Nuances

Kamuli Road

2012-01-23T04:43:00.000-08:00

It is Sunday morning. We are making the hour long drive up to our children’s home near Kamuli. It’s become a “village” of 230 children. I’m in the company of three companions and a driver. We want to join the Sunday service especially today because the kids will be given the reigns to lead it. The road that takes us there is rough, The irony is while it leads there, it’s so damaged it seems equally to stand between us and them.

It’s a fresh morning. Fresh meaning, the smoke haze that has permeated the dry season has given permission for some sky blue hope to translucently bode optimism. An optimism amplified by three young girls treading the edges of the road, resplendent in clean yellow jumpers against black skin greeting the morning. It’s all dew and puppy fur and the first box of crayons in grammar school.

Life along the road is flied with small mundane stories and the occasional drama. While turning into a station to get petrol, we notice a small crowd of young men chasing down and beating a hapless thief. Passers by just join in for some mob justice. James, our sports director says, ”Gang justice will kill him.” There’s flying Kung Fu kicks now. I shout “Hey!” with my ailing bullfrog voice, hoping it conveys enough authority to put a semicolon in the midst of this torturous sentence. The words fall to the bottom of the pond. Two men finally take charge and haul the disheveled, torn shirt fellow away. They mercifully fend off the Kung Fu guys with Chuck Norris stares. There is a particular communal hatred for a thief caught (the thief getting away with it cleverly may evoke a different set of thoughts as anyone who has tried to do business or projects in this part of the world). To yell “Stop thief” may abate a life.

We fill with petrol and settle in for the crumbling tarmac. As I said, the road is poor. The road edges are jagged and drop of onto red soil shoulders where pedestrian traffic predominates. The tarmac when barely intact along it’s breath, hardly supports the passing of two vehicles. If you hold your breath, the passing goes easier. Trucks, transport vehicles and private cars dominate over boda boda motorcycles, then comes bicyclists laden with people, long bundles of firewood or the yellow plastic jugs of water

and finally the walking and waiting masses. The pecking order of the road is rigid and failure to give way to the larger would result in injury or death. The concept of rights of pedestrians would be laughable here.

Moving along, the red dust has settled in on this inland artery of heart and the beat of thousands of feet and tires jarring along. You want to wash the green foliage along the edges to be free of this dust, to blend it somehow with the bluing sky. You pray again for rain knowing that January is not the season. Inside a deeper force is working, I am too aware of our own soiling injustices going on at our children’s village. Why so much dust cast on our children at risk, especially when we have determined our village to be a safe place, far off the tarmac’s beatings? So the rain prayer stands. “What can we do without God in this nation or any other nation?” I hear the discussion yesterday with Kateh, Ugandan born, our teacher and friend, her seer gifting peers through the sifting particles to a hope and future.

Beyond the twenty foot dust band is greenery, locally fired brick and cement daubed homes, a cow is loose in a piece of passing forest, the yellow water jugs parade by on bikes and balanced heads and young banana plants promise matoke on some plastic plates in some future evening. I think of having to pass through this dust barrier to the other side and don’t want to imagine the soiling of my clean clothes. It’s Sunday and I want to stay in sunlight and stay somehow innocent a while longer like the yellow dressed girls. The dust is too much like the street boys who accost you in town, or men with red eyes in filthy, torn shirts drunk on cheap waragi or the occasional mad man who walks in the middle of roads unwashed, mumbling and alone.

I am sick with an upper respiratory something and my lower digestional tract flows better than these tires that bear us. Sleep in the vehicle is impossible with bang of tires against pothole, speed bumps and road edge. In and out of focus, I half record mentally the goings on outside with drifting prayer. “Build the highway. Make the way plain...send your rain.”

We finally reach the children’s village. James was brought along with us to restore him to village life. He was “chased off “ by a bad break in the tarmac, the results of jealousy.

Confusion and every evil work that the apostle James said would happen, did. The children pour out of the church to greet him. They love James. He’s the sports organizer. Bigger than that, he’s a father in a vacuum of guileless fathers. They are rare like a smooth stretch of tar into the future.

We enjoy the show as James gets his mob welcome. A teenage girl in crisp white blouse hurls herself airborne into his arms. This is why we care for children at risk.

I like the other whites have our own coterie of children lining up for hugs. Make straight the highway. “Good to see you...I love you...You look so good...Bless you so much”, and the dust slowly washes.

An older “mama” – a caregiver grips me in a tearful embrace. She’s buried in my chest praying. I’m never quite sure of this woman’s motives but I know I am a father. I fill holes in hearts and try to lessen the transition of rough edges until the pavement becomes whole. I know she lost a husband to war and he never returned. Presumed dead but the years passed and no resolution. Meanwhile she had a baby growing in the belly and he eventually was birthed onto this rough tarmac of life. No dad. No husband. I opt to catch like James.

The mama is here to be safe, to be loved to life and to be a road to others. I hold her longer than I am normally comfortable in my natural self, offering my strength, filling holes and I can’t caress her kinky hair enough. I want to smooth all the roads in one moment like innocence in yellow dresses.

Unexploded Ordnance

2012-01-17T23:13:00.000-08:00

The bright young Acholi woman at the hotel registration desk sends us off with a cherry “Come back in one piece!” We look at her quizzically. “I don’t wish you to come back in many pieces.”

It’s a perennial question: How to explain Africa to the uninitiated? We are traveling down a dusty unpaved road in the half light of dusk. The headlights shining on the pockmarked ersatz surface called “road” here give that high contrast look like satellite transmissions from Mars. Added to the ethereal atmosphere is the orange nodding sun at nadir and that at this time of year the people are burning old grass wholesale. Smoke and a resultant red glow predominate. In another place, old people and asthmatics would be confined to sealed window indoor environs. Not here, the tribe meets the burning of fields with communal burning eyes and no one complains.

The aggregate of view has an extraterrestrial feel. Close encounters of some other kind materialize out of the half light and haze. Shadows turn into women with huge lateral extensions to their heads and they gasp their way homeward with bundles of firewood upon their head. A dog materializes, sleeping in the road. He must be low on survival instincts. How to explain it all? Indeed..

Earlier, we pass a place that was a town of sorts. It’s a remnant of an old displacement camp. This is northern Uganda and most of the former residents have gone back to their home to reclaim what is heirs from the jaws of war. The rebel attacks have abated some half dozen years or so ago. The fear is slow to erode from this clay soil. It manages to hold out claws lying in wait for skitterish ankles trying to walk upright as humans again.

“There are many mines in the fields around here.” our driver Nathan offers. Unexploded ordnance that keep some from planting, erecting buildings or moving on with a dream or tires or strong feet on solid promises. The land calls to be occupied in optimism that echoes heaven’s dictates.

The Lord’s Resistance Army was here carrying their gospel of fear. They attempted to permanently transform this into a Martian landscape, red running and cold as if the tropics had a polar cap. They tore children from families in the night. Taught eleven year old boys to kill and use farm implements to amputate. Little girls found their own hell as ‘wives”. The cries of “Where is God?” peppered the night sky with pin holes until dawn came.

Men who consorted with dark powers are gone now. They are fighting for waning power in the jungles of the Congo. Mine fields and orphans are what remains. They hide off roads less traveled.

We (Uganda Orphans Fund) have a school in the midst of this area. Broadcast and cell towers sprout around this prominent point of real estate. It’s a spiritual high place. We bought ourselves a portal. Used by local witch doctors for the hidden, the secret and the dark for many years. A certain multinational communication company recently eyed this land. We had a raging battle of sniper fire with local officials in a court when the previous owner who sold it to us then, resold it to the communications company. We called in God as our judge. The plans against us were unearthed, exploded and the land came safely into our possession.

We now have cell towers. We broadcast in harmony with the land’s original intent now. Depending on how many (mostly) children are in our school, they number 20 to fifty in number and they stand very tall. They look like street boys, children at risk, ex-prostitutes, former Moslems and the odd adventure hungry looking to redeem a landscape.

