Becoming Radical: A New Order

from NASA

"He cuts out channels in the rocks, and his eye sees every precious thing".
- Job

I remember when I first heard that manned flights to Mars were in the realm of possibility. I had one of those "pick me" moments. I love the beauty and mystery of space. They said it would take two years to get there and I imagined a long quiet trip, looking out at the stars and being brought face to face with myself in a new way. I am amazed by the patterns and organised complexity of the universe, the fledgling stars, the forming galaxies, and the immensity of a whole system of systems. Looking down the microscope can be similar - seeing into invisible places that have their own dynamic type of order.

Order is something that is not always apparent. Sometimes things appear chaotic, or random, and my understanding of the principles and processes is incomplete. Yet one thing I've observed in life is that we all have some system of order, some kind of repetition and rhythm, though we may not consciously be aware of it. I've seen that even the most chaotic looking life has a pattern.

I was like a lot of people in the sense that I wanted to discover, and to depart from some of the established order - to "do my own thing" as we say.
Doing my own thing - that mental picture of discovering new territory and being an individual. In a way I thought I could order my own life and everything would fall into place as planned. But life isn't like that. I expect you know what I mean. Life has the unexpected - it can be like being broadsided by a hit and run rather than a long quiet and uneventful journey. I was thinking about it this week as I enjoyed the tail end of summer and was in good spirit. It's been a marvellous season. And I thought of the other seasons - the ones when things don't seem to make sense, the times of loss, or trauma, and how I often viewed such difficulties as out of order.

I think of Job, whose story is one of the most ancient known to us. Job was a man who had what we call a good life - a productive, orderly, and happy life. And then he had loss. He lost his children, his employees, his assets, and his health, in a series of events one after the other. Job tried to find a rhyme or reason for what happened while his friends found one speculative reason after another to condemn him for bad character. They equated an orderly life with good character. A life with suffering and loss indicated bad character. Job's comforters were no comfort.

I've often thought about Job. I can recall times when I did experience the consequences of my own character - we all have experienced that. But I've also experienced things that didn't add up to me. You may know those sort of times - when some-one dies, when it doesn't seem right that the world carries on, when ill health means missing an opportunity, when people don't play fair in the big wide world and take advantage. I suffered a serious trauma in my childhood and that had left its mark too. Over time my response to those kind of things had created a kind of order of its own. Some-one once said to me it's like breaking an arm and not getting a cast - it sets crooked. My order was like that - I'd set myself a certain way but I was spiritually disabled. Over time I realised I needed a radical change - I was aware of a pattern. What started as fun had become habit. What had been independence had become a treadmill. We can create these sort of repetitive patterns to try and shut out the reality of life and we live in spiritual disorder.

A while back I talked about becoming radical and said:

"Radical comes from the latin radix, and means the root of something. Being radical is not, as often thought, a diversion or unorthodox departure from a source or origin. It is a return to the source or origin. It means getting to the heart, the truth, or the core of something".

I needed a revolution. I'd been reading about revolutionaries. People who tried to bring a new order to the world. I read Blood in My Eye by George Jackson, the Black Panther member. It was a strange book, full of violence and rhetoric. But one phrase stood out to me and I couldn't get it out of my mind. Jackson wrote,"Revolution should be love inspired". I was clever, creative, cared deeply about injustice, was good at organising other people, and in a relationship with some-one. But that sentence undid me. I didn't really know love. I tried thinking of revolutionaries of love and could only think of Jesus - because he had suffered. His love stood the test of the hardest experiences. It wasn't long before I had tossed Jackson aside and was pursuing Jesus, with disputations at times, but he was making sense in a nonsensical world.

Following Jesus was being radical. It also meant being willing to lose my life in order to save it. I was fine with tossing aside the disorder I had incorporated into my personal life system. Glad to be rid of it. And I was quite liberated. It took a while to understand radical love though. Despite wanting to live in a new way I found my old reactions would come to the fore. And the events of the past would come to mind. Sometimes events in the present were very difficult too. The world did not reorganise itself for me because I followed Jesus. The new order had to be from within.

One day I read something Job said while he was processing his life being blown apart:

"Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place where gold is refined. Iron is taken from the earth and copper is smelted from ore. Man puts an end to darkness, and searches every recess for ore in the shadow of death.
...That path no bird knows, nor has the falcon's eye seen it. The proud lions have not trodden it, nor has the fierce lion passed over it. He puts his hand to the flint, he overturns the mountains at the roots. He cuts out channels in the rocks, and his eye sees every precious thing. He dams up the streams from trickling. What is hidden he brings forth to light". (Job 28)

I realised then. Yes, I had a new motivation in life. But I also needed that radical love to be deeper. A new order meant letting God's spirit break through the hard places - the defences that were so old I thought of them as innately part of who I was. The new order was a process. We say that only God knows the heart, and it's true. He knows it, and he knows how to cut through to extract and bring out what is precious. In the new order brokenness becomes a pathway of greater love. So began a process - of talking and praying, writing and reflecting. Of re-breaking where things had set crooked. Of learning new boundaries. Most of all I discovered more love for others, and developed an understanding of just how deep God sees. I know he sees deeper into my heart than I do. I don't know exactly why some things have happened, or what else will come. But I do know that order is not achieved by altering external appearances. Order comes from a liberated spirit. It's the wisdom beyond human undertanding that brings out the precious from the worthless. It's being able to see others as made in the image of God. It's the true radical love that we cannot be separated from.