never made sense that I was so afraid, and so anxious, and began having panic attacks in my 20’s, while loving and serving Jesus. Christian counseling, healing prayers, soaking prayers, worship, praying in tongues, teaching, serving, pleading, crying, giving, did not change things. I continued to smile and white knuckle, while trying to give to others and serve Jesus.
I’m not complaining. I’m thankful to be where I’m at. I confess though, I’m sad about my disordered brain and the years of wrong thinking, so deeply entrenched, and resultant bad choices. I haven’t fallen asleep well, or slept through a night, without waking multiple times, for as long as I can remember. Definitely not in my adult life, maybe longer. (I have used some of Dr. Caroline Leaf’s materials. Others as well)
BTW all, even seemingly innocent teachings, such as teaching children the J O Y (Jesus, Others, You) often repeated instruction, can adversely affect one’s thinking and behaving. A child who is experiencing abuse in the home, and/or in the church, can be devastated by such teachings. What can it possibly mean to a kid whose life experience says, “you don’t matter”? For most the years of my life, the J O Y was essentially a doctrine I tried to live out daily. Not surprisingly, this isn’t G-d’s instruction in the Torah. It is a NT church thing. The good news is that even this false belief was one tiny piece of what ultimately brought me to the place I was willing to admit “it” wasn’t working and to question everything, especially the church’s insistence to put Jesus before anything or anyONE else.
So many steps to walk back. These are baby steps, and frankly, they appear to be leading back to my very early childhood understandings, but YHVH is so kind to Shepherd me in HIS paths of righteousness. I know it is FOR HIS NAMES’ SAKE, and that gives me some courage and confidence. Skip says in TW I have time. I hope so.
Shalom to all in the community.
Marci, I pretty much experienced most of what you wrote! My mama said it took her decades to realize that the correct order is NOT Jesus, Others, and You. The Two Great Commandments tell us that the order is Him, Me, and then Others. I cannot give to others what I have not yet received myself! What a concept! He gives from a place of fullness, and so should we. We can succor them who are tempted BECAUSE we got the same. Even HE helps us from that place!
I like what you write, and it speaks to me so much. I hope that you keep on writing. We are all so messed up, but out of that mess, we do need to reach out to each other. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but your mess makes mine a little better! I just go through my day repenting for the mess, and choosing not to let the Accuser beat me up. You don’t have to agree with the Liar! Halleluah!
Thats an interesting thought Laurita (and certainly those factors play a very strong role in the maintainence of mental illness) but much of what we understand about the brain and it’s vulnerability starts in early life. Our attachment bonds to our parents have very powerful effects on the development of our brains…and so often our “stinking thinking” is tied up in a language of communication we learned long before we understood words: Add a few years of traumatic experience to this and it’s not hard to see why so many people suffer. (Marci that may be helpful for you). Mental illness is outstandingly complicated and each person’s story is unique…despite some similarity of symptoms. Yes sin will make you depressed…but so will taking steroids, beta blockers and having an under active thyroid! I have been a psychiatrist and psychotherapist for nearly 20 years and I am still at the very edges of understanding. What I do know however (and this is born out by research) is that the journey out takes choice and commitment and a new way of thinking, whatever medication is prescribed…including the acceptance that sometimes we need the medication prescribed – spiritual or otherwise 😉
Skip thank you for a really helpful post and for reminding us that death is a constant part of life as we journey in faith…and death to sin and selfishness is only to be celebrated for the life and love that results from the dying.
Emma, thank you for your professional input. I am constantly looking for a balanced way to present a proper basis for faith and hope to those around me, which is going to be the evidence for the things that are not yet seen. Every bit helps! That invisible kingdom is so powerful!
I have pondered on the fact that we are indubitably hardwired to do as we are done by. That is the law of the flesh. Not a bad law (as long as things are perfect, that is!), but boy, can it sure get messed up with those inherited propensities and early childhood set points!