They are the transmitters of the region. They connect earth with heaven. they fast, they pray, sing and play, transforming this well of most times simply by presence. When light occupies even the time and times are cleansed by these Kingdom mysteries of principle.

The children have also become our ordinance hidden. Cloaked as it were, waiting for the touch of God or the footfall of the innocent. An explosion into life like those slow motion movies of plants that explode seed pods at the brush of passing. We heard the testimony of the maimed on a recent Sunday afternoon. Our tears too became the rain of cleansing, cleansing the rivulets of blood in the of road secret places. Prayers and tears healing loss and a redemption of this God ordained prophetic land. Red becomes green. The green of life.

“Is it my imagination or is Gulu (the main city of the region an hour from here) prospering even more than a year ago?” Kateh, our school’s spiritual director smiles; “Could be”.

Our minesweepers lack the crisp uniform of the military. They are the cadres of the broken, world forsaken in torn, sometimes tattered second hand clothes. The Eagle has stirred up His nest and no foreign god was with him. His wings carried them us above this high place. Come and eat the produce of the fields (Deuteronomy 32:3).

There is life on Mars.

In Motion

2011-07-26T08:47:00.000-07:00

...The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. John 12:3

Katie and I celebrated out 29th anniversary on July 16 in Bozeman, Montana area underneath it's blue sky cradled mountains. I'm a blessed man to share a life and love with with an extraordinary woman.

Tim and Pam Dolan hosted a Day at the River - actually the confluence of the three rivers that make up the Missouri. We spent the morning session recounting the history of this sacred spot - the good, the bad and the prophetic for the Gallatin Valley encompassing Bozeman.Montana. We broke into prayer and declaration, remitting sins and speaking Father's plan over the expanse of the Gallatin Valley. The afternoon was spent on exploring individual design of those there and how we fit into a synergy of a body in this new season. Communion with one another and the land sealed the sun kissed day.

Having some time to hike and fish, I was so struck by the air. I couldn't breathe enough of the atmosphere. An unusual experience. Finding God in every breath I took. Refreshing is a moot description for what I savored.

It was a nice confirmation of speaking of this season on God's calendar as fragrance, both corporate and individual.

Spending the night in Gallatin Canyon, I got up to look at the stars. Far from the lights of towns, the stars as in Psalm 19 radiate the kingly glory of God. I pulled them to earth with praise and tethered them there. Just two nights ago in Vantage, WA, I had a similar experience camping on the dry ridge line overlooking the town and the deep flow of Columbia below. "Peg the stars to the earth", a phrase I heard while traveling there made me mouth the declarations of Jesus as King - God's glory reflected in the stars - over the land and flow below.

Thursday, Katie and I are off to Wiconi's living Waters Family Camp, a Native People's oriented gathering in Turner, OR. We will join our friends the Mosleys and perhaps do some dream interpreting as our gift to the gathering.

We leave the camp after the pow wow on Sunday the 31st, drive home and hop on a plane for Scotland on the next day. Yikes.

We will be in Scotland from August 2 - 16. In Inverness, we will join host and team leader Charity Bowman in an outreach to Belladrum Festival www.tartanheartfestival.com. on August 5-7. Charity has been with us at Burning Man for a couple of years. She's taken some of our SpiritDream creative influences and mixed them with a Scottish fire and ignited them underneath the "thin" skies of Scotland. Her infectious heart for intimacy with God evidenced by creative fruit has squeezed it's juice over the UK and northern Europe. We can reach the new age with new tools and ripened love. Please pray that Katie and my teaching times would find good soil. Pray the outreach (a team of 60...the Scots are not small thinkers!) would touch seekers to the core with this team of those that desire to turn the hearts of the "children".

Week two, we will try to bag a few mountaintops for pleasure and prayer. We are interested in a few ancient stone circles, the Island of Iona and whatever else the Spirit leads. We are blessed to have a man offer to lead us on some of this prayer journey. He leads intercession for the Highlands for Pray Scotland. We are always looking for a history and a prophetic lesson.

Breathe the atmosphere,

Rob Mazza

The Strong One

2011-04-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

I had an acquaintance call me out the blue last week. “Rob, are you ready for what God has for you?” I occasionally get these open ended quasi-mystical statements coming my way. I want to stammer “Probably not” in answer to something that could get me in trouble if I take too definitive a step on either fork of this unknown road. Yes, I also had a weird upbringing that causes me to knee jerk respond as such.

I recognized his voice and stalled his wanting to “Elijah” me in dire or ecstatic predictions by saying “How are you Dan?” I tried a bit of small talk because I’ve been to Africa too many times and I know that they do the honoring of the small before they get to the subject of the big. I’m an American African for today because I know that God sometimes sits down to a meal with friends before He’s going to destroy Sodom. It’s the oriental way and I have often preferred to take my prophecies warmed up over a familial fire. I don’t always get my way.

Dan composed himself. He had a dream with me in it and assumed it was about me. “He fell victim to one of the classic blunders – the first of which is never get involved in a land war in Asia.” Quotes from The Princess Bride pop up serendipitously for me especially when I get scared. The second blunder is most but not all dreams are about you not me.

It however turned out to be a God dream for the church. Prophetic in its implications and for prayer in it’s immediate application. The dream was about me, Dan and in fact all of us.

In the dream, Dan is sitting in the front pew of a generic church. He is watching an internationally known minister and me. We are standing and conversing at the front of the church.

Suddenly, the presence of God comes into the building. It’s quite perceived by Dan to be the fear of the Lord. He falls to the floor and remains there unable to move for some time. He is aware that the whole congregation, including the international minister and myself are under the same power. Dan finally struggles to get up and is immediately knocked down by a brooding weight. It was even stronger this time. This presence of God is really upon him. Dan said while viewing me, I just laid there “flat as a pancake” unable to get up.

While rendered inoperable in the prone position, Dan hears the words “Who told you, you were naked?” and “A wave of fear is going to penetrate My church.” The dream ends.

The book of John in the New Testament is where I like to spend a lot of time in. In my opinion, it contains a lot of “get started” revelation about God the Father and His relationship with His son Jesus. The outflow of that relationship is shown in Jesus’ varied, loving and revelatory driven interactions with a cross section of people in first century cultures in Israel. John the mercy gift serves up a rich stew of revealing Jesus doing what the Father does and saying what Father says.

There’s even a transparent glimpse of John’s transition from “call fire” lacking mercy attitude on the ignorant and religiously hated Samaritans and a reoccurring diatribe that pops up about who sits in authority with Jesus on his throne. You sense John’s angling for position. It’s implied in his probably well earned “Son of Thunder” moniker. Process, proximity and a tender heart get him to a place in authority eventually. It looks different than first love destiny perceived with all that aggressiveness garnishing it. He leans on Jesus breast. Rechristens himself “the disciple that loved Jesus”. Post resurrection, he recognizes Jesus’ Spirit in a new skin while Jesus calls the disciples from the shoreline. “It’s the Lord” he says. The disciples are slow on the uptake. John learned about the wind and the Spirit he later wrote about.

The breaking process results in a man who realizes he is loved so much, he loves many. God’s ways love him to the point of exile from all he loves to on a lonely island so God can love him more in revelatory conversation. This great conversation is delivered to a man who clearly can no longer stand on his own feet (really) anymore, the book we call Revelation. Holy, holy, holy. It’s marinated with the awe of God. Love brought him to the “unapproachable” glorious weight of his Master. He has found the Tree of Life.

The first chapter of John reads a bit in the Spirit like the Genesis of the New Testament. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” John the mercy gift writes with poetry and mystery. It’s here we touch on the beginnings of study on how this great Father heart of God contains in his makeup and names the essential God “is” statements. God is Light. God is Life. God is Love. Later, in John’s Gospel we stumble into the forth-essential name “God is Spirit.”

