The Call to Mount Shasta (part 2)

I feel a burden to write all this stuff while it's fresh in my mind. We humans are so forgetful and prone to sin that I imagine I will need to revisit these posts at many points in the journey as a reminder of what God has done for me. I don't assume that this stuff is of interest to anyone else--though I hope the next series of posts will be, seeing as they will contain more testimony than personal items. That said, I feel it's important for the sake of the testimonies themselves to establish a bit of context.

It is no small thing to leave the comfort of my dorm and drive to California. I really covet the time I get to spend with my dorm mates (brothers and sisters), and I consider it a great sacrifice to have forfeited conversations and moments that took place in my absence. Yet, if one really wishes to affirm that Jesus is Lord, one needs to submit to His lordship and respond to Him. I grant that I only did so fourteen months later, but I hope in His sovereignty that He told me what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it so as to bring about the outcomes He desired. Looking back on the past week, I feel this was indeed the case. But as I noted above, I need to place these events within the scope of the last ten months.

I have several times remarked to God that this has been the absolute worst year of my life. He consistently responded that He would redeem it. The significance of what happened on the road and in conversation with the people I met is so much greater than face value would suggest. I hope the paltry summary I write below will enlighten this fact a little.

I wrote in an earlier post how God healed me of Celiac disease. I don't think I mentioned that said healing was about ten years in the waiting. It was only diagnosed in 2006 but I had been experiencing digestive issues since age 18 or so. But I had never experienced the kind of illness that afflicted me between January and May of this year. Being sick every day affects a person's quality of life, but when it has to do with digestion it can also restrict a person's mobility. There were two days in February that stand out in my memory and define the state of mind (and attitude) I had regarding my ailment.

The first happened on the Day of Prayer, a day our school sets aside once a semester when the entire student body devotes themselves to worship and prayer during class hours. I remember anticipating that day with the earnest belief and hope that, if only for one day, the Lord would grant me grace enough to worship Him without the distraction of constantly having to use the washroom. I participated in the morning activities and felt that I had adequate continence to do the second half, but as soon as I got home for lunch break I was suddenly stricken with the worst abdominal cramps. I wound up spending the next few hours lying on my stomach in bed (I couldn't rest on my back because even contact with my mattress applied enough pressure to my rectum that it frustrated the pain that resulted from frequent wiping). I returned to the worship activities just as they were ending and discovered that one of my best friends in the world, Ken Oginga, who I imagine will be a household name in Christian circles one day, was leading the entire school in song. The whole event had such a special international appeal that just oozed with unity and you could just see the global church manifesting in our sanctuary. And I missed it. I was so mad at the Lord for what I perceived as His failure to equip me to worship Him. This left me with a sour taste that led me to curse Him out several days later when I was in the washroom having another episode. I told Him that I would never answer any call that required me to leave my immediate surroundings because I wasn't even comfortable in my own house, let alone in a circumstance where I was distant from "home base." So I told Him I would surely refuse Him if He ever wanted to send me into any kind of missionary field, domestic or foreign. I uttered some other choice words, and as soon as I had finished cursing Him my body just seized up with every kind of pain I could remember having experienced: I had asthma as a child, and my lungs got tight; my back was suddenly crippled again; I had pains in my chest; and so on. It never occurred to me that I should consult a doctor because He was so evidently disciplining me for my blasphemies. As odd as this may sound to nonbelievers (and perhaps some believers), I got the impression even then that it was an act of love, that He wasn't willing to let me heap up sins so overtly. But I didn't want a reminder of His love; I wanted to be whole again.

As difficult and discouraging as it was to deal with the above, my health was like a year-old lamb without defect compared to my spiritual life. I had no discipline in prayer, nor did I desire any. God had become a burden to me. It seemed, in my disillusioned state, that things had been so much better back when I was suicidal drug addict. This started to turn around in March when my health got so bad that I couldn't maintain my intense study habits anymore and finally admitted that things were spiralling out of control. I surrendered to the fact that I couldn't maintain the course I was pursuing, nor the course load, so I dropped a class and started making time for discipleship (pouring into others and being poured into by others). I began attending dorm events, except in extreme circumstances when I had big assignments due. My studies had so consumed me that I was spending six hours painstakingly poring through reading assignments that weren't even worth anything, sometimes averaging three pages an hour. I had become so poor at time management that when it came time to work on assignments worth 30% of my grade that I had to pump my system full of energy drinks and other stimulants just to stay awake, and it was in these times that I kept even worse hours and sleeping patterns than had been my awful norm. But God told me in no uncertain terms that He wasn't pleased with my motives and told me to stop crediting Him with a GPA I had gotten at the expense of my desire to pursue Him.

