Hearing Ears

I have mentioned tension before, I think.  It's where I live, the truest experience of faith that I know.  Tension, being pressed or pulled between two seemingly opposed forces, and finding identity in the mystery of remaining in between.  Tension.

One of the primary tensions of my walk with God is that of obedience and trust.  I've written of this before, in different terms, and will undoubtedly write of it again, simply because I walk to its cadence most of the time.

I'm reading through Deuteronomy.  The twenties are miserable reading for me, because they outline some of the harshest portions of God's law (which I struggle to swallow), followed by repeated curses that are to follow if the law is not followed perfectly.  Miserable, and if it not for chapter 30 I might just skip the book and try something more palatable.

After reminding Israel of what the Lord did in rescuing them from Egypt, in Deuteronomy 29:4-6 Moses says this bit:

But to this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.  I have led you forty years in the wilderness.  Your clothes have not worn out on you, and your sandals have not worn off your feet.  You have not eaten bread, and you have not drunk wine or strong drink, that you may know that I am the Lord your God.

So often I find solace in the truth that God's people can be His even without the fulfillment of their hearts, eyes, ears.  I am so often blind, so often discouraged by my lack of affections for my God, despairing for my regular inability to hear His voice.  I live there, so often.

But Moses continues, and reminds God's hardened people of what the Lord has done.  His word has protected you.  He has fed you with food, physical and spiritual.  After the cross, we would add that He has dwelt among us, died for us, risen in hope and life and victory.  And that will carry me through.

I wrote a song once that had the stanza, "My boots still squeak like the day they came/In the mail with a guarantee/That they'd carry me where I've been/And they'd take me where I need to be."  That's so often my understanding of faith.  I have received it, but not arrived.  I have been carried by grace before I knew I had it, and must trust that it will continue to carry me even after I've grown concerned about my squeaking step.

My prayer is often this:

Lord, give me eyes to see and ears to hear
and a heart to know You, to really know You.  More and more.

But, I don't stay there.   I mean, I don't meditate on my lackings.  Because, if I believe I can pray that prayer, I must trust that He has already brought me into relationship with Him.  Which He has.  I could tell you stories on stories of His involvement in my life.  And so to those stories of His faithfulness I cling, as the Israelites clung to their stories of redemption and freedom.  I tell them to myself.  I write them down.  I talk about them.  I read over my flashcards, as I did this week.  Because, even when I feel far, and blind, and deaf, I have known intimacy, seen the hand of God, heard His voice, sweeter than music.  And that helps me trust that He remains, that His love abides, in the wilderness.  Thus my identity is formed on Him, and my dependence maintained.