Awaken – The Divine is not Nervous – part 2

To view the video podcast https://youtu.be/nEUOuN9FN4k?si=sFvVZuAWK2sDT74m

We began, not long ago, with a simple conviction: the divine is not nervous. Today I want to take that a little further.

When we consider this journey of life and come to this place, at this stage, we realise how much is changing. So much is becoming uncertain. There are so many new voices in our world, additional voices, offering ideas and thoughts that seem tremendously unfamiliar. And we are being challenged to really take them in. Many of us have chosen not to. We have chosen instead to hold even more firmly onto what we have known.

What we are being called to at this stage, I believe, is a place of greater awareness.

We have allowed others to think for us. We have allowed various professionals and various disciplines to take over our lives. We have enjoyed the luxury of not having to bother about where things come from anymore.

Take something as simple as water. In times past, persons caught rainwater from their roofs and stored it, or they dug wells. As a boy I walked to a central place in the community where water was piped, to collect what we needed. Those were the early days of the water being taken over. Now it simply comes into our homes, and we have no clue what has gone on with it along the way. We are told that certain things are put into it for our protection, and we go on, because these things are being provided for us. Nobody challenges it. Nobody looks at it.

And along with the luxury come conditions. In our own country, water you have collected may wet the garden or flush the toilet, but you are not to drink it, while in other places in the world catching the rain is the only way persons have water at all.

Even now, to ease the water problem, we are encouraged to set up tanks. And most of us have. But look at what we did with them. Rather than catch the rain, we attached them to the mains, so that when the company’s water is shut off we have enough of the company’s water to last until it returns. Few of us actually collect the rain. We were handed the means of our own independence, and we plugged it straight back into our dependence.

There are persons, even here, for whom water is a hit and a miss. Days without water to bathe, without water for the most basic things of life, while the rain is falling. The rain is falling. Their ancestors knew how to reach water. What we have now is not so much lack as a helplessness we have learnt, and if we are honest, a helplessness we have been taught.

So a time is coming, or has already come, when we are being asked to stop. Not to be numb to what is happening around us. To notice how we are being shaped and formed, how we are being made to think, how we are being made to respond, and how, without thinking about it at all, we are giving our power away to institutions and to other individuals.

And when we come to matters of faith, is there any difference?

Is there any difference?

I say that I trust in God. I say that my God is powerful, omnipotent, omniscient. And yet, as a child of that great and wonderful divine being, the all-knowing one, the all-seeing one, I am living a life restricted by other persons’ ideas, by other persons’ opinions. Then I am told how I should believe in that God. I am told on one hand that God is all-powerful, and on the other that God works only through certain avenues, avenues that we as human beings have determined.

When one steps away from the usual rhetoric and reflects on Yeshua of Nazareth, we hear a different story. A story that empowers. A story that gives life, that enables. A story that raises the dead, and raises them in so many ways. Not only the physically dead, but those who are dead to society. Persons considered sinners. Prostitutes, publicans, lepers. He raises and gives life to those that society has determined are dead.

And I wonder, as we journey in this world at this time, who are those we are determining to be dead? If Yeshua were with us in the flesh, whom would he be raising from our verdict of death?

Looking at our world, we do not always stop to think about it, but there is such division. And we have all come to accept it. Even in something as basic as health.

As a young boy I was part of a dramatic performance, and one of the songs we sang carried a line that has never left me: if living were a thing that money could buy, the rich would live and the poor would die. It comes from an old spiritual with roots in the Bahamas, and in other versions the word is not living but religion. Both point to the same place.

Can we still put the word if in front of that line? Or are we living in a time when living is a thing that money buys, when the rich have the greater chance of living and the poor the greater chance of dying? I am asking. I am wondering. Are we in that time?

And at the same time we talk of faith. At the same time we talk of our common humanity. But that common humanity is not as common as we would like to pretend. It has hierarchy and distinctions. Some are determined not worth saving, while for others we go to all lengths.

