From the Dungeon

I find myself back there again today - back in that miry dungeon of sin and death. As I come to my senses and ask myself how I got here, the pieces start coming back to me, and eventually I remember.

I remember that desperate feeling that life isn't fair. I remember diving headlong into it, ranting about how cruel God is to withhold this happiness from me - this happiness which is my birthright which He holds just out of my reach.

You see, I'm short - I've been short ever since 8th grade. That's the year I returned from summer break and found that the boys I had teased endlessly with names like "shorty" had shot up far above my head to eternally unattainable heights. Their retribution then - and today, truth be told - was to remind me of my place by holding something precious to me inches above my highest finger reach. (Confession: I find myself occasionally seeking catharsis today by doing such things to my itsy bitsy niece and nephew.)

And this is what I began accusing God of doing: holding this precious item - this happiness I knew I deserved - mere inches outside my furthest reach. What this precious item is today is quite irrelevant to the story - it's a different idol in each life season, but the story is always the same. The teenage temper tantrum is always the same.

It's in this crisis moment of selfish angst that an intersection appears in the road I'm traveling. An opportunity arises to leave my withholding Father behind and become (deludedly) master of my own fate once more. So I take the road I know so well - the wide road, the old road, the path of ego stroking and personal happiness. I throw off the constricting yoke of selfless niceties and choose to go out and get that happiness that God has been keeping from me all along.

What happens next I don't need to describe in detail to you. You've been there, you know it well. Selfishness becomes a type of anesthesia and I am pleased as punch until its effects wear off. That is when I wake to find myself in the dungeon. That is when I realize that this journey of freedom has ended - as it always has and always does and always will - in the same old captivity. My journey for happiness has brought me to a dungeon of worthlessness and filthiness and shame. These same old tormentors - the same old sicknesses that gave me my old battle wounds - these are what I find every time.

What shortsighted forgetfulness this is that does not remember that it was this old well-worn path & these old well-known enemies that broke me and cut me and shattered my soul in days gone by, in battles of old. What shortsighted forgetfulness this is that does not remember the price paid to purchase my freedom and defeat my shame and cleanse and restore my soul. What a broken captive I must be - I, who was freed forever from the power of the enemy but return to his dungeon willingly time after time. What lies must have been infused into my old soul-fractures to draw me back to the home of my original injury.

And yet back I go. Back to the dungeon that Christ rescued me from 24 years ago and 2016 years ago and before the dawn of time when He predestined me for the great Salvation He was planning. Here I am, forgetfully asking, Who will rescue me from this body of death?

When I awake in the dungeon, I have two choices. I can wallow in it and spend the day allowing the lies of worthlessness and filthiness and shame into the depths of my soul. Or I can cry out to my deliverer. Today, I chose the latter. Today - perhaps for the first time - I realized I haven't time to waste in a dungeon.

And because "The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold," and because "I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies," He answered me. The God I had accused of injustice and whose ways I had rejected as withholding came to my aid. He didn't bring armies or trumpets, or earthquakes and fire and hailstones like he does in Psalm 18. He brought a wedding photo.

For that is what Revelation 19 is: it is a photo album from the future - from my future. And when I look at it I know - no matter what I do, no matter how many times or how often or how violently I return to my dungeon of sin - in the end, God will clothe me in white and love me forever. No matter how long I have steeped in this mire of worthlessness and filthiness and shame, I will be cleansed of it all forever and exchange it for blamelessness before His eyes, declared worthy of His eternal love. This is my soul's reward. This God's eternal devotion to an enduringly unfaithful me - this delightful impossibility - this has become my birthright.

And now, with my perspective altered, my eyes are opened and the imagined shackles fade away. It turns out the cell door had never been locked: I had no captor but myself. I had chased illusions of happiness and ended up in an idle, disabled prison, chained by my own self pity. I had been tortured by my own inner brokenness - echoes of captivity past. But now, my true freedom is realized as I am restored to reality - real freedom to walk with God along this new, narrower road of life. Freedom to live for something bigger & Greater than myself.

This, too, is my birthright. Perhaps it is not so far outside my reach.