I experienced a thyroid crash when we rented a house with city water, and I was already so sick. When I finally ended up at a naturopath’s office, she put me on iodine, and I guzzled my way through two bottles of it before it quit looking interesting. Back before the drugs hit the scene, doctors used to give iodine as a response to a whole lot of illness, as so many of them seem to be based on some sort of deficiency. It worked too well, so there are now laws that set the recommended allowance so low most of us are probably now quite deficient, but then, that gets us on those very expensive thyroid meds! It is all so obscene to me.
I hope you are able to find a way to share more of your experience, strength and hope from time to time without compromising your profession, of course, as we all perish without knowledge. We need that stuff to be able to think well about things and make good decisions.
There is no way that what we do with our bodies is not going to affect our minds, as there really are no distinguishing lines between them. Those psych drugs are particularly vicious, and it drives me to the edge sometimes trying to deal with the fallout with some of the precious people in my life! Pharmakeia (Greek for witchcraft) is a loser’s deal. By my definition, anyway, witchcraft is an attempt to make a deal with the devil directly, but even the archangel, Michael, knew better than to try that, and refused to engage the devil. To depend on drugs for ‘cure’ can sometimes end up being more like depending on gasoline to put out a fire! That saying, I depend still on so many things in my life as crutches and plain out addictions, in the places where I still lack knowledge, relationship, or enough faith. Hey, I agree with you; trying to just throw them out on my own (been there, tried that) is just MORE flesh attempts to deal with sin. I have to wait to be freed, but I am learning that that wait consists of repenting! I can repent my way back out! Halleluah! I don’t have to sit there like a duck! I can repent for those unholy mindsets and reactions. I don’t have to put up with anything that exalts itself above the Mind of Messiah, which I have been promised! My walkout from insanity looked so much like taking thoughts captive (but THEN what do you do with those slippery suckers?!) and casting them down by repentance for the scrambled thinking and faulty reactions and the subsequent fear guilt and shame. None of it looks like Him, so all of it can go! I was given the power of the Holy Spirit for this. The Name of Yeshua works! I can cast that spirit of fear that is NOT from Him down and out in His Name and through His power. I don’t have to sit there and take that torment! The first time I told fear I was not in agreement with it and ordered it to leave with that Name and power, I was shocked by the silence and the space. I had no idea how much of my real estate was being hijacked by that override of my sanity. I like not having to put up with panic. Standing on the promises is much more better! Salvation is for today! Halleluah!
It took almost 2000 years for the “church” to lead us from TORAH … it is a long (and often lonely… I speak in human terms) road back!!!
P.S. On reflection, the stake of Self that I must die on, according to Skip in Crossword Puzzles (thank you so, much, Richard Brock!) represents a political or religious POWER over the person. It was the stake that the wilderness serpent was on, (and please correct me if I have this wrong, that that was the significant feature), and it was that stake that Yeshua was pointing out to Nicodemus as the significant part of being “lifted up”. What blows my mind was that in the act of dying on the stake of Rome, He showed his power over Rome’s power to take life, by rising from that death. If I go through the process of dying on the Stake of Self, then, I, through His death and life, then am offered that same resurrection and life as victory over the power of the yetzer ha-ra in my life: over the power that Self has over the true me that was created to be in His Kingdom, and subject to Him. Let me tell you: dying on the stake is a protracted process! I think that we are meant to remember every excruciating detail of how o overcome sin, not only as a deterrent to doing it again, but also so we can help and succor others back out of their holes. I also think that it will serve as a deterrent in Eternity so that we, BECAUSE we can remember all that it took to walk that sin back out, will be cured of ever making those choices again. What I cannot remember, I might repeat. Here’s to tearing down those strongholds brick by brick! I got in by that gerbil maze: I am going to have to get back out the same way!
Thank God we are all walking this way, the straight narrow path.
He brought it to our attention, and He’s taking us through it.
“The Lord is the strength of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?”
Skip,
What you wrote for today seems, to me, to be a writing in generalizations. Are there some specific steps on which you can elaborate? Obviously, steps are particular, but you have generalized the process, as I take this reading today. Also, the steps for each of us will be unique to our circumstances and situations. I did answer those questions with the “I’m not sure” and the “No, I’m not,” prior to reading on. But, then, so did the Apostle, Paul. He was not certain until he was close to the end of his life. And that is as it should be. Otherwise, haughtiness and overconfidence will set in and we will then be thinking more of ourselves as we ought. These are lethal combinations.
