There is a scene in Jurassic Park where we learn how raptors hunt. The raptor you see is not the one who'll eat you. While you're standing very still, looking him in his beady eye, the others have snuck up on you from the sides and come in for the kill.
So it was last week that all my focus was on Matt, on getting him on that plane to Cape Town. On doing it with grace and faith and joy, leaping with no fear. So for a minute I forgot that I gave birth to two other sons, and I didn't see it coming, the thought that ate me alive, that came out of left field and tore me to shreds :
What if my other boys move away?
Other people's kids have done it. Dennis and I did it. Apparently you can survive it. But for a few days last week, fear told me, "
You can't."
In "Life Together", Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about the danger of "wish dreams." He is writing about life in the community of believers, but it speaks loudly to me about life in a family:
By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.
A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse.
Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly.
He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what He has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by His call, by His forgiveness, and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily.
I realize that I have a wish dream of my own, a vision of my family. And I am at the center of it. My wish dream is to have them all here, all doing things together, all coming in and out of the house, all satellites around us. In my vision, this is a full life. This is enough.
My wish dream could wreck my family, if I cling to it. And make me miserable in the process. Which is why God, in his grace, must shatter my illusion. She who loves her dream most does not love her children enough. Worse, does not love her God enough.
You don't have to be a Mom to have this fear. You might be clinging to a wish dream about your job, or your church, or what kind of house you live in. I'm not the only one going through this, and I know it from the conversations I'm having. In my Wednesday morning Bible study yesterday, we talked about faith & fear, and we shook in our boots as we read these words from Hebrews 10:
So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded.
36 You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised. 37 For,
“In just a little while,
he who is coming will come
and will not delay.”
“But my righteous one will live by faith.
And I take no pleasure
in the one who shrinks back.”
39 But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved.
Faith, Hebrews 11 goes on to tell us, is what the ancients were commended for. In the list of those commended for their faith, there are wish-dreamers and schemers. If you go back and read their stories, God had to say to every one of them, "Do not fear." Numerous times. Their wish dreams ended in devastating consequences. Their schemes failed them. Their God never did. They aren't commended for how perfectly they followed Him, but for the fact that they did. They chose following over fear.
You cannot stay where you are and go with God.
- Henry Blackaby, Experiencing God: Knowing & Doing the Will of God
Ok. Let's go.
