grimrack

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed.

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.

If we blind them to The Adversary __ecrease their desire for The Desire_ while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing __reedom of choice,_ then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

And keep them thinking in terms of 'being good' as this is not an end so much as a means to something else __appiness, respect, self-esteem, etc_ And whatever their true end is, take it away, and so goes their goodness.

Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: __hat-Would-Jesus-Buy___ell now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.

Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.

And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as the stage and props for Heaven to reveal itself. There is now nothing ordinary. Everything is being used and spun out for His vast scheme and in His eternal economy, nothing is wasted. Suddenly, all the myriad moments and minutiae of a lifetime show their orchestration __here was nothing that did not lead to this! They look over all their time to find that His redemption has always been rushing, swooping, swerving through their experience, racing to and fro to intervene and infuse Grace.

When their minds mingle with His magnanimity, something of eternity rubs off on their imaginations.

The Adversary, of course, simply wants them to lay down their sins, guilt and all, and follow Him. But this type holds on to their sinfulness and their guilt for it, because otherwise, they__ have no relationship with Him at all. And, of course, no relationship can be based on guilt and survive.

There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside his ciphers, the circle his mind has drawn, his trust evaporates.

The eye is to light as the soul is to God.

When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone.

All this has been happening around them all the days of their lives though they couldn__ see it, then one day, Prayer removes the veil and everything changes. Think of it this way: Picture a man whistling a tune, when out of nowhere, first a harmony joins, then another, and then suddenly he is taken up into a whirlwind of music, countless instruments playing soaring complexities that the man__ whistling is, indeed, a part of, but now he begins to see how small a part; the longer he listens, he realizes that his is not the melody and where he had thought he was whistling alone, the truth had always been the music playing, though never before that moment heard, and now what had been noise becomes symphony.

Properly understood, Imagination and Prayer are directly proportional __he more they pray beyond their bounds, they expand their vision beyond their resources, their experiences, their expectations.

True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about __nowing God,_ they mean more than, __ understand what you__e saying about God,_ but also, __t fits my experience of Him.

When young, the humans are all Imagination because Memory is so much smaller a part of their experience, so little of them is grounded in it. As they grow older, however, Memory overtakes their Imagination, outweighs it. But when they pray with ever increasing confidence, they see with an ever-increasing and youthful Imagination and such burgeoning of possibility causes even their Memory to be lightened and redeemed. The scales fall from their eyes and they wait on their Father with the same childlike wonder that watches a sunrise to see what might happen this time.

But here I__ like to add to what the Tempter__ Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward.

They scold their own hearts but it actuates no real change, only deepens the wound. But they can__ look away from it. Thus, by paralyzing their Present, we beat The Adversary on His home turf. And loop after loop, the depressed haunt and harrow themselves, sometimes for years, when they have only, for a brief moment, to look away from themselves, to look up.