I have spent a lot of time on both myself and others trying to apprehend this Father heart of God to heal and rewire me in that he wanted to me to learn to receive from Him and nurture me before I could go on to become a son. I’ve also spent much time thinking about Jesus words that we are the light of the world. Like Father, like sons. The same inheritance of names is involved with the other attributes of life, love and spirit.

While training teams to go out and engage the culture we have found that our gifted tools of revelatory words, healing the afflicted or slightly more esoteric dream interpretations go better with a team that’s intentional about believing they are the light. This takes some routine and intentionality of soul to practice thinking what your spirit already knows. The rewards are that people in the seeking spiritual cultures like new age or pagan or just downtown folks will often comment on our light. At Burning Man, they have described our camp as having light, a rainbow or aura over it. Fire by day as God’s advertising. We have studied properties of light (along with overlapping implications of life, spirit and love - but I can’t detail that here). We know that scripturally is that light dispels, confounds darkness (before a word is uttered), it attracts the seeking, light heals, exposes and covers things and makes things clear. Clear. Things like truth - an endangered commodity these days.

Several years into events like Burning Man we discovered the comments were changing. From a seemingly Godless culture came comments like “It’s pure here. This is a sacred place. What you guys do is clean. It’s holy here”

Being under a ministry that values character over gifting, we’ve tried hard to stay spiritually in the moment with God’s voice and what we do no matter how odd it looked. It the same time we realize the living water from a throne had boundaries. Pride or rebellion would “clean your clock’ in a Christian hostile environment. While seeing the protection of maintaining character, we were not prepared for the above-mentioned comments to be so lavished on us. Just maybe His awe and fear was with us. I worship in my own inner places at this remembrance and also realize there is much more we haven’t known.

A minister I know mentioned that the description of God as hovering over or moving over the face of the earth in Genesis 1 was weak in describing who and what was really going on. He hinted that God, the trinity, was dominating, overwhelming with almighty splendor over a situation of chaos. The word for God here is Elohim. It is the most used word in the Old Testament referring to God. Elohim means “The Strong One”. That alone to me, would have caused wave and particles and all sorts of quantum disarray to begin to vibrate at a strong sympathetic readiness for lack of better words to describe awe on an uncreated state. Elohim moved, hovered, brooded and fluttered like some cosmic eagle with fierce eyes of intentionality and spoke “Let there be light”

And there was light. And what light! Man and all the created universe contain and respond to that presence, voice and greater light.

I think if we were eye witnesses to the scene (ah, but we can see what children

see, by faith, clear back to the beginning). We would have agreed to the awesome power and fear from the presence of Elohim revealed. We would have viewed this prone while our own light separated from any darkness!

These are troubling times. Sin abounds on so many levels. That’s just an observance about our own churches (I’m not casting stones here. I sit where they sit too). Add the world’s condition to these “worst of times” and life looks pretty bleak. I have heard dire prophesies from a number of sources that are fairly hidden about what’s to come on the earth in the next nine years and there’s no comfort in sight. The flip side is that some gatherings of God’s people will be light houses. Places of refuge, salvation and healing will stand out, well, like lights on a hill. Like the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. This will take some divine process to equal the image of a church projecting purity to counter the darkness.

I’m rethinking that Elohim, God’s first name so to speak, will take precedence again. I’m feeling again he’s hovering, domineering over the chaos and the missing of the mark of so much of who He is and in turn missing who we were meant to be. The Strong one is about to speak again. Light will separate from darkness and no one can escape what first (there’s that word again) must begin in His “house”.

He established the foundations of the earth by wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the genesis of wisdom and will be again. Light will flow out of that.

In the church of the last age is Laodicea. In the Book she is naked. Nakedness and the realization of this is a throwback to Genesis 3:11. Our condition harkens back to our eating and processing from The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Too much has the false and counterfeit guidelines of that tree become a standard for how we, the church understand God and how He works. If the foundations (wisdom and life) be removed what shall the righteous do? We stand naked and with crumbling footing.

At that moment of eating that tree of the soul, our light covering was removed. “Who told you, you were naked?” A valid question indeed or in Elohim’s parlance, it is more of a statement begging a deep meditation on our part. The meditation that leads to repentance or change of thought process to be consort again with the other tree in the garden. God has way out of this present darkness.

The Strong One is again brooding over the face of the deep.

Gulu Sounds

2011-01-26T07:34:00.000-08:00

I am alone in Gulu, Uganda, a white guy bobbing in a sea of majority Acholi life rhythm. I am trying to sleep in the home of my friend Kateh. The bed is a reasonable comfortable. I feel like I’ve been cling wrapped in plastic in this heat. The dampness of pillow and sheets tell me the liter of mango juice I drank earlier will not suffice the night. I too am clung about by sounds and many voices in the night. My mind, ever active, wants to know the interpretation behind each one. I try to lie still and listen and sort.

Soft voices of women speaking in the Acholi tongue are outside my grated window. The sounds waft delicate like fine loam through the filter of the netting placed asymmetrically over the windows opening. No straight lines or perfect angles here. I am reposed in a world of nonlinear understanding. And the loam drifts and clings to sweat and my body.

It filters down fine and poetic and filled with mystery of unknown tongue. I judge the spirit and receive the dusting for the moment.

Soft chatter. Perhaps it is talk of daily tasks like the walk to the market and the cost of posho (corn meal) or the small gossip of close community or of children and all the tomorrows. Maybe it is a conspired lullaby to the night in soft sing song tones where in pause of reflection angels come to comfort troubled souls. While I am not feeling troubled, I open the jar in my heart and reservoir these sounds for a future place when wounds are lanced and grown men lose purpose.

There are other sounds competing in the background. Music blaring from big black speakers in bars trying to commingle with the darkness like large shadowy busses converging on a nocturnal roundabout, jockeying for aural position. It’s 11:30 PM and my instincts tell me this traffic jam of sound will not cease until well after 2 PM.

I think of prostitutes working at the bar in the wandering of furniture and of loud men’s voices. I remember earlier Kateh’s kind hello to one of them who was poured into the skin of a short red dress. The din softened for a moment.

I was reminded to pray for them.

To be kind.

So see them enveloped with God’s earlier song.

To arrest the sound of plunder.

To attempt to reverse the droning white noise of ambivalence and death that has barred the whisper of bird wing consciousness.

“Come here. There is softness cloaked n lullabies.”

The air is so full here in what should be a night’s rest. Many voices and none are without significance.

Trucks rumble and bang in response to road neglect, to metal, to air and the drum reverberates the nocturnal. An occasional horn knifes the air like the whistle that the Acholi blow while dancing (and where does the breath come from in the passion of dance?). No one flinches at the blade but pedestrians who turn aside to darker shadows to avoid collision. Most people here bear with the assaults of horns with grace and sleep on. I and the strangers lie awake and wonder what the horns in Africa communicate. They are a language unto themselves. Where am I in this night? Where am I inserted in this moment of time?

I eventually take a pill to kick down my adrenalin and locate the ear plugs that have laid dormant in my pack. I remember to thank God for the miracles I have witnessed today.

I have been a part of waiting for a painful process to be resolved. Today the symphony was released. An order came into some major connections among people, ministries and what seems to be a bigger plan of God. Like a dull roar of a wall of water that those who have quieted soul can hear. The wall is passing over large landscapes here to water concealed seed. The seed will sprout to other sounds of prayer and to birds at dawn.

I am embraced as I am being lured to sleep by meditating on the sounds that nurture:

Birds at dawn.

And soft spoken Acholi women who speak mysteries.

In the morning, Kateh asks if the Muslim prayer guy woke me up at five. I say no. I slept.

I have contained, plugged in, the birds, the Acholi women and the faithfulness of God and none has escaped my ears.

