“The world is intensely personal.” The lectures this year often began with these words. Perhaps just as often, I have found these words to be alien to my own worldview. What does it mean that the world is intensely personal, when I am not? Perhaps I have not been so personal in much of my past because I never had any deeply personal relationships until God stepped into my life as it were five years ago.
I still battle with my independence. What an inhibitor to becoming personal! Most of the time I functionally live as one who does not need anyone else. I am an island; however, I am now an island inhabited by another. Still, it is so easy for me to be so impersonal.
As I was reading through the course outline, I was jotting down notes as to what to write about, places where I saw I needed to change. When I came to the question “Do you enjoy the other person?” I was struck by the poignancy of it. This question has bugged me, and I have commented in other entries that there is a definite lack of love for others that inhibits me from wanting to know them. However, when I read it this time, I was struck by the fact that I am afraid, not to get to know others, but to be known by others. There are still sections of the self-protecting wall that I have erected in my heart to keep others at bay and so avoid the pain and hurt that those who are close to you can easily inflict.
Knowing this, I pray that God will give me a keener sense that He is a Refuge and Fortress, a Shield and Buckler, the Great Shepherd who keeps His own even in the valley of the shadow of death. The suggestion has been made to make the Psalms my own. I will meditate for the next while on Psalms 62 and 91.
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