Restore My Joy… Enable Me To Go

“Yet I will Rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of the deer, he enables me to go on the heights.”-  Habakkuk 3:18-19

In October of 2012 I moved from Indiana south east to North Carolina, I left my family and a great group of friends behind. I didn’t fully realize how much those friends really meant to me until I found myself battling loneliness in my little apartment. I missed the deep philosophical conversations about competition that my friend Bobby and I would have over a game of cards. I missed the late night runs to Stake N’ Shake and our off key renditions of the Avett Brother’s song “Shame, which I’m sure we sang a thousand times. I missed the random weekly get togethers at someone’s house. You can’t really recreate that atmosphere of joyful community we had. That longing to just be together with others went with me when I left.  Ever sense those first few weeks here I have been praying for a community of people that I could just worship with and be myself. People who were more interested in being the church rather then doing church.

Over the months I started to get more discouraged and more lonely. I was discouraged by the fact that even in the church that I work at as youth pastor, there wasn’t that community. The doing of Church was all there, but the level of community and openness that I have had before was not. I found that it is much harder to lead when you feel like your running on empty. I am such a people person it hurts when I have to be alone. I think this probably has to do with the fact that I was raised in a house with four sisters and parents who always welcomed in our friends. When you are around people so much like I was growing up sharing life is just part of living and so when I am in a place where I am less able to share life with others it feels like I start to die. It’s as if my souls is fragile and weak outside the context of community.

Slowly, I started to make a few friends through some retreats that I attended as a leader and started to see hope again of community. Hope is a powerful thing, when hope takes root the world starts to seem like such a brighter place than before. So as I got to know these people a little more I started to hang out with a guy also named Caleb, which I find ironic. That was the start of God answering my prayers. I had not given up, but my hope had been fading.

Two weeks ago Caleb ask me if I want to go to a house concert in Greensboro where a local band was playing. I didn’t know the band but that didn’t bother me because concerts are one of my favorite things. So we went to the concert in someones living room where we knew no one. There was maybe 30 people crammed in the front room of the house. The small intimate space made for an awesome setting and the music started playing and I felt my soul coming back to life. Every word of the each song sounded like sweet worship to my ears.

After the show we were leaving and ran into the lead singer in the street. We started talking and just out of the blue he invited me to a monday night worship gathering that he and some friends have every week. I was stunned and excited because in my heart I knew thats what I wanted, really what I needed. A rough week went by and I sorta forgot about it. But then monday hit and I remembered the invite and looked him up and asked him where the gathering would be. He told me but said he wouldn’t be there. I thought about not going because I made the excuse I wouldn’t know anyone but I felt God kept saying you need to go, just do it and trust me. So I went, I drove up the greensboro to a neighborhood I had never been to, to a house I had never seen to hang out with people I have never met and it was exactly what I needed.

When I showed up I knocked on the front door but no body answered, after making sure my directions were right, I knocked again and realized the door was unlocked and cracked a little. I would’t recommend this but I let myself in. I heard some people talking in the back so I yelled hello and walked in. There were two guys there who welcomed me as if I was suppose to be there and just like I was a friend.

Others started showing up about 20 of us were there and we all shared a meal and talked. It felt like home to me. I didn’t know anyone when the night started but I felt like I was suppose to be there. After we ate we all moved into the living room and two of the guys started leading worship. There wasn’t sheet music or hymnals, they just picked a key and started singing and everyone joined in. As we sang I was reminded of my time in High school where we use to have a time of worship every wednesday night, where we would just sing worship songs together, no set order of songs or set time. We would all pray for those who needed prayer and just share together.

As the the group sang “Restore the Joy of my salvation God, be my hope oh Lord”, I was filled with Joy again. Joy that i could just be with people that just wanted to be together and sing praises to the Lord. People who just wanted to share a meal and conversation for no other reason than to be in community. It says in Acts that the early church met together, broke bread, prayed, worshiped and just were the church. The church was the people the community. I realize my faith is much stronger in the context of community. When in a place where I can be myself and just sing with all my heart for the Lord. Where life is shared in open honest community.

As the night closed the group shared praises and prayer requests.  There was both joy and sorrow shared with no hesitation. I told the group that I had been praying for a place, a community where I could just worship with others my age and felt like God had lead me there that night. It’s one of those God things. You look at it after the fact and say wow, I didn’t see that coming but I sure am glad it happened. As I drove away I felt God restoring the joy of my salvation.

When I woke up the next morning, I turned on my Bible app on my phone and read Habakkuk 3:17-19 “Though the fig three does not bud and there are no grapes on the vine, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stall YET I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights”

The Lord has restored my Joy and he is my strength, out of the loneliness and times when nothing seemed to be going right God was still working. He is faithful to restore, even when it doesn’t seem like it in the midst of the drought. He will enable us to God where he leads. I hope to go back again to be with this group of people, to be in community and to go where God leads.

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Day 28 “A Year of Thoughts”: Eat this book

“Reading is an immense gift, but only if the words are assimilated taken into the soul- eaten, chewed, gnawed, and received in unhurried delight.”- Eugene H. Peterson

This quote is one of the many that has stood out to me as I have had the opportunity to read Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading by Eugene H. Peterson. If you were able to see either my dorm room or my room back in Indiana you would find shelves, drawers and stacks of books. Some of them I have read and reread. Some wait their turn to be read and some may someday be opened for the first time. But reading is a gift. One of the early points that Peterson makes in this book is that the Bible is not simply another book.