Rock for a Pillow

2010-11-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

The Pinnacle Mountain in New Hampshire is a ninety acre place of prayer and contemplation. After much prayer and diligence to occupy it, it was wrested out of perhaps hundred years or more of occult use. Now it’s a place that if you stretch your arms out just so and leave your hands open, heaven or earth might answer with a gift. A revelation rolled in silver foil or a key for a forgotten lock upon an abandoned door or just plain rain when you need it. Perhaps you’re just trying to cleanse a wound before bandaging. The initial sting on flesh turns to balm if you keep your hands open long enough.

I have climbed to the summit to watch the sun set on this October day. The peak is paved in massive worn round stone slabs set in an earthen mortar and grass. It is designed by to accommodate the fairly ambulatory among us, taking only small effort to crest this patchwork of stones to gain a one eighty plus view of the hills that orbit this spiritual Palomar. Northern hardwoods, mostly oaks are sprouting out of the gapes in masonry, with occasional large roots caressing a boulder like Madonna and child or with a more sinister death grip like an anaconda around a bush pig.

I have a small camera phone. I snap small wonders of root doing life and death dances with ancient boulders and try to catch the drama. “Can you keep it quiet up there?” The slabs rumble, “We’re trying to think” Bush pigs do not go quietly.

I record patterns in lichen on tree trunks that seem like aboriginal circle paintings repeated in patterns. They are all green grey with a luminescence that transcends our earthly spectrum. They too have a tenacious grip upon their canvas but less so that the roots below. More like a decoration made in passing, a stick daubed in mystery paint , to mark a footnote made on a journey. Less than the bold stand made in rock they none-the- less commemorate the circles in life like egg, pupa, butterfly and egg again and winter, bud, leaf and all fall down goes the sun only to have the earth spin around to reassure the eastern view that it’s hope and morning again. Affirm the many circles like our generations of men and reaping and sowing and reaping again. Choose well what and how you mark this creation with or… is it Who?

I’m looking for leaves in change. The color shift hasn’t quite made it’s premier appearance yet except for a few loud red and orange Prima Donna maples on the lower reaches of this mountain. The lofty sentries here maintain a stoic hold on more Puritan colors of faded green and dull mustard yellow.

My camera shifts position to frame acorns in a cluster against grey rock like small birds clustered against a rumor of a winter’s onslaught. Maybe they know something about circles too deep inside their coded DNA. There’s more patterns to see at this vantage point. Contrasting veins of milky quartz make runes of an unknown tongue. If you traveled but a short distance skyward, you could maybe read the aggregate, perhaps you’d find a crafted lyric for God’s heart for this place. A hot air balloon would a be nice vehicle to view and validate such a wonder; then blow away and settle this verse on the darkening valley below.

There’s man made walls here also. Some enclose more civilized flora with circles of stacked stone order. In an earlier time in life, I would have baulked at the attempt to define, improve upon or generally monkey with the natural order. Maybe it’s old age and the trading of sleeping bags on rooted floors of woods for more comfort of mattress and Discovery Channel on TV that’s softened my critique. Perhaps it’s life’s accumulation of books, boxes and files marked dreams and prophesies that make me sympathetic to the attempt to corral and organize. I know that in this entire intentional attempt at beauty and order: there will still remain the massive stone monoliths below and endless sky circling, circling. Above this too is an eternal heaven layered and playing footsie with the ethers of time. There is still the unknown and more hiddenness to be discovered beyond our books and rock wall attempts to explain or contain. We of course try as we are bound to. We tame plots, build more bookshelves and label another file. We are people making our marks on trees and paper and art flaming in the desert. We still stumble into mysteries burning before us on sacred ground. Even the sandals we’ve made to cope with chaos are a hindrance between flesh and the holy.

The sun is taking its sweet time to complete its cycle drama and slip behind western hills. Facing this stage on the Pinnacle is a gently sloping rock outcrop. It’s smooth and slightly sinuous, made for a body in repose. This reminds me of a friend of a friend I knew who had a habit of hiking to high mountain destinations in the Spanish Peak range in Montana. He would reach his day hike goal on some nine thousand or ten thousand plus footer and lie down and take a nap. He did this many times over I was told. I like to think he was absorbing enough majesty for a few weeks of life down below. He’d wake up and silently move on like a Sandberg human version of fog and cat feet.

I find a comfortable position face up. To the left of my head is a fig shape hole cut into the rock about the size of a man’s hand. It’s partially occupied with acorns, pine needles, a loose stone and a couple of leaves swept in by some careless broom. Like a cigar box of nature magic some child of bygone era might collect and hid under his bed. I lie there for some time waiting for the feature film. The previews happen in the wind and the branches of leaves overhead. I get fascinated enough to film the movement on video for a few minutes. This is only good cinema if you wished to enter the best foreign film category “Best Pre-Sleep Award” I would add subtitles for the wind in some forgotten language like the Abenakis tribe in New Hampshire. I could view it when sleep ambled slow or when I’d forget that my Savior was the Creator first.

David before he was King of Israel was told to listen to the wind in the mulberry trees. When he heard it, he was to go to battle with his troops. You never know, a fight could break out any minute here.

Eventually I decide moving leaves is better left a poetry niche in my memory. I file it for the times when life goes concrete and cold and the wipers refuse to respond to rain.

I slowly drift off to sleep. An odd random metronome of wind keeps time over my head.

I don’t think I slept long when the volume of leaf movement seems loud and insistent by my left ear. I hone in. Has the wind increased? I turn my head slowly. One must be careful; an armed Philistine band may have crept up on me.

I once slept in a field on Durnam’s homestead up in the Gallatin Range

I’m snoozing in this field and I wake up to a semi-circle of angus cattle gathered around me. No doubt they were counseling as to what to do about this odd find in their grass and alfalfa. Perhaps they decided I was without a mattress in life and needed protection. I like that: friends in high places.

Come to think of it, I would have been sleeping across from the guy in the Spanish Peaks range. We could have joined company for coffee at Karst Ranch later and swapped tales of majesty or just talked cattle like cowboys.

Ah yes, I honed in to the wind sound upon awakening and no Philistines in sight but a chipmunk eighteen inches away rummaging around the treasure hole in the rock. Head popping in and out, all fidget and rodent intentionality. The usher around here had apparently come to check for tickets. We make eye contact, say hi. He goes to busy; then eye contact with my smile added. His black eyes fix my gaze like the unblinking hold of baby’s pupils. Primal innocence pulls a spirit primal urge in me to somehow span the centuries between this creature’s naming in the Garden to now. What has been lost in the translation to connect? Where are the Abenakis when I need their input? Spiritually, I grasp for the tendril a forearms distance from a whole branch of understanding. I’m all thumbs in an emerging world full of eyes.

My bigger questions have been: “What is this branch, this stewardship of creation? How can you steward what you cannot connect adequately with?” These thoughts are my homework when I get the craved time to go home – to mountains, rivers and stones that talk. Today I get chipmunk eyes, black and unblinking like pools that hold great fish and secrets.

I reach into my right pants pocket, pull the camera and click off a dozen pictures to show my wife. I barely catch the show. The sun bows and moves with its slow gait down behind the western hills. So many times the greater light has been one upped by the actors and activity around it. And yet the show is nothing without a greater illumination of light.

I do a sort of roll and stand to my feet. I walk off this holy ground and thank the owner for a great show.

Back down the mountain, I’m asked “Did you get something up there?” Perhaps it’s directed toward me as a person that has some sort of seer abilities or possesses some prophetic insight on spiritual geology. Maybe I’m being tested for sanity in case I’ve slipped into an unforeseen spiritual dimension and need an emergency extraction. I don’t have anything to say I think would satisfy and it has noting at all to do with the validity of the question.

A slight smile finds its way and creeps across my face and secretly follows the course of a hidden sun, storing up mystery as it goes.

My hand plays with an acorn in my jacket pocket.

