THE MESSAGE OF THE ARROWS
I cried when I was born and every day shows why
George Hebert
There are only two things that pierce the human
heart, wrote Simone Weil. One is beauty. The other is affliction. And while we
wish there were only beauty in the world, each of us has known enough pain to
raise serious doubts about the universe we live in. Form very early in life we
know another message, warning us that the Romance has an enemy.
The psalmist speaks of this enemy and tells us wee
need not fear it:
He [God] will save you from the fowler’s snare and
from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with his feathers,
And under his wings you will find refuge;
His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.
You will not fear the terror of night,
Nor the arrow that flies by day. (Ps. 91:3-5)
Yet we cannot deny that the Arrows have struck us
all, sometimes arriving in a hail of projectiles that blocked out the sun, and
other times descending in more subtle flight that only let us know we were
wounded years later, when the wound festered and broke.
One of the first Arrows I (Brent) remember came on
a fall morning when the green choruses of summer were no longer there to
comfort me. I happened upon my mother
standing by the stove one morning before school began, stirring oatmeal. She had
been crying and the tears shed in anger or even pain due to a momentary spat
with my father. They were not due to some recently delivered message about
illness or death in the family.
They were the tears of a frightened girl in her
mid-twenties who could fin no meeting place between the life she found herself
living as wife and mother and the needs of her own wounded heart that never
felt the connection with mother and father so necessary to living with courage
and hope. I couldn’t have put that into words back then, but I felt the fear as
a palpable enemy that needed to be quickly defeated. If there was an adversary
of the heart that even adults did not know how to handle, my world was much
less safe than I had thought. I moved quickly to help my mother vanquish this
foe in the bst way I know how………………………………….
I remember feeling a sharp pain in my chest that I silenced
with cold anger. I thought what a fool I had been all these years to believe in
the summer message of this place. Laid out before me in the light of day was
obviously the reality that had always been there. It was time I stopped
believing a lie. The mysterious Love and Lover that had come to me in my
childhood were frauds.
I know now I placed that last Arrow in my heart
that day and shoved it cleanly through. I did it to kill the tears of mourning
inside that would have insisted that there was something I had lost. Yet the
Haunting was still there that day on the bridge. I only understood years later
that it was I myself who killed it or tried to. If I had allowed the loss I felt
to flow in the waters of my own tears, the haunting call of that long-ago summer
would have remained. It was in placing a dam of hardness over the ache I felt
inside that I refused to acknowledge the Haunting and even misinterpreted the
message of autumn: Something Lost and Again Coming.
At some point we all face the same decision-what
will we do with the Arrows we’ve known? Maybe a better way to say it is, what
have they tempted us to do?..................................... The result is
an approach to life that we often call our personality. If you’ll listen
carefully to your life, you may begin to see how it has been shaped by the
unique Arrows you’ve been known and the particular convictions you’ve embraced
as a result. The arrows also taint and partially direct even our spiritual
life.
My own spiritual journey with Christ “began” (I’ve
since come to know the beginning was long before I was born) when my first
prayer to God since I was a boy escaped from my heart one morning at work…………
One morning almost without my bidding, my heart cried out from its own depths, “God,
help me, because I am lost”. And God
answered with lavish faithfulness in those “first love” years. I began reading
the Bible and it came alive in my hands and heart. A friend I knew from high
school came by and told me he had ‘become a Christian.’ He invited me to attend
classes with him at Philadelphia College of the Bible, where I drank in everything
I was taught with hungry joy and anticipation. At night, Ralph and I would go
listen to a speaker, or simply out at a diner talking about God, life, girls,
and the abundant living we were sure was ahead. That fall, I went to a retreat
in the mountains of Pennsylvania and met a longhaired girl whose heart God had
recently courted and won. We sat for hours, talking about our personal longings
and fears. We even prayed out loud together, a totally new concept to me.
Becoming a Christian, however, does not necessarily
solve the dilemma of the arrows, as I was soon to realize. Mine were still
lodged deep and refused to allow some angry wound inside to heal.
I chose those words from this chapter of the book for two
reasons:
1)
As Brent had his first encounter with
Our Lord and Saviour which caused him to become TRULY a BORN AGAIN Christian,
my heart skipped a beat and all I could say “this is the God that I know and
the God who taught me why the church is filled with believers who are not born
again because they believe in their beliefs. They became Christians, through
leaders and evangelists selling a watered-down gospel. They are the perfect
pictures of Matthew 23:15 and Matthew 15:13-14. I am not criticizing or judging
rather, I am stating a fact that any Christian living a spiritual life, any Christian
walking in spirit, and any Christian who is abiding can see it clearly through
the eyes of the spirit of God. It is painful to know what I know, yet being so
powerless to make a dent in this mess out there. I found comfort in knowing
that even Christ could not and would not do anything about it. Just like He let
the rich man go without forcing him or tried to manipulate the situation. Just
like the Pharisees, were lost, only very few got to become Christians after
Christ ascension to heaven.
The spiritual side of Ephesians 4:15 is about loving
enough to tell the truth of God like it is in order to provoke a reaction from
those who are not growing and walking with Him. Believe it or not, it is not easy,
and it is a lonely path. Not too many out there say yes to God when we are
called for this kind of ministry.
2)
Brent said: “Becoming a Christian,
however, does not necessarily solve the dilemma of the arrows” That is so true,
because receiving salvation in our heart and soul is just the beginning. But,
only those who are His, will be able to go forward “INWARDLY” to be transformed
by the word of God. You do not go forward because you are better than someone
else, you can do it because of God’s promise in Philippians 2:13. You can do
it, because you have been TRULY SEALED WITH THE SPIRIT OF GOD as a deposit for what
is to come.
WHAT IS TO COME THEN? Well, even our
transformation where heaven comes down into our heart as we abide in Him and
drink of the water that gives life. Our transformation as we are no longer
compartmentalized, we are healed, made whole and freed from the bondage of our
past that shaped us.
THE TRUE GOSPEL IS SO
POWERFUL, SO BEAUTIFUL, SO PAINFUL AND SO TASTEFUL AT THE SAME TIME. We don’t
have to wait to reach heaven to know the riches of this life God has in store
for us.
ARE YOU ABLE TO GO
FORWARD INWARDLY? That is your proof and mine that we don’t have a defective
salvation. That’s our proof that we belong to Him and we are His heirs. Anything else is an illusion, man-made
salvation, good behavior, wishful thinking and the power of our emotions, of a
life lived in the flesh.
Anyway…. I have to
force myself to stop here.
BIBLE VERSES QUOTED
Matthew 23:15 "Woe to you, teachers of the law and
Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single
convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of
hell as you are.”
“Matthew 15:13-14 He
replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be
pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the
blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
Ephesians 4:15 “Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in
every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.”
Philippians 2:13 “for it is God who works in you to
will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”
