Treasures from the summer - pt 2

When my birthday came around this June my sweet friends and I headed out for my usual (by usual I mean 2nd annual) birthday dinner. This time they surprised me with wonderful book selections off of my "buy me a book" board on Pinterest. I also scored some itunes money which I LOVE. I discovered a new band this summer called the Staves. Three sisters making sweet harmony. Secular but not fluffy; somewhere between folk and indie rock. I dig them. Anywhoo, one of the books chosen was the Christianity Today book of the year for 2015 written by Jen Pollock Michel and it is titled teach us to want.  By page 18 I was folding corners and calling my sister. I got the sense this book could be life altering in the way a conversion experience is. You just don't see things the same way after. Sometimes a book does that. Sticks to your insides like oatmeal. The funny thing is I started it on vacation, got about 50 pages in and haven't picked it up again. This is going to be the triumph of my fall if I can finish this book with due diligence. It provides these amazing soul searching questions that I get mad at the minute I read them because I don't have a small group to hash them out with. I CRAVE lively discussion over these matters. It is basically a practical theology of desire. While I still haven't gotten farther in the book (fall starts tomorrow people, I've got time to meet my goal) I have been working my way through Beth Moore's book Audacious. Again, I find themes weaving and paralleling through the books I've been dabbling in. One of the main things is the idea of maintaining a stillness of soul and body in the swirl of everyday life. Here I come across the idea so precious from Gift of the Sea  in my current book Teach us to Want :
    "I want to write, I am also a fixed point in my spinning sphere of domesticity. There are lunches to pack, dinners to plan, socks to pair. There are carpool obligations and clarinet lessons. My pressing responsibilities as wife and mother will not be ignored. Neither, however, will the petulance of writing be eternally put off. Like Madeleine L'Engle, who reflects in Circle of Quiet about the inevitable tug-of-war between her artistic life and her domestic one, I feel fragmented between my two lives, torn by a reflexive self-recrimination when I want, even need, to create space for the quiet work of reading and writing."
 Again I come across this idea of needing solitude and of having a creative work that feeds you.
 Now here is a funny thing. Last year I read the wrinkle in time trilogy for the first time and LOVED it. There are like ten more books in the same series I need to get around to and now that I know the author has one about herself and her writing process I'm inspired to get ALL of them on the hold list at the library. Of course that is a pipe dream because now that school is in full swing I barely have a MINUTE to even sit down and write this! Still, very excited to read Circle of Quiet down the road. Tied to the solitude idea is what? The aspect of desire. Here we find the intersection between Jen and Beth's books. I can't wait to see how Jen applies what I've read in the beginning of her book to practical life and our own desires, (for better or worse) but the essence so far is this: to be human is to desire.
  It is primal and for Jen it meets the road of faith here: "The gospel of Jesus Christ meets our holy hesitations about desire, without eliminating the tension or minimizing the dangers, yet suggesting it can be reformed." Newness of life through faith in Christ can also mean newness in desire. God promised through the prophet Ezekial, "I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them." So. What do we do with want/desire? Is there any precedent for a desire that is holy?  If I believe in a creative God that fashioned me in His image than desire must have a function and a purpose, yes? First I offer this from Beth's book as a starting ground for talking about desire. It is what I personally have been ruminating on. While it might seem off topic the first quote speaks to my current state of being.
    "Many of our perils are deeply personal and out of public sight. We've each faced situations and circumstances we were not sure we could emotionally survive."
   On my worst of days that is currently where I am at. Knowing that, I am humbled by the next quote "He knows the immensity of the treasures He tucked away down inside of us in a place that can only be tapped by turmoil. God knows precisely how He has gifted us and to what unfathomable degree He empowered us through His own Holy Spirit. He knows the minutest detail how thoroughly He has equipped us. God cannot be conned. He requires no proof to quell His own curiosity. Confusion is human, not divine. God knows exactly how real or pretentious our faith is. But we don't. That's the thing. Neither do the people in our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our social environments, or our spheres of influence. Neither do angels or demons.. . .God tests us to bring out the real in us. For Crying out loud, He tests us to prove us genuine to ourselves, the last ones to usually know!"
     Here Beth addresses the fallback that I usually turn to when trying to work out my own salvation. . ."Discipline won't do this for us. Discipline can make us more Christlike but it cannot make us love Christ more. We will never love Him just because we need to. We will only love Him audaciously because we want to." -It was after this line I had penciled in "DESIRE". Finally, she just says it straight out. "WE were created out of divine desire FOR divine desire. God did not fashion us from the dust because He needed us. He created us because He wanted us." and again "God's will is DRIVEN by desire". Here I have penciled in teach us to want . Over and over these books have connected dots for me. Beth exhorts that we have been created and called according to His will. "He who desires us longs for us to desire Him" she says.  I am blown away to look at all humanity in that light. They are right. Discipline does not replace desire. Desire is not utterly destroyed by sin, but retains it's divine motivational force, and lastly, I can ask for more.  Faith and desire are not mutually exclusive. "I believe, help my unbelief" said the grieving father in the scriptures. We know what's true but we desire to experience it, to be immersed in it, and to more deeply understand it. . .through all the seasons of life.