Chatter

2010-09-29T21:16:00.000-07:00

Somewhere east of Butte Montana on Interstate 90, the Clark Fork River comes into view. The lazy waterway at this flat ingress begins a long stitching process, weaving a watery thread connecting a dark grey band of highway to landscape. The ribbon is woven in until the Clark Fork takes an abrupt compass heading north at the town of St. Regis. Then a finer needle is thread with the waters of the St Regis River playing tag with the interstate until getting lost in arboreal riot at the base of Lookout Pass near the Idaho boarder.

I make this trip often as I travel from my home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to Bozeman, Montana where I used to live. It’s business, it’s old friends, it’s teaching and speaking stuff that makes me roll on this 365 mile ribbon of highway. It is not just any highway, it’s alive with 30 plus years of memory. In the last few years it’s been traveled at least six times a year and become kind of an aboriginal, vehicle driven “walkabout”.

It’s a travel through 21^st century dreamtime where somewhere between purpose and daydream and weariness and worry and wonder meet. It’s where I encountered a Native on horseback in a vision at the boarder of two states. There’s more over these three years I cannot tell yet. It’s become a stretch of road to receive revelation.

It’s the depths of this watery thread I’m looking into now. West of Missoula and headed home to Idaho.

I peer down beyond glare and reflection to fish. Moving to the hypnotic whirr of uneven tires that need replacement, I imagine generations of trout witness to flow and riffle, deep slow pools and branch shrouded banks. Grandfather fish have seen the mystery of cloud traces, seen an elk tongue lick water surface, otters play and anticipate a largesse of feast at spring salmon fly emergence.

The Book of Job states, “Ask the fish of the sea and they will explain to you…” I assume their landlocked cousins have the same powers to recount events. Was godly Job delusional? How much we have lost to flood stage and left to rot on neglected banks. Our theological fishing guides were so good they left the natives who lived here and went on to manifest destiny. A destiny with a one dimensional Creator who wanted desparately to explain his hobby -mother earth - for some sons to come.

What’s that below? “They ate our fish bodies but left no thanks.”

I’m of European origin. I’m white. I grew up with people who knew more than God. I too had to stand and hear “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” I listen better than I used to- I like to think. I went through a lot of pain to hear the sun going down. I listen less to theology without scars and brambles underfoot. I worship with Indians in their way and mine. I have a gifted drum and medicine bag. I attend Burning Man because it makes me live the life allotted to me by Jesus and like Jesus, I have been washed by their tears. I have fallen in love more and attend religious institutions less. I talk to trees and birds on occasion. Today, I strain to hear their fish tales rising above the white lined stitches of man made highway.

Softy:

“The Lord God made this: all the mountains, the watersheds, witness of rock and transient cloud. In all your grey highway thoughts – give Him praise.”

I think their telling sometimes rises in song. Like raconteurs in hydrologic harmony not fully perceived by these damaged ears. A song originated by a greater Hand to add bassoons and oboes to the strings of wind against taunt fir and pine. Sometimes the way to perceive is to sing with them in other tongues and ancient voice. If I could have but one day in the original garden, could I have comprehended the symphony swirling there? Would I have responded by falling to the earth screaming “IT’S all too much!”?

My wife once did an experimental worship project for eight months. She had encouraged the collected band of friends and musicians to use vocalizations not in any known language (Think a little Bobby McFerrin here) for many weeks. On one particular night, it clicked, the sounds came primal and jungle and praise. No one forgot that night.

I find myself on this return trip all to often consumed in the greys of this highway especially when tired and thinking thoughts that are better left to decay like detritus on forest floor. This is a vigilant time. A time not to miss the subtle interludes of soft lyrical passage. There are times altogether where the noisy overture of praise passes my notice. The explanation too slips behind a logjam of thoughts.

On a focus day, grace seems more grasped like the sure grip on the steering wheel. I participate with ease in the revelry of sound, of story and of song. On occasion, I pull off the road and cut the engine. Straining, I listen and take the baton and lead. I knew the song in my spirit all along. I discover again and again, it is as ancient as the seven days of creation and as fresh as Romans 8. I must remember this. I offer too my verses to this writers convocation. My hands touch water to by way of blessing and to feel the medium of response.

Ask the fish and they will explain to you.

Somewhere below Lookout Pass the chatter ceases. I crest the pass and think about the Indian warrior again. I’m on a down hill flow to a place of lakes, a loving wife, an ongoing narrative in my own God given place called home.

Post Israel Thoughts: Motion and Rest part 1

2010-04-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

It’s April. I’m in Israel with a literal handful of friends to attend a commercialized new age and music festival on the Nitzanim coast. For us it’s an exploratory fishing expedition maneuvering our boat into a youth party scene. We essentially are the strangers here, noting wind direction and trying what may stand out in our bait and tackle box or in the case of strange seas we act by doing seemingly nothing for a while. Two days out and its good. We feel the encouraging tugs and a few bites. The wind of the Spirit has favored the sails. For an outward show of catch and reward we won’t make the Fishing News. This is an expedition for now.

I remember a photo somewhere of a friend kissing a large trout he had caught. An outward sign of an inner love to fish. We are predisposed to love this culture. The mother and father within us drives us to risk the depths and sundry opposing forces. Our action is to move intentionally toward touching them. It’s literal most times – the touch, the hug, a kiss –god with skin on. A nibble, a bite of knowing and the surface tension of water breaks; “Who are you?” “Why are you here?”

This Spirit life: a cycle of motion and rest: a divinely inspired oscillation between the two. Adam comes in from a hard day naming animals and walks with his Creator in the cool of the evening. We move from a Martha doing the needed tasks to Mary in balance, sitting as necessary. Many years ago I watched some Kenyans just wasting time in my younger mind waiting for a bus. Driven by a mind “to do” as an American I embraced the demon of ascribing little value in this. A wiser man said the Followers use the time to pray. This demon gets expelled (action) but by prayer and fasting (rest) an even wiser man said. It’s a daily cycle young Adam. It’s a time sliced cycle here and at home. It extends to seasons this rest and motion.

So I walk the beach of Nitzanim. It’s morning. The drone of the multitudes is softened by sleep. Rest in the microcosm is gathered when needed. It’s needed. Hundreds of small shells crunch beneath not-so-tough feet. The ebb and batter of small waves mimics the theme of oscillation. “Come away with Me even if it’s an hour or so.”

I walk thinking how meditative it would have been as a first century fisherman repairing linen nets after an all night outing. Katartizo is a Greek word for the mending of nets found in Matthew’s writings. Paul uses the same word in a letter to people in Ephesus.

In chapter four Paul is on a roll of encouraging them with the eyes of their understanding to be more fully opened to bear one another in love. Some of them are gifts given to equip (katartizo) the people of Jesus to do ministry work – the motion. I move between two images. Katartizo as mending net ends together to complete something designed to catch and to hold. I hear waves land and recede against so many shells. and present and future cycles of training and perfecting and a sea of possibilities to pursue.

It is compelling to muse on the net and the caught become eventually one in the mind of God. Today on my small beachhead, linen ends come together in rest and become a greater whole inside.

The Places God Inhabits

2010-03-07T07:36:00.001-08:00

Agreed. The Maker of the universe has delight not in that which is built by hands but in the people he has prepared for himself. We are his Isaiah 66 resting place. Knowing that as a primary truth, it’s also noteworthy and hard to pass by the locations in sacred scripture where God would meet with people. Portals, windows, stones of witness and mountain tops are but a few locations that the Creator uses the creation to be a place of revelation.

Jacob is told to go back again to his stone pillow at Bethel and receive revelation there.

Jesus the pattern son frequents the hills and mountain tops to hear from Father. God directs others to show up at specific locales because he would do something there.

Cosider Naaman’s healing place, Elijah’s non-Hebrew widow’s home and the Upper Room.

