The First Three Matriarchs of Israel...were BARREN

            Have you noticed that in the book of Genesis, the first three matriarchs of the not-yet-but-soon-to-be people called ‘Israel’—Sarai, Rebekah and Rachel—were all barren? And barrenness for a woman in the ancient near east was arguably to be of a similar status to a scarlet-letter-toting woman in the Puritan age. Yet God’s asinine plan of complete and unmitigated salvation—the total and inexorable restoration of the entire world—was begun…through three barren women!

If that does not convince you that this Great Story is God’s doing, and God’s doing alone, then I question what will. And moreover, if we are the characters in the Great Story’s chapter of the now, the chapter of today, then do we expect anything different in the lives he is giving us, the lives which witness to how excruciatingly wonderful Life really is, powerful and redeeming and true.

 

The Author leads his characters down the road of surrender because it is only by walking this road that his characters learn that God is the only real God. And what is more, he is our Father who loves us unchangingly and oh so obsessively. He always has. The wives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—the first three generations of the people of God—are testament to that truth.

 

God breaks us so there is no question that he, and he alone, is our hope.

Therefore, I must joyfully reveal that each step on the road of surrender is unbearable! There will be days when death—physical death, not this slow, inward strangulation of the soul teaching you to trust and forcing you to live by faith—will appear much more appealing than what is tearing at your lungs. Withdrawals bring prickles to your hyper-sensitive being as Sin’s toxins are pumped out and the image of God is re-fashioned anew in your soul. Many times on this road, you will face months of dejection with no sight of rest. You will be bombarded by the lies of the Evil one and you will have to simply wait and endure…and pray.

            He is the God of paradoxes. Death brings life. To be great is to serve. This road of surrender is not physical death. Physical death means nothing; that is easy. That is the blessed martyrdom we all pray for. That is a way that we can please the Lord and still be venerated by the world. But that is not the road of surrender.

Rather, the gate called martyrdom at the top of the mountain is the place of our deepest humiliation.

For those blessed saints, most of whom we never will know (like my teacher friend), they are the ones who walked through a rusted entrance, head lowered with shame and hope as evil mocked their path. Yet they walked onward, abandoning their deepest securities, allowing themselves to be stripped bare.

I remember describing the road of surrender to a friend one time. “It feels as though I’m naked and strung up in front of a mob and they are screaming and laughing at me. They say I deserve to die for my stupidity at believing such a ridiculous ‘Great Story.’ I deserve to die for believing that some invisible God would love me and would want me to be in his family. And I’m pleading with myself to stop walking. At any point, I can stop surrendering and choose not to die. I hold my own death in my hands! I’m committing suicide hoping that a better life awaits me with this God rather than the one I live now just by myself. But at any point, I can join the mob again and they’ll accept me as one of their own. It would be so much easier…But my soul won’t let me! My soul says one step more! It says, ‘Walk on, for I know that voice calling me. You have to trust me. I know that voice.’

And yet these saints with head down walk onward, like Abram, like the Church (for we are all the ones strung up before the mob—never are we alone!) following an invisible God who says he is our Father, hoping beyond hope that we are not being fooled.

For if there is no resurrection from the dead, then we above all others should be most pitied.

Shivering watch of dreary men

Suffer the drops of unsynchronized rain

Taller than tops of chimneys lend

A firm arm scarred and ignoring its pain

And like fertile rabbits of an unholy land

Our minds scatter and toss

Disobedient and quick

Corral them, we are forbidden

Oh, what loss, to watch and

To feel the burnt down wick.

Prayer sustains

O my brothers,

Prayer enlivens and dims

The phantom rabbits in their unholy chase,

Prayer never destroys the innocent fiends

But rather turns our gaze toward another’s Face.

And high above our city

In the cold, drawn out rain,

We watch and we pray, illusions aside

For understand, we do not,

This plight we endure,

Simply watch and pray

For the face to abide

And the pain to subside,

While the cold, faultless rain like symphonic notes sigh.