Posture Perfect
How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers! Psalm 1:1 NASB
Walk/stand/sit – Undoubtedly Watchman Nee’s influential Christian book Sit, Walk, Stand found its genesis in a verse like this. Perhaps you, like me, read it when you first became a believer. A book of prayerful power, victorious living, and uncompromising faith. And perhaps, like me, years later you wondered why Nee’s experience of the presence of the Lord seems so different from your own. Perhaps you chalked it up to the environment. He was in a place of persecution. Faith was demanded of him to stay alive. We are far more comfortable. Perhaps you thought him a bit naïve. Acceptable in a world where things were simple, but now, a century later, life is much more complicated (it’s a good excuse, isn’t it?). Or perhaps you, like me, have compromised so often that it doesn’t seem possible to “sit, walk, stand” anymore.
David’s opening verse really leaves most of us out in the cold. Since I know that I have walked in the counsel of the wicked, stood in the path of sinners, and sat with scoffers, I have no reason to think I will be blessed. Amazingly, I sometimes feel blessed anyway. I guess it’s just pure grace, undeserved, and almost incomprehensible. What I do know is that I don’t feel rinsed in son-light, washed in blood (although I certainly am stained), or lifted to even the second heaven. I just struggle along, trying my best to understand what God says in the mouths of those ancient witnesses and hoping I can find a way to apply what I learn without seriously stepping of the cliff of radical trust. It’s just complicated. At least I would like to think that it is. That soothes my conscience. I tell myself that God really does understand my difficulties, and then I look for ways to avoid Him. Embarrassing? Yes! Convicting? Oh, yes! Discouraging? I won’t answer that. Instead I’ll send you two citations from Frederick Buechner:
“In fact it seems to me that I often feel freer to be myself in the company of stranger-friends than in the company of those with whom there is such a long tradition of reserve and circumspection that it is hard to transcend it.”[1]
“ . . . in which I have touched from time to time on the dark guest who dwells in us all but have never risked laying fully bare the lust, the anger, the childishness, the paralyzing anxiety that are so helplessly part of who I am. ‘Only the young die good,” the former dean of a great English cathedral wrote me . . .”[2]
Or maybe a third one:
“But maybe beneath that lies the fear that if I say too much about how again and again over the years I have experienced holiness—even here I find myself drawing back from saying God or Jesus—as a living, healing, saving presence in my life, then I risk being written off as some sort of embarrassment by most of the people I know and like.”[3]
Maybe I’ve reached the point where I no longer have anything worth saying. I’m with James Bond. “Played out.” Maybe I just need a vacation (smile), but where would I go that I wouldn’t find myself already there? If God’s intention is that Man is to be a conjugation of the divine verb, I wonder if I’m now just a dangling participle.
Topical Index: blessed, sit, walk, stand, me, myself, Psalm 1:1
[1] Frederick Buechner, A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory, p. 114.
[2] Ibid., p. 115.
[3] Ibid., p. 116.