So yeah, things started to improve. I even shared my feelings with someone I'd been developing a crush on since September, and I hadn't expressed such things to a woman since 2000. I chose to spend time with her (and many others), even though it meant I wouldn't have time to complete all the assignments that I was supposed to turn in for a modular class at the end of April (something I still don't regret to this day). In spite of dropping an assignment worth 15%, I still pulled a B in the class. There was something therapeutic and liberating about no longer having to maintain a perfect GPA, which success had been a source of unhealthy and unnecessary pressure I had put on myself. So it seemed that my proverbial morning was dawning. (See notes A and B pasted at the bottom of this post, which were originally published to Facebook during this time, and which I include here as an appendix that describes a gradual shift in my state of mind.)

As planned, I went home for the summer, but I had an odd feeling about it. In accepting the call to Bible college, I was leaving a church setting that met every Sunday for corporate worship and in which I was involved in a few ministries. I will never accept the way my church in Nova Scotia breaks regular ministries during the summer months, but I understand the necessity insomuch as the attitude of most attendants seems to be one of paying the pastoral staff to handle the affairs of God. This is the only way I can explain the fact that I observe 20% of the people carrying 80% of the burden. To go from this to being immersed in a living, active community, especially the dorm, was like going from the desert to paridise. The thought of making the opposite transition, however, from constant ministry support to regular life, struck me as a dangerous thing. And this is what I had to face as the time drew near for me to go back east. I don't know if it was intuition or educated fear, but I had a sense when I boarded the plane in Regina that I was stepping into a spiritual minefield. I was right.

It's hard to describe spiritual warfare, but I imagine it's the emotion that would sweep over a sentient mouse just as a cat is about to plunge her claws into the mouse's side. I imagine spiritual warfare is comparable to the fear that would fill its heart and mind as the she scoops it into her mouth to bite its head off. Only death never comes and this oppressive feeling gets sustained like a chord played on a synthesizer. In my case, it started as I landed and in Halifax and was a constant one throughout the summer. I had conceived a plan to prepare Sunday school lessons for the fall, but this motive quickly turned into self-loathing and extreme depression and fear and loneliness. I remember consecutive days of insomnia during which I would lay in bed all night getting pummelled with dark thought after dark thought, praying them away and rebuking them in the name of Christ. But they remained. The demonic presences were so real it felt like I could touch them. One time I awoke from a dead sleep convinced I had heard a lion roaring in my room and that I would, like the mouse, die upon waking. But then I opened my eyes and it was just the dead of night. There was nothing visible in my room, but I had a sense of disappointment in knowing I was still in this world and that I would face more such encounters. I became aware of how much the enemy hates the Lord and all who presume to pursue Him. I shared this stuff with any sympathetic ear I could find, but the few hours that people could spare did little to alleviate the fact that these guys were just pounding me into dust when no one's schedule would align with mine. But, unlike fleshly creatures, they don't get exhausted of the war and they don't need to rest from the onslaught they consistently fling at God's children like a monkey throwing a handful of its own feces. And much as I don't know why I've slipped into animal imagery, I find it so appropriate in describing the evil that confronted me all summer. They never left me alone. I could do nothing but watch as their propaganda burrowed into my consciousness to the point that I started to believe lies about myself and others, and it wasn't long before I was embracing old sins back into my life, such as pornography. Then relationships with friends and pastors began to crumble because my worldview had become so disturbingly twisted. And I was acting on it. And speaking it liberally. And I walked around with a drawn sword ready to be plunged into a church that had failed me. God, as you might imagine, is quite defensive of His bride. I was in many ways His enemy. That's the James who returned to Briercrest in September. I don't know to what extent I was lost, but I was certainly losing the battle. Satan, it seemed, was about to restore to his trophy shelf the lamb that had been plucked from it in 2007.