I have seen and experienced a few such places in my journey. In fact, the more I pay attention, the more such places seem to crop up. The earth is the Lord’s after all. On my recent trip to Uganda with Uganda Orphans Fund we have become very aware of the importance of our guest house at our main orphan home at Kasozi village. It’s not really a guest house but a large studio type accommodation at the end of a building we have built for the teachers we employ to live in. Studio in the western sense because it contains a kitchen prep area, a large bed room and smaller bedroom space and a private shower space sans shower head. All other US born western comparisons to a real studio apartment are invalid. This is Africa.

It’s not occupied too often by guests so founder Duncan Hill and ministry helpers like me use it to have meetings, take meals and generally hang out while tending to the home needs and the children. We have had a burning bush catch our attention in that place to often to turn away unaffected. Last year for example, we were praying for staff after a meeting for general purposes and as God’s spirit moved, the staff fell to the floor having what we would call “time with Father”. The manifestation quickly grew out of man’s control to spread out to the grounds until the walkways and grass were covered with laughing littered bodies of staff, care mamas and kids. In the long run, this event caused a rising tide of the spirit where the children became more free to pursue God. The secondary effect was cleansing. The results were the removing some staff that were either a spiritual or physical threats to the children. Don’t mess with God’s upper rooms.

It’s February now. Kateh our friend and eyes of the ministry comes in this guest room with Ester, one of our young teachers. She has a dream to be interpreted. It’s a bloody, sick looking baby that is her perception. In the dream it’s being celebrated and praised by everyone but her. I tell he it’s her gift, her design, it’s her unique ability as a woman there to lead in a spiritual teaching ability that other’s see as a needed asset more than she does. She needs a change of perception. I grab her hands after being urged on by our mischievous Kateh (she knows the room and what God wants). “Imagine, Ester, drinking in the freshest water from heaven”. She closes her eyes and ends up sprawled on the bed pointing heaven wards and laughing. Father time. Sometime later we carry her to the spare room to make room for a film session in the big room. Ester lies across some pillows on some bed slats increasing the density of presence already there.

It’s our filmmaker Clay’s plan to film some of the children and workers history on where they came from physically and spiritually and unwrap where they are today in the goodness of what god has done. There are hundreds of stories to tell. Duncan and Clay have chosen a few subjects for film. The kids come and go. It’s not going well. Stilted. No flow. I casually suggest we leave the room with the exception of Clay and the film subjects. The suggestion is picked up wth an interpreter added to the mix. We clear the room for a seat on the “porch” and receive a lap full of ever changing kid bodies as our reward.

Maybe forty five minutes pass. The atmosphere is thick with this guest room thing we know to be our Father at work. I go into the kitchen. The doorway is filled with the frames of Duncan holding Clay in his arms. Clay breaks the embrace looks with face flushed and tear streaked. “I haven’t cried in years” He was behind the camera filming while Christine one of our care mamas recounted her story of becoming a widow with a baby after her husband went missing in some hazily understood rebel soldier activity in the north. Mysteries and tragedies abound in the back histories of our 210 plus rescued souls here. The camera rolled as she got to the part of finding God’s hand of help through Uganda Orphans Fund and her fierce and intense worship of a Father who saw her pain and responded. Clay looses objectivity. The camera records Christine slow lowering of a body language to the humility of concrete floor worship. She disappears from the frame. I of course see this all later on the plane. Now the room is filled with holy weight. Clay crying. Duncan in a reassuring “This is God. This is good” stance as father voice to Clay, flows with the moment. I gingerly walk the holy place, the spiritual equivalent of removing one’s shoes when the bush is burning enigmatically. Christine is slumped on her floor. An altar is here, a place where God inhabits. Her soft weeping is a polished mirror to reflect the glory of this on earth as it is in heaven reality.

2010-02-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

I just returned from a trip to Uganda with Uganda Orphans Fund. I go there a least once a year since becoming a board member of that organization in it's formation. Africa as many developing places in the world can be a shock to us who have seeming much in this world's goods. New visitors are often feeling the need "to do something". "Is it God or is it good?" is a question I have often faced. I recently wrote this to one of the new team members that get invited to experience our rescued kids and love on them.

Dear ____,

One of the universal languages for East Africa soon to be established (as I have heard) in Uganda is Swahili. They have a nice word to describe things in Africa. It's "poli poli" or slowly, slowly. It's not just a word but a concept, a way of life and learning. In a place where it seems there is so much to be done and so much "lack' in our western eyes, the tendency is to jump at many seemingly open doors to enact change. As some missionary friends of mine said "Kenya is littered with rusting projects" from first world nations after seeing a large community water pump doing just that because the donor nation could not connect with the people and their ways.

I have taken a personal view of my "ministry" - I don't really like that word - in Africa as almost moping and praying and saying "Oh God..." I feel comfortable with that and I occasionally get to do something that I believe has been more in line with His heart. All is not what it seems there. I have said a lot of things while trying to do something or connect with what seemed to be right people in our seven months in Kenya and Uganda in the 90's that I was blessed to have some flesh and blood experience of the heart correct me on.

Africa is a learning curve. A slow love affair is better. You and I are learning the simplicity of trust in a Dad who has the better answers for what's beyond what we see. God is in the details of what passes "poli poli" You will grow in wisdom for all your "next times" that Dad gives you.

Blessings,

Rob

A Time for Everything

2010-01-02T11:40:00.000-08:00

Connect with what people already know of the legitimate domain of God and build from there. God spent six days making himself known as Creator. His name Redeemer came sometime after the sixth day.

Christmas Fragrance

2009-12-25T14:43:00.000-08:00

"He (Jesus) came in light and left with fragrance."

I heard those words small voice-like a couple of weeks ago. An ordinary day working in my woodworking shop somewhere between the measure and the cut I'm sure.

Angels we have heard on high doing the ultimate first century light show. A directive given to shepherds to not to fear in this other worldly purity of light. An invitation given, not to kings, mayors or the prevailing religious leaders to protocol the Christ. Shepherds joining the front row of the eye opening show about to unfold on earth as it is in heaven. Unschooled shepherds, making the journey, seeing for themselves the promise of God in unpromising wraps, amazed and with voice spreading the news to those who would listen. Social networking of the God kind. Talk about favor in the media - people listened and were amazed at the new light. Just the start of the new thing.

Time passed and magi show up perhaps a few years later. Mystical men from "the east". The commentaries aren't definitive about who these gentlemen are. They presumably spiritually savvy, wealthy and apparently watch the skies and it's points of light. "We've seen His star and come to worship Him". This move of God is off to a rough start with such people of questionable background. Nonetheless they came. They worshiped. They protocol the prophetic gifts befitting a King from heaven with us. Gold, frankincense and myrrh are mentioned. I have on my shelf a book written on the Song of Solomon called The Bride of Christ. It was written in the nineteen-teens and went into great detail on the fragrances in Solomon's writing. Both fragrances are derived from desert plants grown in harsh conditions. The frankincense shrub can grow upon a stone if need be. The essential resins are obtained by the same means we obtained our healing - with His wounds we are healed. The beads of resin forming on slashed bark are called tears. A root out of dry ground becomes a tree, a cross. Tears become our rejoicing. Father has planted His son whose name is as fragrance (ointment) to be released.

" I love your light but your fragrance lingers"

The Child becomes a Man. The resin of character has blended with the doing good to all who came to Him. One woman can't stand the pressure of passion to what she has been given. Within herself and contained in a costly alabaster vessel is fragrance. She contravenes the protocol of a religious leader's dinner party with foot washing with her own hair, too many tears and the broken vessel released the spikenard's fragrance on His body on earth as it is in heaven. Two bodies now carry the essence of Spirit. The anointing for Jesus' burial filled the room. Filled the street the next day and perhaps beyond. I like to think that fragrance lingered in some dimension from journey to cross to empty grave. Accusations and fragrance. Judgement and fragrance. Lashes on open skin and fragrance. To this end was I born, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing and more fragrance. You get the picture.

