It’s been awhile since I submitted myself – in whole or in part – to lenten reflection. Thanks to a tip from Drew Moser, I picked up the e-mail devotional from CRM Empowering Leaders. Somehow, every day has delivered a word I have needed to hear and words of comfort. I’m so grateful for the folks who have written thoughtful meditations that find their way into my inbox.
This season of my life has been strange and unfamiliar – after a semester of hard work and momentous occasions (my first publication, a Jeopardy! appearance, etc.), I was riding high and once the new year came, BAM! I found myself in a valley of fear, anxiety, and doubt. It’s timely, then, that in the transition back to WordPress I came back across a post I wrote about Kierkegaard almost two years ago, where I included this quote from Provocations:
Just as knowing ourselves in our own nothingness is the condition for knowing God, so knowing God is the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God’s assistance and according to his intention. Wherever God is, there he is always creating. He does not want a person to be spiritually soft and to bathe in the contemplation of his glory. He wants to create a new human being. To need God is to become new. And to know God is the crucial thing. Without this knowledge, a human being becomes nothing. Without this knowledge, he is scarcely able to grasp that he himself is nothing at all, and even less that to need God is his highest perfection.
From “To Need God is Perfection,” in Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, Charles E. Moore, ed. (Plough, 1999), 33.
It’s funny how we sometimes think that our approach to and understanding of God will stay the same as it has always been. The last two months have demonstrated to me that God will speak to you in the ways you will hear, and ways that are unexpected and separate from your usual processing mechanisms.
It’s true that Kierkegaard (as I said in the original post) pulled me back from the gorge of unbelief in college, and thinking about Kierkegaard’s approach has done it again – this time revealing my own nothingness and forcing me to move away from despair. I see God’s demand that I become new, that I become transformed – not just intellectually, but wholly.
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