We Have a God Who Operates At the Fringes
He is a God of extremes.
He wants us to operate there with him, forego all logic and planning, and be ready at any moment to fight with him, trusting him to save us swiftly and resolutely when we need him.
He wants us to walk with him on the fringes.
He wants us to live there with him during our time on this earth.
He wants us to learn to love him there, to know him there, to see who he truly is in his personality.
He wants our soul to be lit afire for him by seeing how much he loves us.
Our God is the God who will fill your life with his miracles, his wonders, and his fantastic doings, so that you can see who he is in his person and love him for it.
He asks us to live and to die on the tightrope.
He wants you to gamble anything and everything on him.
Our Lord is wildly jealous for you, and he does not want you to waste any time.
We must understand that our God fights for us with such a passionate, relentless fervor that there is nothing in the heavens, on earth, or in all of creation that can be compared to it.
He asks us to be wild with him, surrendering to nothing, and fighting with oblivious disregard for all norms, possibilities, and outcomes.
He asks us to let out the raging cry of passionate love for the life that he has given us and out of love for who he is.
That the cry may ring in our ears and our hearts for the love of him who has taught us to love him.
And who has given us something to love that is so worthy of loving that our hearts are saturated with the life and meaning and bliss for a joy that crushes the material thinking of this world.
God is at the edge of the cliff.
He is there where our life is at risk.
He is there where we dare not tread for fear of death.
He saunters with a kingly stride in that dreadful valley where all hope is lost.
He seeks to meet us there.
This is why King David was able to proclaim:
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff comfort me.
Many people misunderstand what it takes to be a saint.
They think that in order to be a saint, we have to be perfect.
But nobody starts off perfect.
We are all heavily laden and burdened with our sins.
God doesn’t expect perfection from imperfect creatures.
God understands that we’re broken, that we’re fragile, that we’re imperfect.
He doesn’t expect us to be what we cannot be, but he also commands us to love him with all of our heart, and all of our soul, and all of our mind.
What does this mean?
It means that in order to become a saint, we have to give God everything that we do have.
We don’t have perfect courage, but we have to give him all of the courage that we have.
We don’t have perfect love, but we have to give him all of that love which we do have.
We don’t have perfect consideration for him.
We don’t have perfect desire for him.
We don’t have a perfect anything.
But God doesn’t want any of that anyway.
He wants all of our being, all of our brokenness, all of our flaws.
He wants it all to be given up to him.
He wants us to offer it to him from the deepest depths of our hearts.
God wants us to come running to him, with a fervor, with a desire, with a passion to give him everything that we have.
And that’s simple.
Yet he had us in mind from the beginning.
God had us in mind from before creation.
And now that we’re finally alive here on this earth, he wants the maximum for us.
He wants the best for us.
He wants the best from us.
No cutting corners, no half measures.
God wants you to throw yourself into an act for him and trust that he’ll help you.
And sometimes he will help you at the last minute, but he wants trust.
He just wants the trust.
He’s constantly checking to see if we trust him.
He doesn’t want us to stress or fear.
He just wants us to trust him and to love him and to sit with him and talk to him.
He wants us to open up to him so that he could show us how much he loves us, what he can do for us, who he really is.
He wants to transform us into lovers of him, and we have to be ready to do that, to keep our hearts open for him so that he can transform us because he wants to transform us.
But when we come to him, he doesn’t want us to come to him with the standards of this world, the way we come to our mothers and fathers and friends and partners and our employees and our coworkers, etc.
The standards of love in this world do not apply to our relationship with God.
What we give to them is insufficient for God.
We have to give God something so much greater.
In fact, it is so great that when the world sees it, it calls it crazy.
The love between God and his child, the agape, is love the world does not understand.
This is why the relationship between God and his child is unique.
It is wild abandonment.
It is the kind of love that says, “I am here. Do what you will with me. I am all yours. My heart is yours. Use me as you please, and I subject myself to you without care or consideration to what the world thinks of me, whether it be my family, whether it be my friends, whether it be anybody who walks on this earth, whether it be angel or demon. I do not care what they are, who they are, or what they think, because I only want to love you and I only want to please you. I love you because you first loved me, and I know how to love because you love me. And I want to be who you want me to be because this is what I was created for.”
This act of surrender takes courage.
The mark of the saint is that he understands that his love for God must be singular, and his love for God will be tested against his love for the world, his love for his reputation, his love for his attachments, his love for his job, his money, his marriage, his children, his hobbies, his worldly joys.
But the saint makes that leap of faith from the depths of his heart.
It is a leap that says, “I am going to jump from all of these things because I know there must be more. I will leap into the chasm, I will leap into the valley which you inhabit, Oh God. And I trust that you will catch me. I trust that you will meet me there. I trust that I will not be alone.”
The mark of the saint is not that he is perfect.
The mark of the saint is that he jumps into the chasm of the unknown to meet God.
The mark of the saint is that he confronts his fears, knowing that there has to be something on the other end of the fear, that, indeed, the fear may not even be real at all.
The mark of the saint is that they fight against all that made them hopeless and desperate, in order to live a life that they were created to live.
None of this requires perfection; it only requires the complete giving of what we have to give and the courageous boldness to submit ourselves to the potential of something infinitely greater than ourselves.
The mark of a saint is a willingness to meet God at the edge of the cliff, where it seems as if we will fall off.
But we will not fall off.
We will live there with God and talk to him there, and he will talk to us.
And it is there that we find that cathartic feeling where we discover that the deepest suspicions of our heart are actually true.
We discover that God put them there.
We discover that God placed them there to pull us toward him.
We discover that God is speaking to us, and only us, and in a way that only we can understand.
We discover that God wants to meet us at the edge of the cliff where only the two of us are allowed to be.
It is the place for wild lovers.
It is the place for wild abandonment, wild faith, wild hope, wild dreams, wild surrender.
It is the place of limitless possibilities.
It is the place where our soul is unleashed, and we are free to be who we truly are.
It is there at the edge of the cliff, in the presence of God, that we become ourselves.