The Goose is Loose

I haven’t felt much like writing over the last two months, mostly because my heart has been AWOL and the rest of me…well, has been on the run.  I’ve spent much of the last 12 months confronting ”my stuff”and honestly, I have grown tired of the daily confrontation.  Sometimes, isn’t it just easier to check out for awhile?  

There is a reason Jesus tells us to abide (or make our home) in him because,  leaving the relative safety of The Path that Jesus has laid out,  I can easily find myself chasing rabbits down a trail until I’m lost in the woods.  For me, it happens slowly, like the hunter who catches sight of his prey and follows after it until, looking back, I realize I have lost sight of the trail.

But Jesus (and Henry David Thoreau) calls us to choose the “road less travelled”…the one that lies beyond “the narrow gate“.  It is less travelled because the Jesus life is not easy to follow.  At first glance, this path appears more difficult to navigate…and it is if we intend to do so in our own strength and using our singular resources.  It is not the path of least resistance.   But the difficulty of this terrain is an illusion because the sheer grace and extended mercy available to us on the Jesus Path are exactly what makes this path the right choice.  The relationship with Jesus as our intimate trail guide gives us something not available on the “wider path”…a tender offer of encouragement during trials, a source of strength in difficult times, a deep pool of water from which to drink when our souls become parched from the journey, a voice of truth to guide us back on to more charted territory.

Writer Howard Macy said “the spiritual life cannot be made suburban.  It is always frontier, and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed”.  The Wild Goose is full of mystery - his ways are not our ways…his path is not the well worn one that the world lays before us.  The path, as any avid hiker will attest, requires our full attention in order to navigate the often treacherous landscape.

I’ve spent years exploring the rabbit trails along the Jesus Path and while there can be peace and solitude in that neck of the woods, it is also a place where a man can hide out…induldge himself in the loner role.  Anyway, that is where a good part of my heart has been residing over the past two months.  I am thankful for the gentle prodding of Jesus to get back on The Path and that He doesnt leave me to find my own way back!

Albert Schweitzer said…”The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives” 

The reality for many men (myself included) is that we can be walking on the less travelled path, sure-footed in our recognition of The Path but,  just for a moment, we allow ourselves to be deceived…to think that we know a better way….to trust our own navigation skills.  I believe that the secrets we keep are one of the great culprits of the death he describes.  When we make choices to live a life of secrecy, it chips away at the soul, bit by bit, until parts of us die.  The secrets may be the big and blatant kind, like pornography or alcohol abuse but they can  just as easily be a secret way of thinking…and deep undercurrent of anger, lustful escapism, or greedy focus on the self. 

Jesus so tenderly allows us to experience that death of self because it was part of his plan from the beginning.  Paul reminds us of that in Galatians when he said, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”.  My flesh (and its selfish desires) must die in order for me to fully experience the life that Christ has planned for me and the disparity between a life lived chasing rabbits in the woods pales in comparison to the one we are called to live exploring the path with Jesus.