Interesting how TW consistently speaks to me where ‘I’m at’. In fact, it usually comes as a confirmation of the Holy One already speaking into my life. I, too, immediately answered ‘No, I’m not’. Even though where I am ‘at’ today is so much better than where I was ‘at’ a year ago, or even 6 months ago – it is still not the ‘place’ where I long to be. A place of continually feeling the embrace of my King, my bridegroom, my Messiah. A place of trusting in him explicitly, no matter what is going on around me. But I’m not a spiritual giant – I’m just one more broken vessel.
Someone told me yesterday that they see nothing different in me – not now – not for ten years back – that I’m just the same. They suggested that I wear a Purim mask and that I’m not who I appear to be. That I’m a fake. While I expected those words to be sharp daggers and rip my heart apart as I visually watched them approach, they were not. The firey darts dropped to the ground before they hit my heart. So maybe I am not the same. Before, I would have wielded my tarnished shield and lashed back out with my own fiery darts. Today, I was able to step back, measure those words, roll them around, turn them over and over and ask the Holy One if there be any truth to them and if so, to show me TRUTH and walk me back to where He wants me to be.
And of course He hears me 🙂 … and He points to where I have missed the mark – here and there – and over here again. Today, however, I feel Him take my hand and join me as he walks back with me…He not only shows me the wrong choices I’ve made, but He points out the right ones….He loves me, embraces me and walks with me and I am content knowing that ‘it is a journey’. It is a journey of learning how to wisely use the characteristics, the attributes that He gave to me and use them according to His plan…yes, that is the answer. Learning HOW to quickly walk back and consistently choose wisely…ahh…that is the question.
Thank you Skip …. for walking on that journey with so many of us.
An EXCELLENT truth to ponder and the weight of it is eternal. As I read the first paragraph another question came to mind. What fruit must I refuse to bite into today? Maybe the weedy vine of unworthiness has overgrown in your life..defeat…unloveable…not just UNworthy but worthless. It is a lie. Skip, your words here are incredibly valuable. So many of us today are given the fruit of this vine as our first solid food and we have continued to eat of it for decades. Of course, doing so gives seed to even more of it’s kind. At some point that parasitic vine needs to be taken down…and it can be a lengthy process. Even those nasty roots…if not exposed and the life of them removed..can impact the next generation. Maybe it was the fruit of a parasitic tree that crowds and stunts the growth I was suppose to enjoy. Having eaten the parasitic fruit for decades, it can be hard to cultivate a taste for the healthy fruit…pushing away even, when healthy fruit is offered to me. The good news is..my Father’s work started in a garden and He knows exactly how to solve that problem. I’ve just had to stay focused on His direction and follow His instructions…Holy Spirit is really good at that part. I’ve learned those parasitic seeds can morph into quite a large contingency of weedy vines that strangle me. Unworthiness leads to frustration, frustration to anger and that to depression and more unworthiness. (And this doesn’t even begin to address the physical results of such a diet.) The enemy on this battlefield really has his strategies down pat! One day when yet another driver zoomed past erratically, that giant urge to pull him out of his car and give him the whipping his mama never did – rose in an instant. “Why bow to that idol?” came the thought. Ah-hah! THAT’S what that reaction is-an IDOL! Okay Marsha, you’ve got a strategy of your own now – “DON’T BOW – DON’T BITE INTO IT!” What if you have to be cut down to the ground to be saved….like me? My Friend gave me some more gardening advice. Did you know that a Myrtle tree when foolishly pruned or otherwise seriously damaged – recovers best by being cut down to the ground-at which point it will grow to twice it’s original growth and do it in one season. I love it!
I need to add the fact that it’s taken 10 years..so far..to pull out the strangling vines and get this myrtle cut down…those vines are incredibly strong!
Skip your helping me with my untraining:)
I’m a little late but I have to say that I’ve been praying about coming home to the lord and this right here helped me with this decision. It helped me with the “little steps”. Thank you Skip Moen for this much needed eye opener!
Welcome home Donita!