I wanted to share something that is working healing in me from Brennan Manning's book, The Signature of Jesus. He is retelling the story of the demon-possessed man who lived among the tombs and cut himself with stones. After Jesus healed and set him free, the man wanted to do something great for the Lord. He wanted to leave everything and go with Jesus, but Jesus told him to simply go home and tell people what happened to him.
"Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you." Mark 5:19
That has always seemed sad to me, almost like a rejection. Like Jesus saying, you are a little too messed up to come along with me and my chosen disciples. But Manning sees the command to "go home" differently, not as a rejection, but as a calling. He sees it as crucial, foundational, as "first word," and has this to say about it:
"Yet he [the demoniac] was called, as we are called, to listen attentively to God's first word to us. This word is the gift of ourselves to ourselves: our existence, our nature, our personal history, our uniqueness, our identity. All that we have and are is one of the unique and never-to-be-repeated ways God has chosen to express himself in space and time. Each of us, made in his image and likeness, is yet another promise he has made to the universe that he will continue to love it and care for it.
"However, even when faith persuades us that we are a word of God, we may remain ignorant of what God is trying to say through us. Thomas Merton wrote: 'God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters me, if I am true to the thought in him I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself and find myself nowhere. I shall be lost in him.'
"With endurance and perseverance we must wait for God to make clear what he wants to say through us. Such waiting involves patience and attention, as well as the courage to let yourself be spoken. This courage comes only through faith in God, who utters no false word." -- Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus1 (bold emphasis mine, italics Manning's)
God spoke the universe and all the people in it into being.
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth. Psalm 33:6
Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness … Genesis 1:26
John writes that Jesus on earth was the word of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:14
Is it such a stretch for me to believe that I am a word spoken by God? That God has something he wants to say through my life? Yet, it is even harder for me to accept that God utters no false word, that what God speaks into being is good.
And God said … God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. Genesis 1:24, 31
Manning urges us to listen to the first word that God speaks to us. The first word spoken to the demoniac was "go home." Maybe that is the first word spoken to all of us hiding among the dead, hating ourselves, hurting ourselves – physically, or with words. Go home. Be who God spoke you to be. You don't have to be somebody else. You don't have to be better or more or smarter or whatever it was that was held up before you as what you were not. You don't have to be the wonderful one. Just be. In Him.
Can I abandon myself to the Spirit of God, the breath of God, the wind of his mouth, the Ruach, and let him blow me into the world with his message, a message that maybe only he will ever know? A message that I cannot create, or "do," but only be? "... another promise he has made to the universe that he will continue to love it and care for it."
For those of us still hiding back behind the tombstones of shame and self-hate, Manning goes on to say this:
"One of the stunning lessons of the Bible is God's free use of fragile human beings to accomplish his purpose. He does not always choose the holy and devout or even the emotionally well-balanced."
Ha ha, that made me smile. That is very good news for some of us. So, whoever we are - you and me - and no matter how messed up and emotionally unbalanced we happen to be, no matter where we are on our journeys, let us abandon ourselves to God's good purpose. For he utters no false word. Let us "be lost in him." Let us go out and be spoken.
1Quote from the introduction of The Signature of Jesus, "An Opening Word."
Photo, Shattered Glass, by Sheila Bair
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