September was certainly the hardest month in memory. All summer I had told people that I longed to return to school, where I could walk down the hall and find someone to pray with. I should mention that a few people had made a genuine effort to see me through this time, but when I finally got back to Caronport all the life I had once felt inside had been leeched from me. The time of relief had come, but I had no desire to know the Lord or serve Him. I told Him several times to go away. At first in my mind but then out loud. My roommate Erik listened to me break down and rant just about every day during the first few weeks of school. One morning I was so broken that I had to skip class because I was such an emotional wreck. I remember wanting to just leave this place and find some mountain somewhere. School was my Jezebel and I wanted to pull an Elijah. Ironically, there was a sense in which I was, against my own will, saying the sort of thing Caiaphas did when he suggested it would be better for Jesus to die for the nation. I had intimated that I wanted to find a mountain, and God was nodding approvingly. "Yes, James, go to the mountain."

Toward the end of September I started to feel a change of heart. I noticed God was using my brokenness to minister to others. I suddenly had less of an attitude problem. I realized I had espoused some kind of superiority complex about the knowledge I'd gained, and it left me cold. I genuinely felt the pain of those who were going through painful experiences. The book of Second Corinthians became so poignant for me. So real. Unlike last year, I participated in an annual missionary conference our school hosts every fall. I developed a passion for the third world and had a strong desire to bring my teaching ministry to them. I got the impression in speaking with missionaries that, although it is difficult to move overseas, people in less materialistic cultures have a way of appreciating the few things God gives them. All the images I saw of them worshipping the Lord just looked so pure and uninhibited by selfish tendencies that come so naturally to Westerners. So I started telling people, and believing, that I would go to some impoverished nation and bring as much learning as I could to people who lack the resources we have here.

On 4 October, Erik convicted me about some sins that I hadn't dealt with. He prayed over me, asking Jesus to make it so that I had committed them for the last time. The very next day, a missionary from Jordan, whom God sent to Caronport to minister to Canadians, prayed with me after chapel and quoted a verse I had come across the night before in my studies: Isaiah 43:18-22. She had received a phone call that morning from the wife of the main speaker at the missions conference. This woman had prayed that she would help just one person that day. She spoke many prophetic things to me about footholds I had given the enemy and asked Jesus to bind my demons.

As I write this, I proclaim with fear and trembling that God has since kept me free from the sins that entangled me this summer. But it wasn't without the loss of sleep that He kept me pure. I have been without an outlet for certain pent up urges, but I have felt closer to Him in the process. It was within the context of all the above, and so many other details that I wish I could share (but are too numerous to include here), that I was reminded on 8 October that I still owed God a leap of faith in response to something He had powerfully confirmed fourteen months earlier: I never did go to Mount Shasta. It dawned on me that, unlike last year, I had a passport now. Unlike last year, I had my car in Caronport. For some reason, Student Loans had given me more than I needed for this year's expenses. Things woulnd't be so tight. He had provided. So I made the decision to obey. It seemed illogical and weird. So unlike me. But He had reduced me to ashes (or allowed it to happen to me) and was building me up again. How could I not go? It occurred to me that all the demons I had faced in the preceding nine months might have been a means of preparing me to do an even harder thing than suffer spiritual oppression, something that was so beyond my comfort zone that the very thought of responding filled me with a sense of anxiety. And awe. Part of me was dying, and it was getting louder and louder, pleading with me not to allow Him to put it to death. But the point was that I had said I would go. To not do so seemed even more risky (cf. Matt 21:28-31).

So I started to share with select people the plans that were beginning to hatch. I was confident that I would make it to Mount Shasta alive, but Jesus never said anything about making it back. I received so many weird confirmations after making the decision, though. I told a friend on 10 October that I felt like coming to Saskatchewan was like leaving Chaldea for Haran and that the trip to Shasta was like my Bethel. Then on 12 October, during the very next chapel session, the school chaplain read the story of Jacob in Genesis 28. I started to notice weird things that God was doing in my life as typologically represented in the Bible. I was Jacob. The name James derives from Jacob. It means "he supplants." Coupled with my second name, my identity reads "he supplants [or takes] a gift from God." I wasn't just Jacob; I was double Jacob. And little did I know I was about to engage God in one serious wrestling match.

There are other confirmations that were kind of cool. How the loonie reached parity with the US dollar in the days leading up to my trip. The words and people who met me in the midst of this approaching behemoth of an experience. It's been a wild ride, for sure. There is a sense in which the story of the redemption of James Wood began with all the above, and there is also a sense in which it began when Erik and Shami prayed over me. Day of Prayer was amazing this fall. So many godincidences have overtaken me recently. The Lord showed up. It was time I put my faith into practice.

