Everything Finished

It started in a wheat field, where the gold grains flowed like the waves of the ocean.  Where a man set eyes a plain woman.  A foreign woman.  It took a man like Boaz to notice a woman like Ruth.  And notice her he did, amongst the waves of that golden ocean.  There he met a woman named Ruth, and they started on a path already laid down for them, choosing to walking together.

It went on to a harlot in the city of Jericho, listening to the marching feet for seven days.  There was nothing but the marching.  No clanging of weapons or roar of soldiers, even though it was a battle.  There was only marching, which left no certainty of where or when the marching would end.  By the end everything would be saved or destroyed, depending on what side she chose.

It chose with the first woman standing at the Tree of Temptation, giving a foothold to the serpent with dark eyes and seductive tongue.  Her heart beat within her naked breast, hungry.  The fruit hung as a tantalizing backdrop to his tempting offer.  Too tempting.  Her will power shattered with her innocence, as she sunk her teeth into that sinful pleasure.  Oh how sweet it tasted, until it killed the best parts of her.

It had nothing good left.  A nation chosen by God decided to choose its own way: the way of destruction.  He wrung his hands and cried out, begging them to listen.  But they had already chosen to keep their luxuries over saving their damned souls.  There was nothing left to stand against the wrath of God.  All that was left was a man named Amos who wept, mourning how it would end with nothing saved.

It ended with a naked, bleeding man.  He stood with arms outstretched--like a beacon calling wheat-swept lovers to join the right story, like a shield holding back feet marching to destruction, like a blanket wrapping around the fallen first woman to comfort her with something new, like the banner of a new nation calling the old to join its side: the only side that could save them.  Such the naked man hung as, and wretchedly did his crowned head bleed as it raised to the heavens.

"It is finished!"

It was.  Everything finished... so everything could begin.

Whom Then Shall I Fear?

I am a fearful person.  Even this morning, I woke up and found a sort of haunting feeling dogging my sleepy, sluggish steps.  Lately fear has become a reoccurring theme for me.  I've always struggled with it, have conquered it in the past, but lately found an uncalled for suspicion that it could come back--that I could be reduced to a paralyzed, trembling child under the covers trying to shut out the dark once more.  This odd phenomenon (of fearing the return of fear) started when fear of the devil began to become a frequent theme in my quiet time.  The book I'm going through right now (Who I am in Christ by Neil T. Anderson) presses the point that we do not need to fear the devil.  Through his examples of fearful people he has counseled, I found similar signs to what I used to struggle with: the sudden terrifying visions, the waking up frozen in fear without cause.  At first I found some comfort in that.  It was nice to know I wasn't the only one.  But something in all those points unsettled me.  Anderson pointed, every time, to the devil as the source of these fears.  Now, I conquered my fears a year ago by the aid of God, but I never really accepted them as Satan's work.  In fact, here lies my first mistake that I want to point out.  

If you have fear, do NOT try and rationalize or excuse it away.  For years I put the blame on myself.  Being a writer, I have a rather vivid imagination.  I told myself, often, that these fears were just the darker side of my imagination at work.  I tried to reason them away by that stream of logic, telling myself they were nothing to fear because they were just part of my imagination.  I think I have since realized how those attempts to heal only further damaged me.  I won't digress any details, but the frightening and grotesque images that haunted my nights were not something I liked to own.  It made my imagination seem something rather twisted and cruel to think it could conjure such pictures.  My attempts to reason the fear away actually only hurt me, because I started to think of myself as the cruel, distorted mind that created my fears.  So not only was I inflicted by the fear, but also I was weighed down by self-reproach as well.  Every time the fear came I would scold myself for thinking things like that.  I could not make the images stop by that method, however, and bad turned to worse.  I spent more than one night in fitful, mostly non-existent sleep that granted no rest.  I eventually saw the uselessness of reasoning away fear and turned it over to God.  I accepted it as a fault of mine for Him to conquer.  That is not necessarily false.  Fear is, in a sense, a lack of faith which we should give to God for reshaping, but I missed one very critical part of the equation which Anderson revealed: the origin of my fear.  If I was to believe what he said, my fears were not from my mind.  They were from the devil.

To be honest, that scared me more than my alternative explanation.  Let's face it: it's frightening to think the devil got inside your head.  That realization brought back the threat of a relapse of my terrified existence.  If it was the devil's work and not mine, could Satan not do it again?  I started to glance over my shoulder, in a sense, just to make sure he wasn't there to plague me.  I got nervous.  This morning I went to my routine shower in a state of near panic.  The images were back, and I had never been haunted by them in the morning before.  In the past they were a thing of night and nightmares, not daytime.  Daytime had been my sanctuary: the balm for the wounds fear inflicted on my mind.  Now the devil was back, and making a clear statement of stronger presence by flaunting his powers in the morning hours.  I tried to concentrate--to think of all the reasons Anderson had given for why we should not fear.

The devil is a toothless lion: all roar and no bite.
We are secure in Christ.  
God is our rearguard.
I know who stands before me, I know who stands behind.
Whom then shall I fear?

All at once, it just sort of clicked.  It was like the moment you've been absorbing all the information about a mathematical process in vain, confused, and all at once the teacher says something that turns all the information into knowledge, and you have a full grasp of the concept.  I was standing there, just thinking about how the devil was out to get me and how he would succeed unless I remembered how to fight it, when God very clearly and almost laughing said one word.

Riddikulus.

Now, to all who disapprove of God speaking in Harry Potter analogies, I apologize.  Maybe He doesn't.  Maybe He just translated it into the sense my nerdy mind would understand best.  For all who do not understand the correlation, which might really only make sense to me, I'll explain.

In the wizarding world of that series, there is a creature called a Bogart which is a shapeshifter.  No one knows it's real form, because it has a nasty knack for taking on the shape of what you fear most.  As far as I know, it can't really do anything to harm, but it sure can make it's victims think it can.  It will haunt them with there fears until fear drives them mad, if it can.  But, luckily, there is a very simple defense: Riddikulus.  It is a spell which will transform the Bogart's shape into something ridiculous, making everyone laugh, and laughter is the Bogart's worst weakness.

So, for me standing in the shower trembling from the fear of the devil, it was a revelation of freedom.  I won't say all the spiders of my imagination gained roller skates and stumbled around, but I suddenly gained the perspective which rendered my fears to foolishness.  God gave me a glimpse of how laughable it was for a Child of the Almighty God to be standing there, frightened at the devil's presence as if it were a rarity.  First, of course the devil was after me.  He's after all Christians.  Actually, the fact he was taking time on me ought to have been an encouragement.  It means I'm worth his time.  It means I'm a threat to him.  Now that is a comforting thought.  Second, not only is the devil a Bogart, who can never actually actually hurt me, but I have Jesus Christ as my rearguard!  In modern language: Jesus has my back.  Why on earth was I standing there, shaking?  I actually laughed.  The entire picture was, simply and nerdily put, Riddikulus.


"Then your light will appear like the dawn,
and your recovery will come quickly.
Your righteousness will go before you,
and the Lord's glory will be your rear guard."
~Isaiah 58:8