Back In The Matrix (but not of it)

It's been tough coming home. I suspect it always is in some ways after a "mountain top" experience but this is different. Boot Camp wasn't just an emotional and passionate high it was a time of real breakthrough and healing. It's hard to come home from that.

I don't mean that my home life is hard. Just the opposite in fact. I left camp fired up about my relationship with Annie and I can already see that what God did in my life last weekend is now taking our relationship to new heights and depths. It's wonderful. The same is true with my relationship with God. Boot Camp wasn't the high for my spiritual life, it was a starting point, a trailhead, letting my faith take off into new heights. What God did last weekend was wonderful. Watching Him continue it through this week is a deep answer to prayer.

But yet something in me is still struggling with being home. I feel a little bit like Neo in that scene in The Matrix when he's plugged back into the true Matrix for the first time driving to see the Oracle. He sits in the car staring out the window watching the scenes of his old life fly by. And there's a disconnect for him, not because his old life was terrible but because he's experienced something deeper, something truer, than that old reality ever was.

A few posts back I quoted C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory saying, "Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

I've found this week that this quote has become even more meaningful to me. God used Boot Camp to take me away from making mud pies and let me glimpse the holiday at the sea. This, I believe, is one of the true challenges of going further up and further in. It is hard to desire more. It is hard to no longer be satisfied by The Matrix.

I don't mean to make it sound like I'm depressed. In fact, I don't believe I've been less depressed my entire life. My heart is overwhelmed with joy at what God is doing in me and where He's taking me. I am learning to be content with where I'm at but at the same time I've never been less satisfied. Everything I said in my post on contentment and satisfaction has stopped being just words and theory. It has become a stark reality of every moment of my life. It's a strange disconnect but through it I think I'm beginning to understand how Jesus could be full of the joy of the Lord and still be called a man of sorrows.

The enemy is right there trying to use this disconnect, this dissatisfaction, to steal, kill and destroy what happened last weekend. He's whispering to me that Hobbes was right in Leviathan when he said life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But it's not. Life is abundant and joyful. Life is passionate and heroic. Life is victorious and beautiful. Most of all life is available. Jesus is better than we think He is and there is far more life prepared for us in this life than we are ready to believe.

God is so gracious in this. No one understood living in the world, The Matrix, but not being of it better than Jesus did. He understood the paradox of feeling abundant joy mingled with the ache of our fallen world. We have not been left as orphans. He understands and He is with us.

Jesus has promised that He will make all things new. The whole of creation will one day be restored to what it was meant to be. But we don't have to wait until the second coming and the end of the world. The process can begin today. There is a cost to desiring more. It's difficult to abandon our mud pies not because we miss them but because we've glimpsed the sea and we know we're not there yet. But God has prepared even for that. He has not made us wait until we reach the sea to begin receiving our abundant life. He is offering it now. And even now as I struggle to plug back into The Matrix I can tell you it's worth it. It is worth it.