It's Christmas. I'm left reminded of who He is and what He has caused us to be. Light definitely. But more than light is the growing up of a people who fill all places with incense, fragrance and essence. In a season of gifting, I'm thankful for the gift of fragrance that lingers.

Katie and I wish a Merry Christmas to you and the best of a New Year. Thanks for the prayers, the donations, the beds to sleep in, the meals at your tables and the all the precious intangibles.

Growing Up

2009-12-16T09:34:00.000-08:00

Odds and ends thinking on a rain -could- turn- to- snow day here in northern Idaho.

A quote from Arthur Burk:

"A child has to learn how to function by character in the context of community,doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, because it needs to be done before he is fit to be released in the context of developing his own design."

The back end (spiritually) of this statement assumes the child has some grasp of Father's unequivocal love. He or she has received some essential healing and moved forward in discovery and the training to do what needs to be done in community.

Why picking up the odd piece of trash, returning the phone call, the borrowed tool and showing up on time are important. The ointment of design is exquisite can can be marred by the years of avoided character training.

This season of mercy we find ourselves in is this new skin of "When you see us, you see Jesus" The ministry is of moving in essential principles not written in stone or parchment but a beating heart of divine proximity. Presence, light and now fragrance become the essential features of who we are and what and how we do it. A person could add taste and sound to this growing Domains a Creator Inhabits list.

Fragrance is a word for me to reconsider these days. The many smells of God. Some odors are pronounced like myrrh on Jesus feet and others subtle like the odor of spring rain. It's an art to mix perfume or cologne with science in back of it. The love motivates the to inspiration. The science is the faith guided by love "doing what needs to be done." Character is a good word here.

Fresh bread odors filled the house a few days ago. The smell some distance away, had to be tracked down to the kitchen, to the bread machine, before I could behold (and taste!) it's beauty. If the incense fills the temple, you smell it before you see the source. On the other had an old jacket I'd been wearing had a peculiar unpleasant odor. On day two of throwing it on, I recognized the rancid meat smell of cutting up a steer a few weeks ago. Katie says "To the wash with it".

Reminds me that I have to occasionally pick some flies from my ointment.

Bells on Horses

2009-11-22T13:28:00.000-08:00

In that day "HOLINESS TO THE LORD" shall be engraved on the bells of the horses. the pots in the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar"

Zechariah 14: 20

I was in a conversation yesterday with an advisor about what millennial Kingdom looks like. He talked about seeing it's clear signs, laid out in sacred scripture, in redeemed land and in government. It was less clear in redeemed institutions like the arts, family, education, entertainment, etc.

At the dawn of this mercy season, I get excited in my spirit when I see signs here and there, like the hand (symbolizing government?) that came out first at Tamar's giving birth. Tamar was delivering twins. The hand withdrew into the womb. As it happened, that hand did not belong to the first one out. The first child was Perez or Breakthrough. The brother that followed had the scarlet thread bound hand of what should have been the firstborn. His name was Zerah which I have heard translated as Sunrise or Dawning.

We are looking for births. Much excitement is generated at breakthroughs and breaches. Lord knows we need these expressions of the Spirit. I need this too. Lately, I have this thing in my craw though, a nagging that if the water doesn't rise and the curtain doesn't part for something outside us all, like dawn breaking across the great darkness I will not be fulfilled. Perez is a great kid but where's that one I long for: The Son of Righteousness who shall rise like the natural glory of sunlight. Pure and unadulterated by the cleverness or wiles of man.

Things sunrise-like happen. Things happen more often to me outside of religious structure. I remember several years ago at a little event called Burning Man, a countercultural festival of fifty thousand held in late summer. It parades and occupies in the shifting dust of a Nevada desert. I am one of that tribe, called to be a voice of a Greater in a place of sitting where my sojourning friends sit. I am a Burner. At this event, we do a posted spiritual menu of gifts of healing and revelation. We serve up transformational experiences for a seeking culture’s journey into light.

On one particular night, I was working with Scott. Two women who were lovers entered our tent for a spiritual "encounter". One, topless and pierced in uncomfortable places and the other artistic and chiseled in appearance were lead to us. Our female team members thought it would be "interesting" to watch Scott and myself work with them. Our tribe values good relations. I questioned the smiling intent of our women that evening in sending these guests our way.

I don't fully remember the details of that night. We interpreted a dream the first woman had and gave some insightful prophetic insights to the second one - very good response - Perez had shown his way. I proceeded into what I felt was a Fatherly blessing to our woman of the dream. Sometime and somewhere beyond the words of a fatherly apology for what men had done in her life and a blessing for this precious life before me, the weight of God fell. The Kabod of God. Like a curtain it did not open but fell on us. The four of us wept under the kind hand of a greater as a Zerah of love leveled us all. Words ceased. Like a mid day sun, the intensity of an incomprehensible light put into right order our individual lights. All right God, you take the wheel.

After that encounter Scott and I finished the evening by taking a walk. A speechless walk.

I live for the moments - few seen - I am ashamed to say when the love of God eclipses the gifts of God in such a way that there is a ceasing if the gift or gifts expressed [a token fulfillment of 1 Corinthians 13:8-10]. I'm thinking it's more like an eclipse than a cease. The giver is the source and the greater of what is given. What is any river to the climatic system overshadowing those flows? Again Perez is a very fine and necessary fellow but when the God who is light, approach-ably unapproachable in his many variegated, many sided (Eph.3:10) ways shows up, well, much transforms.

Fulfillment is a word, which I understand is one of the end goals of the mercy season. Transformation of social institutions will certainly have to occur as on earth is it is in heaven becomes real. The mercy season is not easy to explain with the net of English language or linear understanding. One takes a risk and follows the spiral yellow brick road of hope and asks Him for more out of desperation. You get to see a hand make an appearance on occasion. “I’m here, and boy, is there more to come”. Keep walking.

I set out thinking about redeemed things like the tools in my workshop. Instruments for worship. The simple cherry desk emerging from my hands is one of those Holy to the Lord things. I bless it's eventual presence to a writer's home of Jesus thought as the grain sharpens under planing. If you set out thinking this road you may end up in Kabod land. Interesting events have happened in my workspace. I think I'll stay the road. I kind of want to see what happens. It can get "scary wonderful' as Scott says.

The other thing I set out to do was to share a song. Our friends and fellow Burners, Andrea and Marjorie sang it several times over people at Burning Man this year. You know it. It's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". It caused our team and guests to crawl out of that "curtain" - leveled after lunch one hot day. It became our anthem God rested on this year.

Holy to the Lord like horses bells...

Of Leaves and Wind

2009-11-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

John 3:8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it

Goes. So is everyone who is born of the spirit

Acts 17:27 …in the hope that they might grope for Him though He is not far from each one of us.

I’m walking up a mountain called the Pinnacle. It’s a dedicated mountain – to God. A place of receiving, reception and…conception. Ah ha moments for me come like the frequent bursts of breeze that encircle this high place of revelation. Often.

My feet impose their way through a floor of fall leaves. The smell overwhelms the moment. I go back to a childhood of deciduous moments. The smell brings me back to jumping in piles of leaves with a Robert Frostian joy as in swinging in birches. I revel in the memory.

“Thanks God, for leaves” I work on my fulfillment of my Romans 1:21 impetus to glorify the Creator and be thankful. It’s no effort today. Easy, like a breeze.

I was in Salem, Massachusetts yesterday for Halloween. A place by so many of my fixed set standards not always perceived to be populated by thankfulness to the source of creation.

I am here too to watch leaves and wind interplay. I observe a wheelchair bound young man plow through a covering of leaves curbside. His feet move forward a pile growing by forward momentum. A determined joy on his face. Light stuff. Easily moved by man and wind with scant effort.

I’m nine years old. I emerge from a pile leaped into. My parachute intact from heights unimagined and plane unseen. I grope. I grasp leaves heavenward. [The aroma arises of earth, musk and elemental detritus] Leaves are flung skyward. A worship veiled in childlike glee.