But when I look back on things, they all seem to point to this trip to Mount Shasta. God was calling me into the desert, and He knew that I would face many demons there. Bigger ones than had afflicted me during the summer. Bigger ones than had enticed me to try to kill myself in 2002. Bigger ones than I knew existed. So He anointed me and, against my own will, sent me west at 11:00 a.m. on 22 October 2010. I had tried to secure travel insurance and had failed. I didn't have any American money on my person. I didn't have a map. I had never undertaken anything comparable to this. This was beyond me. My giftings wouldn't help me. It was going to be nothing but me and the Lord. This is the story of how I handed my life over to Him, and it's the story of how He gave it back.

(Tedashii: "I Make War")

NOTE A:

Even the birds were praying for me.

I had such a peace as I lay in bed, like a seagull gliding on the currents, having bid the land adieu. The horizon ever summoning but always the same distance away. For the first time in life I felt truly surrendered. My thoughts, usually so cacophonous, normally rush hour in space, just congealed into a gelatine awareness of myself. Like walking that razor's edge between death's lonely sting and the spread of the toxins. No more fears, no more desires. Just. Peace. My eyes were glazed over, probably. All's I knew, my vision had that soap opera tint. Glowy. I still had Jehoram's curse on me, but suddenly it felt like God was about to roll the credits on my life and just release me from the battles of flesh and mind. How else could they have ceased, bleeding so effervescently into... peace. This prophesied new chapter of my life had just been a motive. The kind of message God places on the lips of the empathetic. I had even gotten to experience a bit of it. But it was just the kind of bait that would coax me into this very moment, having completed the story that God wrote for me. And because I knew I would meet him soon--perhaps any moment--I was wholly and perfectly stricken with peace. I wanted to post something on the web about how I owned nothing and nothing owned me. Stake your claims now, ye friends of mine. Who wants my books? My albums? My clothes? Not my ginch, though; that's disgusting.

I hadn't eaten yet. I had resolved not to. As soon as I got home from class, I excreted what felt like napalm. Sitting down, as it often had been, was my greatest foe today. I lay in bed on my stomach for the first hour at least. I flipped over and tried to sleep. Sleep, though, seemed as if it required too much energy of me, so I just lay there. Next I knew, I'd missed dinner.

The following moments were bitter. Yesterday, I went out for coffee to perk up my afternoon. When I bumped into a friend, God led me to walk the extra mile with him, letting him rant for almost three hours. It was one of those encounters that a person walks away from knowing he hasn't wasted an ounce of his time on it. One of those afternoons where the Lord was permitted to steer the whole thing. Sure, it had crept into my thoughts that I was sabotaging my Revelation paper, but, in the grand scheme, this was the Mary. So Martha was taken captive and bound. And yet, for all this willing submission, for all this service, for all this change of heart from the previous months, all I got in reward was more pain. And as I came to grips with just how sick I am, I wanted to call curses on the name Yahweh but I just handed myself over to him, and gave up. And all I got in return for that was... freedom. And peace. Freedom feels peaceful. They are irreducible. Trust me.

I went back to bed for a bit and felt this odd heartbeat of a compulsion to eat. I wasn't hungry, though. I had this image of walking to the Point in a daze and never making it back. Or making it back and having wasted a few dollars on something that doesn't matter. "Why, Lord, if I am to be called home any moment, should I indulge the hunger that my stomach has consumed?" But then it growled, so I dressed and went.

It took all my concentration to descend the stairs that face the highway. I started to feel my otherworldliness fade with every step. Something about this little jaunt was rocking my world. There was a presence about me that just didn't love me like the Lord once had. Perhaps, in my own foolishness, I had been led astray by some of the morbid visions my mental projector had conjured when I was back in the dorm. But these didn't strike me as morbid. They didn't strike me as anything. They were just images, and in my peaceful, conscious slumber, in the haze of what my existence had sublimely become, I felt absolutely nothing about them. I was dead tired, if not truly dead; a walking coma, if not a legitimate one--and the only thing that knocked me out of my living fantasy was the fact that, here it was, after sunset, and the birds were shouting at me like I had a pack of demons tracking me. Maybe, for the sake of not reading too much into things, I actually did.

