Painful Delight

July 27, 2011

I’ve become increasingly convinced that the most difficult parts of life are also the most necessary and the most fulfilling.  Those gut-wrenching trials and moments (or years) of anguish can be transcendent experiences, causing us to affirm that life is meaningful even as we question whether it is worth all the pain.  It is the nature of existing simultaneously in temporal and eternal realities that incomplete human beings [read: “all of us”] will fight the desire to give up even in the midst of our lives’ most divine moments.

This, it seems to me, is the call to intimacy at work.

But I’ll get back to that.

First:

In April I attended (get ready for a mouthful) the International Justice Mission’s (IJM) Global Prayer Gathering (GPG).  To put it as briefly as possible, IJM is in the slave-freeing business.  It’s basically a global coalition of Christian lawyers, investigators and counselors who find and expose human trafficking rings, provide recovery programs for freed slaves, and prosecute the owners and the traffickers.

And everything they do is blanketed in prayer.  It is remarkable that a worldwide organization of IJM’s size would spend its annual corporate gathering in nearly constant prayer for one another.  I have never (ever) experienced God’s presence more acutely and homogeneously than at the GPG.

It was indescribably difficult, but let me try anyway:

My heart ached.  It was like the pain of losing Sarah, not by way of death, nor even because of some awful fight, but because God spent two years showing us why we were a wonderful match for one another and then told us to end our relationship.  This is probably my greatest fear, and it bared all its teeth while I was on my knees in the Throne Room, begging that mercy and justice would prevail in Cambodia, the Phillipines, and Rwanda.  I was literally overcome with anxiety.  I knew I could not escape it by any of the tried-and-true methods (a brisk jog, breathing slowly and deeply), and so I didn’t bother trying.  How could I be expected to focus my mind and heart on intercessory prayer for captives I would never meet when the secret fears of my own heart were being so viciously laid bare?

Funny thing, though.  A paragraph like that almost demands to conclude with “I was miserable”, but in this case nothing would be further from the truth.  I was standing in the Light, and though His illumination of everything dark in me was anything but comfortable, I was delighted (yes, delighted) to be known so fully and so intimately.

Because when broken people are laid bare in complete intimacy with a perfect God, with every hurt, fear and sin exposed, the result is an extremely painful delight.