Return to your source.

Fly on wings of wind, you outrageous colors of an artist’s pallet hidden.

Receive back what you have touched, imagined, you outrageous God of complexity – you architect too, of this simple moment of crunch of leaf underneath.

I look out at sky on this pinnacle to the Son. Wind moves through hair, brushes face and rustles leaves free from eleventh hour tree bound tenacity. Two days ago I met a gentleman who has an on line witchcraft school with a following of 200,000. He’s high level. We shake hands. He is respectful and studies my face briefly…I choose to see Nicodemus now…wind blowing around his heart and leaves too, made by a finer hand.

There are days when worship gets no better than this fall day. Oh the possibilities of thing set in motion by a finer heart.

Postscript: I must not forget this. I must remember.

Never underestimate the mountains of worship. Never underestimate the wind that swirls from the intimate moments at these heights. The leaves set free settle in valleys below, in towns unseen.

Imago Dei “the God who goes before us” Sometimes it’s a slight breeze that proceeds a greater wind that levels.

The Andrew Zimmerns Among Us

2009-10-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

“It’s Andrew Zimmern”. I nod toward a bald guy shoeless with white socks on. Katie and I are in the security line at the Minneapolis airport. Mr. Zimmern is several people ahead of us in the queue. I imagine his carry on going through the scanner. Roasted scorpions from central China for a mid-flight snack, Fuji fungi for a friend and perhaps those long gelatinous gooey worms hacked out of the cambium layer of some tropical tree. The latter would have to be placed in a quart sized plastic bag with his toothpaste tube for visual inspection.

I look at Katie, smile and say; “Offer him five bucks to eat a bug”.

Andrew has capitalized well on the fascination and abhorrence to consume something well outside the lines of your garden variety sashimi. A gastronome David Livingstone.

If it takes Reinhold Messner like lungs to bag the Everest’s of this world, he has proven his stomach mettle by eating his way across the continents.

Growing up, we had our Andrew Zimmern in a kid named George. My brother Mike once bought a gift variety box of chocolate covered insects through a careful search of a department store in Hartford. Minds whirring at the possibilities of such a find, we knew George would be the human guinea pig for experimentation in what human kind was capable of consuming. It would cost us.

“Hey George, we’ll give you a quarter if you eat this chocolate.”

“What’s in it?”

“OK. Fifty cents.”

“Oh…Kay”

George takes a bite. His face is not reflecting near the reaction we’d hoped for. He did notice a partial bee exoskeleton protruding out of the remaining bite.

“Tastes like Nestlé’s Crunch.”

George shrugs and takes our money.

On another occasion, we offered George serious coin if he would swallow an orange Fizzie. Fizzies are a kid drink product. You dropped a tablet into a glass of water. You got a questionable tasting concoction like sugared Alka Seltzer. Our minds danced with the vision of George having a noticeably distended stomach bloat with this challenge.

Mike and I stared at one another “He could explode.”, we speculated. We were not on Pfizer lab’s radar as research scientist candidates.

George bit…or rather swallowed. He burped a few times and took our dollar.

I vaguely remember the giant pretzels hollowed out and filled with red pepper, the orange soda can filled with salt water and the “how-much –to –eat-a-banana-peel?” caper. It was a dicey affair to eat food offered by the Mazza brothers in those days.

George supplemented his bottom line.

I watched Andrew disappear into the maw of the airport. Fare thee well. The money you could have made if only you were our friend.

Flight Path

2009-10-20T20:54:00.000-07:00

Lying in bed this morning. It’s time to push through the list of so much to do as my mind is not clear on exactly what needs to be done. I look up through the skylights that hover over our bed like portals to another dimension. No help there. It’s dawn grey. On the window to the left leans an arm of leafy locust diagonally across it. I stare hoping for a definable cloud, a flash of light, a sign. “Show me a sign”.

A single engine plane suddenly breaks into the glass pane canvas. It makes an impression against grey undefined. A determined movement across the skyscape, this little plane spotlighted in a sky so great, defines a moment for my brain. “Dear Lord be good to me, the sea is so wide and my boat is so small” – tradition says it’s an Irish fisherman’s prayer. Awash in sea or air unknown, rogue wave and turbulence of fears contrasted with possible doors of new worlds, I choose to believe the later – in one form or another. Linger too much on the wind and the waves and I go down. The knowledge of that this is process toward an expected end, I progress with an agenda that was set in place before sperm met egg and became me. I will get “there” if I don’t give up.

Recently, I had an old print made in the 1930’s returned to me. I had given it away more than 30 years ago. It ended up in a trunk belonging to a friend Charlie who lives in Maine.

“Do you want ‘WE’ back?”

“Please”

“WE” is a print of a painting of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis. A man, a dream and a plane are pictured high above in clouds and vast sea below. It last hung in a room I had constructed above an Old Fellows hall in a small town in Connecticut. I was maybe 22 years old then and my view was out a round window in the gable end. A view restricted to bars and factories – brick, mortar and smaller boundaries.

“WE” has come home, a reminder that with faith and some courage, Paris could be waiting. For me, to navigate 28 years of marriage or a Ugandan orphan’s smile or to embrace with a father’s intent the broken in this culture, I sometimes let myself hear the applause of One in a sea so wide. If you listen, you’ll be encouraged as you look out your window at endless sky on grey mornings.

Flying by Instrument

2009-10-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

I was talking to my brother yesterday. I was drawing a parallel with him on how walking in the Spirit is like a pilot who is certified to fly by instruments. The instruments become an extension of the pilots senses. A kind of ability to multitask and perceive more accurately where you are at and what to do about it. It reminded me of a story.

The last time I was in Connecticut I took a hike up to Castle Craig on Meriden mountain. What loomed high and long in journey in my childhood takes only 20 minutes from the car park trail head. At the top, I meet a 60 year old guy bicycling. Tom works at Pratt & Whitney. We eventually talk of God, relationships. Tom hints of this restless search for answers. Like his long bike rides (he goes form Hartford to New York city) on roads and trails, his thoughts seem to stop at endless trail heads without an expected end. "God is like a good Father. I'm a little boy holding His hand." My theology does not split the earth. I like Tom's openness and the opinions forced and set by the hard of life's pavement. I don't know how to dual with wrinkles and grizzle of face. His hunger and mine is where we meet as equals under God's kind eyes.

Tom is a pilot. He rents planes on occasion. He is licensed to fly VFR or visual flight rules, meaning in a storm or cloud bank, he is lost. He tells a story of flying near Mount Katahdin when all land reference was obliterated by heavy weather. His young passenger is disoriented and panicking. He wants to open the door at an undermined altitude. Tom eventually finds grace - a way out and a landing in Montreal. He talks of a son having his IFR or instrument flight certification which is a nice thing to have to avoid people wanting to bail on you.

I have hope listening to this parable. He on the endless pseudo-western Karma wheel of "If I do enough good or rethink this thing or I'm basically on a good- outweighing- bad scale." Visual VFR Greek thinking of if I can logically see point A to point B I am here. I am flying spiritually to my destination but only if the clouds don't come, the rains don't obscure and night never falls too quickly.

He lost a bride all of 17 years old and raised a smart son who's in his 40's and has a recording studio. The landscape below shows Vietnam, a career of factory job, other women and no relational long term commitments and the bicycle trails that goes on and on where my friend can see. He said he has hope for another 40 years to his sixty. "I don't want to die."

"What happens after you die?" my own father said to me a day earlier.

Much. The flight goes further and on. with the instrumentation of Spirit taking over the endless guessing of what we see by natural means.

Dad holds the hand of little boys who stumble in small but growing perspective. All I know is relationship and small, I think,is my knowledge of Father, flight and the language of the air. Faith is on the instrumentation array. It comes into understanding for others as we smile and pass on our own personal flying stories. For my mountain biking friend - you will find a better way to fly. For my 85 year old dad, you will find safe place to land in all this fog.