I often smile watching a certain kind of movie. Some politician’s or wealthy person’s son or daughter is kidnapped, and because they have access to money they send in their own private army, their own mercenaries, to get that child. Fifteen go in. Two or three, at most, come out, and they bring out the child. And we feel within ourselves: wow, those guys are brave. Well done. They saved that child.

They saved that child for that wealthy person. They saved that child for that politician. And yes, if it were my child, I would want that too.

But we hardly ever stop for a second to consider those who were killed in the process of saving that one life. I find that not just alarming but mind-blowing, that no consideration whatsoever is given to the lives of the lost. We cover it with a lovely cliché: they gave their lives for the sake of the one. But the sake of that one was only because that one’s parents had money, or access to power.

This is the world in which we live. And there is nothing we can do to change our world as such.

But we are not here to change our world. That is the fallacy we keep investing in. We are here to be aware of our world. We are here to choose, as Joshua put it to the people: choose you this day whom ye will serve; as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. And awareness can lead anywhere. It begins where we stand. As the old hymn has it, brighten the corner where you are.

We are here to be aware. To awaken. To see clearly. And to take back our power, to unlock the space where we had locked it away, or allowed it to be locked away, and to begin to see our world as it truly is.

The psalmist asks, What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. And the Preacher says that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.

I think this is the whole point of this existence: to recognise the inventions, and to recognise that they are not real, not in the sense that they are the core. They are inventions. They are things persons have come up with to make life easy for the few. We cannot undo that. But we can live a life that is more real, more conscious, and not let ourselves be dragged along like slaves by a society that has no interest whatsoever in our true well-being.

Anything the human can imagine is possible. Scripture tells us that with God all things are possible. Not with me, we say. But the psalmist also says, Ye are gods. There is a little bridge in there. Do not discount the human. We were made in the image and likeness, and there is power within us. Like everything else in our world, that power can be used to build up or to tear down. The same psalm warns that those called gods shall die like men, and I hear in that the misuse, or the neglect, of the divine inheritance.

So on this day, as I share with you, my invitation is simply this: awaken. Stop accepting everything that is given to you as though it were always in your best interest. Look at life from a more discerning place. Call upon God for the spirit of discernment, for the ability to see beyond the façade.

I am not calling you to be sceptical or paranoid. I am calling you to be more aware. To ask questions, not only of others, but even more of yourself.

Why am I doing this? What is it that I am responding to? What is it that I seem to want? What is it that I think is lacking?

This is where the greatest awareness is. In myself. Because it is in myself that these external things are being targeted. They would not work unless there was something in me creating a landing zone for what I am receiving. So my task is not only to question what is outside of me. It is to question what is inside of me.

What am I hiding from? What am I protecting? What am I not understanding? Where do I perceive lack? Where do I perceive want? Where is fear hiding, dressed up in all manner of outfits and costumes that do not allow me to see it and recognise it as fear? Where are these things hiding in me?

That is why persons say, if you want to see change in the world, be the change. And that is where I am inviting you at this time.

To be the change, and to stand in your divine inheritance.

Awareness brings us into a place where we are more able to exist in the divine realm, as it were. With awareness we are not being contained. We are open. We use our divine inheritance to see from a wider, grander, more cosmic place, and to see the undergirdings of the things we have surrendered to. In reclaiming our power we reclaim our divine inheritance. And in reclaiming our divine inheritance we reclaim that attitude we find in God, and we remember: the divine is not nervous. The divine is not impatient.

And in modelling the divine, we find that we too have released our nervousness, our anxiety, and we are more inclined to hear the words of the prophet Isaiah: they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Waiting here is no idle delay. The Hebrew word behind it, qavah, is often taught as being related to the twisting of strands into a cord. To wait upon the Lord is to let our life be bound, strand by strand, into God’s own. It is the waiting of one who is no longer nervous.

And notice the order. They shall mount up, they shall run, they shall walk. The prophet does not end in the sky. He ends on the ground, walking and not fainting. The summit is not the flight but the ordinary walk: the corner where you are, brightened.

Be blessed. Be safe.