When I got to the Point, I bumped into my friend, who wanted to meet me again. We arranged to meet tomorrow, which sort of suggested I might live to see it. God, it seemed, was not calling me home. I still had at least one appointment. But maybe this was just one of those tests where you get to the point of slicing Isaac's jugular and then God pulls the plug. Maybe he was just testing me to see if I would still say yes in spite of the fact that my body was vomiting me out of it like some straggler Canaanite. But then it dawned on me that, if I happened to live to see the sun again, I would prefer to rouse from my mental vacation to find I had done some research tonight. I bought a few energy drinks then approached the Subway counter.

Someone I knew from church then approached me and asked if he could pay for my dinner. This was, for lack of a better description, the most perplexing question someone could have asked me at that moment. Was God reaching out to me? That couldn't be, because it would beg the question as to who had been suggestively guiding me all stinking night. I replied that if he felt led to buy my salad, I didn't want to step on God's toes. Then he asked me a couple questions about how I was doing, but his expression said, "Dude, you look like walking death." This was just a few moments ago, and I really couldn't begin to recall what I said. So I won't try.

It turns out, though, that I had intuitively told him that we should meet for coffee sometime. The "coffee meeting," as any North American will tell you, is like the idiosyncratic, "how are you doing?" It's just something you say; isn't it? But I had said it. I know this because, after he and his wife dropped me off at Sundbo (sorry, Satan, no ambush on the way home tonight), he called the third floor payphone to make an appointment. Marshall knocked on my apartment door, and then, just as he was going to knock on my room door, I opened it. This about knocked me out of my skin. He told me the phone was for me, and I told him I hadn't given anyone the number. (Nor do I know it!)

So here's my theory. It's just a theory. I'm just a very average guy who spent most of his life coasting. I'm not going to become the president or foreign diplomat of anything. (Insert comment about the gospel, because there's always one person who doesn't have enough tact to know this is not the time to correct my theology; cf. 2 Cor 5:20). In other words, I don't need any fanfare or confetti or parade if, as I felt earlier, in sheer exhaustion, I had pretty much run out the clock. So why, then, would God be reaching out to me tonight? What happened between praying with my roommate last night, feeling like God had planted me on top of the restored Zion, and today, feeling like all my life had been absolutely leeched from me? Maybe, because he is infinitely more faithful than I realize, I was finally paying the price for all the abuse I had wrecked on my body these last 30 years, but am not really Jehoram but Hezekiah. Or maybe I'm really effing tired and imagined the whole thing. I am, as this semester has taught me, human, after all. Maybe God doesn't want to cut me from the vine, seeing as I've finally found a few reasons to embrace it.

But I will say this to all you stubborn people out there: Don't shun his first attempt, or first few attempts, to teach you something. He will come back with something much, much harder. And it just may follow you around. But he loves you enough to break you. Don't be the kind of person who needs a good pruning. As much as you can help it, of course.

NOTE B:

A few minutes ago I was walking to the local convenience store to get some food, when the Lord spoke to me really clearly. (Heh, local convenience store. That’s vaguer than I could have been, but it’s how it came out. I guess I’m halfway into a Maritime headspace again.) So I’m walking toward the highway (only takes a few minutes), and I’m being pelted with droplets. The air is so humid that the horizon looks fuzzy. Not like those cold, merciless days when the wind stuns you into a walking coma, and not like those summer days when you can see the air jostle about like it’s trying to cool itself. Nay, this is a genuine, hovering mist. (Again, I might as well be home.)

Asides aside, this place is distinctively Saskatchewan. I can see the horizon spill into itself. To stare into the distance, it’s like a mostly empty canvas God would have painted, but then He noticed it was already beautiful. And it crossed my mind that my world is about to be turned upside down for four months.

I’m reminded of Paul tonight. (But then, if anything is going to remind me of Scripture, it’s probably going to hearken the man who most messed with my thinking.) Now, I ain’t no apostle, but I know from reading about his travels that he was never at home. Ever. Once he planted a church, it became like a child to him. Having many children by the time he returned from his first missionary journey, his heart was scattered in pieces all over the dang empire. And it hit me again tonight that, from now on, no matter where I go, a piece of me doesn’t come with.

So I’m walking, and I’m wondering, and I’m acknowledging that the Lord has done a lot for me this year. I don’t need to think too far back before I don’t recognize myself. And here I am, getting rained on in the driest part of the country, and the Lord blasts me with some parting advice: “Hope.”

Yeah, I say. I know.

A second time, his frustration coming through: “Hope. Recklessly.” (If He were preaching—well, I guess He was—this is where his fist would strike something.)

Long story short: Come what may, I’m going to do my best to obey.