Growing up in family that reads, a lot, I have been around books and have heard the continence of the Bible from a very young age, but it’s not about the books that you read but how you respond. Peterson’s in this book is trying to explain that eating the Bible is not a book that you can read and not respond to. It should move you, effect you and change you. Reading is a gift but scriptural reading needs to go deeper than a surface level. It needs to be eaten, chewed, gnawed, and taken in a way that is refreshing and nurturing to our souls.

I understand this now, that reading is like eating. You take in the information, but you can’t stop there. You can’t just take in the food without digesting it. It’s pointless to shove a banana down your throat without chewing it first. Your body was not made for steak to be taken in and passed right through, likewise Peterson continually reminds us in this book that we are meant to consume God’s word for more than just the mere means of saying we have read it. We must eat it. It would be unfortunate to have read the Bible or any book for that matter and not be in some way challenged or changed.

Our culture feeds off the mindless activities that do not have any intention of moving our souls to wake up and to thrive. Reading the Bible should not be a mindless activity that leaves us with no reason or place to respond. In the words of Peterson “In our reading of this book we come to realize that what we need is not primarily informational, telling us things about God and ourselves, but formational, shaping us into our true being”(pg 24). When we are able to move from just reading to being transformed by the words applied to our lives, that is the point.

We become more out of our reading. It is not all about knowing. What we take in through our minds should penetrate our hearts. Through all the translations of the Bible we have found that the words have become readable for almost anyone in any country, however, Peterson alludes to the text as being more than readable. It should be livable. It is liveable. “The Bible… is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole”(pg 18).

Peterson, writes of the example in the apostle John being given the command to eat the book that is given to him by the angel. He did not deny the fact that the very words that he was writing must be consumed and lived out through his life. John experienced the gospel first hand. He lived with Jesus and learned to make his teaching a part of his life. John ministered to the broken and poor. He lived the words of Christ. He took them in and ate them, not to simply survive but the thrive and to show Christ to the very world that he lived in.

“Eating a book takes it all in, assimilating it into the tissues of our lives”(pg 20). To follow the example of John is our goal and challenge that Peterson puts forth. But how do we do that? How do we move from just being a reader to being an eater? Moving from just consuming for the knowledge of knowing all the words of the text to assimilating them into our lives. First we must allow the Holy trinity to work through our reading. We have to keep it personal, real, honest and applicable to our lives today. It seems easy to say but harder to do.

We must allow God to speak through the scriptures. It is his voice that we hear in the words and should lead us to live them out. God is at his core relational so it would only make sense that when he calls us to take in his words and apply them it is in a personally relational way. When we eat the scripture we are participating in that relationship. There is this personal understanding that God can work through and in our lives. When we can understand that God can work in us and change us, the text becomes almost in a sense more eatable, more applicable, and more personal.

Peterson gives a great example of the tool of Lectio Divina. Simply put Lectio Divina is practice of or way of reading the scriptures that guards us from doing so in a depersonalized way. The opposite of this kind of reading would be skimming simple to take credit for reading something. Lectio Divina is more than that. It’s a deeper more personal reading of the text. It’s slow. It goes against our consumer mindset of devouring what we read with no assimilation or growth. We consume the text through spiritual reading. Lectio Divina means spiritual reading.

How do we spiritual read something? For centuries the practice of Lectio Divina was carried out in a slow and contemplative way. Contemplative means to slow down and take in. Like eating again contemplative spiritual reading is reading that is meant to nourish and become a way of living. There are four parts to spiritual reading. The reading, the mediation, the prayer, and contemplation.

The reading as Peterson explained through most of the first half of the book is getting in the word and chewing on it. Reading may be understanding the context, style or way in which it was written and pouring through that reading. An example of this for me is taking a pen to what I am reading, writing between the line or underling the voice that seems to be speaking through the text. This reading takes intention and openness to grasp the many metaphors of scripture.

This openness and understanding is carried over to the second part of the spiritual reading which is mediation. This is often where we have to think upon the text and allow God to reveal himself through it. Going back to the Peterson quote, “The Bible… is the text for living our lives. It reveals a God-created, God-ordered, God-blessed world in which we find ourselves at home and whole”(pg 18). When we are reading we have to listen for God’s voice in our lives, that shows through when we mediate and continue to eat the words slowly.

This mediation of the text is also paired with prayer. Prayer is the third step of the spiritual reading. From my understanding of the reading this book, prayer is a part of the relational and personal act of interacting with the text and God speaking into us. In prayer we are in conversation with God over the text and allowing him to move through our words and requests. “Prayer is language used in relation to God… the most universal language, the lingua franca of the human heart”(pg 103).

It’s from prayer that we move to contemplation. This almost a soaking in of the reading, prayer and mediation. In contemplation we might do all the other steps again, but ultimately contemplation should move us to application. Where the text is integrated into our lives. It become not only what we have read but what we are living. That is what the Bible calls us to, is to live it.

In the closing chapters of Peterson’s book he writes about the many translations that have come over time. However, through all of those translations the message has stayed the same. The story from Genesis to Revelation is still the same and it still call us to live. To eat this book and find true life in our savior Jesus Christ.

In all I really enjoyed reading this book and have found it very helpful in my understanding and application of spiritual reading. It challenges me to eat what I read. To take it in and apply it. Reading is not always the problem, moving to a place where the reading becomes life is the challenge. Peterson through his book Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading has challenged me to rediscover my passion for reading the scripture, but not only reading it but living it.

-Caleb Ross Hunter

P.S. sorry for the length of this post but my hope is that you might be able to take something away from this as I have.